Empires and Barbarians (82 page)

           The wind is fierce tonight

           It tosses the sea’s white hair

           I fear no wild Viking

           Sailing the quiet main.
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Battle with such views was joined with a vengeance in the 1960s by the most prominent of current anglophone historians of the Vikings: Peter Sawyer. He argued that the traditional views were wildly overstating the likely size of Viking forces. Most of the chroniclers
who produced the surviving historical accounts of Viking violence were churchmen, if not monks, and, as we have seen, churches and monasteries provided rich, ‘soft’ targets for predatory Vikings. Hence, he argued, there is an inbuilt tendency for the sources to stress Viking violence, when the Dark Ages were generally pretty violent anyway. The only thing that was perhaps new in the period was that the pagan Vikings attacked Christian religious establishments with a greater sense of freedom than was usual. Equally important, these monastic chroniclers ignored other important kinds of Viking activity, such as trading, which were less or non-violent, and their estimates greatly overstated the numbers involved. In his view, the more specific evidence suggests smaller forces: witness the three ships, maybe ninety or a hundred men, who were involved in that first incident at Portland. There is also, Sawyer argued, precious little evidence of women and children being involved. Viking activity was carried on not by ‘whole’ migrating peoples, but by warbands, whose manpower should be numbered at most in the hundreds.
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This argument was a necessary corrective, and its validity for the early phases of ninth-century Viking activity has been generally accepted. The argument that the Viking period largely involved males in warbands also seems largely, if not without some exceptions, correct. But as Viking activity in the west intensified from the 830s, there is good reason to believe that larger forces than Sawyer originally had in mind became involved in the action. The
Chronicle of Ireland
, for instance, records in the 830s that two Viking fleets of sixty ships each were simultaneously in action in Irish waters. The beautiful ninth-century Gokstad ship excavated in the Norwegian Vestfold in 1880 and now on display in Oslo could have carried thirty men, or just a few more, without a problem. At thirty-plus men per boat, each of these fleets would have fielded over a thousand, and this general order of magnitude is consistent with some convincingly specific casualty figures recorded in the same source. In 848, three engagements were fought by different Irish kings against separate Viking forces, who suffered losses of 700, 1,200 and 500 men. And when the fleets of Scandinavian kings started to hit western waters from c.850, then Irish, English and continental sources all – with great consistency – describe them as leading fleets numbering between one hundred and two hundred ships. This would suggest armed forces of a few thousand men.
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The point is only reinforced by the evidence from the Great Army period. These armies were composites, each bringing together several independent Scandinavian kings and their followers, together sometimes with more warriors under the leadership of independent jarls. The original Great Army assembling in East Anglia in winter 866/7 comprised, probably amongst others, the forces of Ivar and Olaf – who disappeared from Irish waters between 863 and 871 (Ivar is probably the ‘Ingvar’ of the
Anglo-Saxon Chronicle
) – and the Vikings who had been harassing the Frankish world of the River Seine for most of the previous decade. Continental sources indicate a gap in Viking violence between 866 and 880, which corresponds to the first phase of Great Army activity in England, and the Norse departure from Frankish waters was probably hastened by Charles the Bald’s construction of fortified bridges across the Seine which made it much more difficult for the Vikings to penetrate inland. Apart from Ivar, the
Anglo-Saxon Chronicle
also mentions by name two further kings, Healfdan (probably a third brother of Ivar and Olaf) and Bagsecg, and five jarls (two called Sidroc, the older and the younger; Osbearn, Fraena and Harold). These kings and jarls led independent contingents within the confederate army. In 875, they were reinforced by three more kings – Guthrum, Oscetel and Anwend – making a grand total of eleven Viking contingents gathered in England. Yet more Vikings arrived just a few years later to overwinter at Fulham in 879/80. The same multiple, composite pattern holds true of the later Great Armies as well.

