Children of Ash and Elm

by Neil Price;

  The Danelaw seems to have had its own economy, which was necessary for maintaining its independence from the English kingdoms across its borders. Silver bullion seems to have been in general circulation, and hoards suggest the Danelaw must have had a general weight standard, although individuals would have personalised their own weights. There is also evidence of attempts to introduce coinage that mimicked the currency of English Mercia and Wessex. The York coinage made explicit use of Viking symbolism, with issues showing the raven banner, sometimes alongside a Christian cross. However, this new silver money does not seem to have found widespread use outside the urban hinterlands, perhaps indicating the realistic limits of Viking power.

  There is also good evidence for the manipulation of cultural identity through the creation and use of new material styles. People wore mass-produced dress accessories with a mix of Scandinavian, English, and European influences, speaking to the formation of cosmopolitan identities. There are even brooches made with component parts manufactured in both England and Scandinavia. The same hogback tombstones found in Scotland are present in northern England in much larger numbers, and here too they seem to have been a way for an Anglo-Scandinavian aristocracy to express their multicultural affiliations. This was the diaspora in practice—fitting in to a new home, but never forgetting the old.

  It is certain that many Scandinavian settlers came to some accommodation with the Church, still a dominant force and deeply embedded in English social structures which the Vikings could not (and perhaps did not wish to) fully replace. They may have quickly adopted Christianity alongside or in preference to their existing beliefs. To take but one example, a free-standing stone cross in the churchyard at Gosforth in Cumbria incorporates images of the Ragnarök into its depiction of what is presumably the Day of Judgement—Odin, Fenrir, and others are clearly visible. Many Thor’s hammer pendants have been found in England, mostly from women’s graves, so the old gods were clearly kept alive by at least some of the Danelaw Vikings. Cultic place-names, such as Toreswe (originally Torsvé) in north Lincolnshire, show that the Norse deities were not only known but actively worshipped in Viking-Age England. Weapons and other metalwork were offered in rivers, streams, and bogs in a way that connects to the Scandinavian ritual concern with wetlands that went back centuries. The symbol of Thor’s hammer also appears on more than thirty examples of coinage minted in the Viking Kingdom of York. On the later issues, it is shown alongside a sword that may represent the weapon of St. Peter, thus combining images of divine protection to cover everyone’s bets.

  Despite the widespread settlement of Scandinavians, they were under constant pressure from the English kingdoms, who had never forgotten what had been lost in the wars of the ninth century. Gradually, the control the Vikings exercised over eastern and northern England began to fray, especially at the edges of the Danelaw. The Vikings had tried to build border fortifications, mirroring the Saxon burhs—defended townships—that Alfred had earlier constructed on the frontier, but in the late ninth and tenth centuries the English began to push back.

  As the Wessex armies chipped away territory, they consolidated their gains by building more burhs. In a reversal of the situation they had once taken advantage of in Frankia, the Vikings’ division and lack of political cohesion meant they could not mount a concerted, organised resistance. Alfred’s early efforts to annex the southern portions of the Scandinavian territories were continued by his children, Edward the Elder and Aethelflaed, following his death in 899. Year by year, decade by decade, the Danelaw was retaken, and by the late 900s it had ceased to exist in practical terms.

  A hundred years after the establishment of the Danelaw, the polity itself was gone, but its demographic impact would be permanent. The Scandinavian settlers mostly remained, assimilated into the wider population. There are also linguistic signals of continuity, such as the poorly understood ‘Danish tongue’ that appears in contemporary documents to denote what was obviously a lingua franca in England among people of Scandinavian descent.

  Importantly, what resulted from the reconquest was not a reconstitution of the former English kingdoms the Vikings had destroyed—instead, the liberated Danelaw was in effect transformed into greater Wessex. Edward the Elder would come to inherit the throne of Mercia on the death of his sister, Aethelflaed, in 918, and further territorial gains by his successor, Aethelstan, would see all of England come under the rule of Wessex in 927. In a curious sense, then, the Vikings were responsible for the creation of England itself, perhaps the element of their legacy that in later centuries would prove to have the greatest consequences for the world.

