Northmen: The Viking Saga AD 793-1241 (14 page)

The unification of England by the Wessex dynasty was undoubtedly one of the most important consequences of the Viking Age. It is by no means certain that this would have happened (and certainly not in the way that it did happen) without the intervention of the Vikings, which completely disrupted England’s existing power structures and, by eliminating its rivals, opened the way for Wessex to unify the country. There was already some sense of a common English identity before the Viking Age, but it had found no political expression. As early as the seventh century, Frankish chroniclers who found it difficult to tell the difference between the Angles and Saxons had coined the expression Anglo-Saxons (
Angli-Saxones
), to describe all the Germanic settlers in Britain. At this time, the Anglo-Saxons were divided politically into seven kingdoms (reduced to four by the beginning of the Viking Age), but they all shared a common culture and spoke closely related dialects of a Germanic language that they called
Englisc
. Known to linguists as Old English, this still had a long way to go before it would be intelligible to modern English-speakers. Attempts to articulate a common English identity began with the
Ecclesiastical
History
of
the
English
People
, written by the Venerable Bede at the beginning of the eighth century. Bede saw common Christian religion as being as much of a unifying factor as language and culture, and this proved very much to be the case in the struggle against the pagan Vikings during which the Anglo-Saxons began to describe themselves collectively as
Anglecynn
(‘Englishkind’). One of the reasons Alfred deserves his reputation for greatness is that he recognised the political potential of this developing concept of Englishness and consciously exploited it in his own nation-building project. The creation of the unified ‘Kingdom of the English’ by Alfred’s successors was only the beginning of the creation of a common political identity. Local allegiances remained strong and the cultural assimilation of the Scandinavian settlers was only just beginning, but even a resurgence of Viking raiding later in the tenth century did not seriously threaten the unity of England.

CHAPTER 3

D
ORESTAD
, P
ARIS AND
R
OUEN

T
HE
V
IKINGS IN
F
RANCIA
799–939

On Christmas Day 800, Pope Leo III crowned the Frankish king Charlemagne (r. 768 – 814) Roman emperor in St Peter’s basilica in Rome. According to Charlemagne’s biographer Einhard, the king had no idea what was going to happen and that if he had only known he would never have set foot in the church. However, this was only the formal modesty expected of a good Christian emperor. In reality the event was long planned, Charlemagne having made up his mind to claim the inheritance of the Roman Empire at least a year beforehand. Comprising modern France, Germany, the Low Countries, Austria, Switzerland, Italy, and parts of Spain, Slovenia, Hungary and the Czech Republic, Charlemagne’s empire, known as the Carolingian empire (from Latin
Carolus
= Charles), was the largest and most powerful state to have existed in Europe since the fall of the Western Roman Empire over 300 years before. The peace and security that Charlemagne’s rule brought to this vast area led to the growth of trade and a revival of cultural life known as the Carolingian Renaissance. Significantly, this was focussed not on the Mediterranean, the centre of Classical civilisation, but on the north, on the Rhineland, the Low Countries and the fertile farmlands of northern France. The impact of this rising prosperity extended well beyond Charlemagne’s domain, stimulating trade in Britain and Scandinavia as well. It was partly to feed markets in the Frankish lands that Swedes were forging new trade routes along the rivers of Eastern Europe. Many Scandinavian merchants must have seen the empire’s rich and undefended ports and monasteries, and wondered if there weren’t other ways to share in its prosperity.

The limits of power

Charlemagne’s coronation was, of course, a celebration of his achievements but he was well aware that his empire faced many challenges, one of which was the threat of Viking piracy: he had, after all, tried to ransom the monks of Lindisfarne who had been captured by Vikings in 793. As a pious Christian, he must have found this attack on such a holy place as deeply disturbing as any churchman.

