The Edge of the World: How the North Sea Made Us Who We Are (17 page)

Being raided, even ruined, was a matter of
routine for the holy
places. This may seem
curious in such a Christian society (and even the Vikings were beginning to convert),
but holiness was not the first thing anyone noticed about a monastery. Much more visible
were their close resemblances to towns, forts, strongrooms.

Monks were meant to live in a walled world,
according to the rule laid down by St Benedict, with gardens, water, mills and crafts
all within an enclosure so that they ‘may not be compelled to wander outside it,
for that is not at all expedient for their souls’. At its very heart would be the
holiest places, churches and relics; outside that, a ring of kilns and crafts and houses
for settlers and helpers, and outside that a kind of estate farmyard. The holy shape was
remarkably like the secular shape of a ringfort.
¹⁴
Monasteries were often set on rises
in the land, with solid walls and banks of earth with palisades on them, and ditches
that worked as moats. They often had round towers, which held their bells but also their
treasury of relics and valuable objects: a conspicuous safe place.

Communities grew around churches. The
southern district of the settlement at Armagh was a holy community, built around a
basilica housing relics, including a linen cloth soaked in the blood of Christ himself,
and a church for the clergy. The community had monks, clergy, nuns, but it also had a
married lay population and a separate church, in the north, for laypersons. It included
the sick, the disabled and children unwanted by their families. Monasteries grew into
holy villages, even a kind of town.

These communities had remarkable engineers.
The monastery at Clonmacnoise in the very heart of Ireland made kilometres of road
through bog which led to a bridge across the Shannon some 160 metres long and five
metres wide, wide enough for carts and animals as well as walkers and riders; and all
this was for monks and pilgrims.
¹⁵
At Nendrum on Strangford Lough,
they built millponds on the foreshore, held in place by embankments of stone and holly
branches, which filled with the high tide; and they built solid stone channels to carry
the rush of water down to the waterwheel which worked the millstone above. The first of
their tidal mills was built around 620; the tree rings in the timber prove the trees
were felled then, and the sapwood is in such good condition the timber must
have been used soon after felling. No
earlier tidal mills are known anywhere.
¹⁶

Kings had the right to billet their troops
on the population of a church, which says something about how much free space they had,
and the right to pasture animals on the monastic estates, which says something about how
well the space was protected. Monasteries were often tightly controlled by the family of
the founder, so they were dynastic. They were also belligerent: monasteries fought not
just the good fight but also each other. Long after clerics had all been exempted from
military service, in 845, two neighbouring abbots were both killed by the Danes in a
single battle, both in charge of small armies, conscripts but holy.

So far, so secular; but what made the
monasteries truly vulnerable was the safety they offered to other people. Their land was
sanctuary land: a fugitive could feel safe there. Offering sanctuary could be a
dangerous virtue; if enemies caught up, there was no great difference between burning
down a man’s house and burning down the church where he was taking shelter.
Churches were still mostly wooden – stone roofs were a kind of insurance that was first
taken out in the twelfth century – so the fire spread fast.

When kings were brawling or bandits were
about, the rule of sanctuary could make strongrooms out of the monasteries. Locals could
store their valuables, which also meant their herds; in 995 more than two thousand cows
were taken from a single monastery, which is more than any simple and holy community of
cheese-eaters could possibly need. There was often food stored inside the church; so
times of famine brought on plundering. All this was especially true of island
monasteries, which were hard to attack unless the water was frozen in a vicious winter:
attack an island, either swimming or on rafts, and you were always vulnerable to
counter-attack from the islanders, who knew exactly what they were doing.

There were Viking pirates who came ashore at
monasteries because they were supposed to be easy, and full of gilded shrines and lovely
jewels: like the raiders who killed St Blathmac. Their raids even had a kindly effect on
the local economy since the treasure went into circulation instead of staying near the
altars, and the church patrons had
to
replace what was stolen so their church would still have glory. But much more often, the
raiders were cattle rustlers or else slavers, looking for the same loot the Irish wanted
from their enemies; which is why the Irish, for all their talk of shock and blasphemy,
went on raiding just as often as Vikings, and the Vikings saw no reason to stop just
because they had converted to Christianity. The two sides even staged joint
operations.
¹⁷
Whatever Alcuin thought, faith was not the issue.

