Northmen: The Viking Saga AD 793-1241 (22 page)

Thorfinn’s close relationship with Scotland did not survive Malcolm’s death in 1034. According to the saga tradition, the new Scottish king Karl Hundason occupied Caithness in 1035 and then invaded Orkney with a fleet of eleven longships. No such king as Karl Hundason ever ruled Scotland. The king’s name means ‘churl son of a dog’, so it must have originated as an insulting nickname, but for whom? Malcolm’s successor as king of Scotland was his grandson Duncan, Thorfinn’s cousin, and he certainly never invaded Orkney. Given that there was already a long history of conflict between the earldom and Moray, it is most likely that Karl was the
mormaer
of Moray, who at this time would have been Macbeth. Thorfinn defeated Karl’s invasion fleet in a hard-fought sea battle off Deerness on Orkney’s east coast and quickly retaliated by invading Moray. At Tarbat Ness, on the north side of the Moray Firth, Thorfinn won a resounding victory over Karl’s army, and afterwards annexed Ross to the earldom, bringing it to its territorial peak.

In 1037 – 8, Norway’s King Magnus the Good gave Rognvald Brusason ships and sent him home to claim his father’s share of the earldom. Thorfinn and his nephew shared the earldom amicably enough for eight years, often going raiding together. Eventually, however, they quarrelled about their shares of the earldom. Rognvald maintained that only the king had the right to decide how the earldom should be divided. Thorfinn would not hear of this, as he still resented having submitted to Magnus’s father, King Olaf. Rognvald was popular with the common people but, recognising that Thorfinn had more warriors, he went to Norway to seek King Magnus’s support. Magnus supplied Rognvald with ships and men but when he returned to Orkney, Thorfinn defeated him in a sea battle in the Pentland Firth. Rognvald escaped back to Norway and returned secretly to Orkney with a single ship just as winter was setting in. Vikings rarely made long sea voyages after the autumn equinox for fear of storms, so Rognvald was able to take Thorfinn by surprise while he was drinking with his men in his hall one night. Rognvald’s men covered all the entrances to the hall and set the thatched roof on fire. Trapped inside, Thorfinn’s men could do nothing to resist. Rognvald allowed the women and slaves to leave but left Thorfinn and his men to burn. Thorfinn managed to break through the hall’s side wall and escape under cover of the smoke. Finding a small boat he crossed the Pentland Firth by night and stayed secretly with trusted friends in Caithness, allowing Rognvald to believe that he had perished in the flames. Surprise was now on Thorfinn’s side and just before Christmas he ambushed Rognvald on the small island of Papa Stronsay and killed him. Thirty of King Magnus’s men who had come to Orkney with Rognvald were later captured. Thorfinn executed all but one of them, who was sent to take the news to King Magnus. This amounted to a declaration of independence. Already at war with the Danes, Magnus had to accept Thorfinn’s coup with as much grace as he could muster. Magnus died soon after and his successor Harald Hardrada was preoccupied with fighting the Danes and let Thorfinn be.

Now unchallenged, Thorfinn was a figure of European stature and he began to behave like any other western European Christian ruler rather than as a Viking chief. Not long after King Magnus’s death in 1047, Thorfinn set out on a pilgrimage to Rome, travelling via Norway, Denmark and Germany. On the way he was feasted by King Svein Estrithson in Denmark, and in Germany by the Holy Roman Emperor Henry III, the most powerful ruler in Europe. On his return to Orkney, Thorfinn laid up his longships and devoted his time to providing his earldom with a unifying administrative and ecclesiastical structure. At his hall at Birsay, on the north coast of Mainland, he built a church as a seat for Henry of Lund, the first bishop of Orkney. Earl Rognvald was also a Christian and shortly after he returned to Orkney in 1037 – 8, he built a church dedicated to Saint Olaf at Kirkwall. This, the church from which the town gets its name (
Kirkjuvágr
= ‘church creek’), survives only as a single romanesque arch, now removed from its original site and re-used in a later building down a minor backstreet.

Thorfinn died of old age in 1065. Because of his achievements, Thorfinn became known as ‘the Mighty’, but he was never a popular ruler and many of his subjects found his rule oppressive, probably because he was more efficient at gathering taxes and tribute than his less administratively capable predecessors. It often happened in medieval Europe that a reaction followed the death of a strong ruler as his subjects tried to claw back some of their lost autonomy. Thorfinn needed a strong successor to hold on to the gains he made but he didn’t have one. Thorfinn’s sons Paul and Erlend succeeded jointly to the earldom. Neither son was a forceful character and Erlend was positively indolent. The brothers remained on friendly terms and were well liked by their subjects, but they were not warriors and, ultimately, they would fail to preserve the earldom’s independence.