  The boundaries of the so-called Kingdom of York in Northumbria were never fully defined, including a somewhat blurred border with the Danelaw, but it was all part of a contiguous region of Viking dominance. At the heart of the York kingdom lay the fortified mercantile centre of Jorvík itself, its Scandinavian name an adaptation of its earlier English one, Eoforwic. From the mid-ninth to mid-tenth centuries, the Viking rulers of York governed an area that stretched south to the Humber River and north to the Yorkshire Wolds—essentially spanning the north of England from coast to coast. Areas of north-western England, including the modern-day counties of Lancashire and Cumbria, have yielded evidence for Scandinavian settlement, and the Wirral Peninsula seems to have acted as a major entry point to the Danelaw from the Irish Sea.

  Archaeologically, the city of York is one of the best known in the entire Viking world. Excavations at Coppergate (the ‘street of the cup-makers’) in the 1970s, and later at many more sites in the city, have revealed a densely packed, truly urban centre of timber buildings, many with cellars, organised into zones of manufacturing and craftwork. With a river frontage on the Ouse, and utilising the layout of the ruined Roman town, Jorvík was a major capital of the North and maintained trading connections in all directions. One of the glories of its archaeology is that many of the cultural deposits are waterlogged, preserving organic materials such as textiles and wood almost unchanged. Buried metres below the modern streets, whole cellars had survived nearly to waist height; the excavators could walk in through the doors. Clothing, musical instruments, furniture, and all kinds of household items and foreign exotica—even Chinese silks—have made Jorvík a baseline for our understanding of Viking urbanism.

  Its most famous ruler was Eirík Haraldsson, more usually known by his nickname—Eirík Bloodaxe. One of Harald Finehair’s many sons, he inherited the sea-king’s life and seems to have ruled parts of Norway for a brief time, but was later driven into exile for the murder of several of his family members (hence the name). He then carved out a fortune for himself in a career of violence that took him from western Norway to his own kingdom in York. His consort, Queen Gunnhild, was almost as notorious, rumoured to be a sorceress and shape-changer of exceptional viciousness. Eirík’s court kept the Viking-Age gossipmongers busy for a decade, and his life could fill a biography of his own. Although he resisted the English move northwards, Eirík was eventually killed at Stainmore in 954, and the Kingdom of York died with him.

  The York kings ruled in a state of constant tension with their counterparts in Dublin, across the Irish Sea. Sometimes allies, occasionally enemies and rivals, these twin factions steered the fortunes of the whole region for more than a century.

  Unlike England, Ireland did not witness a large-scale influx of colonists. However, there were clearly fleets based in the Irish Sea from the early ninth century that perhaps also operated from bases in mainland Britain, such as the Bristol Channel or the Somerset region. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle for 835, for example, records a micel sciphere—a ‘great ship-army’—in Cornwall, and it does not seem likely that this kind of raiding was launched from the North Sea.

  From the 840s, the Viking presence in Ireland becomes more concrete. At this time historical sources begin to document the establishment of the so-called longphuirt in coastal and riverine areas. Though subtly different from the winter camps of England, they fu
lfilled many of the same functions. Some, such as those established at Dublin, Cork, Wexford, Waterford, and Limerick, would evolve to become Ireland’s principal cities.

  According to the Annals of Ulster, the longphort at Dublin was set up in 841. The area had previously been the focus of native Irish settlement, so although the Vikings did not actually found the city, the Scandinavian presence certainly marked a new phase in its development. In the ninth century, the Viking settlement took the form of a defended enclave around the ‘black pool’ that gives Dublin its name, with a possible harbour or jetties. In the tenth century, settlement continued there but was concentrated around the Wood Quay district, another defended site with water on three sides.

