Empires and Barbarians (85 page)

Even Viking settlement, when it did eventually come, can be thought of as at least partly caused by positive, economic motivations. Since there is no evidence that landed resources were particularly tight in Scandinavia in the Viking era, then where Scandinavians did take land elsewhere it is likely a priori that they did so because more and better land, or better terms and conditions for landholding, were available in the areas to which they migrated. This is generally borne out by the detailed evidence. In the west, Norse migrants settled as dominant landholders. Their estates varied considerably in size. At the top end, the larger ones went to jarls and
godar
, the kind of men whose land seizures in Danelaw are reflected in the Grimston hybrids. But even at the more modest social level of sokemen, Scandinavian migrants were important landholders. Their holdings may have been limited in size, but they were their own, they probably ran them using dependent labour, and they personally retained elevated political rights and social status. Even if the individual farms were not huge, then, there is every reason to suppose that this was a desirable outcome for the individual migrant, and represented a better level of existence than would have been available to him had he not come west. In the east, the bulk of Scandinavian settlement – that, at least, so far visible in either texts or archaeology – was focused on trading opportunities. Scandinavians went to Russia to open up relations with indigenous fur trappers and/or to situate themselves in a more advantageous position on one of the riverine trade arteries. In some areas, such as along the axis of the Volkhov, they established themselves in areas that could be farmed before any Slavic-speaking population got there, so that, as in west, there may have been some taking of landed estates.

But whether this happened or not does not affect the fundamental point. Real Scandinavian migration – with the northern and western isles as a possible partial exception – developed out of previous contacts that were all about Scandinavians extracting new types of wealth.

There was a further reason why migration had to be secondary to trading and raiding. It was these activities that allowed Scandinavians to build up the wealth of detailed knowledge about both east and west without which settlement would have been impossible. The Scandinavian north had never been entirely cut off from the rest of Europe. In the Roman period, the Amber Route led from the southern shores of the Baltic to central Europe and the Black Sea, and this axis had facilitated and maintained considerable contacts between north and south. Some Jutland populations had been involved in the Anglo-Saxon takeover of Roman Britain, the ruling dynasty of East Anglia seems to have had some Norwegian connections, and some Heruli from the Middle Danube responded to defeat by migrating north at the start of the sixth century. Nonetheless, trading and raiding in the later eighth and the early ninth century brought larger numbers of Scandinavians into a much more intimate set of relationships with populations in both western Europe and European Russia than they had ever previously established, and provided the active fields of geographical, economic and even political information that made settlement possible.
⁵⁹

The need for geographical understanding is probably the most obvious of these. Without a long period of trial and error, even the terrifyingly vague navigational instructions with which the chapter began could not have existed. The whole North Sea/North Atlantic axis had to be opened up by the intrepid navigators who made the initial jump from western Norway to Orkney, and then made their way round the northern coasts of the British Isles before pressing on out into the Atlantic to open up routes to the Faroes, Iceland, Greenland and, eventually, even North America. There is a chance that the Irish already had some knowledge of the Faroes and Iceland, which may have sparked the Scandinavians’ interest in the Atlantic, but reports that the first Norse found some Irish monks already in Iceland have never been confirmed archaeologically.
⁶⁰
Less challenging, perhaps, but no less important, other Scandinavians were at the same time busy exploring British, Irish and continental river systems. It is easy to take all this for granted, but detailed knowledge had to be
gathered before Norse raiders could push upriver and put fleets on to the inland loughs of Ireland, sail up the Trent to sack the Mercian royal centre at Repton, or find their way up the Seine to the riches of St Germain and Paris.

Russian river systems, too, took a huge amount of working out. In the mid-eighth century, it seems, all the Norse were doing was pushing up the rivers that flow into the Baltic in search of more chunks of fur-producing forest. From this it was a huge leap to finding out where their tributaries led, what possible further connections might be made, and how, eventually, you might end up in Baghdad. Rapids had to be avoided, shallows and sandbanks noted, and portages established between the headwaters of the different river systems. All of this required a huge amount of information and organization, not to mention changes of boats. Round about Ladoga it was necessary to change from ocean-going ships to riverboats, and archaeological evidence has shown that some of its inhabitants made their living by servicing this need. Elsewhere, the biggest problem was organizing the labour for portages. Although the requirement that the population of Smolensk pay its dues to medieval Russian kings in portage work is found only in a charter of 1150, this is the earliest charter to survive from the area and may well reflect long-established practice. When you stop to think about all the information that needed to be gathered, the two-generation time lag between establishing Staraia Ladoga to serve western markets, and the first evidence of contact with the Muslim south, becomes entirely explicable. The large amount of detailed geographical knowledge that the Scandinavian adventurers needed to acquire in every geographical quarter in which they operated is reflected in the geographical texts of medieval Scandinavia. These are full of classically and biblically derived knowledge, as you might expect of a learned tradition perpetuated by monks, but they combine with this specific and accurate information reflecting the practical intelligence built up over centuries of voyaging.
⁶¹

Economic information was also critical. Without a detailed understanding of markets and of the almost unlimited demand for northern forest products represented by the Muslim world, trading down the Russian river systems could never have gathered momentum. An entirely different kind of economic information came to be understood early on by western raiders, namely that Christian monasteries were centres for precious metals, and sometimes too, especially in Ireland,
for valuable human beings. Also fundamentally economic in nature was the growing appreciation of the value of different areas’ landed resources which fed more directly into the later settlement processes.