The Kingdom of Man

The decline of the Earldom of Orkney created the space for the rise of a second Norse state in the region, the Kingdom of Man and the Isles, which was ruled from the Isle of Man. Very little is known about the political situation in the Isle of Man for a century or more after its settlement by the Norse, but it is likely that for much of the time it was within the sphere of influence of the Dublin Vikings or of Irish kings. The island has a strategic position in the middle of the Irish Sea, close enough to England, Wales, Ireland and Scotland for them all to be visible in clear weather. The many Viking Age silver hoards that have been found on the island suggest that it prospered as a result, whether by trade or because it was a very convenient base for launching Viking raids. The origins of the Kingdom of Man are very obscure. The earliest known king is generally thought to have been Maccus Haraldsson, a Viking who was active around the Irish Sea between 971 and 984. Maccus was described as the ‘king of many islands’, but whether the Isle of Man was one of them is uncertain. Maccus had a brother, Godfred Haraldsson, who was also active in the same area and was described in Irish sources as
rí
Innse
Gall
, ‘king of the Islands of the Foreigners’, but again the Isle of Man is not specifically mentioned as part of his domain. Godfred was particularly active in Wales, his greatest success being a raid on Anglesey in 987, in which he took 2,000 captives for the slave markets of Dublin. Godfred seems to have outlived his brother by a few years and was killed fighting in Argyll
c.
989.

The earliest king of Man who can be identified with certainty was Godred Sihtricsson, who died in 1070 and was succeeded by his son Fingal. Fingal’s death is not recorded and he may still have been king in 1079 when Godred Crovan, a Norse-Gaelic Viking from Islay, conquered Man and united it as a single kingdom with the Hebrides. Godred first arrived in Man late in 1066 as a refugee, a survivor of the Norwegian king Harald Hardrada’s crushing defeat by the English at the Battle of Stamford Bridge near York. Godred Sihtricsson welcomed him, but after his death Godred Crovan returned to the Hebrides and in 1079 raised a fleet and army and invaded Man. Twice the Manxmen defeated Godred and forced him to withdraw. Godred raised a third army and landed at the harbour of Ramsey under cover of night. He prepared an ambush for the Manx, hiding 300 men in a wood on the side of Sky Hill, about a mile from his landing place. The Manx attacked Godred at dawn the next day. When the battle was at its peak, the men concealed in the wood emerged and attacked the Manx from the rear, throwing them into disorder. If Fingal was still king, he was likely killed in the battle. After his victory, Godred allowed his men to plunder the island, then he divided it into northern and southern halves. The south he gave to the surviving Manxmen and the north to the men who had come with him from the Hebrides. No one, Manx or Hebridean, held land as freeholders: Godred claimed all the land by right of conquest so everyone was a tenant of the king. Godred ruled Man and the Hebrides as a single kingdom and later in his reign he gathered tribute from Galloway, and was also accepted as king of Dublin between 1091 and 1094. Godred divided Man and the Isles into five administrative districts, which together sent thirty-two representatives to the annual thing, held at Tynwald on the Isle of Man. The modern Manx parliament still meets here annually, in the open air, to promulgate the laws passed during the preceding year, making it probably the oldest continuously functioning legislature in the world.

Godred died on Islay in 1095, leaving three sons, Lagmann, who inherited the throne, Harald and Olaf, who was still a child. Harald soon rebelled against Lagmann but was captured and blinded and castrated. Regretting his actions, Lagmann abdicated and set out on a penitential pilgrimage to Jerusalem, and died on the way, leaving the kingdom without a ruler. The chieftains of the kingdom appealed to Muirchertach Ua Briain, the powerful king of Munster, to provide a regent to govern until Olaf Godredsson came of age. The regent Muirchertach sent turned out to be a tyrant and after three years he was expelled. Shortly afterwards a dispute between the native Manx and the Hebridean settlers on the Isle of Man led to a battle at Santwat (traditionally identified as St Patrick’s Island) in which many of the leading men of the island were killed.

In 1097 King Magnus Barefoot (r. 1093 – 1103) of Norway sent an agent called Ingemund to the Hebrides to assert his claim to sovereignty. When Ingemund was murdered Magnus decided to take the islands by force. In 1098 Magnus raised a fleet of sixty or 160 ships (the sources differ) and sailed to Orkney, where he deposed earls Paul and Erlend and sent them into exile in Norway where they later died. In their place, he appointed his eight-year-old son Sigurd as earl, ending the earldom’s independence. Magnus moved on, laying waste to the Hebrides. Along the way he paused to make a thoroughly respectful visit to Iona before getting back to the real business of burning, killing and plundering. Christianity did not greatly change the ethics of Viking warfare. When Magnus finally landed on the Isle of Man he met no resistance. While he was there, Magnus visited Santwat and found it still littered with the remains of the men who had fallen in the recent battle. Whether it happened now, or perhaps during the earlier conflicts, young Olaf Godredsson went into exile, finding a refuge at the English court.

