Northmen: The Viking Saga AD 793-1241 (9 page)

Monasteries were the main centres of literacy and book production in early medieval Europe and Lindisfarne was home to an outstanding scriptorium where monks ruined their eyesight producing books so intricately illuminated that later generations thought them the work of angels. Of all the monasteries in Britain only the Scottish monastery of Iona rivalled Lindisfarne’s reputation for sanctity. The relics of Lindisfarne’s many saints were its greatest treasures and the foundation of its reputation for holiness. Kings, seeking the monks’ prayers and the intercession of the saints for the benefit of their peoples’ and their own, usually rather sinful, souls gave the monastery generous grants of land. Visiting pilgrims seeking miraculous cures and spiritual merit made their lesser donations. Lindisfarne became wealthy as well as spiritually powerful. This wealth was displayed for the glory of God: silk vestments for the priests, gold and silver communion vessels, crucifixes, croziers, reliquaries and book covers all encrusted with precious stones. The monastery would inevitably have attracted merchants and craftsmen to cater for the monks’ needs for food, clothing, vellum for writing, and precious objects for display. And all this was completely undefended. No wonder it was attractive to the Vikings. Perhaps most valuable of all were the many healthy, well-fed, unarmed monks who they could be confident would fetch a good price at the slave market.

Divine retribution

It is difficult today to understand exactly how shocking this attack was: even the reaction to the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington DC, which robbed Americans of their sense of invulnerability, falls short as a comparison. Americans may trust in God but they do not make Him responsible for their defence policy: early medieval Christians did. Belief in the power of the saints to intercede with God to protect their holy places was absolute. All over Europe monasteries were completely undefended and, certainly, no Christian would have dared risk divine retribution by violating them. The monks of Lindisfarne must have been aware of the danger of Viking attack. About four years earlier three ships from Hordaland in western Norway attacked the port of Portland in the south of England, killing a royal official called Beaduheard, the earliest known casualty of a Viking raid. It is likely that there had been other, unrecorded raids on England too, because the powerful Mercian king Offa ordered the preparation of coast defences for Kent in 792. Yet such was their confidence in God’s protection that still they took no precautions. Of course, as pagans, the Vikings felt no qualms about attacking monasteries, that was the kind of behaviour to be expected of barbarians, but why had God not punished them for their sacrilegious act? This, more than the raid itself, was what really frightened Christians. ‘What assurance can the churches of Britain have,’ asked Alcuin, ‘if St Cuthbert and so great a company of saints do not defend their own?’ Alcuin felt defenceless.

In reality Alcuin was in no immediate physical danger – he was teaching in the school at the Frankish emperor Charlemagne’s palace at Aachen in Germany – but like all medieval Christians he believed that even the mightiest empires existed only as long as they enjoyed the favour of God. This was what was understood to have been the fate of the Roman Empire. God had permitted its creation to make the spread of Christianity easier but it was a sinful state and when it had served its purpose, God allowed it to fall. Alcuin’s response was, therefore, not to see the Viking raid as a military problem but as a moral problem. When God allowed bad things to happen to His followers it was His just chastisement for their sins. Alcuin wrote to the survivors of the raid urging them to examine their own conduct. Wealth, he thought, might have led the monks to relax monastic discipline by eating and drinking to excess, wearing fine clothes and neglecting to care for the poor. Northumbria’s king Æthelred also came in for even harsher criticism for allowing injustice and immorality to flourish under his rule. ‘A country has no better protection,’ Alcuin said, ‘than the justice and goodness of its leaders and the prayers of the servants of God.’ He reminded Æthelred that just one prayer from the good and just Hebrew king Hezekiah secured the destruction of 185,000 Assyrians in a single night. If Æthelred would just reform his ways, and those of his subjects, God would surely smite the Vikings in the same way.

The next year, Vikings attacked another prestigious Northumbrian monastery, Jarrow, once home to the Venerable Bede (d. 735), England’s earliest historian. This time the Vikings were not so lucky: local forces captured and killed their leader and a storm wrecked their fleet as it tried to escape. Those survivors who made it ashore were quickly slaughtered by the angry locals. A just punishment, gloated the monkish chroniclers, but this impressive manifestation of the power of the saints did not deter the Vikings. In 795, Vikings plundered in Scotland and Ireland, sacking Iona and another monastery on the island of Rechru off the Irish coast. In 799, Vikings extended their activities to the Frankish Empire for the first time. It would be more than 200 years before the people of Western Europe could look out to sea and see a sail on the horizon without at least a frisson of fear. Was that a Viking longship?

