Children of Ash and Elm

by Neil Price;

  The Irish longphuirt were not quite the same as the English winter camps, but they can still be usefully studied together. Not least, Woodstown also showed indications of a similar internal economy to Torksey, with a pattern of silver hoards that reflect a close relationship with the Irish kingdom of Osraige in which it was situated.

  From decades of excavations at the winter camps, an entirely new picture of the Viking ‘armies’ has begun to emerge. The key data comes from the isotopic signatures suggesting where the buried dead originally came from, the gendered artefacts, the sheer scale of the sites, and the material indicating the different kinds of activities that went on there.

  First, the Viking forces were clearly multi-ethnic, not just ‘Scandinavian’, a picture that fits with their conglomerate and organic nature. Even the ‘Scandinavians’ in the armies—the majority of their members—were from all over the region and had no focal point of origin. Women were part of these communities, and the armies really were as massive as the written sources imply—several thousand individuals at a minimum. Clearly, they did not restrict themselves to military activities but also pursued craftwork, manufacturing, and trade. There can be no doubt that these entities and their activities go far beyond anything that could merely be called ‘raiding’: the Vikings’ mobile forces had long since become something else.

  The presence of women is particularly telling, and here there is also supporting evidence from beyond the camps. A comprehensive analysis of female jewellery of Scandinavian design, recovered with metal detectors throughout eastern England, suggests there were very large numbers of women wearing foreign fashions in the Danelaw. It does not seem that the brooches and other items were all imported, but rather were made to Scandinavian taste using partly local materials. Of course, the iconography of jewellery is not the same as ethnicity, and anyone can wear a brooch—is this indicative of ‘Danish fashion’ becoming popular (or even advisable) in an area under Scandinavian control? This was tested through a DNA survey, and a strong Scandinavian signature was found—in other words, there really were numerous foreign women in these areas. The numbers of individuals involved are startling in themselves: at a conservative guess up to thirty to fifty thousand Scandinavian immigrants of both sexes may have arrived over the three decades following the establishment of the Danelaw. This is a revolutionary conclusion.

  It seems likely that the women mostly settled in secondary immigrations after the wars with Wessex had died down, but the Repton charnel and the other camps confirm there were also (perhaps different) women actually moving as part of the armies. Even in battle, the Viking forces may have been more mixed affairs than previously thought. There is, of course, the tentative evidence for female warriors, but at the siege of Paris in the 880s, Abbo specifically mentions that Danish women were present on the field—not fighting as such, but close enough to physically push their men back into the fray if they showed signs of hesitation.

  The conclusion is still a little unfocussed but nonetheless clear in outline: after the initial impetus of the attacks in the 830s and 840s, once a kind of beachhead had been established across the east and south of England, there were significant numbers of Scandinavian women (and presumably children) in the armies. They did not ‘accompany’ the men and were not ‘camp followers’ of male Vikings. Instead, their presence was integral to what these forces really seem to have been: not raiders writ large with their wives and girlfriends in tow, but in effect armed family migrations. This movement of people would also rapidly grow in scale.

  There is no avoiding the fact that fighting was absolutely central to this endeavour, including the maintenance of Scandinavian control once the Danelaw had been won. These groups were violent and dangerous, and it seems everyone within them was accepting of that—but war and plunder were not their only objectives. The longships were not still carrying the same kinds of ‘raiders’ as forty years before. These Vikings of the ninth century were different: men and women who shattered the political structures of western Europe, but who did not represent any of the individual Scandinavian polities or power blocs.

  It seems necessary to find a new vocabulary, a different terminology, to describe these forces—ironically, it may be useful to return to one of the oldest clichés about them: the idea of the Viking as pirate.

  This notion is not only inherent in the most common understanding of the word itself, víkingr, but has also been one of the key components of their image since at least the early seventeenth century. Here is the great British historian Camden, in his monumental work Britannia from 1610:

  [The Danes] were by the writers that penned in Latine the histories of England named Wiccingi for that they practised Piracie: for wiccinga in the Saxon tongue, as Alfricus witnesseth, doeth signifie a Pirat that runneth from creeke to creeke.

  But pirates, like Vikings, have also been subject to misleading stereotype. They were not ‘loveable rogues’ in the mould of Long John Silver or Jack Sparrow, created by the popular writers and filmmakers of later times, but actually something much more interesting and sophisticated—as Camden himself probably knew. The famous pirate fleets of the Atlantic and the Caribbean (and their counterparts in the China Seas, for example), which have been extensively researched, can be understood as one of the best comparative paradigms for studying the peripatetic, large-scale Viking forces we see in the ninth-century West.

  What emerges most of all is the sense of piracy as inhabiting, and shaping, its own constructed social world. It provided a consciously alternative lifestyle, with an improvised but nonetheless pronounced egalitarian spirit that was profoundly at odds with the state-sanctioned norms of the pirates’ respective homelands. There was a levelling of hierarchy, in that authority ultimately rested with the crew. Captains were elected, and plunder divided according to skill or duty. And all this was active and conscious, a deliberate reorganisation of maritime social relations to create a ‘masterless’ existence. The pirates even had a name for it: “the new government of the ship”.

