Vikings

by Neil Oliver

The Trelleborg fortress on Sjælland was excavated in the 1940s, inside and out. A burial ground was identified just beyond the main ramparts and found to contain the graves of 154 young men, some with weapons. Warrior graves were found at Fyrkat as well, putting it beyond doubt that Trelleborg and the rest had a military function. Everything about them says ‘garrison towns’ and for many years it was thought they must have been built in advance of Svein Forkbeard’s invasion of England in 1013. More recently, however, archaeologists have made the point that soldiers for an amphibious invasion of the British Isles would have been held in garrisons close to harbours and the sea. With the exception of Aggersborg, located by the harbour town of Aggersund, on the Limfjord, the fortresses dominate inland positions and would have posed all manner of logistical problems for commanders tasked with getting thousands of men onto warships. Furthermore they are all in the north-east of Denmark, facing the Baltic rather than the North Sea.

  Tree-ring dating has, anyway, revealed the royal fortresses were built around AD 980, during the reign not of Svein Forkbeard but of his father, Harald Bluetooth. Nowadays archaeologists believe they were built for control of the locals rather than for the invasion of foreign lands. A king like Harald, keen to reinforce his status and position at every turn, would have needed to police his realm — both to maintain control of the populace and to collect the taxes and agricultural surplus required to pay for extravagant building projects. Whatever their function, they were short-lived. All of the royal fortresses seem to have fallen from use within a generation of their construction.

  As well as being an agent of Danish advancement and progress, Harald was also at the mercy of developments and changes elsewhere in the world. He was hardly the only one. All of the Scandinavian countries were embracing the modern world, to a greater or lesser degree, and in so doing made themselves vulnerable to forces beyond their control. Harald worked hard to grow a government from the ground up, and was among the first of his kind to try and do so. As it turned out, the momentum he generated did not outlast him and when he died, around AD 985, his successors allowed much of his fledgling infrastructure to fall back into the earth from which it had come.

  From the time of its earliest contacts with the East — led in the main by the Swedish Rus — the Scandinavian world had grown increasingly dependent upon Arab silver. From early on the Arab dirhams were identified as containing the purest, most desirable silver and during the decades and centuries to come millions of the coins were funnelled west. Like a supply of oxygen, the flow of silver helped energise the whole area, supplying the power to create nation states.

  So when that oxygen supply suddenly began to dwindle, as it certainly did from the middle of the tenth century onwards, Scandinavia — with no natural sources of precious metal — felt the pain more acutely than anywhere else in Europe. By then the main Arabic silver mines were controlled by the Samanid Empire, from its capital in Bukhara in modern Uzbekistan; and as the tenth century wore out, so too did the veins of precious metal. At the start of the Viking Age, the silver content of the dirhams was around 90 per cent, but by the start of the eleventh century it was down to five per cent or less. The Rus merchants stopped accepting the coins and a flow that had once been torrential slowed to a trickle.

  Just like national leaders of the present day, the kings and would-be kings of the Viking homelands were forced to find solutions to their economic problems. For the Danes, the answer to their newly Christian prayers lay now in the west, in wealthy England.

  *

  Eirik Bloodaxe is surely one of the most famous names in Viking history and, given the proclivities of its bearer, the most appropriate. Harald Fairhair, King of Norway, sired as many as 20 sons and, according to the sagas, Eirik was the favourite. Harald Fairhair’s was the reign that reputedly both united Norway and also forced the exile of so many of that country’s sons and daughters. Historians are now of the opinion that Harald controlled only the south and west of the country and so, when he died, his many offspring had to fight for a share. None was as ruthless as Eirik, however, and it seems he earned his nickname by murdering his siblings one by one — a great deal of the blood on his axe was that of his own family. One of the Latin texts concerned with his life and times refers to him as fratris interfactor, brother-killer.

  By fair means or foul he acquired his father’s throne, but it seems his harshness and cruelty were not restricted to family members. His rule was unpopular even by the standards of the day and soon he was driven out by Haakon, his sole surviving brother, and fled to England.

