by Travers, Tim
The scholar and teacher, Alcuin of York, wrote to King Aethelred of Northumbria in similar style about the Lindisfarne attack:
…never before has such terror appeared in Britain as we have now suffered from a pagan race, nor was it thought that such an inroad from the sea could be made. Behold, the church of St. Cuthbert spattered with the blood of the priests of God, despoiled of all its ornaments; a place more venerable than all in Britain is given as a prey to pagan peoples.1
What drove these Scandinavians to leave their normal trade routes and farms and become pirates? Many explanations have been offered, ranging from over-population in Scandinavia which lead to shortage of land for farming; to climate change of colder weather, resulting in less land for farming; to the desire for honor and treasure; to competition between chieftains to attract followers (fellows) and produce valuable results from raids; to social encouragement in Scandinavia for such expeditions and later for emigration; to the lack of strong European powers at the time to curb such piracy; to the pre-existence of Scandinavian trade routes, which showed the Vikings where the valuable targets were; to the realization that raiding was more productive than trading to obtain silver and treasure; to eighth-century economic growth in Europe providing attractive targets; and to the development of suitable ships (the well known Viking long ships), with the parallel improvement of sailing skills. As well, being pagan, the Vikings had no remorse about plundering vulnerable targets such as monasteries and churches, where valuable artifacts could be found, where there were no defenses, and where monks and servants could easily be taken as slaves. As important was the fact that wealthy monasteries were often located on isolated islands or coasts that could easily be raided from the sea.
These Viking raids brought howls of protest from monks and clergy who were the most affected, and this actually pleased the Vikings, because such tales produced the kind of propaganda that might make the next target more ready to surrender without a fight. A similar sense of outrage came from the Patriarch Photius, in regard to a Viking raid on Constantinople, and on monasteries along the Bosphorus, in 860:
Woe is me that I see a fierce and savage tribe fearlessly poured round the city, ravaging the suburbs, destroying everything, ruining everything – fields, houses, herds, beasts of burden, women, old men, youths – thrusting their swords through everything, taking pity on nothing, sparing nothing. The destruction is universal. Like a locust in a cornfield, like mildew in a vineyard, or rather like a whirlwind or a typhoon or a torrent or I know not what to say, it fell upon our land and has annihilated whole generations of inhabitants.2
Photius was determined to emphasise the indiscriminate destruction caused by the Vikings:
Nor did their savagery stop with human beings but was extended to dumb animals – oxen, horses, fowl, and others. There lay an ox and a man by its side, a child and a horse found a common grave, women and fowl stained each other with their blood. Everywhere dead bodies. The flow of rivers was turned into blood; some of the fountains and reservoirs could not be distinguished because they were level with corpses … Corn land was rotting with dead bodies, roads were obstructed, forests looked wild and desolate … because of bodies; caverns were filled up and mountains, hills, ravines, and gullies differed in no way from city cemeteries.3
The Vikings themselves wrote sagas and poems of their exploits, and one such stanza written around 925 by Egil Skallagrimsson extols the bloody deeds of the Vikings in a very evocative manner:
I’ve been with sword and spear
slippery with bright blood
where kites wheeled. And how well
we violent Vikings clashed!
Red flames ate up men’s roofs,
raging we killed and killed,
and skewered bodies sprawled
sleepy in town gate-ways.4
The Vikings soon gained a reputation as blood thirsty raiders, who were supposed to employ such rituals as the blood eagle sacrifice, in which the victim’s back is cut open, the ribs bent outward, and the lungs pulled out to resemble an eagle. This seems to have been an invention, and the Vikings were probably no more violent than the age they lived in. And despite the terror produced by these early attacks, Viking raids usually led eventually to settlement, then conversion to Christianity, and quite quickly, social integration. But what kind of people were these Viking pirates?
