Empires and Barbarians (78 page)

The identity of these kings has been much debated, but they were probably brothers – Ivar the Boneless and Olaf the White – who from 866 switched their attentions to England, where, as we shall see in a moment, they started a further dangerous escalation in the level of Viking assault with the help of perhaps a third brother, Healfdan. Although this has been disputed, it is also likely that they came to the British Isles directly from Scandinavia in the 850s, and did not originate in Scotland and/or the Hebrides as has sometimes been claimed. More legendary material, preserved only in much later sources written down over two hundred years after the events, also suggests that the three were sons of Ragnar Lothbrok (‘Hairy Breeches’), whose death in the snake pit of King Aelle of Northumbria, after a spectacular career of destruction in which he mistakenly sacked the Italian city of Luni thinking it was Rome, is said to have inaugurated the Viking conquest of England. None of this is at all likely, but the Ragnar of legend may indeed preserve some memory of Reginharius of Paris fame, and the importance of Ivar, Olaf and Healfdan requires them to have been from a very significant family. So they could well have been Reginharius’ sons, but the Reginharius of history didn’t die in Aelle’s snake pit. He met his end at the court of Horik King of Denmark, where St Germain is said to have struck him down in revenge for sacking his monastery.
⁸
If so, this would ruin the motif of revenge that the sagas used to explain the brothers’ assault on Northumbria, but, in the broader scheme of things, even the family ties of Ivar, Olaf and Healfdan are of only passing significance. Their real importance lies in the new era of Viking activity inaugurated by their arrival on the British mainland.

This process of intensification culminated in the 860s when the violent conquest of entire Anglo-Saxon kingdoms was achieved by Viking forces, largely Danish in origin, labelled ‘Great Armies’ (in Anglo-Saxon,
micel here
). The first Great Army gathered in the kingdom of East Anglia in winter 866/7, extracting horses and supplies from its hosts. In 867, it attacked Northumbria, taking advantage of a succession struggle that had divided the military capacities of the kingdom and set them behind two contenders, Osbert and Aelle. The two kings eventually united, but by then it was too late. The Vikings broke into the city of York and killed them both. In 868, spurred on by this success, the Great Army turned its attentions on Mercia, but were driven back by the combined forces of Mercia and Wessex. This setback did not prevent the conquest of East Anglia in 870, and subsequent long-drawn-out campaigns eventually led to a further victory over Mercia in 874.

Wessex under King Alfred now became the target, but a further four years of war, culminating in his great victory at Edington in 878, saw him preserve its independence – if only just. The critical moment came in winter 877/8 when the Vikings took Alfred by surprise and stormed into the heart of his kingdom. This was when he hid himself on the island of Athelney and famously burned the cakes while deciding how best to retrieve the situation. In spring, cakes notwithstanding, Alfred bounced back, concentrating his forces to win his famous victory. In the aftermath of Edington, the Viking leader Guthrum accepted Christian baptism, then retreated into East Anglia. Alfred’s victory drew a boundary around the area of Danish conquest in England, but could not prevent the distribution of the landed spoils won by the earlier victories. Either side of Edington, in separate groups, the Vikings shared parts of Northumbria among themselves in 876, and parts of Mercia in 877. Guthrum’s followers did the same with East Anglia in 880. Danelaw was born.
⁹

One important factor in Alfred’s success lay in the fact that the Viking forces had turned to Wessex last. All the so-called Great Armies were coalitions. This was what made them ‘great’. The first, of 865, for instance, was created by an alliance of the kings who may or may not all have been sons of Ragnar, together with more forces, some of
them substantial and under independent leaders of second rank, called
jarls
(Norse equivalent of ‘earl’). By 878 and the attack on Wessex, some of these constituent elements had either dropped out of the action or were continuing only half-heartedly, since the land-grabbing in Northumbria in 876 and Mercia in 877 meant that some of them – those who had already received land – now had much to lose. But Edington just rang the bell on round one of the Great Army era. Some of the constituent parts of the first Great Army – and there had been plenty of comings and goings since 866 (a subject we will return to shortly) – may have been left out of the land distributions. And more Vikings, encouraged no doubt by the army’s successes, soon came to join them. The
Anglo-Saxon Chronicle
notes the arrival of a particularly large new force, which overwintered on the Thames at Fulham – then outside London proper, of course – in 879/80.