  According to The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle Eirik was ‘taken as king’ by the Northumbrians in either AD 947 or 948. Prosperous kingdom though it was, with its capital at York, it seems its bounty was not enough to satisfy that most bloodthirsty of Vikings. In order to keep himself and his followers in the style he and they preferred, he habitually raided Scotland and around the Irish Sea.

  Eirik Bloodaxe is a complicated character to understand. On the one hand he had a reputation for violent belligerence, but on the other he had surrendered his Norwegian kingdom to his brother without a fight. The sources are generally agreed that he died in battle, at Stainmore, in Cumbria, in 954.

  Whatever else he is remembered for, he was certainly the last independent Viking King of Northumbria. After his death, all of England was ruled by Eadred, a younger son of Edward the Elder and grandson of Alfred the Great. Thereafter, and for a period of over half a century to come, England was ruled by a succession of kings … Eadwig the Fair … Edgar the Peaceful … Edward the Martyr … Aethelred the Unready.

  But for all that they sound ethereal and faintly otherwordly, it was under their rule that the kingdom of England was stabilised and the machinery of effective government took permanent hold. In the absence of Viking kings, the Scandinavian inhabitants of the Danelaw of the east and north of England had learnt to adapt and to blend in. As the name Danelaw suggests, there were still some different approaches to maintaining order at the local level — different punishments for different crimes perhaps, and some surviving cultural differences concerning language and lifestyle — but in the main they would have lived much like their Anglo-Saxon English neighbours. Edgar and his ilk were their kings too and by the latter years of the tenth century the majority of Scandinavians, or people of Scandinavian descent, would have accepted Christianity as their religion. England, all England, was essentially an integrated society.

  Edgar the Peaceful is credited too with promoting ideas of universal justice and he was also successful in securing Scottish and Welsh recognition of his right to rule. Deeply significant, and perhaps easily overlooked, among so much else, was the impact of his reign on coinage. By AD 973 he had pulled off the feat of standardising the production of the silver penny.

  It is always difficult to put a modern-day value on coins of the past but it seems fair to suggest a silver penny in an Englishman’s pocket, around the middle of the tenth century, would have bought him a dozen loaves of bread. Five pennies might have been the price of a sheep and 30 were enough for an ox. At the start of Edgar’s reign there were perhaps seven regional variations of the silver penny. But by AD 973 he had ensured all mints were producing identical coins, his coins, all bearing the same standardised design. All the old coins were taken out of circulation and replaced.

  Whether you were shopping in deepest Wessex, in East Anglia, or in Northumbria, everyone’s coins looked the same as everyone else’s. On the front, or obverse, was a profile portrait of Edgar, his name and the title Rex. On the back, or reverse, was the name of the moneyer (whoever had stamped the coin) and the name of the mint, all arranged around some form of cross.

  There were around 40 mints around the country, all strictly controlled. It was an innovation and on a scale unmatched anywhere else in Europe at the time. As well as making life simpler for the population, this level of standardisation was also a demonstration of royal power and control. Anyone wanting to know who was running
the country had only to look at a silver penny and they could see his name and title — and if they could not read, they could at least see his likeness. Kings like Edgar and his followers grew increasingly determined to retain their hold over the country’s purse strings.

  Forgery was an old problem, and a lot easier in the days of multiple coin designs; but now there were increasingly severe penalties. A first offence might mean the loss of a hand, and any repeat of the behaviour would cost a man his testicles.

  Hardly surprising, then, that a system of such technical sophistication — declaring centralised control of all monies — attracted the attentions of those in need of a fresh source of quality-assured silver.

  You begin to understand the lure of it all when you stand in front of a collection like the Cuerdale silver hoard. Part of it — just a tiny part of it is on display in the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford and I found it every bit as captivating as the Alfred Jewel that sits close by (although maybe that’s just me). The whole, staggering mass of it was discovered in 1840 by a gang of workmen labouring to repair part of an embankment on the Ribble River at Cuerdale, in Lancashire. It amounts to some 8,500 silver coins, ingots and jewellery — nearly 90 pounds in weight and thought to be worth a third of a million pounds in modern terms. It is a collection amassed from multiple sources, with coins from England, Europe and even parts of the Islamic world.

