Norsemen Abroad in Viking Age England

2021-06-05

How the Viking Age Norse in England

The Viking Age – Anglocentrically defined as the period between the years 793 and 1066 – is characterized by an increase in Norse raiding, trading, and settling across Europe and beyond. Of these factors raiding has long received the most attention and has thus been at the heart of the popular conception of medieval Scandinavians. Though the broader public has begun to understand that pointed helmets belong to Hägar the Horrible and Wagner, the medieval Norse are still seen as savage heathen pirates. Non-Norse Scandinavians such as the Sámi are wholly erased, of course. As most popular conceptions of things, it isn’t terribly accurate. However, it has much in common with English Viking Age accounts of Norse activities, which goes a long way to explaining why this conception of the Viking Age Norse is so pervasive. In this post I want to raise some under-represented dimensions of the Norse presence in England during the Viking Age.

Martyrdom of St. Edmund of England - Edmund, tied to a tree, is shot at by Norse archers. He is riddled with arrows. From the Miscellany on the Life of St. Edmund, a twelfth century manuscript.

Here we see King Edmund of East Anglia bearing striking resemblance to a pincushion, much to the amusement of some dastardly Norse archers. This illustration is from the twelfth century Miscellany on the Life of St. Edmund MS M.736 fol. 14r.

In the very English accounts of the horrible heathen pirates, represented across the centuries in writings from Alcuin of York, Alfred the Great’s court, archbishop Wulfstan II and others, the Norse presence in England was seen as an apocalyptic menace sent by God to punish the sinful English. It is not surprising that military forces ransacking lightly defended and very wealthy monastic centres as well as draining the royal coffers with ransom-demands would be represented as such. In texts such as the Passion of St. Edmund or the Battle of Maldon vikings slay the noble champions of England, leaving them leaderless, while the appeasement policies of Æthelred II are described as only resulting in an increase in ransom demands from the Norse armies. Going by these sources one is able to construct a picture of Norse activities in England which boils down to plain hostility and cartoonish antagonism. Not to say that these elements aren’t a part of the overall picture, just that it leaves out some significant details.

Norse contacts with the English weren’t universally hostile. Part of the activity of the Great Heathen Army - a large viking force active across England from 865-878 - in England was settlement, recorded in several Anglo-Saxon Chronicle entries and preserved in archaeological and toponymical findings. Of these settlements Jórvík, or York, is probably best known. England’s -thorpe’s and -by’s owe their provenance to Norse settlement in those areas, preserved to present day. The Norse were settling down, starting a farm, and then letting their English-speaking neighbours know what their new place was called. Old Norse vocabulary made its way into English, giving us Modern English terms like “reindeer”, “reef” and “maelstrom” – the sort of words one would expect seafaring Norsemen to pass on to landlubbing Englishmen who’ve never seen nor heard of a reindeer. The initial hostility gave way to coexistence and integration. Alfred the Great of Wessex and the viking King Guthrum of East Anglia established peaceful relations and defined the boundaries of their respective territories, conditions for trade, and the payment of wergilds – blood money – for killings regardless of whether the victim was English or Norse. Generally speaking, it’s good practice to have an agreement with your neighbor on how to resolve issues like what to do when Edgar stabs your uncle Egil in the back.

When Alfred’s successor Edward the Elder and his sister Æthelflæd conquered the parts of England under Norse rule, the Norse in those areas weren’t driven out or reduced to second class citizens. Even during Alfred’s reign some individual Norsemen were present in his kingdom, such as Ohthere of Hålogaland, whose accounts of his own journeys in Scandinavia are recorded in the Old English Orosius, an English vernacular adaptation of the fifth century priest and historian Paulus Ororius’ Seven books of History Against the Pagans. Despite the recent bad blood between the Norse and English, there seems to have been a desire in the English court to get to know a little more about the homeland of their new neighbours. Following Edward and Æthelflæd’s conquests some of the Norse elites who submitted to their rule were able to retain their positions, and these territories maintained certain separate Norse legal concepts, such as wapentakes in place of hundreds, even whilst under English rule. In the English church individuals of Norse ancestry could also rise to prominence, particularly in the North, such as Oswald of Worcester, who was Archbishop of York from 972 to 992. When in the early eleventh century Danish kings Sweyn and his son Cnut gained control of England, the number of Norse and Anglo-Scandinavian magnates in England increased further, and they continued to have a presence even after the succession of Edward the Confessor of the House of Wessex to the throne in 1042. Vikings ransacked England at various periods of the Viking Age, but the Norse presence in England meant more than plunder and pillage.

The shocking and graphic descriptions of viking violence in contemporary English accounts from the Viking Age have long dominated the perception of the medieval Norse as a whole. However, it is worth considering that it was Norse settlement, trade, and rule in England which had more lasting impacts on English history than their raiding and warring. Beyond the polemics of preachers and the propaganda of the royal court, for much of the Viking Age the Norse presence in England was one of gradual adaptation and integration.