Northmen, The Viking Saga 793-1241 AD

Chapter 2: Lindisfarne, Athelney and York. The Vikings in England 789–954

Early in 793 the people of the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Northumbria witnessed strange apparitions in the sky. Immense flashes of lightning terrified the people, and fiery dragons flew through the air. Famine followed. Bloody rain fell from a clear sky onto the northern end of St Peter’s cathedral in York, Northumbria’s capital. It was a sign, surely, that something terrible was going to come from the north. Then, on 8 June, the dreadful omens were fulfilled: Viking pirates sacked the wealthy and influential Northumbrian monastery on the island of Lindisfarne. In a letter written shortly after the attack, the distinguished Northumbrian scholar Alcuin (c. 735 – 804) expressed his anguish and shock:

‘We and our fathers have lived in this fair land for nearly three hundred and fifty years, and never before has a such an atrocity been seen in Britain as we have now suffered at the hands of a pagan people. Such an attack was not thought possible. The church of St Cuthbert is spattered with the blood of the priests of God, stripped of all its furnishings, exposed to the plundering of pagans – a place more sacred than any in Britain. ...Who is not afraid at this?’

(trans. Stephen Allott, Alcuin of York (York, 1974)).

If there was anyone who was not afraid, they soon would be, for this was just the beginning.

Low lying and largely covered with sand dunes, Lindisfarne lies in the North Sea, just a mile off the mainland to which it is joined for a few hours twice a day at low tide by sand flats. Today Lindisfarne feels remote, especially when the tide is in and tourists cannot reach it, but it is only 5 miles by sea from Bamburgh castle, one of the main strongholds of the Northumbrian kings. It was because of its closeness to this seat of power that Aidan, an Irish monk, founded a monastery and bishopric here in 635 as a base for the evangelisation of the still pagan Angles of Northumbria. On his death in 651, Aidan was buried at Lindisfarne and was soon recognised as a saint. A veritable factory of holiness, Lindisfarne’s next eight bishops were also recognised as saints, the most famous of them being St Cuthbert (d. 687), so gentle a man that he was supposedly even befriended by the local otters.

Monasteries were the main centres of literacy and book production in early medieval Europe and Lindisfarne was home to an outstanding scriptorium where monks ruined their eyesight producing books so intricately illuminated that later generations thought them the work of angels. Of all the monasteries in Britain only the Scottish monastery of Iona rivalled Lindisfarne’s reputation for sanctity. The relics of Lindisfarne’s many saints were its greatest treasures and the foundation of its reputation for holiness. Kings, seeking the monks’ prayers and the intercession of the saints for the benefit of their peoples’ and their own, usually rather sinful, souls gave the monastery generous grants of land. Visiting pilgrims seeking miraculous cures and spiritual merit made their lesser donations. Lindisfarne became wealthy as well as spiritually powerful. This wealth was displayed for the glory of God: silk vestments for the priests, gold and silver communion vessels, crucifixes, croziers, reliquaries and book covers all encrusted with precious stones. The monastery would inevitably have attracted merchants and craftsmen to cater for the monks’ needs for food, clothing, vellum for writing, and precious objects for display. And all this was completely undefended. No wonder it was attractive to the Vikings. Perhaps most valuable of all were the many healthy, well-fed, unarmed monks who they could be confident would fetch a good price at the slave market.

It is difficult today to understand exactly how shocking this attack was: even the reaction to the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington DC, which robbed Americans of their sense of invulnerability, falls short as a comparison. Americans may trust in God but they do not make Him responsible for their defence policy: early medieval Christians did. Belief in the power of the saints to intercede with God to protect their holy places was absolute. All over Europe monasteries were completely undefended and, certainly, no Christian would have dared risk divine retribution by violating them. The monks of Lindisfarne must have been aware of the danger of Viking attack. About four years earlier three ships from Hordaland in western Norway attacked the port of Portland in the south of England, killing a royal official called Beaduheard, the earliest known casualty of a Viking raid. It is likely that there had been other, unrecorded raids on England too, because the powerful Mercian king Offa ordered the preparation of coast defences for Kent in 792. Yet such was their confidence in God’s protection that still they took no precautions. Of course, as pagans, the Vikings felt no qualms about attacking monasteries, that was the kind of behaviour to be expected of barbarians, but why had God not punished them for their sacrilegious act? This, more than the raid itself, was what really frightened Christians. ‘What assurance can the churches of Britain have,’ asked Alcuin, ‘if St Cuthbert and so great a company of saints do not defend their own?’ Alcuin felt defenceless.

In reality Alcuin was in no immediate physical danger – he was teaching in the school at the Frankish emperor Charlemagne’s palace at Aachen in Germany – but like all medieval Christians he believed that even the mightiest empires existed only as long as they enjoyed the favour of God. This was what was understood to have been the fate of the Roman Empire. God had permitted its creation to make the spread of Christianity easier but it was a sinful state and when it had served its purpose, God allowed it to fall. Alcuin’s response was, therefore, not to see the Viking raid as a military problem but as a moral problem. When God allowed bad things to happen to His followers it was His just chastisement for their sins. Alcuin wrote to the survivors of the raid urging them to examine their own conduct. Wealth, he thought, might have led the monks to relax monastic discipline by eating and drinking to excess, wearing fine clothes and neglecting to care for the poor. Northumbria’s king Æthelred also came in for even harsher criticism for allowing injustice and immorality to flourish under his rule. ‘A country has no better protection,’ Alcuin said, ‘than the justice and goodness of its leaders and the prayers of the servants of God.’ He reminded Æthelred that just one prayer from the good and just Hebrew king Hezekiah secured the destruction of 185,000 Assyrians in a single night. If Æthelred would just reform his ways, and those of his subjects, God would surely smite the Vikings in the same way.

The next year, Vikings attacked another prestigious Northumbrian monastery, Jarrow, once home to the Venerable Bede (d. 735), England’s earliest historian. This time the Vikings were not so lucky: local forces captured and killed their leader and a storm wrecked their fleet as it tried to escape. Those survivors who made it ashore were quickly slaughtered by the angry locals. A just punishment, gloated the monkish chroniclers, but this impressive manifestation of the power of the saints did not deter the Vikings. In 795, Vikings plundered in Scotland and Ireland, sacking Iona and another monastery on the island of Rechru off the Irish coast. In 799, Vikings extended their activities to the Frankish Empire for the first time. It would be more than 200 years before the people of Western Europe could look out to sea and see a sail on the horizon without at least a frisson of fear. Was that a Viking longship?

In the short term, however, life on Lindisfarne soon returned to normal. Many monks, including the bishop Higbald, survived the attack, so too did the monastery’s precious relics and many of its other treasures, such as the magnificent intricately ornamented Lindisfarne Gospels, now displayed in the British Library in London. It is likely that the monks had at least some warning of the attack and managed to hide many of the monastery’s valuables – a small rocky hill nearby, now occupied by a castle, would have made a fine look-out point. As Alcuin makes no mention of burning or wanton destruction, the monastic buildings may have escaped undamaged and the community was re-established within the year. It is even possible that the kidnapped monks eventually made it home. Alcuin wrote to Higbald to tell that him that Charlemagne would try to ransom the captured monks: we don’t know if he succeeded. After the failure of the attack on Jarrow, no further Viking raids against England are recorded for over thirty years. That does not mean that there weren’t any. In 804, the monks of Lyminge in Kent, a few miles inland from the Channel coast, took the precaution of acquiring a refuge in the relative security of nearby Canterbury. Five years later, Vikings audaciously captured the papal legate Ealdwulf at sea while returning to the Continent from a mission to Northumbria. Recognising that they had captured someone of importance, the Vikings immediately took Ealdwulf back to England where the Mercian king Coenwulf paid his ransom. However, a few small-scale raids around the coast were trivial affairs compared to the many battles recorded in this period between the four Anglo-Saxon kingdoms, Northumbria, Mercia, East Anglia and Wessex. The rivalry was most intense between Mercia and Wessex, each of which aspired to be recognised as the dominant kingdom of Britain. Their rivalry culminated in 825 with the great battle of Ellandun in Wiltshire, at which King Egbert of Wessex defeated King Beornwulf of Mercia and became recognised as Bretwalda, an ill-defined title probably signifying ‘overlord of Britain’.

