Children of Ash and Elm

by Neil Price;

  The notion that, before the raids, the Scandinavians were ignorant of what lay ‘west over the sea’ is nonsense. They probably had a good idea of life at least along the east coast, in particular around the markets and monasteries—but this is not the same as complete familiarity with England, its people and landscapes, its politics and culture. It may be that much of this early period was essentially one of tentative exploration, mapping out vulnerabilities while ensuring relatively safe lines of supply and retreat.

  However, in Scandinavia the early raids were having an effect. A growing number of men may have improved their social standing, personal wealth, longer-term economic outlook, and perhaps their marriage prospects. These men were not isolated from their communities at home, but of course fully integrated within them. The raids very much played across borders of gender. Every woman with whom the raiders were connected, in any way, thus played a part in the changes set in motion by the flow of foreign loot. Other people also arrived in Scandinavia—the newly enslaved—whose lives were changed forever, the women’s most (and worst) of all.

  The results and proceeds of the raids were not limited to the raiders themselves. The elites who financed the expeditions made other kinds of gains: their coffers filled, perhaps augmented still further by demanding a cut of the general take (although ‘their fair share’ sounds nicer, doesn’t it?). They could activate these economic rewards to entrench and expand their positions, including through the funding of more raids that would drive the cycle forward. Their retinues grew, along with their strength and status. This might not have been solely positive, for with affluence comes rivalry and jealousy, and with increasing power comes envy on the part of those who would like to usurp it. The internecine politics of Scandinavia and its petty-kingdoms were probably enflamed rather than soothed by the North Sea adventure.

  And of course, some of the raiders never came back at all—perhaps even quite large numbers of them on unlucky occasions, such as the Monkwearmouth fiasco when most of the ships foundered and their crews were massacred. The Viking life was a risky one, even for a fortnight. This too had its consequences, but given the militarised ideologies and honour systems of the North, it is likely that such hazards were not a primary concern, and certainly not much of a deterrent.

  The raiding of the early ninth century was intense but sporadic; this situation changed in 834. There is no evidence that the events of that year, as recorded in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, were the result of a coordinated and deliberate shift in strategy. It is only in retrospect that they appear as a watershed, a divider between what came before—a few boatloads at a time, just a lið or two of warrior brothers—and what would follow.

  After 834, the Scandinavians regularly came in fleets numbering hundreds of ships, carrying thousands of men. Their depredations would bring the major western European powers to the very brink of destruction, and they would also acquire names in the chronicles and annals of those regions: the Great Heathen Army or the Great Raiding Army; the Armies of the Seine, the Somme, and the Loire; the Great Summer Army; and more. Their stories were complex ones, but they are key to understanding the following two centuries of Viking activities across Eurasia.

  Just as with the coastal attacks that began decades earlier, the nature and motivations of these new ventures were intimately connected with the political economies of Scandinavia. But this time there was a key difference, something that set the fleets and armies apart from the first raids: in the early ninth century, there was no single polity, kingdom, or other social entity in Scandinavia sufficiently large to launch maritime ventures of this kind. In other words, none of these forces can be understood in simple ethnic or political terms. They were not ‘the Danes’, ‘the Norwegians’, or even ‘the sea-kings’; in fact, they were not ‘the anybodies’. They were something else, and the challenge is to find out what that was.

  Getting inside these escalating Viking groups is now a possibility, through archaeological excavations in the remains of their camps, their burials, the detritus of their daily lives—much of it with startling implications. Aside from confirming that they really did number in the thousands, it seems these ‘armies’ also included women and children—families—and that they had entire economies of manufacturing and exchange. They were by no means just fighting forces, although raiding was always at the heart of their operations. Going deeper, inside their heads, one finds new vistas of bold social experiments, political resistance, and attempts to create a different kind of life.

  All this suggests that the large-scale, mobile Viking conglomerates of the ninth century were neither ‘armies’ nor ‘warbands’, but continuously evolving migratory communities. They were not on their way to anywhere, but were an end in themselves, justified through action. In essence, these forces were polities in their own right.

  As the fleets grew bigger, as the forces swelled in size and became more diverse, as they hit tougher targets, and above all as they began to stay away from Scandinavia for ever-longer periods, something significant occurred. Where raiding had once been an activity, something for a few weeks or a summer, it now effectively became, at least for some, a lifestyle. To be a Viking in this context was a frame of mind; a belief system; a career strategy; a ritual act; of course a livelihood, if a violent and risky one; but most of all, a choice.

  It’s not that the profits to be made in the West were unknown before, it’s just that now something has moved and come together in their minds—not collectively and simultaneously, of course, but meshing gradually through grapevine communications, the talk in the ports, and not least, the persuasive qualities of visible success. In time, a short time, the practical understanding of just how rich a potential lies beyond the marine horizons, in almost every direction, will transform their world.

  One must begin with what happened, and only then can the why and how become apparent.

