Empires and Barbarians (77 page)

To reach Greenland, turn left at the middle of Norway, keep so far north of Shetland that you can only see it if the visibility is very good, and far enough south of the Faroes that the sea appears half way up the mountain slopes. As for Iceland, stay so far to the south that you only see its flocks of birds and whales.

S
O, ROUGHLY PARAPHRASED
, run the navigational directions in an Icelandic manual of the Middle Ages,
¹
and it’s enough to make your hair stand on end. With detailed instructions like this, how could you fail to hit the target? All you need is the ability to recognize whether the visibility is very good or not around Shetland, and if not (as it often isn’t), to guess at the island’s whereabouts; an instinctive grasp of the height of the Faroes; and knowledge of how to sail in a straight line using the stars in between. Add to that a deep knowledge of the fauna of the seas around Iceland, the luck not to be blown off course by the notoriously wild Atlantic winds (or the ability to reorient yourself, once you have been), and there you are. And all this in a small open boat made of wood, under sail power, with no radios (and no lifeboat services should you have had one). Given all this, the fact that the Viking who found the eastern seaboard of America did so while looking for Greenland becomes much less surprising. Late in the first millennium, the North Atlantic was clearly full of courageous, skilful, lost Scandinavians blundering around ‘discovering’ things.

For all these difficulties, between 800 and 1000
AD
Scandinavians took to water of different depths with great gusto. Aside from their very well-known voyages of discovery in the North Atlantic, they were also exploring the river routes of western Europe, central Europe and European Russia in boats of all shapes and sizes, and for a wide variety of purposes. In these centuries waterborne Vikings exploded out of the narrow confines of their native Baltic
to trade, raid, settle and form political communities all the way from the Pillars of Hercules to the Ural Mountains. The societies they encountered in the course of these journeys, and their own, were completely transformed in the process. The purpose of this chapter is not to discuss the Viking period in general, but to explore the extent to which Scandinavian migration featured in its different phases, and compare its forms, motivations and effects both with modern examples and with the other early medieval case studies examined in this book.

In western Europe, Viking raiding began with a vengeance in the late eighth century. The first really spectacular act of Viking destruction came in 793: the sacking of the famous island monastery of Lindisfarne off the Northumbrian coast of Britain on 8 June (which just happens to be my birthday). Within two years, the raiders had worked their way around the north coast of Scotland and down through the western isles, where they sacked an Irish monastery on Rathlin. These acts of destruction were carried out, it seems, largely by Norwegians, led to the northern coasts of the British Isles by a natural combination of winds and currents. The prevailing easterlies of springtime carried the Norwegian raiders across the North Sea to Shetland, Orkney and north-eastern Scotland. This involved braving the open sea between the coasts of Norway and Shetland, initially out of sight of the land. This was a major undertaking, but not an overwhelming one. Going from Bergen in western Norway to Shetland took no longer than coasting round southern Scandinavia through the Skagerrak and into the Baltic. And once you had reached Shetland, everything else could be done without losing sight of land. Scotland was within easy reach, and straightforward coastal routes then led the Norwegian raiders round its north coast to the Hebrides, the Irish Sea, western Britain, and Ireland itself. Then – very conveniently if they had no wish to stay longer – the prevailing winds of autumn in the North Sea, being by contrast, westerlies, took them home again. If seasonal winds and
currents were reversed, we might now be writing about medieval Scottish invasions of Norway.
³

At the same time as northern Britain and Ireland were coming under attack, there was also trouble along the coasts either side of the English Channel. Sometime between 786 and 802 (the incident cannot be placed more definitely because of the vagaries of the dating system employed by the
Anglo-Saxon Chronicle
), in what is possibly the first recorded raid of the Viking period, three ships containing Northmen landed at Portland on the south coast of Britain. The local royal official wanted to take them to his king, but they killed him; it has been argued that he mistook them for traders. The ships were from Horthaland in Norway. Other evidence of trouble is less direct, but clear enough. As early 792, Offa, King of Mercia and overlord of England south of the Humber, allowed a coastal monastery in Kent to prepare a place of refuge for itself further inland, safe inside the still-standing Roman walls of the city of Canterbury. Preparations were also made south of the Channel. In 800, the Emperor Charlemagne strengthened his defences at the mouth of the River Seine. Viking raiders had already sailed much further afield. The previous year, they had made their way round the coast of Brittany to attack the island monastery of Noirmoutier at the mouth of the River Loire in western France. Ten years later, the Emperor decided to establish fleets at Ghent and Boulogne, their purpose again the suppression of sea-borne raids.
⁴