Not all of these different contingents operated as part of a single army at the one time. Contingents came and went according to their perceptions of the best available opportunities. But five kings, at least five earls (jarls), and other forces besides clearly amounted to a substantial body of warriors. In 878, Healfdan was killed in Devon with 840 (or 860 in another version) of his followers, which suggests that royal contingents may have been somewhere in the region of a thousand men. The
Chronicle
also notes that this force was carried in twenty-three ships, making about thirty-six men per ship, which fits nicely with the carrying capacity of a Gokstad-type ship. Estimating each of the Great Army’s main contingents in the high hundreds or roughly one thousand mark is also in line with the kind of forces operating in Ireland after the 830s when raiding intensified. If this reasoning is correct, the Great Armies – each composed of half a dozen or more such contingents – must each have mustered several thousand
warriors, though probably not much more than a maximum of about ten thousand. This is an entirely appropriate size for armies able to conquer whole Anglo-Saxon kingdoms.
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And there were, moreover, several of them. As we have seen, two well-documented Great Armies attacked England: one between 865 and 878, the other from 892 to 896. Encompassing some of the same manpower, there were also another two armies which assaulted the north coast of the continent in the 880s; and the forces operating in Normandy and Brittany, and back and forth to Ireland in the last decade of the ninth century and the first twenty or so years of the tenth. All told, and even allowing for overlaps between the different forces, we must reckon with a minimum of twenty thousand warriors on the move.

This is directly relevant to the scale of Viking migration because, in eastern England and northern Francia, it was the Great Armies who turned victory into settlement. Whether this was part of the original design or not, the first Great Army destroyed three out of the four independent kingdoms of ninth-century Anglo-Saxon England, and reallocated substantial parts of their landed resources to its own members. These original settlements of the 870s were then reinforced by more pulses of settlers from the later Great Armies. One is explicitly recorded in 896, and there may have been others. On the continent, further Great Army activity eventually led, as we have seen, to settlements in Normandy and Brittany, one licensed, others not. What percentage of Scandinavian manpower participating in the Great Army action eventually settled in the west is unknowable, but the numerous different settlements are likely to have involved well over ten thousand individuals, even allowing for the fact that some surely preferred to take their wealth back to the Baltic. This is substantial, but not massive, given that the total population of the areas affected must be reckoned in the high hundreds of thousands at least.
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The Great Army settlements took a particular form, however. Highly suggestive is the entry of the
Anglo-Saxon Chronicle
under the year 896, recording the break-up of the second Great Army to attack England: ‘In this year, the host dispersed, some to East Anglia, some to Northumbria, and those without wealth got themselves ships there, and sailed south over the sea to the Seine.’ This is not without its puzzles. Does the reference to wealth mean that the Vikings had to buy estates in Danelaw rather than just seize them? I strongly doubt it, but either way, the entry makes powerful links between membership
of a Great Army, amassing wealth and subsequent settlement. Individual Vikings did not drag themselves overseas to fight a series of thoroughly dangerous engagements far from home, in order then to settle down as moneyless peasants. The point of all the effort, for those who wanted to settle in the west, was to amass sufficient resources to establish themselves in a desirable socioeconomic niche. If they had just wanted to be peasants, there was no need to fight. Anglo-Saxon landlords were always looking for labour.
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How relationships within a particular Great Army contingent may then have translated themselves into a settlement pattern, when lands were distributed, is suggested by case studies of the detailed evidence for Scandinavian settlement in the Danelaw county of Lincolnshire. Lincoln itself was one of the five boroughs of central Danelaw, from which some kind of independent political power was exercised; there were kings in Danelaw after 878, but never a king
of
Danelaw. The centre of Lincoln itself perhaps saw some Viking settlement and certainly expanded considerably in the later ninth and tenth centuries. Outside the town, Viking settlement seems to have come in two forms. Some of the greater estates were received intact by leading Vikings. These are marked by place names of the famous Grimston hybrid variety, where a Norse personal name (
Grim
-) is combined with the Anglo-Saxon suffix for a settlement (-
tun
), and are by and large to be found on the best-quality land throughout the Danelaw counties. Other pre-existing estates were then broken up, it seems, to be parcelled out in individual holdings to Vikings of lesser but still free status. The evidence for this is provided by the coincidence between the distributions of Norse place names (ending in -
by
and -
thorp
and, again, very often combined with a Norse personal name) and that of smaller landowners with unusually high status – called
sokemen
– in the official documentation for Lincolnshire generated after the tenth-century Anglo-Saxon state incorporated the county into its territory. The same sokemen also seem to have kept their Norse-derived tastes in the decoration of everyday metalwork well into the tenth century.