  In the year 834, Dorestad, the wealthy emporium at the fork of the Rhine about one hundred kilometres from the Dutch coast, was attacked and burnt, apparently by a force from Denmark. It was an astonishing move—this was no monastery or isolated community, but one of the most important places in the trading networks of northern Europe. This would be like physically assaulting one of today’s great financial hubs. The Vikings slaughtered at will and took shiploads of slaves. The surrounding region was devastated. The same was to happen every single summer for the next four years, in the face of ineffectual Frankish responses that included failed peace negotiations. The Vikings seem to have played a careful hand, combining feigned diplomacy supported by the raiding they never had any intention of renouncing.

  By 837, the Annals of St-Bertin were resignedly describing the “usual surprise attack” on Frisia. Utrecht and Antwerp were hit repeatedly, and the same Viking fleets crossed the Channel to raid the Isle of Sheppey in the Thames estuary. There is a suggestion that the Scandinavians followed a similar south-coast route as in previous decades and headed into the Irish Sea from the south. As before, while en route they also tried their luck in Frankia with a probing attack on the Loire in 835 in which the monastery on the island of Noirmoutier was overrun. This would be a harbinger of much worse to come.

  Ireland was heavily and constantly attacked from the mid-830s onwards for the next fifteen years. Raiding along the coasts and also inland along the rivers, the Vikings hit more than fifty named targets (many several times), and there are records of more regional impacts. Monasteries were again focal points of the raids, but markets and settlements had now become targets too. The fleets established temporary bases on the rivers, defences for their ships, and camp sites from which they raided at will in the countryside.

  England seems to have been left in relative peace in the 830s, although this is possibly a distortion resulting from deliberate omissions in the Chronicle. In 839, for example, there is a strange ecclesiastical record of dreams that troubled the sleep of the king of Wessex, images of pagans devastating his land. This nocturnal vision was
so disturbing that he pledged to make a pilgrimage to Rome to ask for divine intercession. Viking raids evidently weighed so heavily on the mind of southern England’s most powerful monarch that he thought his kingdom hung in the balance. This is not only suggestive of considerable Viking activity in England at this time, it is also a very long way from the burning of a church on Lindisfarne.

  In any case, this would change decisively in 840 and 841, when another shift can be detected. The Irish west coast was raided repeatedly, and expeditions were made to the interior. Camps were founded at Dublin (probably in the Kilmainham area), Annagassan, and other sites, and a seasonal Viking presence became entrenched in these areas. The eastern and southern coasts of England also came under attack, with at least a dozen raids in two years, each of which probably ranged widely. The Vikings were now a fixture of the English experience, and the financial impact of their activities had real political weight. The human toll, in lives lost both literally and to enslavement, was growing.

  The real catalyst for the surge in Viking activity was civil war in Frankia—the Carolingian Empire named after its founder, Charlemagne. In 840, his successor, the emperor Louis the Pious, died. The turbulent relations between Louis’s three surviving sons, barely kept in check during the emperor’s declining years, boiled over on his death. Charles the Bald, Lothar, and Louis the German began to fight it out for control of the Empire, in a conflict that spilled over into every sector of the realm, from the Iberian border to the Alps, all the way to southern Denmark and the Rhine. The state apparatus was riven with disunity and factionalism, as minor nobility, city governors, local magnates, and even bishops formed their own militias and took sides (often simply their own).

  The Vikings poured into the gap left by the distraction and destabilisation of the Empire, and would not leave for twenty years. The great rivers of Frankia—the Seine, the Somme, and the Loire—acted as watery motorways into the heart of the Empire. This was no longer a matter of coastal attacks and peripheral economic damage: the Vikings brought war to the Franks, striking hundreds of kilometres inland up the rivers. It is evident that there were many different groups, each with their own commanders and agendas, sometimes combining in larger constellations. What they had in common was the ability to insert themselves deftly into the political chaos.

  Mobile Viking bands fought the forces of the three imperial claimants, singly or sometimes in alliance. They also raided local municipalities and took on the militias, or just whatever ragtag defence the peasantry could muster in the face of indifferent central leadership. Vikings were also hired as mercenaries by any and all of these factions, to fight their civil enemies or even other Vikings; in many cases, the Scandinavians then pooled their forces to turn on their erstwhile employers. None of this took place in a vacuum of knowledge, nor was it a matter of haphazard reaction: the Vikings knew exactly what they were doing, where they were doing it, and who they might be likely to encounter in the process. This mastery of reconnaissance in depth—an awareness of the value to be placed on prior knowledge—showed throughout their campaigns in Frankia and later in England. The Viking commanders were active political agents, stirring the civil war to effect maximum destabilisation, which in turn fed the Scandinavians’ own twin objectives of moveable wealth in the form of plunder, and mobile labour through the taking of captives.

  Even God was enlisted in the struggle, as seen in an antiphonal (a piece of music for a church service) made for use in the imperial chapel of Charles the Bald, which records a prayer sung for protection against the raids: de gente fera Normannica nos libera, quae nostra vastat, Deus, regna: “Grant us freedom, Lord, from the wild Northern people who lay waste our realms”.

