by Neil Price;
When a large fleet landed at Thanet in 865 and quickly moved to East Anglia, the Vikings encountered a very different political scene than they were used to in Frankia. Although the Empire had been divided, it was at least nominally a functioning imperial bureaucracy. England, by contrast, was made up of several separate kingdoms, some more powerful than others; the largest were Mercia in the Midlands, Northumbria in the north of the country, East Anglia on the east coast, and Wessex to the south. They were often in uneasy alliance, but sometimes in openly expansionist competition. England had been converted to Christianity a couple of centuries earlier, and thus its sociopolitical structures were radically different from those of Scandinavia, but there were nonetheless similarities in the network of interlinked, rival kingdoms. The Vikings seized on this to their immediate advantage.
For the next fifteen years, what the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle calls either the ‘Great Heathen Army’ or sometimes the ‘Great Raiding Army’ fought its way across the English kingdoms. From the beginning in East Anglia, one can observe aspects of the Vikings’ interactions in supposedly hostile territory that throw new light on the nature of their campaigns. The Chronicle records without comment that “there the army was provided with horses”. In other entries over the years, the raiders were given supplies of various kinds, including food, and allowed safe havens where their families (explicitly mentioned, which has interesting implications) could remain protected. Even in the period of the earlier, intermittent raids, there had been signs of something similar—in 838, for example, the Vikings had made an alliance with the people of Cornwall. There are other signals of such relations. A splendid gospel book, the Codex Aureus, was donated to Christ Church Canterbury with an inscription adding that it had been ransomed from a Viking army by a pious English couple—something surely impossible without relatively sophisticated lines of communication and at least some degree of trust.
It is very clear that—albeit perhaps as the least of several evils—by no means all the English were necessarily opposed to the Vikings. The expansionist ambitions of Wessex were no secret, and in some regions the Scandinavians might have been seen as a bulwark against the aggression of the southern kingdom. In any case, their presence was inescapable. Only a few years later, an ecclesiastical grant of food rents, allocating the produce of tax levied in kind, makes provision for dislocation in supply on account of heathen attacks—in other words, the Vikings had already become encoded into legal documents as possible disruptors, along the same lines as ‘acts of God’ in today’s insurance policies.
The army had multiple commanders—among them men who were possibly the sons of Ragnar lothbrók, including Ivar the Boneless, Halfdan, and Ubbe—and it was, like the fleets in Frankia, a conglomerate of smaller units. These were the same lið of the early raids, but multiplied. We should envision a hierarchy of Viking groups—some loyal to a single ship’s captain, others forming a small flotilla or two of loose affiliation, or loyal to even larger units, all placed within networks of allegiance and agreed support under the nominal command of one or more ‘jarls’ (as they are called in the English sources). There was no ‘king of the Vikings’, no single person with whom the English could negotiate. Even in Frankia, when emissaries sought the leader of a Viking army, the response came that they had none, but made their decisions collectively.
Having wintered in East Anglia, the army headed north and in 866 took the emporium of Eoforwic—York—after fighting all along the Roman walls of the city. For almost a century afterwards, Jorvík, as it became known, would be the main Viking stronghold of the north, ruled first by puppet kings and then directly by Scandinavians.
Thanks to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, the path of the Vikings can be followed with great precision, at times month by month. In 867 they made an attempt on Mercia, wintering in Nottingham, but were bought off after Wessex came to the Mercians’ aid, and the army returned to York for another winter. In late 869 the Vikings were back in East Anglia, where they stayed for a year. Its king, Edmund, resisted and was captured and killed—becoming England’s first official martyr at Scandinavian hands. Thereafter, East Anglia, like Northumbria, passed into effective Viking control.
The Vikings were masters of what one scholar has aptly called “longboat diplomacy”. In the course of years spent in the field, the Vikings had shown themselves to be completely in tune with the English systems of defence. They knew all about the networks of strategic communications in the form of herepaths, or ‘army-roads’, and used them to their advantage. They understood the signal beacons on high ground, which they sometimes lit themselves to confuse the local militias.