  At the time of the longphort’s founding, burials from the area suggest that the groups operating there included not only Scandinavians but also individuals from the British Isles, implying some of the Vikings’ early victims may have thrown their lot in with the raiders. The largest cemetery, however, can be linked directly to the longphort: most of the graves at this site, Kilmainham, are those of men, often accompanied by full sets of weapons including large numbers of single-edged swords. These burials are very clearly those of fighting forces, equipped for serious military operations. In line with this, there is a remarkable element of trauma evident in the Dublin skeletons, with more than a third of the adult males exhibiting signs of injury from blade weapons and blunt force. In the tenth- and eleventh-century deposits at Fishamble Street, some seventeen skulls were found scattered across the site in pits and latrines. Several of these crania were clearly the result of decapitations, and some bear the marks of stakes or poles—it seems the riverbanks were lined with heads. Such trophy displays were long a part of Irish war customs, and it may be that these practices were adopted by the Dublin Norse. For the first century of its existence, at least, Dublin was clearly a hard town, an appropriate base for a piratical fleet.

  This ties in with the bigger picture. Of the nearly four hundred burials with Scandinavian material culture in Britain and Ireland, fully half contain weapons. Another indication that trade may not have been at the heart of the Viking urban experience in Ireland is the simple fact of the Norse confinement to the coasts. This may not have been their wish, but expansion inland could have been limited militarily by the Irish clans.

  During its early years, Dublin seems to have had a pronounced rural economy, albeit with an organised street plan along the banks of the River Liffey and extending up the slopes behind. Later, the settlement was divided into neighbourhoods with clearly differing qualities of housing—a familiar picture from modern towns. At its Viking-Age height, Dublin was probably home to a population numbering in the low thousands. Excavations have revealed a range of domestic structures, ranging from small houses with benches and central hearths, to buildings that probably functioned as storerooms. Finds from their interiors have provided detailed insights into daily life in the Viking-Age town. These include gaming pieces and improvised boards; children’s toys, such as miniature wooden ships and swords; and detritus from craft activities that attests to the settlement’s long-distance trading connections.

  Pig pens have also been found in Dublin, along with animal bones that indicate the settlement was being supplied with beef from outside its walls—a similar pattern to the food economy of the Scandinavian market centres at home. Dublin enjoyed a good relationship with the surrounding farms for the first years of its existence, with the choicest cuts of meat being brought in (though this may also reflect some degree of coercion towards their producers). By the early tenth century, however, possibly because of the increasingly tense relationship between the Dublin Vikings and the indigenous population, things had clearly deteriorated, and only inferior-quality meat was being sold in the town.

  It is hard to say how many Vikings were operating in Ireland, though the numbers of longphuirt suggest a number perhaps in the low thousands. Fleets are listed that range in size from a few tens of vessels to a maximum of three hundred, escalating into the tenth century, when conflicts with the Irish were at their zenith. By the early eleventh century, the full-force fleet of the Dublin Norse is reckoned to have numbered around two hundred ships, and the city was able to field an army of six to ten thousand men. The same period saw frequent fighting, not only with the Irish but also with other Vikings, in addition to raids across the sea to England. In order to maintain numbers, a steady flow of new recruits would have been needed.

  This level of violence, which was clearly a prevalent feature of life in Viking-Age Ireland, raises serious questions about the Scandinavian presence. Not all the longphuirt developed into towns, but it is possible they were much more than military enclaves. Some may have been multifunctional trading centres intended to facilitate the movement of goods. It is useful to remember that those Vikings who engaged in maritime piracy and warfare would likely have been the same individuals who appeared at market sites and emporia to sell or trade what they had obtained through force only a short time previously. Perhaps the longphuirt represent the centralised redistribution of wealth, no matter its origin or the legality of its acquisition. If so, this may go some way to explaining the settlement pattern of Viking forces in Ireland, which seem to have been largely confined to the immediate hinterlands of the longphuirt.

  While it is possible that Scandinavians did settle at least to some degree in the wider landscape, adopting local housing styles and material culture in a way that would make them archaeologically ‘invisible’, Vikings may have found it more beneficial to harness Ireland’s economic potential without seeking any form of direct rule. Irish social power had never been based on control of land—other than certain symbolic sites of prehistoric fame—but rather on the overlordship of people. This meant that the Vikings might adopt a different approach to that employed in other regions, by creating gateways through which trade and wealth could flow into and out of the Irish interior. The Scandinavian elites based in these coastal settlements could then make a profit from the redistribution of imports (including captives), which in turn allowed them to dominate maritime trading routes.

