Viking England How the Danes Became English

Chad M. White April 8, 2016 Viking England How the Danes became English On the thirteenth of November in the year 1002, Æthelred, King of all England, ordered the slaughter of every Dane living in England.1 Such an insane order was apt for one who bears the soubriquet “Unræd” or the ill-advised. The command was an act was both dangerous in its implications and impossible to effect. The Scandinavians living in England had been established in the British Isles for generations, through settlement, warfare, and by treaty with King Alfred of Wessex, Æthelred’s great-great-grandfather. The acculturation process had begun long before and the peoples of the eastern and northern England were no longer so easily separated Dane from Saxon, but were now Anglo-Danish. The very language was infiltrated by Danish loan-words, so easily transferrable to english with his shared Germanic roots. Evidence exists that the English and the Scandinavians were living side by side, in both peace and hostility, in much the way that the various Anglo-Saxon tribes had been prior to the Viking Age. Many of the Danes were Christian by this point and even the de facto viking capital in the north, the city of Jorvik, retained its archbishopric, an appointment made by the English king in Wintancaester. The Danes that Æthelred ordered killed on that day, Saint Brice’s Day, would not be so easily removed and had become an integral part of the English peoples, both blending into English society and altering it forever. The Viking Age in Britain historically began with a raid on a defenseless coastal monastery, an isolated religious community, in the northwestern part of the island in 793. The preeminent English record, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, records the events thusly: 1 Anne Savage, trans., The Anglo-Saxon Chronicles, (Surrey: Colour Library Books, 1995), 148. Her wæron reðe forebecna cumene ofer Norðhymbra land, þæt folc earmlic bregdon, þæt wæron ormete þodenas ligrescas, fyrenne dracan wæron gesewene on þam lifte fleogende. Þam tacnum sona fyligde mycel hunger, litel æfter þam, þæs ilcan geares on .vi. Idus Ianuarii, earmlice hæþenra manna hergunc adilegode Godes cyrican in Lindisfarnaee þurh hreaflac mansliht. In this year fierce, foreboding omens came over the land of the Northumbrians, and the wretched people shook; there were excessive whirlwinds, lightning, and fiery dragons were seen flying in the sky. These signs were followed by great famine, and a little after those, that same year on 6th ides of January, the ravaging of wretched heathen people destroyed God's church at Lindisfarne.2 The date generally accepted for the attack on Lindisfarne is in fact 8 June rather than 8 January. It is presumed that “vi id Ianr” is an error for vi id Iun, or 8 June 793. A date in early summer would be more logical than one mid-winter, as sailing and ocean winds would be far more favorable to the longships.3 This was not truly the first attack on Britain, as other, smaller raids had taken place in preceding years. Scandinavian merchants had been known to frequent the British isles in the 8th century, trading between the Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms, Frisia, Frankia, and further afield. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle entry for the year 789, just four years before the attack on the monastery, tells us of three shiploads of “Northmen from Horthaland" who came into Wessex and killed a royal official. The king's reeve, a high-ranking magistrate of the king charged with defense and tax collection, went to the harbor south of Weymouth on the southwest coast of Britain. Assuming the men to be traders, the reeve presumably planned to escort to Dornwaraceaster, modern-day Dorchester, and local seat of government. The Chronicle tells us 2 Swanton, Michael, The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, (New York: Routledge, 1998), 56. 3 Ibid., 57. White !2 that the reeve was killed and identifies his murderer as the first of the “Danish men” who would in the future seek out to control all of the land of the English.4. Typically the Chronicle identifies the attackers as Danes, a term used synonymously with another term, Northmen, and employed generically to signify all Scandinavian invaders. Hordaland, mentioned above, is actually in Norway, not Denmark. However, it would be the warriors from Denmark, the Danes, who would be the most frequent raiders on English soil. The entry above was written a century after the events it retells, drawn from other records now lost or from local histories or tales, therefore its content is reflective of the writer’s hindsight. Despite the attack on the southern coast, the raid and destruction of Lindisfarne in the north is used most often to signify the beginning of the Viking Age, a period of time deemed by historians and researchers to encompass the era