The 830s saw a step-change in the nature of the Viking threat to England. The attack on Portland in 789 involved just three ships and was a classic example of what the Vikings called strandhögg, ‘hit and run’. It is likely that this was typical of early Viking raids. Then, in 836, a fleet of twenty-five or thirty-five Danish ships (sources disagree about the number) arrived in the west of England. King Egbert gathered an army and met them in battle at Carhampton in Somerset. Both sides fought hard but in the end it was the Anglo-Saxons who broke and, as the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle put it, ‘the Danes had possession of the place of slaughter’. The Anglo-Saxons soon had the opportunity for revenge. In 838 a Danish fleet arrived in Cornwall, which at that time was an independent Celtic kingdom. Egbert had devoted much of his reign to trying to conquer the Cornish, so, not surprisingly, they welcomed the Danes as allies and together they planned to attack Wessex. Egbert moved fast, however, and attacked first, defeating the alliance at the Battle of Hingston Down. It was Egbert’s last victory. He died the next year, having made Wessex the leading Anglo-Saxon kingdom and set a precedent of effective resistance to the Vikings that his successors would exploit.

In 850 there came another escalation in Viking activity when a Danish army occupied the Isle of Thanet in Kent and settled down to spend the winter there in a fortified camp. So far raiding had been a seasonal activity, confined to the summer months, and by September the Vikings were heading home to avoid getting caught at sea by autumn gales. By wintering in their victims’ territory, Vikings could extend the raiding season into the autumn and make an earlier start the following spring. Spring 851 saw the arrival of a new Viking fleet in Kent. Reported to be 350 ships strong, this was by far the largest Viking fleet to attack England so far. This formidable force sacked Canterbury, England’s premier ecclesiastical centre, and then the growing port of London. Mercia’s king Beorhtwulf brought the Vikings to battle but was heavily defeated. Buoyed by their success, the Vikings crossed the Thames and invaded Wessex, only to be defeated in battle at the unidentified location of Aclea (‘Oak Field’). It was the greatest slaughter of heathen raiders the Anglo-Saxon chronicler had ever heard of.

In the same year Æthelstan, a son of King Æthelwulf of Wessex, defeated a Viking fleet in a naval battle at Sandwich harbour and captured nine ships. Naval battles were exceptionally rare in the Viking Age. Ships of the period could not remain at sea for extended periods to patrol for enemy fleets so the chances of intercepting a Viking fleet on the open sea was negligible. Naval battles, when they did occur, usually took place when one fleet managed to trap another in a harbour or estuary, as Æthelstan’s seems to have done here. These victories bought England only a year’s respite and in 853 the Vikings were back on the Isle of Thanet. Yet despite the unrelenting raids, Æthelwulf of Wessex felt that his kingdom was secure enough for him to go on a year-long journey to Rome to visit the pope in 855, taking with him his favourite youngest son, Alfred. The Vikings were a severe nuisance but they were not, so far, seen as an existential threat.

After more than half a century of Viking raids, the Anglo-Saxons appeared to be meeting the Viking challenge. True, many important towns had been sacked but they would certainly have been well aware of how much more severely Ireland and the Frankish Empire were suffering at the Vikings’ hands. The Anglo-Saxons had never run away from a fight and when they had brought the Vikings to battle they had won more often than they had lost. Despite their ferocious reputation, Vikings were not invincible military supermen. Their weapons were no better than those of the Anglo-Saxons or Franks and nor did they use innovative battle tactics. On a battlefield it would have been hard to tell the Anglo-Saxons and Vikings apart. Both fought on foot and relied on the shield and spear as their main weapons, and both formed up for battle in a linear formation known as the shield wall, in which each warrior stood in rank with his shield slightly overlapping that of the man next to him. Depending on the size of the army, the formation could be several ranks deep, with the men in the rear ranks adding weight to the formation when it came to the pushing and shoving when battle was joined, and stepping forward to fill the front rank when men were cut down. It was essential to maintain the integrity of the shield wall. The critical point of many battles came when one side began to lose its nerve and tried to withdraw. If the shield wall remained intact the defeated army could withdraw in good order to lick its wounds without suffering heavy casualties. If the shield wall collapsed it was every man for himself and casualties would be heavy because the victors could strike the exposed backs of their fleeing enemies.

The real secret to the Vikings’ success was their mobility, which meant that they, rather than the defenders, usually held the initiative. In pre-modern times, travel by water was always faster than travel by land. Viking longships had only a shallow draught so a raiding fleet could make a landing almost anywhere on the open coast or penetrate far inland on rivers. If they found local forces alert and waiting, the Vikings could just move on and try somewhere else, and sooner or later they would catch somebody off guard. When that happened, the Vikings could plunder and be well away before sufficient local forces could gather to oppose them. By collecting their forces to oppose the Vikings in one place, the defenders necessarily left other areas exposed to attack. This tended to undermine the defence. In most western European kingdoms, the Scandinavian kingdoms included, adult free men had to perform levy service when called out by their lords or kings. Men willingly turned out when a campaign involved invading a neighbouring state because of the opportunities for plunder that it brought: the Vikings were not at all unique in early medieval Europe in seeing war as an opportunity to profit. In contrast, defensive campaigns brought no such benefits to offset the risks and costs of war, and men were also naturally reluctant to leave their own families and farms unprotected. As a result, the call to arms often went unanswered.

Full-scale battles were relatively rare in the Viking Age. Thanks to their mobility, Vikings could generally avoid fighting if they thought the odds were unfavourable to them. However, the pay-off from victory could be very high so Vikings were not shy about fighting when it suited them. Plundering could most efficiently be done by splitting an army up into smaller bands to rove widely over the countryside. However, such bands were always vulnerable to being picked off by local forces. If the defender’s army could be engaged and decisively defeated first, the Vikings were free to plunder unhindered. Apart from loot, and a strong hand when it came to negotiating tribute payments with the vanquished, victory in battle also enhanced a Viking leader’s reputation, securing the loyalty of his warriors and attracting new ones. Conversely, the defenders were acutely aware of the awful consequences of defeat. Just maintaining an army in the field at least inhibited Viking activity, so the defenders were usually more cautious about seeking battle than the Anglo-Saxons. This may seem a cowardly strategy, but they had a lot more to lose than the Vikings so it was often safer to pursue a policy of damage limitation than to risk everything on a battle.

In 865 it was finally England’s turn to feel the full fury of Viking attack. Early in the year, a Viking fleet once again settled on Thanet. The long-suffering people of Kent had had enough of being raided by now and instead of resistance they offered the Vikings tribute in return for peace. This was the first time that what came much later to be called Danegeld was offered by the Anglo-Saxons. The offer of tribute was a sign that in the worst affected areas morale was beginning to break, but the money was never actually paid. The Vikings were merely using negotiations to lull the people of Kent into a false sense of security before launching a surprise attack on them. The Vikings had calculated that they could get more by plundering than from negotiating. Far more serious, the same year saw the arrival in East Anglia of a ‘great heathen army’ from Denmark. So far the Vikings had only been after plunder. This army was different, its objective was to conquer and settle.

The leaders of the Danish army were an alliance of landless ‘sea kings’, the most prominent of whom were Ivar, Halfdan and Ubba. Ivar and Halfdan were certainly brothers: Ubba may have been their brother but the evidence is inconclusive. Contemporary sources have nothing to say about any of the leaders’ origins, but in Danish and Icelandic sources of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries Ivar had become identified with the enigmatically named Ivar the Boneless, a son of the legendary Viking Ragnar Lodbrok (‘hairy breeches’). Whether there is any truth in the tradition is anyone’s guess. Ragnar is one of those legendary characters who, like King Arthur and Robin Hood, may well be based on real historical people but whose actual lives have become buried under such a deep accretion of later legends that separating any facts from the fiction is now completely impossible.

