Vikings

by Neil Oliver

  Much of what is visible now is fifteenth-century but within the fabric of the building, fossilised there, are fragments of much older masonry. Some parts of the eastern end are old indeed, and in his classic work The Buildings of England the great architectural historian Nikolaus Pevsner described it as ‘one of the most precious survivals of Anglo-Saxon architecture in England’.

  Worth a visit for its own sake is the Anglo-Saxon crypt, built during the reign of King Aethelbald in the first half of the eighth century, and accessible now via a flight of steps leading down from the left-hand side of the altar. The last few stones are deeply worn, as though by fast-flowing water, but this was a river made by pilgrims’ footsteps. It was a natural spring that first made the site sacred and the original structure was a baptistery. Only later was it turned into a mausoleum, but in time it became a resting place for the bones of kings and at least one saint. Wystan, the grandson of another King of Mercia, Wiglaf, was murdered in 849 and his bones placed in the crypt at Repton. Soon there was talk of miracles and the flow of pilgrims began.

  It is a tiny space, just 16 feet square and lo feet high and divided into nine square bays. The vaulted ceiling — not to mention the weight of the later Anglo-Saxon chancel above — is supported by four stone columns. Added in the ninth century, they are carved like barley sugar sticks, with spirals coiling around and down from capital to base. Some say they copy the style of the pillars of St Peter’s original tomb in Rome. John Betjeman visited and described the atmosphere as ‘Holy air encased in stone’.

  The Great Heathen Army arrived in the autumn of 873 and promptly drove the incumbent king, Burgred, into exile. Knowing what was good for him, he left Repton and Mercia, and eventually fled all the way to Rome in search of final salvation. The Vikings made a puppet king of Ceolwulf, one of Burgred’s retainers, and then settled down for the winter. Pagans they surely were but the spiritual — and therefore political — significance of seizing a royal church-settlement was not lost on them. That they seem to have sought power and even legitimacy by association with one of Christianity’s holy places suggests the start of a longer-term strategy. From early on it seems the Vikings understood the political advance to be made by exploiting the faith of western Europe.

  Repton was also of a straightforward strategic importance that would have mattered just as much to the intruders. Sitting proud upon a bluff of high ground on the south side of the river, the settlement commanded a junction of routes and crossing points. Control of Repton conferred control of Mercia itself and with this in mind the Vikings set about modifying the site until they had created a long port. Having arrived by river, they made their moored boats into one side, the northern side of their fort. Next they created a D-shaped rampart and ditch that incorporated the church itself into the southern side, opposite the river, so that the doors through the building’s long walls served as a massively defended entrance to their fortification. As a statement of intent, it was emphatic.

  Repton also marked a turning point in the life of the Great Heathen Army. Something happened there in 873 that prompted the splitting of the force into two distinct units — and an explanation for the schism may well have been revealed by archaeological excavations of the area between 1974 and 1988.

  In addition to revealing the design and structure of the Viking fort, archaeologists Martin and Birthe Biddle also excavated a number of pagan burials in and around the churchyard. One of the most significant was what was effectively a double grave, containing the skeletons of one man aged around 20, and a second aged between 35 and 45. The elder, and evidently more important, of the pair had died an especially violent death. Felled by two catastrophic injuries to his skull, he also suffered a wound to his leg that would have severed his femoral artery. There are even suggestions he may have been disembowelled. Known today as the Repton Warrior, he was buried with full Viking honours.

  His sword, in a fleece-lined, wooden scabbard, was laid by his side, along with two knives, one of which appeared designed to fold in half, like a penknife. A decorated copper buckle revealed he had been wearing a belt, presumably of leather, around his waist. On top of the sword scabbard was an iron key, and around his neck a little silver Thor’s hammer. Thor was the warrior’s god and by making a keepsake of his famous weapon — the thunder-bringing hammer called Mjölnir — fighting men like the Repton Warrior hoped to ensure his blessing in battle. This little artefact, more than any other item in the grave, simple and roughly made though it is, proclaims him as a Viking. And, after all, Odin himself had decreed that all warriors must be buried or burnt along with everything of value they owned. The hoped-for destination of every Viking warrior was Valhalla, where he would fight all day alongside the gods and feast with them throughout the night, entertained by the Valkyries. It was a prerequisite that such men be laid down with swords, knives, belts and anything else they might need to look the part alongside Odin and Thor.