The Vikings were settling, in their way,
which did not prevent them taking over the territory of Picts across the water in
Scotland, then coming home to beat back an Irish attack, then going after the kingdom of
Strathclyde in south-west Scotland and coming back with magnificent plunder and almost
too many slaves for the market. They raided more monasteries. They feuded among
themselves. Some started settlements which had flocks and herds worth stealing, so
naturally they were stolen.

At the centre of all this was Dublin and the
claim of Dublin’s king to be the overlord of all the new settlements and trading
depots, like Waterford, and in time the overlord of all the Vikings in the British
Isles, even when his hold on Dublin itself was none too certain. The smaller centres
learned to resent this claim. Dublin was not much more than a waterfront row of houses
and storerooms, set carefully behind a palisaded embankment, but it was beginning to
look like a new kind of town: not an accident of a holy place, not built to hold a
chieftain and his people, but deciding and serving its own ends. It was a base for
trading, it was distinct from the territory around it. The first craftsmen and merchants
were moving in. The burial grounds held more and more women who had lived and died
there. You could make an urban business and an urban life. The needs of Norsemen, from a
place that hardly had towns at all, were helping to invent the town in Ireland.

They had post and wattle fences to mark the
boundaries between plots; which means that someone had the authority to divide up the
land. Around Dublin thickets of hazel trees were planted and tended in order to supply
the flexible branches that were woven to make the
walls of houses – simple buildings, one storey tall, the
roofs thatched. To get to them, you walked streets of small stones and gravel, which
mostly followed some natural contour like the crest of a hill. The houses stood end-on
to the street, which is a pattern familiar from the warehouses along the water at
Northern ports;
¹⁸
so when you found the entrance to the plot you wanted, you had to
walk straight through the first house on the plot if you were looking for someone in a
house that lay behind it. There must have been a careful etiquette for asking for
access, which means some sort of civility. There were still ports without towns, just
harbours ‘where more than one ship might come at once’,
¹⁹
but in places like
Waterford there would very soon be a recognizable town cramped on the shore.

Once settled, Dublin became a turntable for
the various Viking trades: goods coming in, goods going out, but also the booty from
raids which could be turned into cash to finance more-respectable business.
²⁰
Money
may explain why Norsemen ate their beef from cattle that were noticeably smaller than
the Irish herds, whether they raised the cows themselves or bought them from the Irish;
cattle were a practical source of food now, and no longer the obvious way to keep your
wealth. Silver, which the Vikings had in generous amounts, began to matter much more.
Coins were easier to tend than cows, easier to steal but far easier to hide, and useful
wherever you went.
²¹

Once Dublin was settled and secure in the
middle of the ninth century, the Vikings could start their settlements in Scotland. On
the offshore islands, the Norsemen found plenty of land compared to the narrow Norwegian
coast, and no armies to oppose them; there was even enough wood inland to build ships,
if ever they wanted to do that, and flocks to grow the wool that could be exported on
their ships. Women, men and children landed and stayed: ordinary persons. To the
Scottish islands, the newcomers brought money, weights and measures,
²²
so there are
Arab coins found on the Isle of Skye, merchant scales on the tiny island of Gigha.
²³
Farmers, raiders, pirates were all being drawn into the same world: the coastal world of
sailors.