Ragnar’s career, as told by Saxo Grammaticus, begins in a credible enough fashion, with him fighting off a host of rivals to become king of Denmark. Like real historical Viking kings, Ragnar consolidated his position by leading great plundering raids, but the range of his activities is improbable, he plundered everywhere from Britain and Ireland to the Mediterranean, the Byzantine empire, Russia and the Arctic. Ragnar earned his nickname for the shaggy trousers he wore for protection when he killed two enormous venomous serpents that were ravaging Sweden. Ragnar married three times but to no ordinary women: one of his wives was Lathgertha, a shieldmaiden (a type of Viking Amazon and just as legendary; women did not fight in real Viking armies). Another wife, according to Icelandic traditions, was the daughter of the mythical dragon slayer Sigurd Fafnisbane and his valkyrie wife Brynhild. Ragnar was survived by enough sons to crew a small longship, among them, according to Saxo, Regnald, Fridlef, Rathbarn, Dunvat, Daxon, Björn Ironside, Sigurd Snake-in-the-Eye, Hvitserk, Ubbi, Erik Wind-Hat and Agnar, as well as Ivar the Boneless. Most of these sons probably belong as much to the realm of legend as their father.

The Danish army wintered at Thetford in East Anglia and in the spring struck a peace deal with the locals. The East Angles would ​provide the Danes with horses and they would ride off and plunder someone else. This indifference to Viking raiding in the other Anglo-Saxon kingdoms was typical. On only one occasion did one Anglo-Saxon kingdom ally with another against the Vikings, and it worked greatly to the Vikings’ advantage as they were able to concentrate all their efforts on one kingdom at a time. Acquiring horses gave the Danes much the same mobility on land as they had previously enjoyed on water, with all the tactical advantages that went with it. The Danes used their horses to invade Northumbria, which was wracked by a civil war between rivals for the throne: Vikings always exploited political divisions when they could. Northumbria’s capital city, York, fell to the Danes without a fight on 21 November. Recognising the seriousness of the threat, the two kings, Ælle and Osberht, made common cause and together they attempted to recapture York in March 867. York’s defences were not in good condition and the Northumbrians stormed in, but once inside the city the battle turned against them and both kings were killed along with most of their followers. According to the colourful, but unreliable, medieval Scandinavian traditions, Ælle was responsible for the death of Ragnar Lodbrok. Ælle captured Ragnar after he was shipwrecked and had him thrown into a pit of adders to be bitten to death. Ragnar warned Ælle that ‘the piglets would be grunting if they knew the plight of the boar’, meaning that his sons would avenge him. When they captured Ælle at York, Ragnar’s sons sacrificed him to Odin by making a ‘blood eagle’ of him, that is cutting open his ribcage either side of the spine and pulling out his lungs to create the appearance of bloody wings. Scholars have endlessly debated whether this was a genuine Viking practice or merely the product of a fertile skaldic imagination. The sacrifice seems no more horrific than the old English punishment for traitors of hanging, drawing and quartering, so it would be foolish to rule out the possibility that it was sometimes actually performed: víking was not an activity for the squeamish, after all.

As well as two kings, much of Northumbria’s military aristocracy died in the Battle of York. Deprived of leadership, those Northumbrians who survived submitted to the Danes, who appointed an obscure Northumbrian nobleman called Ecgberht as a puppet king. The Danes remained quietly at York for the next twelve months before invading Mercia in spring 868. Mercia’s king, Burgred, put aside old rivalries and appealed to King Æthelred of Wessex for help. The two kings laid siege to the Danes in Nottingham, but they seem to have lacked resolve. The Danes refused to come out and fight, while the allies were unwilling either to storm the fortified city or to starve them out by a long siege. Burgred made his peace with the Danes, probably paying tribute in return for their withdrawal to Northumbria. It is likely that Æthelred preferred a more confrontational policy because the two kingdoms never co-operated against the Vikings again.

In 869, the Danes returned to ravage East Anglia, burning and destroying every monastery they came to and slaughtering their monks. In November, Ivar and Ubba crushingly defeated the East Angles at Hoxne, captured their king, Edmund, and brought the whole kingdom under their control. According to later hagiographical traditions, Ivar and Ubba offered to allow Edmund to rule East Anglia as a tributary king if he would become a pagan. Edmund refused and was tortured by being shot full of arrows, like St Sebastian, before being beheaded. Edmund’s head was thrown into the wood, where it was later found safe, supposedly guarded by a wolf calling ‘here, here, here’. Miracles followed and Edmund was quickly considered to be a saint. It is probable that the Danes appointed a caretaker puppet king, as they had in Northumbria, while they planned their next expedition. It is likely that sometime over the winter Ivar died, as he is not mentioned again in Anglo-Saxon sources.

In 870 the Danes invaded Wessex and seized the town of Reading, which they used as their base until spring 871. However, the Danes’ further advance into Wessex was strongly resisted by king Æthelred and his brother Alfred. Eight or nine battles were fought across Wessex over the next year, none proved to be decisive and both sides suffered heavy casualties. The West Saxons lost an ealdorman and a bishop in the course of the battles, the Danes a king and nine jarls. In April 871, King Æthelred died and was succeeded by Alfred, the only king the English have thought worthy of being described as ‘the Great’. Alfred’s biographer and adviser bishop Asser would later describe his reluctance to accept the throne because he felt inadequate to the task of defeating the Danes unless God gave him support. A good Christian king should be modest and pious, of course, and Asser was determined to present a favourable image of his employer. In fact, almost all the sources on which we depend for our knowledge of Alfred’s struggle with the Danes were written by people who were close to the king or who were writing under his direction. We only have Alfred’s side of this story.

Around the time of Alfred’s accession, the Danes were reinforced by a new fleet under Guthrum, Anund and Oscetel, which sailed up the Thames to Reading. After suffering two defeats in quick succession, Alfred made peace with the Danes on condition they would depart. The terms of the deal are not known but Alfred probably paid them tribute, as the men of Kent had done in 865. The Danes finally left Reading in the autumn, but they only went as far as London, which they seized from the Mercians. Alfred was probably lucky that a rebellion by their Northumbrian puppet king forced the Danes to hurry back to York early in 872. Ecgberht was dealt with quickly enough for the Danes to invade Mercia and winter in a camp near Torksey on the River Trent. Recent excavations have discovered large quantities of hacked-up Arab dirhems on the site. This is probably evidence that Scandinavian merchants with links to the eastern trade routes visited the camp, most likely to buy slaves captured by the army. With the Vikings, trade and war were always closely linked. The large size of the camp, estimated at 64 acres (26 hectares), confirms that the Anglo-Saxon chronicler was not exaggerating when he described the Danish army as a ‘great’ army, probably several thousand strong.

In 873 the Danes took a fleet up the Trent and captured the main Mercian royal centre at Repton, where they spent the winter. The site of the Danish winter camp at Repton has been the subject of intensive archaeological investigation. The Danes built a slipway on the riverbank so they could draw their ships ashore for the winter, as was normal Viking practice. To protect the ships from attack, the Danes constructed a roughly semi-circular ditch and rampart, about 200 yards (183 m) long, which opened onto the riverbank. The rampart incorporated a pre-existing church building as a strongpoint. Viking fortifications of this kind were common in Ireland, where they were known as longphuirt (‘ship landings’, singular longphort). Covering only one acre, this longphort is very small compared to known Irish longphuirt, and to the previous winter’s camp at Torksey, so was clearly not intended to house the whole army. Just outside the rampart was a unique mass burial containing the skeletal remains of at least 249 individuals, 80 per cent of which were robust males aged between fifteen and forty-five. These were arranged around the body of a single male, thought to have been one of the leaders of the Danish army. None of the skeletons showed evidence of battle injuries, so it is likely that they were victims of an epidemic – in pre-modern times disease often caused more casualties in an army than enemy action. Coins found in the burial confirmed that it dated to the time that the Danish army wintered at Repton. Several individual burials were also found near the site, including a man who had died from a blow to the hip. The man was buried with a sword, a Thor’s hammer amulet and a symbolic penis to replace the one he must have lost in combat.