  More mysterious was the discovery, between his thighs, of a boar’s tusk and, lower down his body, a bag or box containing a bone from a jackdaw. As well as being disembowelled, he may have been castrated postmortem, and the tusk might have been provided to complete him, make him appear whole and masculine once more.

  The younger man buried beside him had also died violently, as a result of a single heavy blow delivered to the right side of his head with a sword or an axe. He had an iron knife by his side and the Biddles thought it at least likely he had been a companion of the Repton Warrior — perhaps a weapon-bearer — and that since both had died together it was felt appropriate to bury them together. He may even have been a slave, dispatched to accompany his dead master.

  Having laid the pair to rest, the burial party sunk a large wooden post into the ground to mark the spot, then covered the grave with sandstone blocks. Perhaps the post was painted or carved so that any passers-by would be reminded they were in the presence of brave men.

  But if the double grave was impressive it was as nothing compared to the discoveries revealed by the Biddles’ re-excavation of a mound in the nearby vicarage garden. First disturbed by a labourer in 1686, and then again in both the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, it turned out to have once been a stone-built tomb or mausoleum erected by Mercian Anglo-Saxons. Discovery of four silver pennies among the rest of the remains revealed the building had been reworked and reused by Vikings during their occupation of Repton. Coin specialists established that three of the coins could have been made no earlier than 872, while the fourth was securely dated to 873/4.

  The workman who opened the mound in 1686 reported finding a stone coffin containing a ‘Humane body nine foot long’ surrounded by 100 skeletons, arranged ‘with their feet pointing to the stone coffin.’ When the Biddles re-excavated the site they found the disarticulated remains of at least 249 individuals, the bones originally stacked around the stone foundations of the Anglo-Saxon tomb. The central burial described in the seventeenth century had not survived but the Biddles concluded that the disarticulated bones had indeed been stacked on all four sides of it, so that the tomb was made into a charnel house. Before the warriors sealed the mass burial of their honoured dead — with stone slabs, a mound of earth and a kerb of stones — it appears they sacrificed four young people and placed their bodies close by the rest. Analysis of the bones revealed the occupants of the burial were predominantly maleover 80 per cent — and of strikingly robust build. The female remains were rather different, and deemed Anglo-Saxon rather than Viking.

  It is the Biddles’ conclusion that the central burial was that of Ivarr himself — also known as Ivarr the Boneless. Having made himself a king in Ireland, it seems he may subsequently have been among the first leaders of the Great Heathen Army that so terrorised and dominated England. Ivarr died in 873 and at least one of the sagas records that he was laid to rest in England, ‘in the manner of former times’. The precise circumstances and consequences of Ivarr’s death remain unknown, but surely it is tempting to imagine that
the loss of an exceptional and charismatic leader prompted much soul-searching on the part of the men he left behind, especially those of high rank. The people whose bones were stacked around his coffin were Viking men (together perhaps with the local women they had taken for wives) who had lost their lives during the campaigns of the army and been originally buried elsewhere. It seems Ivarr’s death prompted the collection of those scattered dead so their bones might be interred a second time around the remains of their leader.

  What is undisputed is that the Great Heathen Army split into two at Repton. After nearly a decade together, tensions of one sort or another finally caused a rift. A Viking chieftain called Halfdan — who may have been kin to Ivarr, even his brother — took half of the force and headed north to Northumbria. From his base there Halfdan began making trouble for, among others, the Picts and the Britons in the north. It was hardly the first time Vikings had raided there. The 200 ships full of slaves that had arrived in Dublin in 871 had contained not just hapless Anglo-Saxons but also Britons and Picts.