The Swedish Vikings, who travelled along the rivers of Russia, were known as the Rus, from which it is argued that the name Russia derives. These Swedish Vikings in Russia primarily wanted to capture slaves to trade, and were also involved in the fur trade.Amusing details of the lives of these particular Vikings come from two Arab travelers in the first half of the tenth century, Ibn Fadlan, a diplomat, and Ibn Rustah, an astronomer and geographer. Ibn Fadlan, sent on a mission from Baghdad to the town of Bulgar on the Volga in 921–922, paints a rather negative picture of these Swedish Vikings from the perspective of a cultured and sophisticated observer:
They are the filthiest of God’s creatures. They do not wash after discharging their natural functions, neither do they wash their hands after meals. They are as stray donkeys. They arrive from their distant lands and lay their ships alongside the banks of the Atul [the Volga], which is a great river, and there they build big wooden houses on its shores. Ten or twenty of them may live together in one house, and each of them has a couch of his own where he sits and diverts himself with the pretty slave-girls whom he has brought along to offer for sale. He will make love with one of them in the presence of his comrades, sometimes this develops into a communal orgy, and, if a customer should turn up to buy a girl, the Rus will not let her go till he has finished with her.
Ibn Fadlan was not impressed by their hygiene:
Every day they wash their faces and heads, all using the same water which is as filthy as can be imagined. This is how it is done. Every morning a girl brings her master a large bowl of water in which he washes his face and hands and hair, combing it also over the bowl, then blows his nose and spits into the water. When he has finished the girl takes the same bowl to his neighbour – who repeats the performance – until the bowl has gone round to the entire household. All have blown their noses, spat, and washed their faces and hair in the water.5
Ibn Rustah, writing in the 940s to the 950s period, described their activities in a more positive manner, though his description of their island location may well be fanciful:
They stay on an island (or peninsula) in a lake, an island covered with forest and brush, which it takes three days to walk round and which is marshy and unhealthy … They sail their ships to ravage as-Saqaliba [the surrounding Slavs] and bring back captives whom they sell at Hazaran and Bulgar [both towns on the Volga]. They have no cultivated fields but depend for their supplies on what they can obtain from as-Saqaliba’s land … They have no estates, villages, or fields; their only business is to trade in sable, squirrel, and other furs, and the money they take in these transactions they stow in their belts. Their clothes are clean and the men decorate themselves with gold armlets. They treat their slaves well, and they wear exquisite clothes since they pursue trade with great energy. They have many towns. They deal firmly with one another; they respect their guests and are hospitable and friendly to strangers who take refuge with them … They do not allow anybody to molest their guests or do them any harm…
On the other hand, Ibn Rustah had a healthy respect for their prowess in battle, emphasising the Vikings’ determination, ‘If a group of them is challenged to battle, they stick together as one man until victory has been achieved.’ Similarly, ‘They are courageous in battle and when they attack another tribe’s territory they persist until they have destroyed it completely. They take the women prisoners and make the men serfs. They are well built and daring, but their daring is not apparent on land; they always launch their raids and campaigns from ships.’6
These Swedish Vikings were warriors and traders, and over the period of their expansion into Russia t
hey took over towns such as Kiev and Novgorod, attacked Constantinople in 860, and again in 941. In this last attack, the Vikings were defeated by the use of Greek fire, which forced them to jump overboard rather than burn alive. But by the end of the tenth century the Viking Rus had converted to Christianity, and by the 1040s they had assimilated and become Slavs.
What of the predominantly Danish Vikings in England? A similar pattern existed there where the Vikings started as raiders and pirates, then settled, converted to Christianity, and became traders, craftsmen and farmers. The town of York, the Viking Jorvik, has recently been excavated, and the results tend to emphasise the craft and trading aspect of the Vikings. York was taken in 866 by Danish Vikings, who ruled the town and surrounding area, with some interruptions, until about 954. The Vikings of York included leather workers, wood workers, metal craftsmen, jewelry makers, shoe makers, and traders of all kinds. This image of the Vikings as creative artisans and traders goes some way to offset the image of the Vikings as primarily savage pirates, interested only in booty and killing.