The loss of their capital led to the collapse of Mercian resistance and King Burgred fled into exile in Rome where he later died. The pope was probably not overjoyed to see him: he had only recently written to Burgred telling him that his kingdom’s troubles were his own fault for allowing all manner of fornication to flourish. As they had done in Northumbria and East Anglia, the Danes appointed a caretaker puppet king, a nobleman called Ceolwulf, to rule until such time as they decided what to do with the kingdom. In just eight years the Danes had conquered three of the four Anglo-Saxon kingdoms. Only Wessex remained, but it would not have to face the full might of the Danish army again. By now, many of the Danes wanted to settle down and enjoy the fruits of victory and in 874 Halfdan left the army and took his followers back to York to consolidate his control of Northumbria. In 876, Halfdan divided the kingdom into two parts. The northern province of Bernicia (extending from the Tees to the Firth of Forth) remained independent under native rulers based at Bamburgh. The southern province of Deira (roughly equivalent to Yorkshire) Halfdan shared out between his followers and York became the capital of a Viking kingdom. Halfdan probably did not reign for long, because this is the last time he is mentioned in Anglo-Saxon sources. It is likely that he is to be identified with Alband, a Danish chief who, according to Irish sources, was killed at Strangford Lough fighting against the Dublin Vikings in 877. Little is known about Halfdan’s immediate successors. One, ‘Airdeconut’ (probably Harthacnut), is known only from a single coin discovered in a hoard at Silverdale, Lancashire, in 2011.

The rest of the Danish army, now under the leadership of Guthrum, Oscetel and Anund, moved to Cambridge, in the east of Mercia, where they spent a year before invading Wessex late in 875. This took Alfred by surprise and the Danes successfully evaded the West Saxon army, crossing the kingdom to winter at the nunnery at Wareham in Dorset, an easily defended site between two rivers. Alfred laid siege to the Danes but, just as at Nottingham, a stalemate ensued. Negotiations followed and in 876 a peace agreement was reached, which probably involved Alfred paying tribute to persuade the Danes to leave his kingdom. Hostages were exchanged as a demonstration of good faith and the Danes sealed the deal with oaths sworn on a sacred ring dedicated to Thor. Pagan Scandinavians kept such rings, reddened with sacrificial blood, in temples specifically for the swearing of oaths. It is surprising that such a devoutly Christian king as Alfred was willing to sanction a pagan ceremony, but he presumably believed that this way the Danes would feel more bound by their oaths than if they had been made over Christian relics. If so, he was wrong. The Danes did not regard oaths sworn to Christians as binding and they had simply used the peace agreement to lull Alfred into a false sense of security. They killed the West Saxon hostages and, abandoning the hostages they had given Alfred to their fate, set out for Exeter in Devon, part of the army riding overland, part going by sea. Alfred pursued the mounted army but failed to catch it before it reached the safety of the city walls. Those Danes who went by sea were less fortunate: their fleet was caught by a storm and 120 ships were lost.

This disaster changed the military balance. Alfred spent months outside the walls of Exeter but it was now he who had the initiative. When the Danes finally gave in, Alfred did not need to pay them to leave the kingdom: they gave hostages again and in August 877 withdrew to Gloucester in southern Mercia. They now called on Ceolwulf to divide the kingdom with them. Ceolwulf was allowed to keep the western half of Mercia, while the Danes took the east. Anund and Oscetel were probably among those who took lands there as they are not heard of again. Danish settlement was densest around the towns known as the Five Boroughs: Derby, Nottingham, Lincoln, Leicester and Stamford. It is unlikely that the Danish settlement resulted in large-scale displacement of the Anglo-Saxon peasantry. The ranks of the Mercian nobility and freeman classes would have been thinned by the wars and the Danes simply took over their lands: the local peasants just got new landlords. Many monastic communities had been destroyed so their lands were also available for sharing out among the conquerors. Guthrum did not take lands: he still had his eyes on Wessex.

In the Middle Ages, campaigning usually ceased during the winter months. Seas were rough, roads became impassable with mud or snow and there was no grazing for horses so, as the nights lengthened, Vikings and their opponents alike headed for winter quarters. But as Alfred settled down to celebrate Christmas at Chippenham, Guthrum was preparing to attack. Shortly after Twelfth Night (5 January) in 878 Guthrum left Gloucester and made a surprise attack on Chippenham. Alfred only narrowly evaded capture and, with his family and retainers, fled south-west to take refuge in the great wetlands of the Somerset Levels. Now largely drained for agriculture, in Alfred’s day the Levels were an area of twisting river channels, reedy fens, willow woodland, shallow lakes, and peat moors interrupted by low ridges and islands of dry land. When Alfred fled there in mid-winter, the Levels would have been completely flooded, but in summer they dried out enough for parts to be used as rough grazing. It was from this practice that the county of Somerset got its name, from Sumersaete, the ‘summer country’. Alfred hunted in the area and knew it intimately but it was effectively impenetrable for outsiders, so for the time being he was safe. Guthrum’s failure to capture Alfred was a serious setback. Guthrum lacked the forces to occupy all of Wessex so his best chance to control it was by persuading Alfred to rule as his puppet or, if he refused, kill him and appoint someone who would. This approach had been successful in Northumbria, Mercia and East Anglia, it likely would have worked in Wessex too.

Alfred’s flight into the wetlands became the stuff of legend. A story first told in the eleventh century, Life of St Neot, tells how Alfred took refuge in the house of a peasant woman. The woman prepared some cakes and set them by the fire to bake. Telling the king to watch the cakes, she went out to collect firewood. However, the careworn king nodded off and the woman returned to find the cakes had burned. She angrily scolded the king, telling him that he was happy enough to eat them but was too lazy to help her cook them. Alfred took his scolding with the grace and humility expected of a pious king. Another story of Alfred’s time in the wetlands is that St Cuthbert appeared to Alfred in a vision promising help against the Vikings who had chased him out of his home at Lindisfarne. This was a politically convenient vision if ever there was one: if Northumbria’s patron saint had transferred his support to the Wessex dynasty, was this vision not a sign that he wanted the Northumbrians to do the same? A third tale tells how Alfred disguised himself as a minstrel so he could infiltrate Guthrum’s camp and learn all of his plans. All these stories emphasise not just Alfred’s moral qualities but also the desperate circumstances to which he is supposed to have been reduced. Yet, as subsequent events showed, he still retained the loyalty of his subjects and had substantial resources at his disposal.

Around Easter, Alfred established a fortress on the Isle of Athelney, a small island – barely half a mile long – in the southern reaches of the Levels. Athelney’s name is derived from Old English (the language spoken by the Anglo-Saxons) Æthelinga íeg, meaning the ‘island of princes’, so it was probably part of a royal estate. Alfred really had no need to lodge with peasants and ruin their cooking. Only after the most severe flooding, as in the very wet winter of 2013 – 14, does Athelney ever resemble an island today, but before modern draining of the Levels it was a natural fortress.

Athelney’s potential was first recognised in prehistoric times when each end of the island was fortified with a bank and ditch. These ready-made defences, which could easily have been refurbished, must have been part of the island’s attractions for Alfred. Archaeological evidence of ironworking on the island in Anglo-Saxon times suggests that the king may have used it as a secure centre for weapons production. A causeway linked the western end of the island to dry land at the burh (‘fortified town’) of East Lyng to the west. Anyone hoping to attack Athelney from this direction would have to take East Lyng first. Just a mile north-east of Athelney is the strikingly abrupt hill of Burrow Mump. Though only 79 feet (24 m) high it has a commanding view over the surrounding Levels. A medieval church and a Norman motte have obliterated any evidence of earlier structures that may have been on its summit, but Alfred would surely have built a watchtower here to cover the northern approaches to Athelney.

Alfred ensured that his subjects knew that they had not been abandoned, as the Mercians had been, by launching raids out of the fens to harass the Danes. Athelney’s position near the southern edge of the Levels not only put the wetlands between Alfred and the Danes, it also gave him good communications with Devon, Dorsetshire and Hampshire, which remained unoccupied. Ubba led a strong raid into north Devon, perhaps with the intention of outflanking Alfred, but he was defeated and killed with 800 – 1,200 of his men by a smaller West Saxon force under Odda the ealdorman of Devon at Countisbury Hill. Ubba had forced the West Saxons to take refuge in a hastily constructed fort on the hill. The West Saxons lacked food and water so, rather than attack the strong position, Ubba decided to wait and let hunger and thirst force their surrender. The West Saxons weren’t ready to give in, however, and they launched a surprise dawn attack and massacred the drowsy Danes. Only a handful of the Vikings managed to escape back to their ships.