  As well as continuing the tradition of raiding, it seems Halfdan’s men also sought to put down roots — both literally and metaphorically. According to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, in 876 he ‘shared out the land of the Northumbrians, and they proceeded to plough and to support themselves’. If this was so then it would mark yet another turning point, and the chronicle even identifies Halfdan as not just a king leading the army, but a king of at least a part of Northumbria itself.

  The rest of the army, under the leadership of three Viking chieftains named Guthrum, Oscetel and Anwend, departed Repton for the area around modern-day Cambridge. After over-wintering there, the Vikings once more focused their sights on the last surviving independent English kingdom, that of Wessex.

  Alfred the Great was the only English king who managed to defeat the Vikings. He came to his throne in 871 following the death of his elder brother, King Aethelred. Those were dark days for the people of Wessex and the shadow over the land was cast by Vikings. With no other options available to him, the newly crowned Alfred had to ‘make peace’ with the invaders. No doubt that peace was bought with a large quantity of gold and silver from Wessex coffers — and in any event it was short-lived.

  Time and again during the next seven years Viking forces invaded Alfred’s kingdom, and always Alfred was forced to buy them off. Guthrum, one of the triumvirate that led half the Great Army away from Repton, masterminded the surprise attack that all but claimed the life of the king himself. Alfred was staying at a royal stronghold in Chippenham in the winter of 877/8, when the Vikings struck. With most of his fighting men slaughtered, Alfred led a ragtag band of survivors to Athelney, in the Somerset Levels, where they threw up hasty defences. It was there, at his lowest ebb, that he was apparently given shelter by a peasant woman. Unaware she was entertaining her king, she left him to keep watch over some cakes she was cooking on her fire and, distracted by his plight, he let them burn.

  Much like Robert the Bruce, King of Scots, Alfred seems to have found new resolve while on the run. It was in the May of 878 that he returned to the fray and achieved a decisive victory at the Battle of Edington. Properly cowed by the scale of the defeat, Guthrum promised to lead his army out of Wessex for good, and as part of the deal he even accepted baptism into Alfred’s Christian faith. With a new name, Aethelstan, and with Alfred as his godfather, the Viking accepted a peace deal that saw a new boundary appear on the map of England. While Alfred’s Wessex now extended into the western half of Mercia, the Vikings could lay claim to much of the territory north of the Thames and the River Lea, and into East Anglia. This Viking domain would become known as the Danelaw; and rather than being a geographical concept, it was that part of England where the legal systems of the Norse held sway.

  From the Viking point of view it was an astonishing achievement. Having arrived as an army of 3,000 men 15 years before, now they had conquered three of the four English kingdoms and claimed much of the north and east of the land for their own colony. There, Norse kings would rule and even today the place names and the very blood of the people are silent witnesses to the scale of the Viking success.

  It was never likely that Alfred’s peace with Guthrum would bring matters to a final close and in 892 there was an attempted influx by two armies of Vikings hoping to settle in England. Alfred was ready for them, however, and his pre-prepared defences, with armies on standby, meant the would-be settlers were thwarted. A poor shadow of the Great Heathen Army of nearly 30 years before, they roamed hopelessly until 896 when, according to The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, the soldiers went their separate ways, ‘some to East Anglia, some to Northumbria and those who were without money or property got themselves ships there, and went south across the sea to the Seine’.

  The principal centres within the territory of the Danelaw were Lincoln and the capital of the Norse in England, York. The confluence of the Ouse and the Foss rivers has recommended itself for settlement for millennia. It certainly attracted the Romans, who arrived in AD 71 and called it Eboracum — the place of the yew trees. After they left it was known to the Anglo-Saxons as Eoforwic and as Jorvik by the Vikings. Archaeological excavations in York, particularly in Coppergate, have painted a detailed picture of busy, productive lives. Craftspeople lived and worked in timber houses built on long narrow plots separated one from another by wattle fences. Over time the style of buildings changed but always the inhabitants were engaged in the business of making tools and household items as well as jewellery of amber, bronze, silver and gold.

