The Vikings in Brita
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The invasions to c.954 3l Scotland 3 Scandinavian activity in Scotland concerned itself with three prin- cipal geographical areas: the Northern Isles, the Caledonian main- land,and the Western Isles extending as far as the Isle of Man. Most The course of the interesting and clearcut are the Northern Isles of Orkney and Scandinovion invasions to Shetland. These consist of two virtual archipelagos of islands, rcarly 70 in the Orkneys and about 100 in the Shetlands, only com- c..to 954 paratively few of which are now inhabited. Communications were of necessity by sea, and skilled seamen were needed to man the boats in what are often tempestuous and dangerous waters. Yet at several points in time these islands have been at the centre of important movements of people and civilization. Megalithic monuments such The Viking Age lasted the best part of three centuries, and it is by as the stone-built tomb of Maeshowe in Orkney, great henge monu- no means easy to decide the most convenient and useful point to ments such as the Ring of Brodgar or the Ring of Bookan, the well- break a narrative account of the impact of the Northerners. Their excavated and much discussed village site of Skara Brae, all testify aims, methods, and achievements varied from generation to genera_ to the vitality of the inhabitants of the islands in the two millennia tion and right to the end provide the historian with a complicated sc. At a later stage the fantastic brochs, the stone-built tower of pattern of human nature and circumstance. There were settlers in which at the best-known broch site at Clickhimin near Lerwick still the eighth century; there were raiders and pillagers in the eleventh. stands l7 feet high, speak of a strong organized military community Active Danish, Norwegian and Swedish traders performed their spreading from the mainland throughout the islands in the second more peaceful function throughout. Nevertheless if a break has to and third centuries np. Modern man is rightly amazed at the skill be made 954 represents as convenient a dividing point as any, mark- of the sailors of these periods from the Neolithic to the Early Iron perpetually ing as it does the end of the attempt to keep the north of England in a Age. But though it is wrong to think of the islands as on Scandinavian/Irish political orbit. the fringe of civilization, it is probably true to say that never were Within the first of these periods, c.786-954, each of the main they as much at the centre of a great movement as during the Viking communities suffered in different ways and at slightly different Age. periods, interlocked and interdependent, and connected also with Mysteries surround the arrival of the Scandinavians in Orkney the ebb and flow of Viking invasion on the Continent, especially in and Shetland. Both the state and nature of the original inhabitants Normandy. Scotland has been treated first because of a natural and the date of the Scandinavian descent were even more a mystery priority in time and also because of peculiarities in its development to historians of the Middle Ages than they are now when there is still which make it essential to grasp the situation in the North if invasion a deep division of opinion between those who claim evidence for elsewhere is to be understood. Ireland is treated next for a similar strong pre-Viking contact between the Islands and Norway and chronological reason, and Wales is brought into the story to round those who insist that Norse settlement was not effective until well off the picture of events on the western seaboard of Britain. Last of after ao 800. In Norway the Historia Norwegiae (dated to c.1200) all in place but not importance is England. Rather more than half took refuge in a set of good stories, describing the Picts as little more than this chapter will be taken up with English affairs not only because pygmies, active builders in the morning and evening but hiding events are so much more fully recorded in relation to them, but also themselves in sheer terror in subterranean dwellings at midday when because truly decisive happenings not only for the British but for they lost all their strength. There were also Goidelic priests called popqe European history took place on English soil during these years. because of their white robes. The medieval historians put 32 The Vikings in Britain The invasions to c.954 33 settlement can probably be exaggerated. Virtual absence natural emphasis on the deeds of Harold Fairhair and his followers, ? tn. of does not necessarily imply peace: rather it shows that the pirates of the kin of Ragnald, in the late ninth century. He is said weapons took good care of their weapons and did not lose them. Later to have established his winter quarters in the Orkneys from which settlers accounts refer to the settlers as ness-takers; men who, secure summer forays were made, leading to the exercise of tyrannical rule saga threw up hasty fortifications across the neck of a headland now among the English, now the Scots, and now the Irish, to the at sea, peninsula to give themselves a base on land. Peaceful farming point where they subjugated Northumbria in England, Caithness in or later when the settlement land-taking Scotland, and Dublin and other seaports in Ireland. could come and were complete. know something of their institutions from Scandinavian Modern archaeological evidence tempers the emphasis on Harold We in the homeland and to some extent from archaeological Fairhair, proving Scandinavian presence in the islands from at least analogies place-name evidence.The bondi, a peasant-farmer, represented 800 and confirming the presence of Picts who were overwhelmed and basic unit in society, head of a household with odal rights. politically but not exterminated. Continuity in domestic building on the leadership was supplied by sea-captains, but there is no sites such as Buckquoy in north-west Orkney suggest some element Military of an aristocratic principle at work, and no evidence for the of cultural transmission. But well-authenticated and serious raids evidence of rank over the North Sea except for the special down the east and west coasts of Britain (c.7g6-g40) become lully transportation respect shown to some men who may have been capable of boasting intelligible if associated with the presence of secure bases of the of royal blood in their veins. In the first settlement there was little Jarlshof type in the Northern Isles, and one can postulate fairly a room for the flourishing of lordly principles. We hear of men who period of steady Scandinavian recruitment through the raiding styled themselves jarlbut of no jarl (or earl) of Orkney or Shetland period to about 865 or 870, followed by intense colonization coin_ until the close of the ninth or beginning of the tenth century. ciding with Harold Fairhair's activities late in the century. During From their headquarters in the north, Scandinavians spread south this long period those of the original inhabitants who survived to the mainland and west to the Western Isles in the course of would be enslaved and lose their native social and Christian orga- the ninth and early tenth centuries. The first prominent ruler was nization. Saga accounts substantiate the view of a predominantly Sigurd, brother of Ragnald More (and so probably the uncle of heathen community in the Northern Isles as late as the early eleventh century. Rollo, first duke of Normandy) at the end of the ninth century. From the Orkney centre he exercised some authority over Shetland All authorities agree that that heathen community was the direct and also over Caithness. Place-names suggest Scandinavian pene- product of a true migration, principally from Norway. Subtler tration further south in Ross and Cromarty and Sutherland at the linguistic work on dialect suggests a preponderance of settlers from expense of Pictish power. The distribution of early Scandinavian the western fjords, especially from Rogaland and the fylkir to the names suggests that their movement was seaborne, that they estab- south of Bergen. Remarkable excavations at Jarlshof, Sumbergh lished their little farrning Jarlshof-type centres along the river Head, the southernmost point of Shetland, have revealed charac_ valleys, relying on the rough pasture of the highland shielings to teristic features of an early Scandinavian settlement, the first ele- supplement and support the exiguous products of the poor barley- ments of which are dated to the first half of the ninth century. A growing lands of the scanty lowlands. Whether they displaced or rectangular longhouse, some 70 feet by 20, with the longer walls intermarried with the native population is uncertain, probably more curved in slightly at the ends, was the chief building. Beside the of the latter than the former. The limit of Scandinavian penetration house itself there were outbuildings identified as a byre, a smithy was indeterminate, far-reaching and longlasting in the modern and a bath-house. Animal bones and midden deposits suggest that shires as far south as the great spread of Inverness-shire, north of farming activities predominated in this community - even fishing the great firth, no more than scattered, spasmodic, and temporary playing a relatively minor role. The presence of many stone loom_ on the eastern seaboard of the Moray Firth and Aberdeenshire. The weights indicates the importance of textile activity. Bone combs, widest extent was probably reached as late as the middle the exquisitely carved pins with animal, axe-head and thistle decoration, of eleventh century under the jarldom of Thorfinn the Mighty (d.