England suffered two main waves of Viking attacks, each followed by periods of settlement, one wave of attacks lasting from 835 to 934, and the second lasting from 980 to 1035. Similarly, in the case of Ireland, there were raids followed by periods of settlement. For example, there was settlement between the 830s and 870s, when the Vikings initially founded Dublin, among other small towns. The Vikings helped to foster commerce, and then there was another wave of settlement between 914 and the 940s. In between these more peaceful periods of immigration and land settlement in Ireland occurred the brutal early years of the tenth century, when the Irish Sea was infested with pirates, both Viking and Irish.7 Thus, in 902 a Viking force was defeated in Dublin and the Viking pirates left for the Isle of Man and north-west England. Then in 914 further Viking fleets arrived on the Irish coast. Later, in 917, the Vikings Ragnall and Sitric led fleets to south-east Ireland. Sitric led his men up the river Liffey and re-established a base in Dublin, which was to be his main centre of operations. Meanwhile, Ragnall landed at Waterford, left the next year, and fought a battle in Scotland, on the Tyne – apparently a draw. In this fight Ragnall dividing his forces into four battles or groups, three in the front line, and one in reserve. The reserve battle was supposed to either force the victory or cover a defeat.8 Back in Ireland, in 919, Viking forces defeated the O’Neill, King of Tara, and 12 minor kings. It also seems that in 919 Ragnall, and subsequently Sitric, gained control of the town of York, introducing a period of Irish-Scandinavian rule. Essentially, the Viking pirates, by virtue of their success in England and Ireland, were becoming kings in their own right, and so were really ceasing to be pirates by organizing armies and becoming involved as local and national rulers.
Thus from 865 to 954 the Danish Vikings arrived in England as invading armies, aiming at conquest and settlement rather than raids. The armies were small – perhaps 500 to 2,000 men, but large enough to leave piracy behind and become something else. These armies landed, established bases, and used the old Roman roads to move inland on horse, either capturing local horses to use, or bringing horses with them. Then they dismounted and fought in a shield wall style of battle. The object was either to loot and plunder, or to force the local inhabitants to buy them off with silver, coins, or other valuables. Ultimately the Vikings wanted land, to settle and farm, and to encourage others to follow as immigrants. Resistance was difficult, and Alfred of Wessex in the 870s, and again in the 890s, tried to deal with the Danish Vikings in a variety of ways. Alfred used local militias, constructed coastal defenses, built a fleet, fortified a series of strong places, retreated when defeated, and finally made treaties, which accepted Danish settlement in an area of eastern England known as the Danelaw. But these relatively large scale Viking operations really can no longer be called pirate raids – the Vikings had become Norse settlers in England.
Before this transition to settlement, what were the raiding methods of the Vikings? The original Viking tactic was to sail and row their famous long boats toward their target, and then find a suitable island or protected place at the mouth of a river or an inlet on the coast to act as a base. A suitable church or fort, or defended village, could also be used as a base. The Vikings would then leave their ships with a guarding force, and range inland. If the raid aimed at going far inland, the Vikings would use horses to reach their objective, and then dismount to fight. These horses might be brought by specially constructed ships (not easily done, but shown as possible in the Bayeux tapestry of Duke William’s 1066 invasion of England), or as mentioned, could be captured locally.
Battle of Maldon: 991
A typical Viking raid has been preserved for us in poetry, and is known as the Battle of Maldon. This Danish raid was led by a well known Viking chief called Olaf Tryggvason, who lived in Dublin, and then later ruled in Norway as king. He was a pagan, and used the ‘crack a bone’ method of divination to plan his actions, although he later became a Christian. Olaf was an unusual individual, according to reports. He was an expert swimmer and mountain climber. He could run along the oars of his long boat while the crew was rowing. He could juggle three daggers in the air at the same time. He could strike equally well with both hands, and so could throw two spears at once. In the end, in the year 1000 he drowned himself rather than surrender to a strong Swedish-Danish fleet.9 But this was in the future.