In the short term, however, life on Lindisfarne soon returned to normal. Many monks, including the bishop Higbald, survived the attack, so too did the monastery’s precious relics and many of its other treasures, such as the magnificent intricately ornamented
Lindisfarne
Gospels
, now displayed in the British Library in London. It is likely that the monks had at least some warning of the attack and managed to hide many of the monastery’s valuables – a small rocky hill nearby, now occupied by a castle, would have made a fine look-out point. As Alcuin makes no mention of burning or wanton destruction, the monastic buildings may have escaped undamaged and the community was re-established within the year. It is even possible that the kidnapped monks eventually made it home. Alcuin wrote to Higbald to tell that him that Charlemagne would try to ransom the captured monks: we don’t know if he succeeded. After the failure of the attack on Jarrow, no further Viking raids against England are recorded for over thirty years. That does not mean that there weren’t any. In 804, the monks of Lyminge in Kent, a few miles inland from the Channel coast, took the precaution of acquiring a refuge in the relative security of nearby Canterbury. Five years later, Vikings audaciously captured the papal legate Ealdwulf at sea while returning to the Continent from a mission to Northumbria. Recognising that they had captured someone of importance, the Vikings immediately took Ealdwulf back to England where the Mercian king Coenwulf paid his ransom. However, a few small-scale raids around the coast were trivial affairs compared to the many battles recorded in this period between the four Anglo-Saxon kingdoms, Northumbria, Mercia, East Anglia and Wessex. The rivalry was most intense between Mercia and Wessex, each of which aspired to be recognised as the dominant kingdom of Britain. Their rivalry culminated in 825 with the great battle of Ellandun in Wiltshire, at which King Egbert of Wessex defeated King Beornwulf of Mercia and became recognised as
Bretwalda
, an ill-defined title probably signifying ‘overlord of Britain’.

The raids intensify

The 830s saw a step-change in the nature of the Viking threat to England. The attack on Portland in 789 involved just three ships and was a classic example of what the Vikings called
strandhögg
, ‘hit and run’. It is likely that this was typical of early Viking raids. Then, in 836, a fleet of twenty-five or thirty-five Danish ships (sources disagree about the number) arrived in the west of England. King Egbert gathered an army and met them in battle at Carhampton in Somerset. Both sides fought hard but in the end it was the Anglo-Saxons who broke and, as the
Anglo-Saxon
Chronicle
put it, ‘the Danes had possession of the place of slaughter’. The Anglo-Saxons soon had the opportunity for revenge. In 838 a Danish fleet arrived in Cornwall, which at that time was an independent Celtic kingdom. Egbert had devoted much of his reign to trying to conquer the Cornish, so, not surprisingly, they welcomed the Danes as allies and together they planned to attack Wessex. Egbert moved fast, however, and attacked first, defeating the alliance at the Battle of Hingston Down. It was Egbert’s last victory. He died the next year, having made Wessex the leading Anglo-Saxon kingdom and set a precedent of effective resistance to the Vikings that his successors would exploit.

In 850 there came another escalation in Viking activity when a Danish army occupied the Isle of Thanet in Kent and settled down to spend the winter there in a fortified camp. So far raiding had been a seasonal activity, confined to the summer months, and by September the Vikings were heading home to avoid getting caught at sea by autumn gales. By wintering in their victims’ territory, Vikings could extend the raiding season into the autumn and make an earlier start the following spring. Spring 851 saw the arrival of a new Viking fleet in Kent. Reported to be 350 ships strong, this was by far the largest Viking fleet to attack England so far. This formidable force sacked Canterbury, England’s premier ecclesiastical centre, and then the growing port of London. Mercia’s king Beorhtwulf brought the Vikings to battle but was heavily defeated. Buoyed by their success, the Vikings crossed the Thames and invaded Wessex, only to be defeated in battle at the unidentified location of
Aclea
(‘Oak Field’). It was the greatest slaughter of heathen raiders the Anglo-Saxon chronicler had ever heard of.

