Vikings

The Vikings

With a reputation for fearsome bloodshed and vicious acts, the Vikings thundered out of Scandinavia in the late 8th Century AD and cut a swathe across most of Europe for the next 300 years.  Britain was an easy target – wealthy, busy fighting amongst themselves and with too much confidence in the natural protection of being an island.  Monasteries were usually built on the coast where it was peaceful and mostly safe from land-born dangers, but no-one was expecting attacks to come from the sea.

Raiders and invaders

Norway, Sweden and Denmark in the early middle ages were not the easiest places to eke out a living.  Norway’s extreme cold and short daylight hours in winter and wet summers, Sweden’s 80% forestation and poor soil elsewhere, and Denmark’s low-lying, swampy landscape made for a region that was difficult to farm and even harder to move about in.

The development of ship technology was necessary for travel.  It’s easier to sail around a fjord or along a river to the next village than to try to climb the mountain or traverse the swamp between you.  Vikings developed fast, agile ships with a shallow draught that enabled them to both cross seas and travel a long way inland on rivers. 

Of course if you have a race car, you’re going to want to race it!  Especially if the farm has been left to your older brother, there’s no more arable land available and you would really like a wife.  Marriage in Viking times was a financial and political arrangement: a husband would have to give his wife a bride-gift to secure the deal, and this was something that she got to keep whether they stayed married or got divorced.  Given that you wouldn’t want to lose part of the family farm in a divorce settlement, the best thing to give your wife was moveable, stable wealth.  Ideally in the form of silver.  And where were you going to get this silver from, being a young Scandinavian man with a ship and a need to prove himself worthy of the Gods in battle?  Yes of course – you go and raid a monastery!

Invasion and Settlement

Beginning in 793 with the raid on the monastery at Lindisfarne, the first 70 or so years of the Viking age was mainly based on raiding and trading.  Bands of Vikings would hit easy coastal targets around the northern coasts of Europe, steal their wealth, kill or capture the peace-loving monks and sell them as slaves.  However, in 850 the Vikings decided to over-winter in Britain, on the Isle of Thanet on the tip of Kent.  Overwintering meant that a) you could start raiding earlier next season as you didn’t have to wait for the seas to calm and b) you could now go further inland to raid.  The next fifteen years saw Vikings breaking further and further into Anglo Saxon territory until in 865, a great heathen army arrived.  This was no longer about raiding: this was now about conquest.

King Alfred and the Vikings

Were it not for the arrival of the Scandinavians in 865, England may well be a very different place today.  Over the next few years, combining hit and run tactics with deceit, sneakiness and downright unsportsmanlike behaviour (they attacked at Christmas! Who attacks at Christmas??) the Vikings managed to defeat East Anglia, Northumbria, and most of Mercia and Wessex.  Realising that this could be England’s last chance to remain under Anglo Saxon control, the young King of Wessex, named Alfred, rallied the last of the Mercian and Wessex warriors, and took the fight to the Vikings.

Alfred realised that if that he was to keep his Kingdom, he had to beat the Vikings at their own game.  He used the Vikings’ own tactics against them, striking hard and fast and not waiting for formal declarations or polite battle lines.  Eventually he defeated the Viking leader, Guthrum, and took back his Kingdom.  Well, half of it.  The peace agreement divided the country into north and south along a line roughly from London to Manchester.  The Anglo Saxons would rule the south, and the Vikings would rule the north.

the Danelaw and the creation of England

The Viking half of Britain was known as the Danelaw (the English called all Vikings Danes no matter where they were from).  Being the sneaky meanies that they were, the Vikings soon broke the peace agreement and began using the Danelaw as a base from which to mount more raids.  Having caught their breath, the Anglo Saxons were more able to deal with the incursions now, and over the next 80 years the Danelaw was slowly retaken by the English.  By this time Alfred’s grandson Athelstan was on the throne, and England was no longer four separate kingdoms.  It wasn’t even Wessex and the Danelaw.  Athelstan was the first King of a united England.

The Viking empire

Between Athelstan and the end of the Anglo Saxon age in 1066, it wasn’t all plain sailing.  Scandinavia was also unifying and would soon convert away from their heathen ways, becoming Christian at various times from the end of the 10th to the beginning of the 12th centuries.  Wars, Marriage alliances, political wranglings and questionable succession crises would dog the next hundred years, with the throne being passed back and forth between the English House of Wessex and the Danish Kings.  The greatest of these – King Cnut – ruled England as part of a North Sea Empire that also included Norway, Denmark and parts of Sweden.  Eventually Cnut’s line would fail putting the throne was firmly back in the hands of Wessex, until it passed to William the Conqueror in 1066 (see our Anglo Saxon page for more about 1066!).

In England, the Viking age officially ended in 1066. Although parts of Scotland remained under Scandiavian rule until the 15th Century, the newly Christianised Vikings put their energy into Crusading instead of raiding and Viking age was over.