Like the sack of Lindisfarne, the Portland incident involved Vikings from Norway. For the most part, however, the action on this southern front in the ninth century would be carried forward by Scandinavians from Denmark. Again, this was due to facts of geographical proximity that made the eastern seaboard of England and the entire Channel zone highly accessible to Danish seafarers. This was, however, only a tendency. ‘Norwegian’, ‘Dane’ and even ‘Swede’ are anachronistic categories in the Viking period. At its opening, none of the three existed as a cohesive political unit, and leaders of note recruited manpower from right across the Baltic.

Some aspects of the violent but smaller-scale raiding characteristic of the first phase of Viking activity in western Europe are better documented than others. The action in northern Britain was both dramatic and early. Already by the mid-ninth century, the island systems of Shetland, Orkney and the Hebrides had not only been raided, but were playing host to large-scale colonization. This story is largely untold in historical sources, but there were already established Norse leaders in the western isles by the year 850, and, for their northern counterparts, place-name and archaeological evidence are both eloquent. In the long run, every older layer of name-giving was wiped out in Shetland and Orkney. Every name for every place in these islands derives from the Old Norse language. The archaeological evidence mirrors the same substantial level of takeover, with Pictish settlement forms being eclipsed by new ones of Scandinavian type. Throughout the northern and western isles, the old circular and figure-of-eight building styles of native Celtic and Pictish traditions were quickly replaced by the Scandinavians’ rectilinear houses, offspring of an alternative cultural tradition. In the Hebrides, Norse-derived names are plentiful if not quite so comprehensively prevalent, and the archaeological evidence is similar. The Isle of Man and possibly also the western fringes of Wales saw both raids and some initial settlement at this point.
⁵

Further south, in England and Ireland and on the continent, historical sources help establish some clearer patterns. Odd references to Scandinavian attacks appear in continental and insular sources for the early decades of the ninth century, but then the raiding intensified dramatically. In Irish sources, the first named Viking leaders appear in the
Chronicle of Ireland
for the mid-ninth century: a greater knowledge had been born of more intense contact. And the narrative confirms the point. Monasteries within Ireland, not just coastal establishments, became subject to attack for the first time in 836. To do this, the Vikings had penetrated the island’s internal river systems and loughs: another sign of the greater knowledge they were building up of their target. At the same time, Channel ports were being heavily hit. Between 835 and 837, the port of Dorestad in Frisia was attacked in three successive years, while Sheppey in Kent was attacked in 835, and
Wessex in 836. In the same era, Viking raiders forced the monks of Noirmoutier to abandon their monastery and start a prolonged retreat inland. In the next two decades, some Viking raiders ranged still further afield. In 844, one group sailed right across the Bay of Biscay to attack the Christian Spanish kingdom of Galicia in what is now north-western Spain, before moving south into Al-Andalus, the rich lands of Islamic Spain. Perhaps the most spectacular raid of all came in 858, when Spain was rounded, the Straits of Gibraltar penetrated, and the coast of Italy attacked. Overwintering in the Mediterranean, the same group attacked up the River Rhône in 859, and even kidnapped the King of Pamplona in northern Spain on its journey home in 861. He was ransomed for sixty thousand gold pieces.
⁶