In the same year Æthelstan, a son of King Æthelwulf of Wessex, defeated a Viking fleet in a naval battle at Sandwich harbour and captured nine ships. Naval battles were exceptionally rare in the Viking Age. Ships of the period could not remain at sea for extended periods to patrol for enemy fleets so the chances of intercepting a Viking fleet on the open sea was negligible. Naval battles, when they did occur, usually took place when one fleet managed to trap another in a harbour or estuary, as Æthelstan’s seems to have done here. These victories bought England only a year’s respite and in 853 the Vikings were back on the Isle of Thanet. Yet despite the unrelenting raids, Æthelwulf of Wessex felt that his kingdom was secure enough for him to go on a year-long journey to Rome to visit the pope in 855, taking with him his favourite youngest son, Alfred. The Vikings were a severe nuisance but they were not, so far, seen as an existential threat.

The Viking way of war

After more than half a century of Viking raids, the Anglo-Saxons appeared to be meeting the Viking challenge. True, many important towns had been sacked but they would certainly have been well aware of how much more severely Ireland and the Frankish Empire were suffering at the Vikings’ hands. The Anglo-Saxons had never run away from a fight and when they had brought the Vikings to battle they had won more often than they had lost. Despite their ferocious reputation, Vikings were not invincible military supermen. Their weapons were no better than those of the Anglo-Saxons or Franks and nor did they use innovative battle tactics. On a battlefield it would have been hard to tell the Anglo-Saxons and Vikings apart. Both fought on foot and relied on the shield and spear as their main weapons, and both formed up for battle in a linear formation known as the shield wall, in which each warrior stood in rank with his shield slightly overlapping that of the man next to him. Depending on the size of the army, the formation could be several ranks deep, with the men in the rear ranks adding weight to the formation when it came to the pushing and shoving when battle was joined, and stepping forward to fill the front rank when men were cut down. It was essential to maintain the integrity of the shield wall. The critical point of many battles came when one side began to lose its nerve and tried to withdraw. If the shield wall remained intact the defeated army could withdraw in good order to lick its wounds without suffering heavy casualties. If the shield wall collapsed it was every man for himself and casualties would be heavy because the victors could strike the exposed backs of their fleeing enemies.

The real secret to the Vikings’ success was their mobility, which meant that they, rather than the defenders, usually held the initiative. In pre-modern times, travel by water was always faster than travel by land. Viking longships had only a shallow draught so a raiding fleet could make a landing almost anywhere on the open coast or penetrate far inland on rivers. If they found local forces alert and waiting, the Vikings could just move on and try somewhere else, and sooner or later they would catch somebody off guard. When that happened, the Vikings could plunder and be well away before sufficient local forces could gather to oppose them. By collecting their forces to oppose the Vikings in one place, the defenders necessarily left other areas exposed to attack. This tended to undermine the defence. In most western European kingdoms, the Scandinavian kingdoms included, adult free men had to perform levy service when called out by their lords or kings. Men willingly turned out when a campaign involved invading a neighbouring state because of the opportunities for plunder that it brought: the Vikings were not at all unique in early medieval Europe in seeing war as an opportunity to profit. In contrast, defensive campaigns brought no such benefits to offset the risks and costs of war, and men were also naturally reluctant to leave their own families and farms unprotected. As a result, the call to arms often went unanswered.

Full-scale battles were relatively rare in the Viking Age. Thanks to their mobility, Vikings could generally avoid fighting if they thought the odds were unfavourable to them. However, the pay-off from victory could be very high so Vikings were not shy about fighting when it suited them. Plundering could most efficiently be done by splitting an army up into smaller bands to rove widely over the countryside. However, such bands were always vulnerable to being picked off by local forces. If the defender’s army could be engaged and decisively defeated first, the Vikings were free to plunder unhindered. Apart from loot, and a strong hand when it came to negotiating tribute payments with the vanquished, victory in battle also enhanced a Viking leader’s reputation, securing the loyalty of his warriors and attracting new ones. Conversely, the defenders were acutely aware of the awful consequences of defeat. Just maintaining an army in the field at least inhibited Viking activity, so the defenders were usually more cautious about seeking battle than the Anglo-Saxons. This may seem a cowardly strategy, but they had a lot more to lose than the Vikings so it was often safer to pursue a policy of damage limitation than to risk everything on a battle.