In the course of his expedition, Magnus gained Scottish recognition of Norwegian sovereignty over ‘all the islands off the west coast which were separated by water navigable by any ship with the rudder set’. According to the saga tradition, Magnus tricked the Scots’ king Edgar into ceding the Kintyre peninsula by having his ship dragged overland at the narrow isthmus at Tarbert while he sat at the helm. Magnus used the Isle of Man as a base to gather tribute in Galloway and Anglesey, off the north Welsh coast. The Normans were also trying to win control of Anglesey and Magnus defeated two earls, Hugh the Fat of Chester and Hugh of Shrewsbury, in a battle by the Menai Straits. During the battle, Magnus personally killed Hugh of Shrewsbury, hitting him in the face with an arrow.

In 1099, Magnus returned home to deal with a dispute with Sweden but returned to the Isle of Man in 1101 or 1102, and spent a year or two raiding in Ireland in alliance with King Muirchertach. During his time in Ireland, Magnus began wearing the Gaelic kilt instead of the Norse trousers, earning him his nickname ‘barefoot’ or ‘barelegs’. Muirchertach needed Magnus’s support against his rival for the high kingship, Domnall king of Ailech, and in return ceded Dublin to him. Magnus was on the brink of achieving the complete domination of the Irish Sea, but his career came to an abrupt end in August 1103 when he was ambushed and killed by the Irish while foraging for supplies in the north of Ireland: he was aged just thirty. Magnus was the last Scandinavian king to be killed on a Viking raid. Many of Magnus’s closest advisers thought he was reckless in battle, but he always had an answer, ‘a king is for glory, not for long life’: it was a fitting epitaph for a Viking Age kingship. The Norse colonies in the Northern Isles and the Hebrides had finally lost their independence, not to the nearby Scots but to the king of Norway. However, the islands were at the far reach of Norwegian royal power and time would quickly tell if Magnus’s successors could hold on to his conquests.

CHAPTER 5

D
UBLIN AND
C
ASHEL

T
HE
V
IKINGS IN
IRELAND
795–1014

Few places suffered more at the hands of the Vikings than Ireland. For the best part of 200 years the Vikings systematically milked Ireland of its people to supply the slave trade, yet, for all their military success they failed to conquer and settle in any territory besides a few fortified coastal enclaves. This is the conundrum of Viking Age Ireland; it was a land that looked weak but was in reality strong and resilient.

Superficially, Ireland must have looked to the Vikings like an easy target. There is no doubt that in England and Francia internal divisions worked to the Vikings’ advantage, and if there, why not even more so in Ireland, which was the most divided country in western Europe? Early medieval Ireland was a complex mosaic of around 150 local kingdoms and a dozen over-kingdoms. The local kingdoms or
túatha
were usually very small – often less than 100 square miles with populations of only a few thousand – and were defined as a ‘people’ or ‘community’, rather than as territorial units. The people of a
túath
were, in theory at least, an extended kinship group, or clan, and the king was the head of the senior lineage. The king (
rí
túathe
) was responsible to his people for the fertility of their land and cattle, hence their prosperity: this was a legacy of pagan times when a king who failed to deliver would be sacrificed to the gods. Kings also had duties of lawmaking, judgement and leadership in war. In return all the free families of the
túath
owed the king taxes (paid in kind) and military service. Local kings might themselves owe tribute (usually in cattle), hospitality and military service to an over-king (
ruirí
), who in turn might owe it to a high king (
rí
ruirech
). Over-kings, therefore, did not exercise direct rule outside their own
túath
, their power rested upon their ability to call on the resources and services of their client kings. The most powerful over-king of the day might be described as High King of Ireland (
rí
Érenn
), but this was not really a formal institution with defined rules of succession. The relationships between kingdoms were not fixed. A local king with military ability and ambition could build a strong war band and use it to make himself an over-king by forcing other local kings to become his tributaries. Nevertheless, by the eighth century some stable dynasties of over-kings had emerged, the most powerful of which were the Northern and Southern Uí Néill dynasties of north-east Ulster and Meath respectively. To an outsider, early medieval Ireland would have appeared to be a chaotic and deeply divided country and, indeed, small-scale warfare between its kingdoms was endemic. Yet this highly decentralised political structure was to prove incredibly resilient, well able to absorb the shock of Viking invasions and constantly renew resistance.