The Edge of the World: How the North Sea Made Us Who We Are

by Michael Pye

  The Irish monk Dicuil wrote in around 825 that hermits from Ireland had been living in holy isolation for almost a hundred years on islands north of Britain: the Faroes, probably. ‘But,’ he complained in his geographical treatise Liber de mensura orbis terrae, ‘just as those islands were deserted from the beginning of the world, so now because of the Norseman bandits they lie quite empty of hermits, but full of countless sheep and far too many seabirds.’75

  That is the familiar story: the destructive power of the raiding Norsemen, their campaigns against isolated hermits and also against all the new brilliant towns that were growing around the coasts of the southern North Sea. Those towns were based around churches, monasteries, convents or else feudal powers; they were new foundations serving an old kind of power. Attack them, and the Norse attacked the fragile institutions of the North Sea world. But the perpetual travellers and pillagers from the North were not just wrecking and burning. They were also, almost accidentally, creating a new kind of town that did not depend for its life on king, lord or church: our kind of town.

  We can see that in Ireland, which is where it all began.

  4.

  Settling

  ‘If a hundred iron heads could grow on a single neck, if each head had one hundred tongues of well-tempered and indestructible metal and if each tongue shouted ceaselessly with a powerful and unstoppable voice, it would never be enough to list all the pain the people of Ireland – men and women, laymen and clerics, young and old – have suffered at the hands of these pitiless pagan warriors.’1 So a twelfth-century chronicler told the world. It is true the Vikings came to Ireland with the overture you expect in legends: drought, monstrous thunderstorms, famine, floods, murrain, dysentery and smallpox. All this, along with a nasty outbreak of rabies and the constant problem of bloody flux, filled fifteen years towards the end of the eighth century with proper, apocalyptic thinking.2

  Then the real troubles began. St Patrick’s Island was burned, the monastery at Inishmurray went up in flames, Iona was attacked and attacked again in a murderous kind of reconnaissance. Local lords fought back, and so did local clergy, who were often the relatives of local lords. Sometimes there would be no raids for years, but after an eight-year pause Howth was plundered in 821 and the Annals of Ulster report that the heathens ‘carried off a great number of women into captivity’.3 The women most likely went for slaves, although sailors also needed lovers, wives and expedients.

  The monastery at Clonmore was burned to the ground on Christmas Eve and again ‘many captives were taken’.4 The holy places at Armagh were overcome and ‘great numbers … were taken captive’. Perhaps the pauses and sudden restarts in the slaving business had something to do with demand in Arab markets.

  By 837 there were sixty Viking ships in the River Boyne, and sixty on the Liffey, and each fleet carried at least fifteen hundred men: a very organized expedition, perhaps with royal backing, but still mostly adventurers come down from the Norse bases in Scotland. They battled through the kingdoms of east-coast Ireland, ‘a countless slaughter’, the Annals say. Irish exiles reckoned Ireland was overrun, that ‘the Vikings have taken all the islands around without opposition and have settled them’. Yet nobody could be quite sure what Vikings wanted: plunder or territory or both. Nobody could even be sure to what authority they answered, if any. They worked up the rivers and into the lakes, they took to spending the whole winter on Lough Neagh: settlers, almost. They may have used the islands in the Lough as holding camps for their prisoners, because from there they went raiding for slaves into County Louth and took away ‘bishops, priests and scholars, and put others to death’.5

  The Irish provincial kings were made to notice that the invaders were not simply landing, pillaging, ravaging and plundering; they were turning into neighbours, which was just as alarming. The Irish briefly stopped warring among themselves and defined the Vikings as the enemy; they won battles against the Norsemen, and for a moment it seemed they might even drive them out of the country. The victories were obviously splendid because victories always are but they were also useful in the long term because they formed the basis for a story about a glorious past – how the great kings disposed of a great enemy – a propaganda that would live for centuries.