With renewed strength, in 871 the Vikings invaded Wessex itself, where they were reinforced by a second Viking fleet—the ‘Great Summer Army’, as the Chronicle calls it. King Aethelred of Wessex, and his young brother, Alfred, led the English levies in eight or nine battles with the Vikings over the following months, with neither side gaining the upper hand through a succession of defeats and victories. Three months after a Wessex triumph at Ashdown, Aethelred died, and Alfred was crowned. He paid off the Vikings in some desperation, and they wintered in London, before spending the next three years pacifying Northumbria, overrunning the small kingdom of Lindsey (in present-day Lincolnshire), and finally taking Mercia.
It should be stated clearly: in just nine years, an invading Scandinavian force had effectively destroyed all but one of the English kingdoms. By 874, only Wessex remained as an independent realm. And again, the Great Army was in no sense a national entity, or a politically directed military strategy.
At this point the Viking host divided. Some headed north with Halfdan, who took them raiding even into southern Scotland. Returning to York in 876 they did something new: in a startling single line that echoes through the rest of English history, the Chronicle says that “they divided up the land of Northumbria, and they were ploughing and providing for themselves”. The meaning is clear: the Vikings had begun to settle down, and the nature of their contact with the British Isles thereby changed forever.
The southern branch of the army, under Guthrum and two other commanders, went back to war. The kingdom of Wessex’s desperate four-year fight against the Vikings is a cornerstone of English history, spawning as much myth and legend as fact, but the events are nonetheless solidly underpinned by the Chronicle. The Vikings crisscrossed southern England with forays north to Mercia, and penetrating as far east as Cornwall. Alfred’s Wessex forces fought or ran, and even attempted to confront the Scandinavians at sea (with little success), until by 878 they had been pushed to the brink. In a final effort, Alfred rallied what was left of his troops and led them to an unexpected victory at Edington. Both sides had fought each other to a standstill, and agreed on a peace treaty dividing England in a manner that left Wessex in control of the south and west, while the east and north of the country was formally ceded to the Vikings in a recognition of de facto political realities. Although it would not acquire the name until slightly later, this region became known as the Danelaw—literally the land under the legal code of the Danes. The Viking armies dispersed throughout this area and into Mercia, and again began to settle.
In the year of the Treaty of Wedmore that created the Danelaw, in Frankia there was a strange repeat of what had happened in 865. The Carolingian emperor, Charles the Bald, had died in 877, followed soon after by his son, plunging the Empire back into yet another conflict over the succession. As they had done decades before, the Vikings turned their eyes to Frankia. While most of the Great Army stayed in England, some chose to cross the Channel for the chance of renewed plunder; they were aided by a third Viking force that had recently arrived at Fulham in London, which rapidly turned around for the Continent. This does not need to have been a stark choice, as there is every likelihood individuals moved back and forth between the Frankish raids and a Danelaw home. The armies were distinctly fluid entities.
Over the next six years, a second Viking assault washed over
the Empire, with fleets ranging far up the Rhine and even taking the Frankish capital at Aachen. The imperial palace was occupied and its chapel humiliatingly used as a stable for the Vikings’ horses.
Paris was besieged for a year from 885 to 886—an event illuminated for us by the eyewitness account of Abbo, a monk who watched the fighting on the walls from the nearby monastery of St-Germain-des-Près. He relates how the Seine around the Île de la Cité—where Notre-Dame stands today—was choked with so many Viking ships that you could cross the water on the wooden river of their decks. The fleet was backed up downstream for kilometres. Abbo vividly describes the fight for the bridges, duels of archery around the towers, and the Vikings’ use of siege engines (perhaps even mounted on their ships). As the city walls were set ablaze, he says, the night sky above “turned the colour of copper”. Ultimately, the siege was lifted by the arrival of an imperial army, but the Vikings were so feared that even the emperor did not engage them, instead paying them to go away (much to the disgust of the Parisians who had held out for so long).