  Also recovered were fragments of the lead casket the hoard had been stored in, along with bone pins indicating the loot was once parcelled into bags that were then fastened shut. The coins allow numismatists to say the silver was buried sometime between AD 905 and 910. The Cuerdale hoard is the largest Viking hoard ever found — greater even than anything discovered in Scandinavia — and it must excite the imagination of everyone who sees it.

  Cuerdale and the Ribble Valley are en route between the Irish Sea coast and the Viking capital of York, suggesting to some archaeologists that the silver was part of the portable wealth carried out of Dublin when the Vikings were driven from Ireland around AD 902. It has even been described as a war chest, set down by the leaders of an army for safekeeping in troubled times and never recovered. It is surely impossible to look at such a collection (the bulk of it is in the British Museum) without imagining scooping up handfuls of it and listening to their sweet music as they tumble together. Since the Danes knew as well as anyone just how much liquid wealth was available, in the former Danelaw and in the rest of the British Isles besides, it is a wonder they waited as long as they did before arriving to help themselves to it.

  *

  King Edgar earned the epithet of ‘Peaceful’ on account of the stability his reign brought to England. His eldest son, Edward, had a rather different experience. Although the eldest, there were questions about his legitimacy and he had not been universally accepted as his father’s heir. As a result, there were those in the kingdom who favoured the claim of his seven-year-old half-brother, Aethelred. Edward was only around 13 years old himself at the time of Edgar’s death, and it seems the pair were essentially pawns or figureheads manipulated by powerful men. Edward was made King in 975, for all the good it did him. Just three years later he was dead, murdered while visiting Corfe Castle, in Dorset, and swiftly replaced by young Aethelred. Edward was remembered as ‘the Martyr’ and soon revered as a saint.

  It was around this time of general unrest and uncertainty, with a boy-king on the throne and rivals conniving and double-dealing in the background, that the Vikings returned to England. They came in dribs and drabs at first, half-hearted raids that, while unpleasant for those enduring them, had little impact on the kingdom as a whole. Since Harald Bluetooth was engaged in what was effectively a civil war against his son, Svein Forkbeard, until around AD 985, it is believed it was Norwegian Vikings who were first to return to British shores. Whoever they were, and wherever they came from, they concentrated their activities on the coast and picked off targets as far apart as Cheshire and Thanet.

  But the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle records that in 991 a fleet of 93 Viking ships arrived on the south-east coast of England. The force that disembarked, led by Olaf Tryggvasson, grandson of Harald Fairhair, proceeded to wreak havoc. Their wide-ranging attack on English soil culminated in a disastrous defeat for the English at the Battle of Maldon, in the August of the same year.

  In order to stop the Viking advance Aethelred agreed to buy off Olaf’s forces with 10,000 pounds (in weight) of silver. This was a payment of Danegeld — his first of many — and during the coming years the royal coffers would haemorrhage silver. In 994 the sum required to pacify the invaders was 16,000 pounds; in 1002 it was 24,000 pounds; in 1007, 36,000 pounds and by 1012 the price of peace had risen to 48,000 pounds.

  Coin specialist Rory Naismith of Cambridge University puts the scale of the Danegeld into context. He said the world’s best and biggest collection of Anglo-Saxon coins is held in a museum in Stockholm, rather than in England — proof that a huge percentage of the available silver was crossing the North Sea in the holds of Viking ships.

  ‘In fact over 60,000 English coins have been found in Scandinavia, compared with 10,000 coins here,’ he said. ‘Six times as many.’

  He added that while the majority of them were leaving the country in the form of tribute a great deal were also taken as payment for mercenaries, as ransom payments for hostages or through straightforward theft and robbery.

  Olaf Tryggvasson may well have been something of an expert on silver. Forced into exile from Norway as a child, he was raised among the Rus in the days before the Samanid mines finally dried up. He also learnt early on that fighting for survival was a fact of life, and along the Baltic coastline he became practised in leading men as well. By the time he arrived in the Thames estuary in 991 he was a lethal, vengeful warrior and warlord.