Even fear began to change. Running from the
Vikings was still
seen as reasonable in
Ireland; it was one of the few acceptable excuses for breaking the Sabbath. The new and
greater fear, though, was of somehow not being able to tell the Norsemen from the Irish
any more. The Irish were anxious about the prospect of ‘an abbot from among them
over every church; / one from among them will assume / the kingship of Ireland.’
By 850 two kings already had suspiciously Norse names, and claiming to be an Irish king
was a very fluid business, after all, full of legend and counterclaims. Norsemen even
seemed to be acquiring Irish habits; Amlaíb, chief of Dublin, was in the business of
commissioning poems from the Irish poets (‘I bore off from him as the price of my
song,’ one wrote, ‘a horse of the horses of Achall’) and he was said
to pay up rather more reliably than some of his Norse colleagues.
²⁴

And yet the Vikings were never secure in
Ireland; their kingdom, even their empire, was always elsewhere or on the seas. Their
towns looked outwards. In 866 their ‘great heathen army’ broke into England
and took Eoforwic, which was a tiny town with a school, an archbishop and a port of
sorts: the religious centre for the kingdom of Northumbria. When they left, the town was
Jorvik, which became York: grown in less than a century to a thriving, stinking
city,
²⁵
all cesspits and middens and waste, where the hot-metal industries
were alive and thriving as they had not been since Roman times, smelting iron, silver
and gold, turning lead into glass. There were craftsmen making combs from bone or
antler, shoemakers and saddlers, jewellers working in amber and black jet. The scatter
of houses on open spaces had been organized into streets and plots, a new plan which
owed nothing to the Roman city on the same spot. The city also got its parish churches
in Viking times, or most of them, for Norsemen and archbishops alike wanted independence
from the English kingdoms, and power of their own, so they worked together. The
Archbishop of York was once besieged alongside the Norse king, Olaf, who was on a
murderous but profitable raid into England at the time; and this was when Olaf was still
a pagan, not yet baptized under English influence.
²⁶
The city had such a separate
character, a mix of Anglo and Scandinavian, that it was furiously resistant later to the
Norman invasion of England: Norsemen’s descendants against Norsemen’s
descendants.

King Alfred, the ninth-century English hero, recognized
other kings who were properly English but entirely subservient to the Danes;
‘puppets’, you could say. He tried to make a working relationship with the
Norse kingdom of East Anglia: each side acknowledging that the other had the power to
impose his own law, but both sides agreeing rules for the business of buying horses,
cattle or slaves. Churches did deals with the Danes over land, although sometimes the
deals were very circumstantial: the Abbot of Carlisle claimed he’d been visited in
a dream by St Cuthbert himself, told to buy a Danish slave called Guthred and make him
king, and then to ask King Guthred for the land that had once belonged to the
communities at Monkwearmouth and Jarrow and other monasteries which had been
extinguished. Even when the Anglo-Saxons took back the Danish lands, the Northerners
sometimes stayed put and had their tenure confirmed.
²⁷

For the moment the Vikings needed York as a
military base, but ‘they were ploughing’, according to the
Anglo-Saxon
Chronicle
for 876, ‘and were providing for themselves’.
²⁸
Just
as Dublin was pulling in craftsmen and merchants, laying out streets and defining zones
for industry, so in York the Viking influence made a city from a settlement.

A city means a choice of pleasures, some for
the belly. There were seeds of dill, celery, opium poppy and coriander: all kinds of
spices. There were puffball mushrooms to eat, a luxury out of the woods. There were bees
for honey, chickens scratching in yards, oysters in quantity and sometimes mussels,
cockles, winkles and whelks. There was herring and eel for everyday eating but there was
also cod and haddock from the seas, sturgeon and salmon; and the state of the bones
suggests that Vikings knew not to overcook fish.
²⁹
Wine came from the Rhine, soapstone
vessels from Scotland, even brooches made by Pictish craftsmen who somehow escaped the
various Viking slaughters of their countrymen. Through Denmark came the world: the
silver coins of Samarkand, the silks of Byzantium, the cowrie shell currency of the Red
Sea.

The base coins of Northumbrian times became
pennies rich in silver, coins which manage to muddle together the Viking sword, the
hammer of the god Thor and some
inspirational Christian messages. ‘The city is crammed beyond expression,’
the
Life of St Oswald
says, ‘and enriched with the treasures of merchants
who come from all parts, but above all from the Danish people.’
³⁰