  Piracy brought with it chronic instability, though also a sense of continuity from crew to crew. It was not a system that could sustain prolonged or severe internal conflict. On occasion, the activities of the so-called Golden Age pirates (broadly speaking in the period from the 1650s to the 1720s) could be sponsored by state actors, often to achieve objectives with which the state could not be associated—but they never operated at a national level. Despite being obviously of the maritime world, pirates could and did intervene in affairs on land.

  The pirate life was sustained by tales and rumours of its own success. Pirates affirmed their special identities through the use of visual media such as the famous flags; one leading scholar has even described the images on them—crossed bones, dripping blood, hourglasses, and the like—as forming “a triad of interlocking symbols: death, violence, limited time”. They also employed specific combinations of material culture, and its expression in their own dances, shanties, magic, and ritual. Loyalty was above all to the community itself—the flexible life of choice that it offered, fuelled by the social insights provided by travel and encounter. Pirates also tended to have a different view of the marginalised, and of minorities, than the states from which they had come.

  Those who fought the pirates also had opinions about all this, of course. For our purposes, the most important is encapsulated in a term that was coined to describe the difficulties of engaging with and neutralising a pirate threat. It seems to have first been used in 1631 by Richard Braithwaite, who described the typical mariner in the convoluted language of his time:

  They will have it valiantly when they are ranked together, and relate their adventures with wonderful terror. Necessary instruments are they, and agents of main importance in that Hydrarchy wherein they live; for the walls of the State could not subsist without them; but least useful are they to themselves, and most needful for others supportance.

  The key word here is ‘hydrarchy’, which was expanded in t
he eighteenth century to become a general label for the revolutionary fulcrum of dangerously radical social ideas represented by the Atlantic maritime community. The situation the term tries to capture is one in which there are no overall leaders with whom to negotiate (there was never a pirate monarch, which was part of the point), no state structures to oppose, and indeed no formal organisation to fight. The mythical hydra, the multiheaded beast of Greek legend, was a challenge to defeat because every time one of its heads was severed, two more grew to take its place. Likewise, sinking individual pirate ships or killing notorious captains did little to dent the nature of the enemy—and yet, through it all, ‘the pirates’ as a collective source of grave political peril remained entirely valid and operative, just like the supposedly unkillable hydra.

  In my opinion, the application of this concept to the Viking Age represents a real breakthrough in understanding what was going on with the ninth-century ‘armies’. Using the terminology of hydrarchy to describe these forces soon reveals that the points of comparison are compelling. There are textual references to named Viking leaders, but no kings or real nobility; indeed, there are explicit descriptions of collective decision-making. The ‘armies’ were confederacies of lið, as in the ‘brotherhoods’ of the Annals of St-Bertin. In a later entry for 861, the same source describes how in the spring, “the Danes made for the open sea, and split up into several flotillas which sailed off in different directions according to their various choices”. They were also made up of networks of oath-driven relationships, and short-term contractual bonds for mutual benefit. Just like the pirates, the Viking armies had limited internal cohesion and could exhibit rapid fluctuations in size. This is reflected in the nature of their camps—transitional and expedient spaces, perfect for the working out of new identities and different ways of life.

  In search of settlement opportunities with plunder, the Viking forces were never coherent wholes and, equally, did not represent a coordinated move outward from Scandinavia. There was never any single motivation behind this phenomenon. Some scholars believe the key factor was a dramatic expansion of Baltic trade, spreading around the coasts of Europe. Bigger targets for raids presented themselves at the same time that the profitability of attacking isolated sites such as monasteries probably declined. It is not hard to see that the evolution of larger Viking groups—true fleets and real armies—would make sense in response to these trends. This is easy to suggest but harder to map out in practice, although it would have provided both motivation and direction for a movement that would soon coalesce around mobile forces on a massive scale. On the other hand, the internal politics of the North provided ample reasons for people to want to leave—whether as a result of backing the wrong party in a domestic conflict, or simply to seek an alternative, many might choose to join one of these new social experiments. There is every indication that this was a fluid decision, not necessarily a permanent one.

  This was what the Vikings of the West had become. Operating beyond the borders not only of Scandinavia but also of its political structures, for much of the ninth century a Viking hydrarchy extended across the British Isles and the Frankish Empire.

  A hundred years away from Lindisfarne, and now well into the Viking Age, the Scandinavian mark on the political map of Europe was already indelible. In essence, the rise of the great armies in Frankia and England marked the emergence of Vikings—real Vikings—as an independent force for the first time. Just as with the false dichotomy of ‘western’ and ‘eastern’ Viking Ages, so the same pattern is repeated here: while the expansion towards the British Isles and the Continent was unfolding, other (and sometimes the same) Scandinavians were also moving in all directions.