The first recorded Viking attack on the Frankish Empire did not come until 799. The raid was not a great success. The Vikings plundered an island off the coast of Aquitaine, probably Noirmoutier, an important centre for the salt and wine trades and home to the important monastery of St Philibert, but some of the Vikings’ ships were wrecked, an occupational hazard, and over a hundred of them were killed by the Franks. This did not make Charlemagne complacent. Writing with the benefit of hindsight, the monk Notker the Stammerer (d. 912), one of Charlemagne’s less reliable biographers, says that the great warrior wept on hearing the news of the first Viking raids on the empire, not because he feared them himself but because he foresaw the trouble they would cause his successors. The story is probably a monkish invention, meant to shame Charlemagne’s less able successors, but his response to the raid was certainly vigorous. In March 800, Charlemagne set out from his palace at Aachen for Boulogne on the Channel coast where he personally oversaw the preparations for defence against the Vikings. Further measures followed in 802, 806 and 810. Showing a clear understanding of the nature of the Viking threat, Charlemagne concentrated his forces – fleets, coastguards and fortifications – at the mouths of the empire’s major rivers. These were highways into the empire’s economic heartlands, lined with towns, monasteries and the richest farmlands. Charlemagne’s defences were intended to deny their use to the Vikings.

However, there was little that he could do to protect the open coastline. An incident recorded in the
Royal Frankish Annals
in 820 illustrates both the strengths and weaknesses of Charlemagne’s defences. A fleet of thirteen Viking ships landed in Flanders, but the coastguards drove the pirates off before they could do much damage. The Vikings moved on to the Seine, but the coastguards were ready here too and again they were driven off after losing five of their number in skirmish. But the initiative was always going to be with the Vikings. They moved on and kept probing, eventually plundering the unguarded village of Bouin on the coast of Aquitaine. The empire’s most exposed area was Frisia, which lay only a couple of days’ sail from Denmark. The first recorded Viking raid on Frisia came in 810 when the Danish king Godfred, with a fleet of 200 ships, forced the Frisians to pay him 100 pounds (45 kg) of silver in tribute. On hearing news of the attack, Charlemagne immediately ordered the mobilisation of the fleet and the army, but by the time he reached the area, the Danes had already sailed for home. Frustrated, Charlemagne lamented that God had not granted him the opportunity to let his ‘Christian hand sport with these dog-heads’. Charlemagne was now aged around seventy and this was the last time he would lead an army in person.

The great
emporium

Charlemagne’s coastal defences provided a large measure of security for the empire and few incidents are recorded in the twenty years after his death in 814. However, in 834 a large Viking fleet suddenly penetrated over 50 miles into the Rhine delta and sacked the Frisian town of Dorestad, the empire’s most important
emporium
or trading centre (equivalent to the Anglo-Saxon
wic
). Near modern Utrecht in the Netherlands, Dorestad was founded in the early seventh century as a beach market outside the walls of a ruined Roman fort at the junction of the Rhine and the River Lek. In the agrarian economy of early medieval Europe, tolls and taxes on trade were one of the few ways a ruler could get his hands on hard cash. Self-interested Frankish kings offered privileges to encourage merchants and traders to settle at Dorestad and by Charlemagne’s time a town stretched for about 2 miles along the bank of the Rhine, covering an estimated area of around 1 square mile. With a population of around 2,000 people, it was probably the largest town in northern Europe at the time. Enough silver passed through Dorestad for it to have its own mint. The town’s silver coins acknowledged its maritime links, carrying stylised images of single-masted sailing ships with strongly curved hulls.