  The instabilities of Ireland’s politics continued into the tenth century, with increasing conflict between ostensibly ‘Irish’ and ‘Scandinavian’ communities whose ethnicity was becoming blurred. However, one should be wary of convenient terms for hybrid identities such as the ‘Hiberno-Norse’ (or the ‘Anglo-Scandinavians’, for that matter), not least because they somehow assume there were previously ‘pure’ ethnicities that later blended. This ignores the universal nuances of personhood, allegiance, background, and all the other components of identity. We should rather see these polities, effectively little ‘city states’, as building single communities from multiple identities.

  For the Dublin ‘Vikings’, the balance of power was finally tipped in 980 by their failed invasion of Meath in the eastern midlands, which ultimately led to a concerted Irish effort to curtail their strength. In 1002 something very unusual occurred; the Irish were united under a High King, Brian Bóruma, who over the next decade built up a massive coalition against Dublin. In practice, Scandinavians were present in both camps, as were people from all over the Irish Sea world and beyond. In 1014, the Dublin forces were decisively defeated at the Battle of Clontarf outside the city, although Brian was killed. In practice, the Scandinavians retained control of the town itself, but thereafter the real power lay with the Irish.

  Situated between York and Dublin in the middle of the Irish Sea, the Isle of Man was also heavily impacted by the Vikings, who first settled there during the mid-ninth century. One scholar has suggested that Man was in effect a pirate kingdom, which its central location would certainly make feasible.

  Little is known of the settlement process itself, but early graves imply at least a measure of threat and aggression on the part of the first Norse colonists. One of the more notable burials is that from Balladoole, where an early tenth-century boat grave seems to have been deliberatel
y built over and through a number of pre-existing Christian graves. Whether this reflects an act of deliberate desecration or a more general attempt to place burials within a ritually powerful location is hard to tell, but in either case the Balladoole burial physically established the presence of the settlers in a symbolic statement of land-taking.

  Traces remain of the familiar Scandinavian legal systems and structures of assembly, including the unique Tynwald thing-mound on which the Manx legislature still meets on formal occasions. As in Ireland, there is little evidence for the Scandinavian-style longhouses that are so commonly found in the North Atlantic colonies. There are only a few structures that are distinctly recognisable as ‘Norse’, of which perhaps the best preserved is a bow-sided longhouse discovered at a site called the Braaid. Hillforts and defended promontories suggest a not entirely peaceful existence. Unfortunately, much of the basic settlement pattern of Norse Man is an archaeological blank, but the island is relatively small, and it can be assumed the incoming Scandinavians took over the agricultural landscape of the indigenous Manx.

  One of the most fascinating aspects of the Viking settlement on Man is the clear evidence for a fusion of traditional spiritual ideas and Christianity. The early Viking burials there have a particularly ‘pagan’ flavour. In addition to that at Balladoole, notable graves include the one at Ballateare where a woman had been sacrificed, and a female burial at Peel Castle on St. Patrick’s Isle. The woman at Peel is notable for the large number of grave-goods accompanying her, including two knives (one with a handle decorated in silver wire), a comb, a goose wing, an ammonite fossil, a necklace of jet and amber beads, and an object that has been interpreted variously as a cooking spit or perhaps a magic staff of the type used by a völva sorceress. The manner in which all these people were buried conforms to the wider pattern of pre-Christian funerary rite observed in Scandinavia. Later in the tenth century, however, religious identities seem to have started taking new shapes. As in England at places like Gosforth, a number of Manx carved stones portray Christian iconography alongside images that seem to derive from Old Norse cosmology. Perhaps the best example of this is Thorwald’s Cross, from Kirk Andreas, which appears to depict Odin being devoured by the wolf Fenrir at Ragnarök. On the other side of the cross is an image of a figure (perhaps Christ?) trampling a serpent. This implies that, within a few generations, the settlers had begun to adapt to new belief systems and cultural traditions, though perhaps while maintaining aspects of their own traditional worldviews.