While this was happening, Alfred’s agents were travelling the countryside secretly preparing to raise a new army against the Danes. In early May, Alfred left Athelney and rode to Egbert’s Stone near Selwood in Wiltshire where he met with the levies of Somerset, Wiltshire and Hampshire, who gave him a rapturous reception. Knowing that news of the gathering would soon reach the Danes, Alfred moved fast. Camping only one night at the stone, the next day he marched his army to ‘Island Wood’, which was probably near Warminster, around 10 miles to the north-west. The next morning, Alfred broke camp and advanced another 8 miles to Edington, where he met the Danes in battle:

‘Fighting fiercely with a compact shield wall against the entire Danish army, [Alfred] persevered resolutely for a long time; at length he gained the victory through God’s will. He destroyed the Danes with great slaughter, and pursued those who fled as far as the stronghold, hacking them down’. (Bishop Asser, Life of King Alfred, trans. Simon Keynes.)

The unnamed stronghold is usually reckoned to have been Chippenham, but that is over 12 miles from Edington, a very long way for a hot pursuit after what was clearly a hard-fought battle. It may be more likely that the Danes actually took refuge in Bratton Camp, an Iron Age hillfort only 2 miles from Edington. After a two-week siege, Guthrum capitulated, agreeing to leave the kingdom, hand over hostages and accept baptism.

Three weeks later Guthrum and thirty of his leading men were baptised at Aller, not far from Athelney. Alfred personally raised Guthrum from the font and adopted him as a godson. Guthrum and his men wore the white robes of baptism for eight days, their heads bound by white cloths where they had been anointed with holy oil. After their heads were ceremonially unbound at the royal manor at nearby Wedmore, twelve days of festivities followed at which Alfred gave Guthrum and his men ‘many excellent treasures’. In the autumn, Guthrum kept his word and withdrew to Cirencester in Mercia for the winter and then, in 879, to East Anglia, which he ruled as king until his death in 890. It is impossible to be sure how sincere Guthrum’s conversion was but, at least outwardly, he ruled as a Christian king, issuing coinage under his baptismal name Æthelstan. Alfred would later commemorate his triumph over Guthrum by founding an abbey at Athelney, but it never prospered. When the abbey was dissolved in 1539 it was completely dismantled for building stone, fetching just £80. Only a modest stone monument to Alfred (with no public access) marks Athelney as a place of significance to the history of the Viking Age.

Determining the size of the Viking armies that came so close to conquering England has proved very difficult. Contemporary annalists, both in England and elsewhere in Europe, tended to describe the size of Viking armies in terms of the number of ships they arrived in, rather than numbers of warriors. Most sources agree that the numbers of ships involved increased sharply in the 840s, from fleets of three to about thirty-five ships before this date to ones of 100 – 350 after. Assuming these figures are accurate, they still raise obvious questions. How big were the ships? How many Vikings were there in each ship? Some Vikings did take their wives and children with them on campaign and they are known sometimes to have transported horses in their ships. This would have reduced the numbers of warriors carried in each ship. Two almost complete longships from this period were discovered in the nineteenth century in burial mounds at Oseberg and Gokstad in Norway. The older of the two is the Oseberg ship, which was built around 820 or perhaps earlier. This extremely ornate and elegant ship was 71 feet (21.6 m) long by 16.7 feet (5.1 m) broad and 5.25 feet (1.6 m) deep and had fifteen pairs of oars and, like all Viking ships, a single square sail. Sea trials with a replica have shown that the Oseberg ship was not very seaworthy so it is unlikely to have been a raiding ship. The Gokstad ship, built around 895 – 900, is a better candidate for a raiding ship, especially as the skeletal remains of the king or chieftain buried in it show clear signs that he was killed in battle. The ship was 76.5 feet (23.3 m) long by 17 feet (5.2 m) broad and 6.5 feet (2 m) deep and had sixteen pairs of oars. However, a rack along the gunwale carried sixty-four shields, suggesting that it carried a double crew. Unlike the Oseberg ship, the Gokstad ship was very seaworthy indeed: a replica has been sailed across the Atlantic. The oldest known Danish longship, from Ladby on Fyn, is roughly contemporary with the Gokstad ship. Like the Gokstad ship, the Ladby ship had sixteen pairs of oars and, at 68 feet (20.6 m) long, was nearly the same length. However, at only 9.5 feet (2.9 m) broad and 2.3 feet (0.7 m) deep, its hull was also much narrower and shallower than the Gokstad ship’s. Although it would have carried fewer men and been less seaworthy than the Gokstad ship, the Ladby ship would in many ways have been a better raiding vessel as it drew less water and would have been much faster under oars. If this ship was typical of those used by the Danes raiding England in Alfred’s time, we could conclude that a large Viking army must have numbered at least a few thousand (but probably not tens of thousands) of warriors. This seems all the more credible because we know from reliable literary and archaeological sources that Alfred’s Wessex could muster around 30,000 armed men.

A major Viking army of this period did not have a hierarchical structure with a single supreme commander. The basic Scandinavian military unit was the lið (or, in the late Viking Age, the hirð), a kings’ or chieftain’s personal retinue of warriors the size of which depended on the wealth and status of its leader. The warriors of a lið formed a sworn fellowship or félag, which was bonded together by oaths of mutual loyalty. Formal discipline in the ranks was unnecessary. Viking warriors regarded their honour and reputations as their most valuable possessions and had to be defended at all costs. Any warrior who abandoned his comrades in battle would lose his honour and become niðing, literally ‘nothing’, a non-person. Most Vikings would have preferred an honourable death to becoming niðing – at least this preserved a man’s posthumous reputation and protected his family’s honour. For a víking expedition, a chieftain could supplement his lið with men recruited from the local defence levies. With the promise of loot and land, there was probably no shortage of volunteers. Armies like that, which invaded England in 865, were essentially just groups of liðr which had come together for a common purpose. Decision-making was consensual with the greatest weight being accorded to the most successful war leaders and those with royal blood. When a campaign was over, armies simply broke up into their respective liðr to settle, return home or join another army somewhere else.

After Alfred’s victory at Edington, England enjoyed a respite from major Viking raiding. Most of those Vikings who were not busy settling moved across the Channel to Francia in search of easier pickings. Alfred used this period of relative peace to embark on a thorough reform of his kingdom’s defences. A problem with fighting the Vikings was that it took time to raise an army. Alfred set up a rota so that a third of his thegns (military aristocracy) and a half of the peasant levies were always in arms. The thegns were expected to supply their own horses, so they could form a rapid reaction force, and everyone had to bring sixty days’ supplies with them so that the army could stay in the field longer. Alfred built a fleet to take on the Vikings at sea: it immediately proved its worth in battles with small raiding forces around the coast. The most important element of Alfred’s reforms was his system of burhs, ‘fortified towns’, often built at strategic river crossings, which acted as refuges for country folk and secure operating bases for his army.

Together, Alfred’s reforms were intended to deny the Vikings freedom of movement and ensure that they would be pursued everywhere they went, preventing them from plundering effectively, reforming the army and building a fleet to take on the Vikings at sea. A devout Christian, Alfred believed that no amount of military reforms would defeat the Vikings unless he also had the support of God, so he introduced educational reforms to raise the standard of the clergy. Alfred invited scholars from abroad and personally translated several major works, including Pope Gregory the Great’s Pastoral Care, into English. He was also responsible for beginning the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. This is the major source for the events of the Viking Age in England, but modern readers need to be aware that, despite the chronicle’s matter-of-fact style, its main purpose was to glorify the West-Saxon dynasty’s role in saving Christian England from the pagan Vikings.

Alfred’s reforms got their first test in 885 when a large Viking force arrived in Kent and laid siege to Rochester. When Alfred turned up with his army, the Vikings fled to their ships, abandoning their prisoners and all the horses they had brought with them from Francia in anticipation of harrying the countryside. Guthrum had broken the peace by supporting the invaders so, in 886, Alfred seized London in retaliation, which had been under Danish control since the fall of Mercia, rebuilt its Roman walls and installed a permanent garrison. By doing so he effectively closed the Thames to Viking fleets. In the same year Alfred was recognised as king by all the Anglo-Saxons who were not living under Danish rule. It was probably at this time that Alfred agreed a peace treaty with Guthrum, the text of which still survives. In return for treating the Anglo-Saxons under his rule equally with Danes, Alfred recognised the borders of Guthrum’s kingdom as running ‘up the Thames, and then up the Lea, and along the Lea to its source, then in a straight line to Bedford, then up the Ouse to Watling Street’ (an old Roman road). The agreement was most advantageous to Alfred, as it effectively recognised his annexation of all of western Mercia. Alfred had prepared the ground for this already by marrying his daughter Æthelflæd to the ealdorman Æthelred, who had been the ruler of Mercia since Ceolwulf’s death in 879 or 880.