In the year 991 Olaf’s aim was the small town of Maldon, near the coast in Essex, England, which could be reached by the Blackwater River. In August, Olaf’s very large fleet of Viking ships raided on the east coast, and then came up the Blackwater River, on the flood, past the old Roman fort, and beached at Northey Island, where the Viking base was established. The Vikings then shouted across the causeway to the Saxon defenders that they would go away if paid gold. The Saxons were led by the local ealdorman, or king’s deputy, Brihtnoth, whose colourful name meant ‘battle bright’. Brihtnoth refused to pay ransom for the town of Maldon, and three of his Saxons stood firm on the narrow causeway, preventing the Vikings from crossing to the mainland. The poem then suggests some trickery used by the Vikings to cross the causeway, but also that Brihtnoth proudly invited the Vikings across the narrow causeway, which was partly under water, being high tide. Brihtnoth was perhaps over-confident, or much more likely understood that if the Vikings were paid to go away, they would simply raid somewhere else on the Essex coast.
The Saxons formed a small army composed of thanes, or warrior class men, supported by the local fyrd, or militia. For their part, the Vikings were all warriors, and some of the upper class were well protected with coats of mail and helmets. Both sides possessed shields – the Viking shields being very large to protect the whole body, with an iron boss in the middle to deflect arrows and spears, and painted in strong colors. These shields would be raised in the air if the Vikings wanted peace, but this obviously wasn’t the case at Maldon. Both sides possessed spears, swords, axes, and some bowmen. However, the poem suggests that the principal weapons used first in this battle were bows. The battle started with a hail of arrows, then spears were thrown and also used as stabbing weapons, and finally, swords were drawn and used in the climactic part of the battle when all the spears had been thrown or damaged. Axes were another favourite weapon of the Vikings, but are not mentioned at Maldon.
Before the battle started both sides shouted insults, while each side formed the battle hedge or shield wall, with interlocking shields. Brihtnoth apparently first rode his horse up and down the Saxon line to make sure it was properly organized. Then he dismounted to fight. The leaders stood in the centre, accompanied by a standard bearer and a bodyguard of the chief warriors. After opening the battle with a hail of arrows and spears, the object of both sides was then to use spears and swords and brute strength to cut a hole in the opposing shield wall, and roll up the enemy from either side of the hole. The poem describing this battle, composed by an anonymous Saxon companion of Brihtnoth, has lost its beginning and en
d, but gives a strong flavor of the battle:
Bow strings were busy, shield parried point,
Bitter was the battle. Brave men fell
On both sides, youths choking in the dust.
Brihtnoth was the focus of the Viking attack, and he was wounded by a spear. He knocked the spear out with the edge of his shield, and killed the Viking who had wounded him. A second spear hit Brihtnoth in the side, which was pulled out by a fellow Saxon and hurled back, killing the Viking who had wounded Brihtnoth. But Brihtnoth was again wounded, this time in his sword arm, and he dropped his sword on the ground. Now he was defenseless, and Brihtnoth was hacked down, together with two of his Saxon thanes. This death struck fear into some of Brihtnoth’s followers, who fled from the battle:
The sons of Odda were the first to take flight:
Godric fled from the battle, forsaking Brihtnoth.
Forgetting that his lord had given him often the gift of a horse.
He leapt into the saddle
Of his lord’s own horse, most unlawfully,
And both his brothers, Godwine and Godwig,
Galloped beside him; forgetting their duty
They fled from the fight
And saved their lives in the silent wood.
This was actually the crucial moment of the battle, for the Saxon warriors thought that it was Brihtnoth himself who was riding away, since Godric had taken Brihtnoth’s own horse. The Saxon line therefore scattered in alarm, and allowed the Vikings to break through the Saxon shield wall. But others continued to fight, and the poet names these Saxon heroes: Aelfwine, Offa, Aethelric, Byrhtwold, and Leofsunu. The veteran warrior Byrhtwold shook his ash spear, and encouraged the others:
Mind must be the firmer, heart the more fierce,