  But then in 849, as the Annals say, ‘A sea-going expedition of 140 ships of the King of the Foreigners came to exercise authority over the Foreigners who were in Ireland before them, and they upset all Ireland afterwards.’6

  Instead of a single Viking enemy, worth uniting to fight, the Irish discovered that foreigners came in at least two varieties. They had long known the raiders and settlers from Norway who shipped out from bases in the islands north and west of Scotland: the Finngaill, the ‘white’ foreigners. Now there were also the fleets that belonged to the settled Danish kings carrying the Dubgaill, the ‘black’ foreigners, who sailed out from bases in England and Scotland.7 The two factions seemed to be at war, but they’d been known to work together, so they could be allies, rivals or enemies and they could always change their minds. They weren’t some single force of evil; they had politics, like the Irish.

  There was a brief time when the Norsemen had to scrap among themselves to settle who would rule. The Danes took over for a time, then the Norwegians fought back – at first in 852 with 160 ships, which was not quite enough, and then in 853 with enough men and sails to take back power. Once control of Dublin was settled, at least among the Northerners, a remarkable exchange could begin. The lovely worked metals of Ireland went north; walrus ivory and amber and furs came south. The Irish were sometimes obliged to pay tribute, but the Vikings on their side gave hostages. Marrying a Viking became thinkable for the upper-class Irish: the King of Leinster’s daughter married the Viking King of York, who was later the King of Viking Dublin, and after that she married the King of Ireland, who was not Viking at all, so her first husband evidently did no harm to her social standing. The King of Munster, meanwhile, was married to the daughter of the Viking ruler of Waterford. They must all have had some kind of language in common.8

  Co-existence began.

  The Irish had their own settled sense of all being Irish, something beyond the local loyalty they felt to a chief or a place or a king; they had songs and laws in common, stories about how things started and family trees for saints and kings, a particular style of religion. Northerners seemed to be the same; they understood what each other said, shared laws and gods and stories.

  The two sides had other, disconcerting things in common, which was convenient. The Vikings had their berserkrs, who went about in pairs or groups of twelve, who went into battle ‘without mailcoats and were frantic as bears or boars; they slew men but neither fire nor iron could hurt them’. Their frenzy in battle was famous and it could be used.9 The Irish had their own wild men: the fían,10 lawless fraternities called the ‘sons of death’, who went about ravaging ‘in the manner of pagans’. Pagan here does not mean being like the Vikings; it means like Irishmen before the Christian missionaries arrived. Fían were men without a fixed standing in society, unsettled because they had been exiled as outlaws or they were young or they were waiting to come into their own. They were alarming all the time, and not least when they planted themselves in settled communities during hard winters. They were wilderness people out on the moors, sure they had a right to plunder, warriors who went howling into battle like wolves and who were said to have the power to change their shape at will (which may have been a question of dog-like hairstyles). The sons of kings and nobles got their military training in the fían; which meant they might change completely in a day if the right person died, from outsider to ruler, from landless to magnate.

  Like berserkrs, such men were also a useful resource for kings and nobles, who used them as mercenary soldiers, just as Viking warriors made excellent mercenaries and useful allies for any Irish king whose power was otherwise all too equal to his rivals. War was more an occupation than an event, after all, and paid help was required.

/>   The Vikings went on raiding, though, and Christians were persistently, officially outraged. The priests were shocked that the Vikings dared to go ‘as far as the door of the church’, that they violated the temples of God and went into the zone of holiness and sanctuary at the heart of monasteries. They were especially shocked that when people crowded into a church for safety, they were not just unprotected; they might as well have helped the slavers by rounding themselves up.11 Their objection was not so much to the sin itself, which was common to both sides, but to who was doing the sinning. It is true there are lovely brooches with Celtic patterns and workmanship found in Norway, which prove the Vikings did pillage churches: those brooches began as mountings, which were ripped from shrines or holy books and conveniently had pins already on the back.12 But the Irish king, the King of Cashel himself, famous as a scribe and as an anchorite, or hermit, felt free to burn his first monastery in 822, including its oratory, and in 832 burned another ‘to the door of the church’.13

  Being raided, even ruined, was a matter of routine for the holy places. This may seem curious in such a Christian society (and even the Vikings were beginning to convert), but holiness was not the first thing anyone noticed about a monastery. Much more visible were their close resemblances to towns, forts, strongrooms.