The arrival of two large Viking armies from Francia in 892 tested Alfred’s new defences to the limit. The larger of the two armies built a camp at Appledore on Kent’s Channel coast. The smaller of the two sailed into the Thames estuary and built a fort at Milton Regis in northern Kent. The leader of this army was Hastein, a brilliant commander who had made his name leading a daring Viking raid in the Mediterranean in 859 – 62 (see ch. 7) and had spent most of the previous thirty years plundering in Francia. A Norman monk, Dudo of St Quentin (c. 960 – c. 1043), would later describe Hastein in lurid terms as a ‘cruel and harsh, destructive, troublesome, wild, ferocious, infamous, destructive and inconstant, brash, conceited and lawless, death-dealing, rude, ever alert, rebellious traitor and kindler of evil’, and every bit the freebooting Viking of the popular imaginative. Hastein certainly lived the Viking dream, a peasant boy who made good through sheer guts but whose lack of royal blood prevented him from reaching the pinnacle of Scandinavian society by conquering a kingdom of his own.

Alfred responded to the invasion by placing his army in mid-Kent between the two Viking armies. A long stand-off followed. Alfred could not concentrate his forces against one Viking army without leaving the other free to plunder as it wished but, with a large Anglo-Saxon army in the field, the Vikings were also reluctant to stray far from their camps. At some point Alfred entered negotiations with Hastein. These resulted in the baptism of Hastein and his family and a payment of tribute in return for his promise to withdraw. In the event, Hastein took the money and stayed. The stalemate was finally broken when a third Viking army, this one from York, arrived in Devon in spring 893 and occupied Exeter. This left Alfred no choice but to split his forces. The new Viking army spent the summer besieged in Exeter before breaking up in the autumn, some to return to York, others going to Ireland. This diversion gave the two Viking armies in Kent the opportunity to escape. Alfred had easily contained the Vikings in Kent so both armies decided to move across the Thames estuary to East Anglia, where they could expect support from local Danish settlers. Hastein built a new fort at Benfleet in Essex, while the Vikings from Appledore sent their ships to Mersea Island, also in Essex, and then set out to join them by marching overland through Wessex, plundering as they went. Heavily burdened with booty, the Vikings moved slowly and were intercepted by Alfred’s son Edward at Farnham in Surrey. Rather than abandon their booty and run, the Vikings fought and were defeated. The survivors escaped to Mersea but their king had been badly injured in the battle and could no longer provide effective leadership, so most of them defected to Hastein at Benfleet.

Encouraged by this reinforcement to his army, Hastein set out on a plundering expedition in east Mercia. While he was gone, ealdorman Æthelred raised an army from London and stormed Hastein’s camp at Benfleet, capturing all his ships and booty, along with his wife and two sons. Many of Hastein’s ships were taken to London and Rochester, the rest were broken up and burned. Charred ships’ timbers found by navvies building a railway bridge at South Benfleet in 1855 may have belonged to the Danish ships destroyed after the battle. Hastein built a new fort at Shoebury, 10 miles east of Benfleet, where he received new reinforcements from the East Anglian Danes. Undeterred by the defeat at Benfleet, Hastein launched a raid across west Mercia to the Welsh border. Harried by Mercian and Welsh forces, he was besieged at Buttington on the River Severn, near Welshpool in Powys. Hastein fought his way out but suffered heavy casualties and retreated back to Shoebury. Reinforced by more East Anglian Danes, Hastein set out for Mercia again in the autumn. This time he occupied the old Roman legionary fortress at Chester, but the Mercians had cleared the surrounding countryside of food. Short of supplies and with winter coming on, Hastein again retreated, this time to Mersea Island. Alfred now released Hastein’s family but his conciliatory gesture was not reciprocated. In 894 Hastein sailed up the Thames and built a new fort on the River Lea, north of London, but was forced to abandon his ships in 895 when Alfred built a stockade to block the river. Another raid into west Mercia that summer also failed while Alfred’s new fleet won victories over several small raiding fleets from York and East Anglia. Though Hastein had never suffered a decisive defeat, Alfred’s reformed defences had denied him the freedom to plunder. Frustrated, the Danish army broke up in 896, some to settle in East Anglia, others to return to Francia with Hastein, where it is likely he settled. A relieved chronicler wrote: ‘The raiding army had not, by God’s grace, greatly afflicted the English people to a very great extent, but they were much more severely afflicted during those three years by the mortality of cattle and men.’ Wessex had weathered the storm.

Alfred had never enjoyed good health and he lived only three more years. In the late Anglo-Saxon period, Alfred’s reputation was overshadowed by those of his son Edward the Elder and grandson Æthelstan. Alfred’s reputation began to grow in the twelfth century, thanks to his almost hagiographical treatment by the chronicler William of Malmesbury (c. 1095 – c. 1143) but it was not until the sixteenth century that he acquired his unique title ‘the Great’. Certainly, with the benefit of hindsight, Alfred’s reign can be seen as decisive in English history, marking the beginning of a national kingship. In his combination of political, military and scholarly abilities, Alfred stands alone among the rulers of early medieval Europe.

While Wessex’s survival still lay in the balance, the Danes consolidated their control over their conquests in East Anglia, the east Midlands and Yorkshire. Because different legal customs, introduced by the Danes, prevailed there, the area subsequently became known as the Danelaw. The scale of Danish settlement is difficult to assess. Danes certainly formed the social and political elite of the Danelaw, what is unclear is if there was also widespread settlement of Danish peasant farmers. Genetic studies of the modern population of the Danelaw have failed to shed light on this because the Danes came from much the same area that the Anglo-Saxons originally hailed from, so the two populations were not genetically distinct. However, place-names of Danish origin are very common in the Danelaw, strongly suggesting that Danes did settle in substantial numbers. Two of the most common place-name elements are -by, as in Grimsby (‘Grim’s village’), and -thorpe, as in Kettlethorpe (‘Ketil’s outlying farm’). Danish place-names are not spread evenly throughout the Danelaw so it would seem that many areas saw little or no Danish settlement. The military nature of the Danish settlement is reflected in the local government of the Danelaw. In Anglo-Saxon England, the basic unit of local government, for taxation and defence was the hundred, a unit of land considered sufficient to support a hundred families: in the Danelaw it was the much larger wapentake, from Old Norse vápnatak (‘weapon taking’). The Anglo-Saxon hide (the area of ploughland needed to support one peasant family) was generally known as the ploughland (Old English plogesland). The law of the Danelaw was distinguished from English law by procedural differences, heavy fines for breach of the king’s peace, and the use, unknown in England at the time, of sworn aristocratic juries of presentment to initiate the prosecution of criminal suspects in the wapentake courts. While under contemporary English law, trial by ordeal was used for the most serious crimes. In the Danelaw trial by combat was normal. There were also major differences in landholding in the Danelaw, with much larger numbers of peasant freeholders, or ‘sokemen’ than in the rest of England. In Lincolnshire freeholders accounted for nearly 50 per cent of the population and in the rest of the Danelaw counties they averaged around one third.

Assimilation of the Danes with the native population began with conversion to Christianity. This was a diplomatic necessity at the top levels of Danish society because it made relations with English rulers easier. The Danish kings of East Anglia issued coins in the name of St Edmund as early as 890, but this may have been intended to appeal their English subjects as much as it was a genuine show of piety. It is not clear how quickly Christianity was adopted by the rest of the Danish population but pagan burial customs had died out by around 950. There probably still were pagans in England after this date, however, because the Anglo-Saxon chronicler criticised King Edgar (r. 957 – 75) for allowing heathen ways. Assimilation was made easier because the Old Norse and Old English languages were to a limited extent mutually intelligible (this is particularly the case with the Old English dialects spoken in East Anglia and Northumbria). Although it was the Danes who finished up speaking English in the end, it was not a linguistic one-way street as hundreds of Danish words were adopted into the English language. Modern English words pronounced with a sk, as in skin, sky, skirt and scrape, are usually of Danish origin as are words pronounced with a hard k or g, like kid, get, give and egg.