of piracy and warfare stemming from those men and women coming mostly from lands that are now Denmark, Norway, and Sweden. Another general term to encompass all of these disparate peoples from yet-to-be unified countries is Scandinavian. However this is problematic as the Scandinavian Peninsula does not include Denmark, which is located on the Jutland Peninsula, which is attached to northern mainland Europe. Also, settlers and decedents of these original settlers spread further out, to Ireland and Northern France, from where further attacks would later be staged. Eventually their willingness to explore would bring them to discover new lands, from Iceland, to Greenland, to the North American continent, as well as south, to Constantinople in Asia Minor. Another word used to encompass all of these people would be Norse which is a late-medieval term simply meaning “from the North” and refers to those whose origin lies in the shared culture of those who we 4 Savage, The Anglo-Saxon Chronicles, 73. White !3 think of as Vikings. Both Norse and Scandinavian are used as a cultural-linguistic concept to encapsulate the various tribes and communities of these aforementioned northern Europeans. The term Viking itself is problematic for most scholars today. In the past, and today in modern pop culture, the term is used to encompass the entire culture of the Scandinavians. However the word is more akin to the term pirate or raider. It was an activity that one performed, and not so much a title one possessed. Many of the vikings that are known throughout history likely lived as farmers and herdsmen until it was time to go a-viking, or raiding for wealth, supplies, and slaves. Therefore the terms Danes, Scandinavians, Norse, and Northman are used almost interchangeably in order to describe the people from whom sprang the Viking warriors. The use of the term viking appears to have fallen out of use in the Middle Ages, only to later be reintroduced during in the late-eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, about the same time when Richard Wagner famously wrote his Operas that began the erroneous associate of vikings with horned helmets.5 It is also important to note that while the Viking Age began with the attack on Lindisfarne in 879, Scandinavians were raiding and pillaging their neighbors and each other for centuries before they expanded beyond their local waters into more far-flung lands. There was steep competition for arable land in Scandinavia for a booming population brought on by climate change. Their society was an agrarian one and farmland was coveted and guarded voraciously. This provided them the chance to hone their skills and to develop the techniques and tools, mainly their superior ships, to the point where they were nearly an unstoppable force from the late 8th to mid-11th century.6 5 Julian D. Richards, Viking Age England, (London: Batsford Ltd, 1991), 10-11 6 Ibid.,11. White !4 After Lindesfarne, Viking attacks increased, with the raiders tending to choose isolated but wealthy monasteries, such as Monkwearmouth-Jarrow in Northumbria and Iona Abbey in Scotland.7 These attacks would have most-likely been in the warmer months, when the Scandinavian farmers could turn to warfare and fair seas. It wasn’t until 855 CE that “Heathen men first spent the winter at Sheppy,” an isle in the northern coast of Kent, Britain’s eastern coast, and located in the Thames estuary.8 Initially it appeared that the Scandinavian raiders were content with undefended church communities that were handily stocked with portable items of great wealth. The second half of the ninth century brought a change of tactics, and the various warlords, seeing the fertile fields of Britain when compared to their own fjords and mountainous lands, opted to band together and set out to completely conquer the English kingdoms. In the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle this combined force is described as mycel hæþeb here, or “Great Heathen Army”.9 The number of warriors that comprised the Great Heathen Army has been debated, however as most fleets of viking longships that are recorded in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle are fewer than 100 ships. The average ship carried about 32 men loaded down with equipment, based on extant ships found today. Therefore a sound estimate puts the Great Heathen Army at about 1,000 men or fewer, despite what numbers contemporary English propagandists might supply.10 7 Savage, The Anglo-Saxon Chronicles, 76. 8 Ibid., 89 9 Ibid., 89. 10 Katherine Holman, The Northern Conquest: Vikings in Britain and Northern Ireland, (United Kingdom: Andrews, 2012), iBooks edition. White !5 Steadily the Great Heathen Army moved to overpower over the seven kingdoms. Initially landing in Kent, the warriors were paid by their unwilling hosts in order to ensure peace as they wintered in Thanet.

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