Dorestad’s appearance was typical of the north European trading places of its day, an untidy collection of houses, warehouses and workshops built entirely from wood, clay and thatch, cut by muddy streets roughly paved with split logs. Apart from two wooden churches, no public buildings have been identified. Dorestad was divided into an upper and lower town. The upper town, centred on the old Roman fort, was the administrative centre: governance was shared between a count and the bishops of nearby Utrecht, who owned a large part of the town. The lower town, stretched along the riverbank, was the commercial and industrial quarter. The riverbank was divided into long, narrow plots to give the maximum number of traders access to the river. Causeways of earth and timber stretched out into the river to give access to timber jetties. As the course of the river gradually changed, swinging away from the town, these jetties grew ever longer, eventually stretched over 150 yards from the riverbank. Excavations have uncovered evidence of a wide variety of manufacturing activities. Weavers, metalworkers and jewellers, comb-makers, basket weavers and shipbuilders all plied their trades here. The town’s merchants acted as middlemen, importing high quality lava quernstones, glass, metalwork, wheel-thrown pottery, and wine from the Rhineland, and re-exporting it to Britain and Scandinavia. What they received in return is not known. Baltic amber has been found on the site but most imports were probably perishable goods such as hides and furs. Behind the waterfront was a less densely settled area of farms, which supplied food and other animal products to the town. Just outside the town was a fortified enclosure, protected by a ditch and bank, which may have been a refuge for the townsfolk in times of war or the compound of a local aristocrat. The town itself was not fortified, a sign of the peaceful conditions that prevailed in Charlemagne’s empire.

Exactly how much damage the Vikings inflicted on Dorestad in 834 is unclear. Frankish chronicles paint a familiar picture of burning, killing and captive and tribute taking, but the Vikings thought it worth their while to return again in 835, 836 and 837. Clearly the town was able to recover quickly from Viking raids and output from Dorestad’s mints actually peaked in the period 838 – 40 and continued to be high throughout the 840s. It is quite possible that Dorestad was profiting indirectly from Viking raids elsewhere. As wealth flowed back to Scandinavia from Western Europe it stimulated greater trade, more than compensating for the damage caused to Dorestad itself: the Vikings were great redistributors of wealth.

A troubled empire

That Vikings were able to penetrate as far inland as Dorestad is a sign that Charlemagne’s coast defence system had broken down. The reasons for this have little to do with the increasing strength of Viking fleets in this period. They are instead related to internal political developments in the Frankish empire. Frankish tradition dictated that on the death of a king, his kingdom should be divided equally between all his surviving legitimate sons. Since its foundation by the Merovingian dynasty in the fifth century, the Frankish kingdom had experienced frequent partitions, but a vigorous tradition of dynastic murder kept the number of potential heirs in check and prevented it breaking up permanently. When the Carolingians overthrew the Merovingians in the mid-eighth century, they continued the tradition and Charlemagne provided for the empire to be divided between his three sons Charles, Pippin and Louis the Pious after his death. In the event, Charles and Pippin died before their father, so the empire passed intact to Louis the Pious (r. 814 – 840). In 817, following an accident in which he narrowly escaped death, Louis made provision for the succession. Under the influence of the church, which saw the empire as an instrument of God for promoting the unity of the Christian people, Louis broke with Frankish custom and, instead of providing for an equal division of the empire between his sons, he appointed his eldest son Lothar as co-emperor and granted his younger sons Pippin and Louis subkingdoms in Aquitaine and Germany. This settlement unravelled when Louis decided to marry Judith of Bavaria in 819 after the death of his first wife the year before. Had Louis been less pious and made do with mistresses, the future of the Frankish empire might have been much less troubled. In 823 Judith bore Louis another son, Charles (the Bald, as he would later become known).

Louis could only provide Charles with a suitable inheritance at the expense of his elder brothers. When Louis granted Charles his own subkingdom in 829, Lothar, backed by his brothers, rebelled and deposed him. Charles was excluded from the succession but this seemed grossly unjust to Frankish traditionalists. With their support, Louis was restored in 830, but the problem of the succession continued to fester for the remainder of his reign, steadily undermining the strong royal authority on which Charlemagne’s military system was based. Following Louis’ death in 840, a civil war broke out between his three surviving sons, Lothar, Louis and Charles (Pippin died in 838), which resulted in a tripartite division of the empire at the Treaty of Verdun in 843. This settlement did not bring stability. In the decades that followed, the empire went through a succession of partitions before it broke up for good in 888. Throughout this period, the Vikings often came a poor third in the Frankish kings’ list of priorities: combating dynastic rivals and trying, generally unsuccessfully, to prevent the counts from usurping royal powers always came first.