  The graves of western Norway and Denmark from this time are full of Frankish metalwork and coinage—the fruits of the raids. It is possible to discern a hierarchy of insular objects in the burials, activated in new Scandinavian contexts. One can almost perceive the relative status of different participants in the raids, manifested in the materials and quality of the looted items. Jewellery seems to have been particularly popular and was preserved either intact or else reused as pendants and the like. Carolingian disc brooches are common finds, whereas silver was mostly melted down and recast into objects more to Norse tastes.

  In 843, the three main Carolingian factions agreed on peace and a tripartite division of the Empire—Charles ruled Francia Occidentalis, from the Pyrenees to the Pas-de-Calais; Lothar governed Francia Media, a north-south strip of territory that included most of the Low Countries, Burgundy, and Provence with an extension into northern Italy; Louis got the east, Francia Orientalis, with lands in what is now western Germany; the small ‘Celtic’ province of Brittany remained fiercely independent.

  The Viking response to the treaty was considered, and worrying. In that same year, a fleet overwintered in Frankia for the first time, setting up a base (on Noirmoutier, again) at the mouth of the Loire with good access to the open sea. This set the pattern for decades to come and was repeated in England from 851 onwards. Usually located on estuarine islands or other easily defended marine sites, these camps would sometimes serve for a year or two before being abandoned, but over time some of them developed into more-or-less permanent bases. Three major and distinctive groups of Vikings would congregate at such enclaves on the Loire, Seine, and Somme, and were thereafter referred to as the ‘armies’ of those regions. By the 850s, the points of entry to all three major water routes into Frankia were essentially under Viking control.

  The ‘raids’, which had long since become seasonal campaigns, now evolved into a continual Viking presence. The armies were still uniquely mobile, never far from their ships, and their operations in the field year on year are unparalleled for this period. Ever since the 830s, the fleets had also been increasing in size. Sixty-seven vessels—an unusually exact number—are mentioned at Nantes in 843. Two years later, Paris itself was attacked by a fleet of 120 ships that had fought its way up the Seine; this was the raid led by one of the most famous Vikings of all, Ragnar lothbrók. He was an effective if vicious commander, and his followers were given a staggering seven thousand pounds of silver and gold bullion in order to finally leave the city in peace. It would be the first of many such payments.

  After Paris, the size of the raiding fleets only increased still further, no doubt prompted by the demonstrable profits such ventures could produce. Into the 850s, there are records of a 252-ship raid in Frisia; 105 ships at the Île de Bièce and 103 in the Vilaine, both in Brittany.

  On Lothar’s death in 855, the Empire again experienced periods of unrest, with Louis making a move on his brother Charles through an invasion of the west. Although Charles survived and, in time, would come to rule as sole emperor, the weakness of the imperial defences was again an open invitation to the Vikings. They were not slow to exploit it. In 860, the situation was vividly described by Ermentarius of Noirmoutier, a monk who had been driven from his monastery when the Vikings took it over as their base on the Loire:

  The number of ships grows: the endless stream of Vikings never ceases to increase. Everywhere the Christians are the victims of massacres, burnings, plunderings: the Vikings conquer all in their path and nothing resists them: they seize Bordeaux, Périgeux, Limoges, Angoulême and Toulouse. Angers, Tours and Orléans are annihilated and an innumerable fleet sails up the Seine and the evil grows in the whole region. Rouen is laid waste, plundered and burned: Paris, Beauvais and Meaux taken, Melun’s strong fortress levelled to the ground, Chartres occupied, Evreux and Bayeux plundered, and every town besieged.

  On the Seine in 861, the Annals of St-Bertin lost count of a Viking fleet at 260 ships. There was no such thing as a ‘standard’ longship, so it is impossible to know how many people each one held, but on average, scholars usually find thirty or so to be a reasonable number. This was now a matter of thousands of Vikings in the field, moving across multiple regions in different groups.

  Even when local defences managed to b
lock the raiders’ advances, they simply moved somewhere else. It was not until 862 that Charles the Bald, having achieved a modicum of stability in his kingdom, was able to organise sustained resistance in the form of an innovation that had instant and practical effect. He ordered the construction of fortified bridges across the main arterial rivers, controlling access along their passage by leaving only small openings blocked by moveable barriers and chains. The remains of one of them have been excavated at Pont de l’Arche on the Seine near Pîtres, revealing a complex structure with a fortress on each bank of the river, spanned by a massive defended bridge that also blocked a tributary. The outlay must have been enormous, and it is clear why administrative calm was a necessary prerequisite for such a project.

  The impact of the bridges was rapid. The fleet sizes quoted by the annals rapidly fall. On the Loire and the Seine, there were only forty and fifty ships by 865, rather than the hundreds of a few years earlier. The success of the imperial strategy was not appreciated in England. In that year, the Viking fleets collectively withdrew from Frankia and crossed the Channel in a massive invasion. In the process, and over the following decades, the English records provide us with our highest-resolution images, from anywhere in the world, of the Vikings at war.