Political understanding, too, was vital, not least when it came to settlement. Given that Scandinavian migrants were looking to settle as relatively wealthy, socially dominant landholders, they had to understand existing sociopolitical structures at their chosen points of destination. Before setting out, they had to be certain that they could oust the sitting elite, either on their own or with the help of a few retainers – as was the case, it seems, in the northern and western isles. Either that, or they had to work out how much force was required to achieve a similar result in areas of greater social and political cohesion, such as Anglo-Saxon England and northern Francia, and put together sufficient military manpower for the job. Whether this was their intention from the outset is unclear, but one key point about the Great Armies is that they were large enough to destroy the military and political capacity of targeted Anglo-Saxon kingdoms. And without this destruction, the reallocation of estates could not have followed. Sometimes, too, political knowledge of a more specific kind is evident. It would beggar belief to suppose it a coincidence that, having gathered in East Anglia, the Great Army then headed off for Northumbria. Any direction (except east – they would have got wet) was available to them, but they went north. And Northumbria was in the middle of a civil war. In similar vein, the switching of Viking forces in the decades either side of the year 900, backwards and forwards from England and Ireland to the continent, as opportunities arose and then were cut off, similarly reflects the impact of more particular intelligence.

We have, of course, encountered the necessity for active fields of information in every pulse of first-millennium migration. That operating in the Viking era was more complicated, and took much longer to build up than some of the others because of the huge distances and wide variety of locations it encompassed. It is over five thousand kilometres from Reykjavik to Baghdad even as the crow swims, with a hell of a lot of dangerous water, shorelines and riverbanks in between. For the same reasons, the Viking diaspora involved more complicated logistic problems than any other of the migration flows we have so far encountered.
⁶²

Aside from the prevalent emphasis on wealth generation – or perhaps one should say wealth gathering, since there was not much
generation involved in sacking monasteries – the other unifying feature of the Viking diaspora is that all of its many and varied activities were waterborne. Trading, raiding, even settlement: all of these were based on the exploitation of the sea and of river systems. Access to the relevant mode of transport – ships – was of critical importance, therefore, and ships were not cheap. Only with the advent of the transatlantic liner – particularly its capacious steerage class – in the late nineteenth century did it become possible to transport vast masses of humanity overseas at relatively low cost. Before that, sea passages were too expensive to make mass waterborne migration for the poor a practical possibility, unless states decided to provide subsidized transport for their own reasons, whether free passages for workers required in new colonies, or convict fleets bound for Botany Bay. The few pieces of evidence we have all highlight the costs of shipping in the Viking Age. It was for this reason, as the sagas and other Icelandic texts suggest, that colonization of the North Atlantic was led by aristocrats – even if relatively minor ones. Only they could afford the necessary ships, although they brought their less well-off retainers along to provide the military manpower required either for subduing Picts and Scots, or for clearing the land and starting up farms in the Faroes and Iceland. The kings who came later into western waters presumably fitted out, in part, their own fleets, as well as hiring in those who already had their own transport. When an ex-King of the Swedes returned to re-establish himself in Birka, for instance, he had eleven ships of his own and hired in twenty-one others. Serving in the retinue of a king or jarl who could afford an entire fleet must have been one way for poorer men to get overseas, and presumably represented the path to eventual success taken by many a Danelaw sokeman.

An alternative approach for those who were less well off but had
some
wealth was to buy a share in a ship. A runestone from Aarhus records one Asser Saxe, who owned a part share in a merchant ship. The same stone records that he was also a lithsman – a member of the company of a warship – and it may be, too, that some raiding ships were fitted out on a part-share basis. One Frankish source refers to the Viking companies overwintering on the Seine in 861/2 as ‘brotherhoods’:
sodalitates
. This fascinating word perhaps indicates that each ship represented a small jointly owned raiding company. A similar conclusion is also suggested by the runestones from southern Sweden
commemorating those who had failed to return from Ingvar’s Russian expedition. That their families – presumably – could afford to raise the stones again suggests that they were not from the poorest stratum of society.
⁶³

Access to shipping, then, was the key logistic problem, even if the boats required were not all the same. There’s a famous passage from
Egil’s Saga
that you often see quoted. It records that Egil sometimes went trading and sometimes went raiding. Asser Saxe of runestone fame confirms that the substance of this report, while deriving from an entirely post-Viking source, is not at all inconceivable, and even traders went armed. On his first visit to Denmark, St Anskar hitched a ride with some merchants who had the capacity to fight all day when pirates attacked. But the two activities – trading and raiding – required different types of ship (hence, perhaps, the runestone’s noting that Asser Saxe had an interest in both). Warships carried more men to row and fight, and had a shallower draft for penetrating further upstream on river systems. Merchantmen were broader of beam so as to carry more goods. At certain points, too, ships had to be swapped en route for riverboats. In Russia, as we have seen, Slavs provided the rivercraft –
monoxyla
, the word implying that they were constructed from a single tree trunk – used on the Dnieper.
⁶⁴

Scandinavian migration in the Viking era was strongly influenced, therefore, by the logistic problems it encompassed. Sheer cost is an important factor in explaining why the migration units involved were smaller than many of their counterparts of the so-called
Völkerwanderung
. Sailing may have been quicker than walking, but it was also much more expensive, and it seems highly unlikely that poorer Scandinavians could have afforded to take up any of the exciting and profitable new opportunities. This, it seems to me, is another reason for not believing in a large-scale migration of Scandinavian peasants into the Danelaw after the Great Army era settlements. Why would anyone have bothered to pay their transport costs, when there was a plentiful and thoroughly subdued Anglo-Saxon labour force already available for nothing? This may also be relevant when considering how many women and dependants are likely to have accompanied the warriors westwards. As we have seen, the explicit evidence isn’t good, but, again, if women were available locally, then transport costs may have been one factor that reduced the number of Scandinavian females taking part in the action.