Again, it is worth pausing to reflect on this. Less than a century earlier, perhaps a few dozen men ran up a beach to burn the monastery at Lindisfarne in an attack that was probably over in less than a day. At Paris, a fleet of thousands of Vikings, in hundreds of ships, besieged one of the greatest cities of Europe for a year, and fought pitched battles with the best soldiers the Empire could field. The speed and scale of the escalation is breathtaking.
In the following years, the Frankish Empire again began to stabilise, with the same effect of dramatically and quickly improving defensive measures against the Vikings. By 890, the fleets had dispersed as quickly as they had coalesced, either heading back to Scandinavia or returning to the Danelaw.
This Frankish coda to the century of the great raids also provides a moment to review their real cost, and to try to understand their true scale from a different perspective. The damage to the imperial economy was without parallel. If the data from the Continental written sources is combined, the protection money paid to the Vikings during the ninth century totalled about thirty thousand pounds’ weight of silver, most of it in cash: a sum equivalent to seven million silver pennies over a period when the estimated total output of the Frankish mints was in the region of fifty million coins. This equates to approximately 14 percent of the entire monetary output of the Frankish Empire—for a century—evaporated in the payment of extortion demands that produced no tangible positive gain and, in many cases, failed to appease the Vikings anyway. In addition even to that, the Scandinavians were given grain, livestock, produce, wine, cider, horses, and other commodities as part of their terms for not attacking—literally for not doing anything—and, of course, the same things were often lost when they did. Between 830 and 890 in Frankia, some 120 named settlements were sacked and destroyed, besides the unspecified accounts of regional devastation. And of course, the human cost was incalculable. Ermentarius of Noirmoutier did not exaggerate in choosing imagery reminiscent of a Viking apocalypse.
For many years, the Scandinavian depredations of the 830s through the 880s tended to be studied from discrete geographical or political perspectives—the Vikings in England, in Ireland, in Frankia, and so on. But the key point is that these were in large part the same forces moving, dividing, and reforming. If one area managed to organise sufficient resistance to impede the Vikings’ progress, they simply shifted somewhere else. Even Alfred of Wessex, in most cases, did not actually defeat them—they just moved on, and may well have done so anyway.
In a cautionary tale for all archaeologists, in the absence of written sources we would never dare to postulate the scale of the Viking invasions of England and Frankia from their material remains alone—with one exception. The inner workings of the armies have already been glimpsed: their constituent parts of ‘brotherhoods’, their complex command structures, communal decision-making, and propensity to division. However, in the last three or four decades, archaeology has begun to reveal previously unsuspected aspects of these armies in the remains of their camps.
These establishments seem to have appeared first in Ireland in the late 830s, and then in Frankia a few years later. In the Irish sources (via Latin), they are termed longphuirt (sing. longphort), meaning roughly ‘ship-landing’, and also dúnad and dún, both of which have connotations of fortification. Vikings are also mentioned as coming from specific places, as if they were some kind of semi-permanent bases. Focussing on the east coast, ‘camps’ of this kind are found at Lough Neath, Strangford Lough, Carlingford Lough, Dublin, Waterford, Wexford, and Cork, amongst other locations; in all, some twenty such sites are named. Most are in locations with good water access, and it has been suggested that each was within a day’s sail of its nearest neighbour. Parts of one such camp have been excavated at Woodstown near Waterford, and a second surveyed at Annagassan. In Frankia, with the exception of a fortification at the Camp de Péran in Brittany, all are known mostly from the written record—the Île de Bièce in the Loire, Oissel in the Seine, Neuss on the Rhine, and others, including monastic houses taken over as strongpoints.