  Monks were meant to live in a walled world, according to the rule laid down by St Benedict, with gardens, water, mills and crafts all within an enclosure so that they ‘may not be compelled to wander outside it, for that is not at all expedient for their souls’. At its very heart would be the holiest places, churches and relics; outside that, a ring of kilns and crafts and houses for settlers and helpers, and outside that a kind of estate farmyard. The holy shape was remarkably like the secular shape of a ringfort.14 Monasteries were often set on rises in the land, with solid walls and banks of earth with palisades on them, and ditches that worked as moats. They often had round towers, which held their bells but also their treasury of relics and valuable objects: a conspicuous safe place.

  Communities grew around churches. The southern district of the settlement at Armagh was a holy community, built around a basilica housing relics, including a linen cloth soaked in the blood of Christ himself, and a church for the clergy. The community had monks, clergy, nuns, but it also had a married lay population and a separate church, in the north, for laypersons. It included the sick, the disabled and children unwanted by their families. Monasteries grew into holy villages, even a kind of town.

  These communities had remarkable engineers. The monastery at Clonmacnoise in the very heart of Ireland made kilometres of road through bog which led to a bridge across the Shannon some 160 metres long and five metres wide, wide enough for carts and animals as well as walkers and riders; and all this was for monks and pilgrims.15 At Nendrum on Strangford Lough, they built millponds on the foreshore, held in place by embankments of stone and holly branches, which filled with the high tide; and they built solid stone channels to carry the rush of water down to the waterwheel which worked the millstone above. The first of their tidal mills was built around 620; the tree rings in the timber prove the trees were felled then, and the sapwood is in such good condition the timber must have been used soon after felling. No earlier tidal mills are known anywhere.16

  Kings had the right to billet their troops on the population of a church, which says something about how much free space they had, and the right to pasture animals on the monastic estates, which says something about how well the space was protected. Monasteries were often tightly controlled by the family of the founder, so they were dynastic. They were also belligerent: monasteries fought not just the good fight but also each other. Long after clerics had all been exempted from military service, in 845, two neighbouring abbots were both killed by the Danes in a single battle, both in charge of small armies, conscripts but holy.

  So far, so secular; but what made the monasteries truly vulnerable was the safety they offered to other people. Their land was sanctuary land: a fugitive could feel safe there. Offering sanctuary could be a dangerous virtue; if enemies caught up, there was no great difference between burning down a man’s house and burning down the church where he was taking shelter. Churches were still mostly wooden – stone roofs were a kind of insurance that was first taken out in the twelfth century – so the fire spread fast.

  When kings were brawling or bandits were about, the rule of sanctuary could make strongrooms out of the monasteries. Locals could store their valuables, which also meant their herds; in 995 more than two thousand cows were taken from a single monastery, which is more than any simple and holy community of cheese-eaters could possibly need. There was often food stored inside the church; so times of famine brought on plundering. All this was especially true of island monasteries, which were hard to attack unless the water was frozen in a vicious winter: attack an island, either swimming or on rafts, and you were always vulnerable to counter-attack from the islanders, who knew exactly what they were doing.

  There were Viking pirates who came ashore at monasteries because they were supposed to be easy, and full of gilded shrines and lovely jewels: like the raiders who killed St Blathmac. Their raids even had a kindly effect on the local economy since the treasure went into circulation instead of staying near the altars, and the church patrons had to replace what was stolen so their church would still have glory. But much more often, the raiders were cattle rustlers or else slavers, looking for the same loot the Irish wanted from their enemies; which is why the Irish, for all their talk of shock and blasphemy, went on raiding just as often as Vikings, and the Vikings saw no reason to stop just because they had converted to Christianity. The two sides even staged joint operations.17 Whatever Alcuin thought, faith was not the issue.