If Lincolnshire can be taken as more than a one-off case, as does seem likely, then Great Army contingents seem to have kept something of their social shape upon becoming landed, since settlements were organized by the leaderships for those who had already amassed enough booty to satisfy their aspirations and pick up a small landed
estate pretty much like the normans. Those who hadn’t, presumably, took their booty and went looking for a new leader to follow. The landed estates used in the settlement had all been confiscated from Anglo-Saxon owners. Some were taken from secular landowners who had been killed or exiled – although there does not seem to have been a complete extinction of the old Anglo-Saxon landowning class in Danelaw – but there is good evidence too that many estates were taken from Church institutions, which by the ninth century may have owned up to one-quarter of England’s landed resources.
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If Lincolnshire can be taken as a particular example of the general rule, then the following model could be suggested for Danelaw and northern Francia. The basic migration unit was the individual Great Army contingent of up to a thousand men, or just a bit more in the case of kings, less in the case of jarls – not the army as a whole – whose leaders organized the allocation of lands to those who were ready to settle. Some of the relevant issues – who would qualify for any land, and on what scale – were presumably discussed in the original negotiations which brought the Great Armies into being. These settlements took a form analogous to the kind of partial elite replacement we have encountered in some of the fifth-century Germanic settlements in former Roman provinces in Europe, except that the sokemen with their -bys and -thorps may have represented the insertion of a smallholding elite at a lower social scale than anything suggested by the settlements on Roman soil. The main reasons for thinking so are the smallish size of their holdings recorded in
Doomsday Book
, where their descendants survived until 1066, and the fact that they generated a bigger cultural change on the linguistic and other fronts than anything analogous in the post-Roman west.

Certainly in northern Danelaw, at least, Norse became the prevalent language, whereas Germanic languages never replaced Latin and its dialects except in Anglo-Saxon England, where the elite replacement had been more or less complete. When it comes to explaining the linguistic change and all the Scandinavian place names, some have supposed it necessary to envisage that the settlement of Great Army contingents was followed by further – undocumented – settlements of Scandinavian peasants. This seems unnecessary. Given that certainly ten thousand Vikings – and potentially considerably more than that – had to be accommodated in the distribution process, this was enough to generate a Norse-dominated landowning class at a sufficiently local
level to explain the cultural changes. In comparison, the Norman Conquest involved accommodating only around five thousand new landowners, and that over the whole – not just part – of England, so there is no doubt that the new dominant Norse class lived much more cheek by jowl with their Anglo-Saxon peasant labourers than the Normans who were to follow.

Great Army contingents were responsible, however, for only one part of Norse migration into the west. In Ireland, settlement took a different form. There Scandinavians never managed – perhaps never tried – to destroy the coherence of whole kingdoms and make possible the large-scale redistribution to themselves of landed assets. Instead, we see only niche settlements, limited to a few coastal towns: Dublin above all. These were quite large, and economically powerful. After its re-establishment, rival tenth-century Irish kings competed with one another to exercise hegemony over Dublin’s valuable mercenary and monetary assets. Nonetheless, although the migration unit must again have taken the form of organized warbands, permanent Norse settlement in Ireland can only have amounted to a few thousand individuals at most.
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