  There were English puppet kings in York at first, but by the early 900s they were Scandinavians, often basing their legitimacy on descent from Ivarr. York grew into a veritable city of between 10,000 and 15,000 souls and such a centre attracted merchants and visitors from all over the known world. As well as finds of Irish and Scottish origin, excavations in Coppergate have turned up evidence of French wine and Byzantine silk. Sure of themselves and determined to ape Anglo-Saxon ways, the Scandinavian kings of York even began minting coins.

  Years of Danelaw turned to decades and soon even the language of England began to show Norse influence. Anglo-Saxon and Norse are, anyway, from the same branch of the tree of languages. The Anglo-Saxons came to Britain from north and western Europe in the wake of the Romans, and by the time Vikings began arriving, four or five centuries later, both peoples could still understand one another relatively well. As more and more Norse settlers appeared in the Danelaw in the second half of the ninth century, so the two languages became increasingly intertwined. Place names are particularly revealing. The thousands of town and village names ending in -by, -thorp and -thwaite indicate that those places were either established, or taken over, by Vikings. A quick look at a map of the north and east of England makes clear just how much of the land was therefore settled by Scandinavians. Perhaps more surprising are just how many so-called ‘loan-words’ are used in modern English as a result of the ninth- and tenth-century mixing of the two languages. Everyday words like ‘cast’, ‘die’, ‘egg’, ‘knife’ and ‘window’ are all derived from Old Norse and we would not have ‘their’, ‘them’ and ‘they’ either without the Scandinavian influence. Something like 600 Old Norse loan-words are still part of modern English and it is only the loss of local dialects — regional variations of speech that survived for millennia but that are now all but drowned out by the uniformity imposed by modern media — that has recently done away with thousands more.

  The dialects of northern Britain were generally affected more noticeably than those in the south, and many words used today in Cumbria and Yorkshire — like ‘tyke’ for an unruly youngster, ‘nay’ meaning no, as well as good old honest ‘muck’ — are all understood to be loan-words from the Vikings. The Scots word ‘kirk’ for church has the same origin. Best and surely most unexpected of all, it turns out ‘akimbo’ is Old Norse too, and comes from a word meaning something like ‘bent into a crooked shape’.

  In Shetland, the memo
rial to the men of the Shetland Bus is on the sea-front at Scalloway, capital of the islands until the eighteenth century. As you might expect, it takes the form of a little boat riding high upon a wave on a storm-tossed sea. It seems clear the westward expansion of the Norwegian Vikings reached those islands first of all and, having been established as the beachhead, Shetland was for ever after a fixed point in their understanding of the world.

  Archaeology has proved there were Swedish Vikings in Staraya Ladoga, in modern Russia, by the middle of the eighth century. Nothing has been found so far to place the Norwegians in Shetland quite so early — but common sense alone makes such an idea tenable at the very least. The most northerly part of the British archipelago has been a hub around which exploration and expansion has revolved for hundreds, if not thousands, of years.

  Despite the obvious logic of placing Vikings on the Northern Isles from the eighth century onwards — and at least earlier than the attacks on the Northumbrian monasteries — there is no physical or even documentary evidence that it was so. No one wrote anything down about the settlement of the islands until 300 years later; and by then the testimony, by Icelanders and others of Scandinavian origin, is in the form of sagas written to entertain rather than to keep track of dates.

  What we do know is that by the seventh century AD Shetland and Orkney, as well as the north and east of the Scottish mainland, were home to people descended directly from the hunters and gatherers who had colonised Britain at the end of the Ice Age 10,000—12,000 years ago. Their ancestors had walked dry-shod onto what was then a peninsula of northwestern Europe and those who made it as far as Orkney and Shetland had reached the end of the line: Ultima Thule. The way of life there had been evolving for millennia and during the early centuries of the second millennium AD, the height of the pre-Roman Iron Age, had given rise to the mighty circular stone towers known as brochs.