Such long-distance raids were the exception, however, not the rule. Sustained attack went no further than south-western France, and the Garonne River system of Aquitaine. These assaults were eventually countered by the efforts of the rulers of the region – Charlemagne’s grandson Charles the Bald, and his nephew Pippin – but even Aquitaine was a sideshow compared with the increasingly intense raiding unfolding further north, on either side of the Channel. Here, the increase in Viking assault manifested itself in three ways: a growth in the number of Viking groups involved, an increase in the frequency and duration of the individual assaults, and, as in Ireland, the spread of raiding from the coast up through the river systems leading into the interiors. The rich monastery of St Wandrille was sacked in 841, the port of Quentovic in 842, and the city of Nantes in 843. Two years later a Viking leader by the name of Reginharius (as in Ireland, it is a significant moment when chroniclers start to name names) penetrated with his followers up the Seine as far as Paris itself, where he broke into what was probably the richest monastic foundation of western Europe: St Germain. But the monks had been forewarned. The monastery’s relics – including St Germain himself – and all its treasures had been evacuated further up the Seine. When the monks returned six weeks later they found only some superficial damage to their church and a couple of burned outbuildings. The real damage was to their wine cellar, which the Vikings had found, and with predictable results. The rest of Paris was not so lucky. All told Reginharius extracted for his trouble over three thousand kilos in weight of gold and silver: a mix of protection money, loot and ransom.

From about 850, the level of assault intensified still further. For the
first time, the Vikings began to overwinter in western Europe, reducing the respite that usually came between November and March when the North Sea was too dangerous for navigation. This was also ominous for the degree of detachment it suggested in the attackers’ attitudes to their Scandinavian homelands. Raiding groups occupied the isles of Thanet and Sheppey in east Kent in the winters of 850/1 and 854/5, respectively. The Seine region of northern France was subject to virtually continuous attack between 856 and 866. By this stage, Viking raiders were such an established part of the political landscape that they were being hired by opposing sides in internal political disputes. In 862 both the ruler of Brittany, Duke Salomon, and his great rival Duke Robert of Anjou, each hired their own Viking auxiliaries. Vikings were also being hired to fight other Vikings. In 860, Charles the Bald took on a Viking leader by the name of Weland to attack other Vikings who were wreaking havoc along the Seine. A certain amount of haggling delayed matters slightly, but in 861 Weland duly turned up with two hundred ships. Such were the tangled webs being woven by this stage, however, that he was paid off a second time by his intended Viking victims. But they did at least disperse into a number of separate and less threatening groups in the winter of 861/2. Paying chosen Vikings to help defend against the threat posed by their countrymen was by this stage, in fact, a well-established tactic. Charles’s father Louis the Pious had done it with a Danish king called Harold in the 820s, and Charles himself had tried it in 841 with Reginharius, who a few years later would so much enjoy his cruise up the Seine to Paris.
⁷

In Ireland too, the pressure had increased. Between 830 and 845 the
Chronicle of Ireland
records specific attacks on about fifty monasteries and another nine general assaults on people and churches in larger areas such as Leinster and the kingdom of the Ui Niell. By the mid-ninth century, the larger monastic centres such as Armagh, Kildare and Clonmacnoise represented the largest concentrations of wealth and people to be found anywhere in Ireland, and hence made excellent targets. Faced with this aggression, the kings of Ireland responded with vigour. In 848 Mael Sechnaill, High King of Tara, defeated one group of Vikings in County Meath, killing some seven hundred of them. The same year the Kings of Munster and Leinster achieved even greater success in County Kildare. The Viking Earl Tomrair and twelve hundred of his men were left dead on the battlefield. News of the Irish victories was sent to the courts of Frankish kings, but any sense of
triumph was premature. In 849, an ominous new development showed itself. For the first time, the
Chronicle of Ireland
noted the arrival of a Viking leader whom they styled ‘king’. At the head of 120 ships, this individual set about subduing those Vikings who had already moved west, as well as extracting further tributes from the unfortunate Irish. By 853 there were two ‘kings’, identified in some sources as brothers, operating in Irish waters, and they had forced all the Vikings already resident in Ireland to acknowledge their leadership. They stayed in Irish waters until the mid-860s.