The most productive archaeological examples have been explored in England, of which the first was excavated at Repton in Derbyshire. Recorded in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle as the location of an overwintering of the Great Army from 873 to 874, Repton was also the site of a Mercian royal mausoleum, located next to an impressive church. In the 1970s and 1980s, excavations around this building unexpectedly located three key elements of the winter camp: a D-shaped enclosure with its straight side against the bank of the river Trent, incorporating the church itself as a fortified gateway; a series of clearly pagan Viking burials around the church; and a massive charnel deposit of disarticulated human bones that had been built into the looted mausoleum.
The charnel represents at least 264 individuals, including nearly 20 percent women. Many exhibited weapon trauma. It is a single deposit, although it is harder to tell if the bones had been assembled over a year or two, perhaps by gathering the dead from fields of battle to be finally interred at a main camp. However, it can definitely be associated with the presence of the army through radiocarbon dating, finds of coins dating to 872 and 873, and weapons of Viking type. In the Repton discovery, archaeologists had a chance to explore the actual members of a Viking force for the first time. Work is still ongoing, but the isotopic data reveals that the majority of individuals came from all over Scandinavia, with some also from the British Isles and the Continent, perhaps even as far south as the Mediterranean. The burials clustered around the church all have Scandinavian isotopic signatures. The same data reveals significant changes of diet over time, which suggests these people moved around a great deal. The men fall within an age range of about eighteen to forty-five.
The whole charnel deposit was covered by an earthen mound, with a double curb made of deliberately smashed-up English sculpture and querns from the monastery. There seems little doubt that this was a defiantly non-Christian Viking occupation. A number of postholes and pits filled with offerings suggest elaborate rituals, and several children were buried by the approaches to the mound in what appear to be sacrificial acts.
A few kilometres away at Heath Wood, lies one of the only later mound cemeteries from England; excavations have revealed it to be a Scandinavian cremation grave-field, so far unique in Britain. The remains were relatively meagre and hard to interpret, but included at least one woman who seems to have been buried with weapons. The excavators speculated that the site may have had a relationship to the Repton army—perhaps an offshoot or faction of the Viking force burying their dead in a different way.
From 2011 to 2015, a second major Viking camp was excavated at Torksey in Lincolnshire, the location of the army’s overwintering in the year before it arrived at Repton. The project revealed a totally different picture to the relatively small enclosure at Repton that had hitherto been the model for what a camp was thought to look like. Torksey does not appear to have had
formal defences; instead, it was located on a marshy island that provided natural protection. The Vikings clearly adapted to circumstance. Most important, it was vast—some fifty-five hectares, with space for thousands of people; at last the implications of the written sources were matched by the archaeology. Inside the camp was a revelation: evidence of craftwork and manufacturing, trade with the local environs, fishing, and clear proof of the presence of women. Numerous coins, weapons, and other artefacts securely dated the site, and suggested the army had spent up to six months there. In short, Torksey revealed not just an army, but an entire mobile community with a degree of self-sufficiency and its own economy.
A third army camp at “a riverine site near York” (abbreviated ARSNY, the location kept confidential at the landowner’s request) was also investigated at about the same time. The material signals there mirror the finds from Torksey with the same emphasis on physical scale (this time thirty-three hectares), manufacturing and trade, local exchange networks, and the presence of women. The ‘winter’ camps were also entirely serviceable, and often occupied, in the spring, summer, and autumn. At both ARSNY and Torksey, something not far from a small town arose, with all this implies for the nature of the population that built it.
The apparent discrepancy in scale between these sites and Repton may have a relatively simple explanation. It has been suggested that the sites of Repton and Heath Wood may be part of the same entity, but widely dispersed in the landscape. In this model, the Repton enclosure might have formed a sort of defended citadel or ship-shelter within a larger camp. And if Torksey and ARSNY have given us the sites and activities, Repton has shown us the inhabitants themselves.
Both Repton and Torksey saw continued activity even after the army had departed, suggesting the legacy of their presence resonated for many years in a conflicted landscape. At Repton this took the form of further burials in and around the great charnel mound, a clearly Christian cemetery where isotopes show that at least half of those interred were local people. At Torksey, the site developed into a town renowned for its pottery industries.