While the establishment of the Danelaw was an undoubted triumph for the Danes, it came at a price. By taking land and settling down, the Danes lost their main military advantage over the English, their mobility. Now that the Danes had farms and families to protect they became vulnerable to English retaliation. The Danes were also vulnerable because they were divided into many small politically unstable kingdoms. The changed balance of advantage soon became apparent in the reign of Alfred’s son and successor Edward the Elder (r. 899 – 924). Edward’s first three years as king were spent suppressing a rebellion by his cousin Æthelwold, whose claim to the throne was supported by the East Anglian Danes. Æthelwold’s death in battle in 903 freed Edward to take the offensive against the Danes. In 909 Edward attacked the Danes of York: the following year they retaliated by invading Mercia only to be defeated by the combined levies of Mercia and Wessex at Wednesfield, near Tettenhall in Staffordshire. Danish casualties were heavy and included three kings and eleven jarls.

Following his victory, Edward, aided closely by his sister Æthelflæd of Mercia, embarked on the methodical conquest of the Danelaw. Danish resistance crumbled after an unnamed king of East Anglia was killed in battle at Tempsford in Bedfordshire in 917, and by the end of 918 all of the Danelaw south of the Humber was under Edward’s control. Edward was generous in victory. The Danish settlers were not dispossessed of their lands and were allowed to retain their own laws and customs. The Danelaw would retain a distinctive identity within England until well after the Norman Conquest. Vikings were not political nationalists. Laws and customs were the true markers of ethnic identity in early medieval Europe, not states, and these concessions helped bind the Danes more closely to the English crown. In parallel with his campaigns in the Danelaw, Edward steadily absorbed Mercia into Wessex, seizing London, Buckinghamshire and Oxfordshire in 911 and the rest of the kingdom in 919 following the death of Æthelflæd. Edward consolidated his conquests by extending Alfred’s system of fortified burhs north. When Edward died in 924, it was clear that he had set his sights on eliminating the last bastion of Danish power in England, the kingdom of York.

York originated as a Roman legionary fortress, founded in AD 71 on a low, level ridge between the confluence of the rivers Ouse and Foss. The Romans named the fortress Eboracum, a name of Celtic origin probably meaning the place of the alders or yews. York had two great attractions to the Romans: it lay at the heart of a large and fertile plain, the produce of which could feed the garrison, and the Ouse was easily navigable to the ships of the day so it could be reached from the North Sea. Like most Roman fortresses, York soon attracted merchants, craftsmen, innkeepers and brothelkeepers eager to relieve the soldiers of their wages and a civilian settlement, or vicus, developed on the west bank of the Ouse, opposite the fortress, to which it was linked by a bridge. The vicus had grown to such an extent that by 237 it had been formally recognised as a city. It was in York, in 306, that Constantine the Great, Rome’s first Christian emperor, was proclaimed emperor by his troops following the death there of his father Constantius.

With the end of Roman rule in Britain in 410, York ceased to be a major population centre but the fortress, at least, was not completely abandoned. The fortress walls remained intact and the legionary headquarters building continued to be used, probably as a palace for the rulers of the small British kingdom of Deira. York began to recover after it became the capital of the Anglian king Ælle, who conquered Deira around 581. Around 604, Ælle’s successor, Æthelfrith united Deira with the neighbouring Anglian kingdom of Bernicia to create the kingdom of Northumbria, which stretched from the Humber north to the Firth of Forth. The Anglian kings continued to maintain the walls and use the legionary headquarters until it was destroyed by fire around the time of the Viking conquest. As trade between Britain and the Continent began to revive in the seventh and eight centuries, trading ports, known as wics, began to develop on navigable rivers. At York, known to the Anglo-Saxons as Eoforwic, a wic developed to the south of the fortress along the banks of the Foss.

With the conversion of the Angles to Christianity in the early seventh century, York became an ecclesiastical as well as a royal centre. The Northumbrian king Edwin was baptised there in a newly built wooden church in 627: this was replaced by a stone church c. 670. The establishment of an archbishopric at York in 735 made it the second most important ecclesiastical centre in Britain after Canterbury. A school associated with the cathedral developed in the eighth century into a major centre of scholarship with a vast library and an international reputation. In 781 Alcuin, the principal master at the school, met the Frankish king Charlemagne at Parma in the course of a mission to Rome. Recognising his talents, Charlemagne recruited Alcuin to found a school at his palace at Aachen. The fate of York’s cathedral school and library under Danish rule is not known for certain but they are unlikely to have survived, if, indeed, they were still functioning at the time of the conquest. The disruption caused by Viking raiding to the church – the main provider of education in the early Middle Ages – had already led to a dramatic decline in the standards of learning in England by the 830s.

Under Danish rule York, or Jórvik, as it was called by the Danes, was the capital of the most powerful of the kingdoms of the Danelaw, controlling an area roughly equivalent to modern Yorkshire and parts of Lancashire and Cumbria. Despite their paganism, the Danish kings tolerated the church and it is more than likely that they made use of its literate personnel in administering their kingdom. It would have been in the archbishops’ interests to collaborate as this would offer some protection to church property and personnel as well as the opportunity to spread its teachings among the Danes. York’s second Danish king, Guthred, may have been an early convert as he is known to have been buried in the cathedral after his death in 895. The Danish kings also adopted the city’s mint, issuing coins bearing both Christian and pagan symbols, which were obviously intended to appeal to both settlers and natives. York’s trade links under its Anglian rulers had been mainly with Frisia and the Rhineland. To these established links, the Danes brought new connections with Scandinavia, Ireland and further afield: coins from Samarkand, Byzantine silk and Baltic amber have been found in excavations. The Danish rulers actively promoted trade, which they could tax for their own benefit. Their success in stimulating commercial activity is demonstrated by the fact the silver content of the city’s coinage increased and by rapid growth of the city’s population, including re-occupation of the old Roman vicus west of the Ouse. The Roman walls were refurbished and in places extended to protect newly settled areas. Effective urban planning is suggested by the laying of regular tenement blocks and streets in parts of the city in the early tenth century. Archaeological excavations have revealed evidence for a wide range of craft and industrial activities, including glass-making, metallurgy, weaving and manufacturing items of bone, antler, wood, leather and jet.

By the late tenth century, York’s population had reached around 10,000, making York a large city by contemporary standards and, in the British Isles, second in size only to London. Despite this, any merchants visiting from the more urbanised Mediterranean or Arab worlds would not have been impressed by its appearance. Only the city’s churches were built of stone and these were mostly modest structures, without towers (the appearance of the cathedral at this time is not known but it was probably the largest building in the city). Most buildings in the city were built of perishable materials: timber, wattles, clay and thatch. Life in the crowded waterfront areas was damp, muddy and unhygienic – latrines were often dug within feet of wells used for drinking water. These waterlogged conditions are ideal for the preservation of organic materials such as leather, cloth and wood, because of the lack of oxygen. Thanks to this, excavations in these parts of the city, notably in the Coppergate area in the 1980s, have revealed a vivid picture of everyday life in the Viking city.

Danish control of York first came under threat not from Wessex but from the Norwegians. In 902, the Irish expelled Norwegian Vikings from their fortified settlement at Dublin and many of the refugees fled east across the Irish Sea to north-west England. Some of these refugees, led by Ingamund, tried to seize the island of Anglesey, but were expelled by the Welsh. Ingamund then invaded Mercia, but was defeated by ealdorman Æthelred after his Irish followers defected to the English. Ingamund appealed to Æthelred’s wife Æthelflæd for lands, and she allowed him to settle on the Wirral peninsula near Chester. A few years later, Ingamund attempted to seize Chester, but he was driven off by the inhabitants who quite literally threw everything they had at the Vikings, including their beehives. Little is known about the Norwegian settlement in the rest of the north-west. An anonymous History of St Cuthbert written at Durham records the flight across the Pennines of an abbot and of a nobleman called Alfred son of Brihtwulf, who were escaping the Vikings, so the settlement probably involved the expulsion of the Anglo-Saxon landowning class. Place-names of Norwegian origin are common in Wirral, the Fylde in west Lancashire, the Lake District, and just across the modern Anglo-Scottish border in Dumfriesshire. Fell (fjall = ‘mountain’), beck (bekr = ‘stream’), thwaite (tveit = ‘clearing’), and side (saetr = ‘shieling’, i.e. a summer settlement) are common place-name elements of Norwegian origin in these areas. The settlers also left a long-lasting genetic legacy. After excluding recent immigrants, a recent DNA study found that around 50 per cent of the population of Wirral share distinctive genetic markers with the people of Norway.