  The man who led the English at Maldon was an Essex ealdorman named Byrhtnoth. He found Olaf and his men encamped on Northey Island, in Essex, and, confident in his superior forces, he allowed the Vikings to cross to the mainland for a pitched battle. Leading from the front, Byrhtnoth was among the first to fall and his death broke the spirit of the English warriors. The ealdorman cried out to his men with his dying breath that they must fight on, but the mass of them fled the field. Only the hero’s closest friends rallied to his call, and they were slaughtered to a man.

  Aethelred’s Danegeld seemed to work, at least at first, and for three years no more was heard of Olaf Tryggvasson and his Vikings. But when he and they returned in 994 the Norwegian was accompanied by Svein Forkbeard, son of Harald Bluetooth and now King of Denmark. Svein had finally forced out the old man and, according to the account by Adam of Bremen, the king who had united the Danes died of wounds received in a final battle, sometime between AD 985 and 987, the accounts vary. This time the Vikings arrived in 94 ships and, just as before, they swept across the south and east of England like a plague. Only the brave men of London managed to defy them and indeed, according to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, they inflicted more than just a bloody nose. Apparently the invaders ‘suffered more harm and injury than they ever imagined that any town-dwellers would do to them’.

  Brave and doughty the Londoners certainly were, but they were the only ones able to turn back the tide. Elsewhere, throughout Essex, Kent, Hampshire and Sussex, the Vikings slaughtered and plundered at will. When Aethelred offered his 16,000 pounds of tribute, to bring the horror to an end, it was on condition that Olaf accept Christianity. Against the odds, and with no real need to do so, Olaf consented to the deal, and also promised to leave England in peace for the rest of his days. By all accounts he was as good as his word, and turned his attention to his old homeland instead.

  His time as a Viking in England had made him rich after all — and he had the wit to realise that with such wealth and status among his warriors he could set his sights on nothing less than the kingship of Norway, the land once ruled by his grandfather.

  Haakon Sigurdsson was, at that time, King of Norway in all but name.
Harald Bluetooth had claimed the title, and had written as much in the runes on his great stone at Jelling; but Denmark’s claim on Norway effectively died with him. Haakon was a son of a family whose hold on Norway was much more deeply rooted than that of any Dane. Part of their demesne was Hålogaland and they had grown rich and powerful from its harvest of walrus ivory, polar bear furs, whale bones and skins and reindeer hides.

  But those were the makings of the old wealth, based on relationships stretching far into the darkness of the north and to the Saami — into the past. Olaf represented the new wealth, new money and the future, and he had drawn his power from the wider world. When he returned to Norway in 995 he was simply too much for Haakon to handle.

  Olaf siezed the kingdom and, with the words of his Christian godfather, Aethelred, still ringing in his ears, set about driving the new faith into his subjects at the point of the sword. For all his undoubted power and sheer force of personality, not even Olaf Tryggvasson was enough to make Norway’s conversion permanent. There were plenty of powerful and ambitious magnates happy to challenge the new king. Among the heavyweights was Earl Eirik, son of the lately dispossessed Haakon, and he was able to join forces with the Swedish king Olaf Eriksson and also Olaf’s former comrade Svein Forkbeard. The treachery of Svein must have been hardest of all for Olaf to swallow, but these were all powerful men vying with each other for prizes that clearly outweighed any notions of loyalty or brotherhood. At stake were whole kingdoms and in the case of Olaf and Norway the matter was finally settled by a sea battle off the coast of an island between Denmark and Norway, referred to then as Svold, but unidentified now.

  According to the Heimskringla of the Icelandic poet and historian Snorri Sturluson, what happened there that day, in AD 1000, was the stuff of legend. ‘This battle was one of the severest told of, and many were the people slain,’ he wrote.

  King Olaf was returning home from a tour of the Baltic coast when his fleet of 11 ships was ambushed by at least 70 led by his foes. Despite the odds, Olaf chose to fight and one by one his ships were captured. Finally only Olaf’s own vessel remained and before it could be taken he leapt into the sea, holding his shield over his head to ensure he would sink fast.