  The Vikings were settling, in their way, which did not prevent them taking over the territory of Picts across the water in Scotland, then coming home to beat back an Irish attack, then going after the kingdom of Strathclyde in south-west Scotland and coming back with magnificent plunder and almost too many slaves for the market. They raided more monasteries. They feuded among themselves. Some started settlements which had flocks and herds worth stealing, so naturally they were stolen.

  At the centre of all this was Dublin and the claim of Dublin’s king to be the overlord of all the new settlements and trading depots, like Waterford, and in time the overlord of all the Vikings in the British Isles, even when his hold on Dublin itself was none too certain. The smaller centres learned to resent this claim. Dublin was not much more than a waterfront row of houses and storerooms, set carefully behind a palisaded embankment, but it was beginning to look like a new kind of town: not an accident of a holy place, not built to hold a chieftain and his people, but deciding and serving its own ends. It was a base for trading, it was distinct from the territory around it. The first craftsmen and merchants were moving in. The burial grounds held more and more women who had lived and died there. You could make an urban business and an urban life. The needs of Norsemen, from a place that hardly had towns at all, were helping to invent the town in Ireland.

  They had post and wattle fences to mark the boundaries between plots; which means that someone had the authority to divide up the land. Around Dublin thickets of hazel trees were planted and tended in order to supply the flexible branches that were woven to make the walls of houses – simple buildings, one storey tall, the roofs thatched. To get to them, you walked streets of small stones and gravel, which mostly followed some natural contour like the crest of a hill. The houses stood end-on to the street, which is a pattern familiar from the warehouses along the water at Northern ports;18 so when you found the entrance to the plot you wanted, you had to walk straight through the first house on the plot if you were looking for someone in a house that lay behind it. There must have been a careful etiquette for asking for access, which means some sort of civility. There were still ports without towns, just harbours ‘where more than one ship might come at once’,19 but in places like Waterford the
re would very soon be a recognizable town cramped on the shore.

  Once settled, Dublin became a turntable for the various Viking trades: goods coming in, goods going out, but also the booty from raids which could be turned into cash to finance more-respectable business.20 Money may explain why Norsemen ate their beef from cattle that were noticeably smaller than the Irish herds, whether they raised the cows themselves or bought them from the Irish; cattle were a practical source of food now, and no longer the obvious way to keep your wealth. Silver, which the Vikings had in generous amounts, began to matter much more. Coins were easier to tend than cows, easier to steal but far easier to hide, and useful wherever you went.21

  Once Dublin was settled and secure in the middle of the ninth century, the Vikings could start their settlements in Scotland. On the offshore islands, the Norsemen found plenty of land compared to the narrow Norwegian coast, and no armies to oppose them; there was even enough wood inland to build ships, if ever they wanted to do that, and flocks to grow the wool that could be exported on their ships. Women, men and children landed and stayed: ordinary persons. To the Scottish islands, the newcomers brought money, weights and measures,22 so there are Arab coins found on the Isle of Skye, merchant scales on the tiny island of Gigha.23 Farmers, raiders, pirates were all being drawn into the same world: the coastal world of sailors.

  Even fear began to change. Running from the Vikings was still seen as reasonable in Ireland; it was one of the few acceptable excuses for breaking the Sabbath. The new and greater fear, though, was of somehow not being able to tell the Norsemen from the Irish any more. The Irish were anxious about the prospect of ‘an abbot from among them over every church; / one from among them will assume / the kingship of Ireland.’ By 850 two kings already had suspiciously Norse names, and claiming to be an Irish king was a very fluid business, after all, full of legend and counterclaims. Norsemen even seemed to be acquiring Irish habits; Amlaíb, chief of Dublin, was in the business of commissioning poems from the Irish poets (‘I bore off from him as the price of my song,’ one wrote, ‘a horse of the horses of Achall’) and he was said to pay up rather more reliably than some of his Norse colleagues.24