Another legacy of this migration may be the Cuerdale hoard, with over 8,600 objects and weighing 176 pounds (80 kg), the largest Viking treasure hoard found anywhere outside Russia. The hoard was discovered in 1840 by workmen digging on the bank of the River Ribble at Cuerdale, near Preston in Lancashire. The hoard was buried in a lead-lined chest and contained 7,500 silver coins from all over the Viking world. Around 40 per cent of the coins were silver pennies issued at York by its Danish kings Sigfrid and Cnut, but others came from as far away as Spain and Afghanistan. The latest coins in the hoard are fifty-five pennies of Edward the Elder, a papal coin of Benedict IV dating to 901 – 3, and coins of king Louis of Provence dating to 901 – 5. These suggest that the hoard was buried not long after 905. As well as the coins, the hoard contained over 1,000 pieces of jewellery and hacksilver. Vikings put no great store by the artistic merit of the precious objects they looted and usually hacked them up into smaller pieces to make the loot easier to share out. Most of the hacksilver and jewellery came from Ireland and Cuerdale is only a few miles inland from the Irish Sea. It is likely, then, that the hoard was buried by Viking refugees from Ireland, who must have come to a bad end not to have recovered such a valuable stash.

The Norwegian settlers in the north-west probably followed a similar trajectory of assimilation and conversion to Christianity to that of the Danes further east. The remarkable sculptured stone cross at Gosforth in west Cumbria gives some insights into the process of Christianisation. Tall (15 ft/4.5 m) and very slender, the cross is decorated in the distinctive Viking Borre art style, which dates it to the first half of the tenth century. The likely Irish origin of the local Norse settlers is betrayed by the head of the cross, which has a ring around it, which is usual in Irish sculptured crosses but not English ones. Although the cross carries a depiction of Christ’s crucifixion, it is dominated by scenes from Norse pagan mythology showing Ragnarok, the battle at the end of time when the gods will be overthrown and a new cycle of the universe will begin. The mixture of pagan and Christian imagery represents an early stage of conversion, where Christ was worshipped alongside the old gods. Missionaries accepted this as an essential first step: convincing converts that only Christ to be worshipped could come later. The choice of Ragnarok as a subject for the cross is therefore not really the concession to the old religion that it at first seems to be. It is a graphic reminder to pagans that their gods are mortal and are ultimately doomed to be overthrown. Eternity belongs to Christ.

In 910 the Danes of York invaded Mercia. They were retaliating against a raid into the kingdom of York by Edward the Elder’s army the year before. The Danes got as far as Tettenhall in Staffordshire before they were met by the combined levies of Wessex and Mercia. In the battle that followed, the Danes suffered a crushing defeat. The deaths of their three kings, Halfdan, Eowils and Ivar, in the battle left the kingdom of York without a ruler. This created the opportunity for Ragnald, the son of Ivar I, a king of Dublin, to seize control by a coup in 911. Ragnald had just enough time to issue some coins in his own name before the Danes drove him out, but he returned in 919 and ruled York until his death in 921. The Irish-Norse dynasty was never able to establish itself securely at York, however. Following the death of King Sihtric Cáech (‘squinty’) in 927, king Æthelstan of Wessex (r. 924 – 39), Edward’s son, seized York, thereby bringing, for the first time, all of England under a single ruler. An attempt by Sihtric’s nephew Olaf Guthfrithsson to recapture York in alliance with Constantine II of Scotland and Owen of Strathclyde was defeated by Æthelstan at the hard-fought battle of Brunanburh in 937. So great was the victory that the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle abandoned its usual matter-of-fact style and burst into heroic verse. Unfortunately, while strong on blood-thirsty images of slaughter, it does not give any details of the conduct of the battle itself. When the Vikings and their allies finally fled they left the bodies of five minor Norse kings, seven jarls, and Cellach, the son of King Constantine of the Scots, as well as countless warriors. King Owen was probably also among the dead. ‘Never yet in this island,’ the Chronicle exulted, ‘was there a greater slaughter of people felled by the sword’s edges... since Angles and Saxons came here from the east and seized the country from the Welsh’. Brunanburh’s location has never been located but a credible candidate is Bromborough on the Wirral peninsula. Lying on the Mersey estuary, its accessibility from the Irish Sea would have made it a convenient mustering place for Olaf and his allies, who could also have expected a friendly reception from the local Norse settlers.

Æthelstan’s achievement was threatened after his death in 939, when Olaf returned with Scottish support and not only recaptured York but conquered Northumbria and the important Five Boroughs of the Danelaw. Olaf did not live long to enjoy his victory: he died on campaign in 941 and his successor, his cousin Olaf Sihtricsson, was unable to hold on to his conquests. Æthelstan’s successor Edmund (r. 939 – 46) recaptured the Five Boroughs in 942 and York was back in English hands by 944. York was returned to Scandinavian rule for the last time by the exiled Norwegian king Erik Bloodaxe in 948. For the next six years he struggled for control with Olaf Sihtricsson, who had become king of Dublin in 945, and King Eadred (r. 946 – 55) of England. However, it was the people of York itself, perhaps wearying of his violent ways, who finally drove him out for good in 954. Erik fled west across the Pennine hills but was ambushed and killed by the otherwise unknown Maccus on the bleak Stainmore Pass: a ruined medieval cross, the Rere Cross, was traditionally regarded as having marked the site of Erik’s death, that is, before it was moved to its present location in a litter-strewn layby to make way for a road improvement scheme. Eadred, apparently unopposed, took back control of York. Osulf of Bamburgh, who had orchestrated the coup against Erik, was rewarded by being made ealdorman of Northumbria. England’s unity was never again seriously threatened. The Wessex dynasty’s unification of England was achieved not only in the face of opposition from the Vikings and their British and Scots allies but also that of many of the Anglo-Saxons who lived in the Danelaw. Local traditions of independence died hard and East Angles, Mercians and Northumbrians sometimes fought with the Danes against the West Saxon conquerors. For them, a local Viking ruler was preferable to a distant West Saxon one. One of the most consistent supporters of Scandinavian rule at York was its archbishop, Wulfstan I (d. 956). Wulfstan may have feared that the status of his seat would be diminished in a united England and he was implicated in several conspiracies against the West Saxon kings. After Erik’s overthrow, Eadred allowed Wulfstan to keep his office but had to exercise it from a monastery in the south of England, where he would have no opportunities to plot to restore northern independence under Viking rule.

The unification of England by the Wessex dynasty was undoubtedly one of the most important consequences of the Viking Age. It is by no means certain that this would have happened (and certainly not in the way that it did happen) without the intervention of the Vikings, which completely disrupted England’s existing power structures and, by eliminating its rivals, opened the way for Wessex to unify the country. There was already some sense of a common English identity before the Viking Age, but it had found no political expression. As early as the seventh century, Frankish chroniclers who found it difficult to tell the difference between the Angles and Saxons had coined the expression Anglo-Saxons (Angli-Saxones), to describe all the Germanic settlers in Britain. At this time, the Anglo-Saxons were divided politically into seven kingdoms (reduced to four by the beginning of the Viking Age), but they all shared a common culture and spoke closely related dialects of a Germanic language that they called Englisc. Known to linguists as Old English, this still had a long way to go before it would be intelligible to modern English-speakers. Attempts to articulate a common English identity began with the Ecclesiastical History of the English People, written by the Venerable Bede at the beginning of the eighth century. Bede saw common Christian religion as being as much of a unifying factor as language and culture, and this proved very much to be the case in the struggle against the pagan Vikings during which the Anglo-Saxons began to describe themselves collectively as Anglecynn (‘Englishkind’). One of the reasons Alfred deserves his reputation for greatness is that he recognised the political potential of this developing concept of Englishness and consciously exploited it in his own nation-building project. The creation of the unified ‘Kingdom of the English’ by Alfred’s successors was only the beginning of the creation of a common political identity. Local allegiances remained strong and the cultural assimilation of the Scandinavian settlers was only just beginning, but even a resurgence of Viking raiding later in the tenth century did not seriously threaten the unity of England.