  This gradual and unplanned expansion across the Eurasian world was never a one-way process (or really a process at all), but more a matter of mutual feedback. People came home and journeyed away again, often many times; other peoples came to the North, sometimes in greater numbers than those leaving it. All these travellers carried with them, and left behind, a great many things: not only objects—the ‘material culture’ beloved of archaeologists—but also ideas, attitudes, and information. At the most intimate levels of interaction, they also left their genes, and their families acquired new ones.

  This was the beginning of the Viking diaspora, and it is now time to follow them there.

  13

  DIASPORA

  THE TWIN POLES OF THE Viking experience, as traditionally perceived, were raiding and trading. Both embody the act of movement, of expansion, of the drive into the world beyond Scandinavia that has always been a hallmark of the Viking Age. What is often overlooked is that they were also complementary.

  The raids on the West initially boosted the personal economies, and prospects, of individuals. At the same time, they fuelled the ambitions of elites and provided them with the material currency with which to keep and increase their hold on power. Ultimately, the raids amplified trends and behaviours that had long been developing inside Scandinavia, and projected them outwards and overseas. The feedback that then kicked in was the flow of looted objects—quite literally portable wealth—that was converted into status as well as comfort. In time, that influx of the new also included ideas, some of which (like Christianity) would prove to be unsettling for the established norms of the North.

  The raiding became something else—and mutated into the hydrarchies of the ninth century—in part because the political situation in Scandinavia had been changed by the raids themselves. There were winners and losers in these power games, for example among the sea-kings, just as there had been in the centuries prior to the Viking Age. The great raiding armies and fleets provided a lucrative and, perhaps, somewhat nostalgic alternative to this changed reality that in a short time offered something more permanent: not just profitable adventures but settlement and a new life. Both the consolidation of the expanding kingdoms in Scandinavia, and the opportunities offered by campaigning overseas gradually reshaped the North. The Vikings changed the places through which they moved, often violently, but they were themselves transformed in the process.

  But the West was not the only focus of Viking activity—the East, too, and in time the South, would draw the Scandinavians. In the course of the ninth century, at the same time as the fleets cruised the waterways of western Europe, the river routes from the Baltic shore were beginning to be opened up. Places like Ladoga, our riverine Deadwood, would expand and soon become only the first link in a chain that stretched thousands of kilometres eastwards—not only to Byzantium, but as far as the Eurasian steppe and even connecting with the Silk Roads of land and sea. In the south, the Viking forces in Frankia would gather at the base on the Loire in a move to strike Iberia, and also to sail into the Mediterranean.

  Like the European operations, the roads to the East would eventually also lead to settlement opportunities, indeed to the establishment of colonies even bigger and longer-lasting than those of the West. We do not know whether all this was an objective or an unexpected dividend. What is clear is that by the mid- to late 800s, the Scandinavians had begun to look at the surrounding world in a different way. This was an unfolding series of events, one thing evolving from what had come before. A Viking diaspora had begun to take shape.

  Until the twenty-first century, scholars had always talked of an ‘expansion’, almost in an imperial spirit of Scandinavians spreading across a ‘Viking world’. Starting a decade or so ago as individual studies and coordinated projects, this perception shifted into something more diffuse but also realistic. The concept of the diaspora has now taken root in Viking studies and is today recognised as a much more useful way of looking at the geopolitical spread of Scandinavian settlers, raiders, traders, and influence.

  As it was first introduced to Viking research, the notion of a diaspora was very much built on the social sciences and heavily mediated through textual source material. Many of the concepts derive from recent history—linked to themes of migration and transnationalism—but
they can usefully be applied to the Viking-Age past. In the process, the diaspora also opens up new ways of understanding the period. It is actually quite a specific term, and relates as much to the arguable concept of a Viking ‘homeland’ as to where (and how, and why) the Scandinavians travelled.

  A diaspora, including that of the Vikings, can involve several features, most obviously dispersal from an original starting point. This can be traumatic, but can also involve a search for better prospects of various kinds, or the furtherance of colonial ambitions. Over time, the diaspora can foster a collective memory, even myth-making, about the notion of ‘home’, which can also become idealised. This does not mean that movement in a diaspora was only in one direction—there may be constant contact, reverse migration, or at least “a continuing conversation”. There may be a strong ethnic group consciousness, sustained over long periods of time and extending across the diaspora beyond its constituent regions. This may lead to tensions with the original inhabitants of the diasporic settlement areas, but, equally, it can manifest in the positive evolution of new, creative interactions.

  To a greater or lesser degree, all these features can be found in the Viking diaspora. From the ninth century onwards, this flow of people, things, and ideas certainly involved violence—a great deal of it, in fact, especially in the West. But underneath these currents of raiding aggression ran the constant undertow of trade and more peaceable interaction. At one level this was catered for by the networks of emporia, nodes in the still broader webs of markets and commercial sites that operated at so many levels. This, too, extended into the East with the river trade.