All of these new Vikings, together with all those who had not so far satisfied their expectations, were still ready to fight. But with opportunities in England being shut down by a combination of the resurgence of Wessex under King Alfred’s leadership, the land distributions themselves, and Guthrum’s commitment after Edington to help keep the peace, it is hardly surprising that they had to look elsewhere. Frankish sources record the renewal of large-scale Scandinavian activities on the continent from the spring of 880.

In that year, the Fulham arrivistes departed from England in search of new areas of profit. The political situation on the continent looked particularly promising. Three kingdoms had eventually been carved out of Charlemagne’s Frankish Empire for his grandsons: a western kingdom controlled by Charles the Bald, the middle kingdom of the eldest, Lothar (Lotharingia), and the eastern kingdom of Louis the German. Lothar’s son had died childless, leaving the middle kingdom without its own ruler; Charles and Louis were quarrelling over the spoils. With a ready eye for an opportunity, the returning Vikings concentrated their attention on the coastal zone of northern Lotharingia, what is now Belgium and Holland, and the extremities of the eastern and western kingdoms. In 880, an initial success went to the Franks. One group of Vikings on the Scheldt was defeated by Louis the German, who inflicted on them losses of more than five thousand dead. Another Viking group further east, in Saxony, was more successful, though, killing two bishops and twelve counts, together with many
of their followers. But the main Viking successes in subsequent years were to come in the Low Countries, the old heartlands of Lotharingia.

In 881, despite a defeat said to have cost it nine thousand dead, the Great Army pillaged Cambrai, Utrecht and Charlemagne’s great palace at Aachen, as well as burning Cologne and Bonn. Once again, this was a composite force led by three Scandinavian kings – Godfrid, Sigfrid and Gorm. The ageing Louis the German was now too ill to intervene, dying on 20 January 882. Hence it was under Louis’s last surviving son, Charles the Fat, that Frankish forces gathered in that same year. Charles decided to echo the policy of Alfred of Wessex, making a treaty with Godfrid which included his conversion to Christianity, presumably hoping to divide and rule the Viking forces. The policy worked well enough for three years, despite Viking attacks up the Scheldt in 883 and up the Somme to Amiens in 884. At that point, the ruler of west Francia was killed while out hunting. This encouraged the Vikings to attack in greater force, and in 885 was enough to make Godfrid break his treaty. Godfrid was quickly disposed of, but Viking forces enjoyed extensive success further west, moving inland in great numbers, beyond Paris and as far as Rheims in 886 and 887. Dissension within the Frankish kingdom prevented any effective response until 891, when Arnulf, the illegitimate grandson of Louis the German and King of east Francia (who had deposed his uncle Charles the Fat in 887), caught a large Danish army in their fortifications on the River Dyle close to Louvain in modern Belgium. The Franks stormed the fortifications and inflicted a massive defeat on their enemy, killing two kings and capturing sixteen royal standards.
¹⁰

Frankish resurgence had the same effect – in reverse – as Alfred’s successes a decade earlier. With no more easy pickings on the continent, much of the continental Great Army headed back to England, where the 880s had been quiet apart from one abortive attack on Rochester in 886. But Alfred had always understood that the Viking threat had been parried, rather than defeated. Throughout the 880s, the
Anglo-Saxon Chronicle
noted where the Viking armies were operating in each particular year, giving a strong sense that they were being watched with trepidation. And with huge urgency, Alfred inaugurated a programme of defensive building, which established a series of fortified centres –
burhs
– throughout his kingdom. His policies not only built the refuges, but organized their garrisons and revamped the
field army as well. In the 860s and 870s the first Great Army had been able to march unmolested across England, covering large distances in a short space of time. The fortresses changed all this. They were not easy to capture, and could not be left unsubdued in an army’s rear, since they contained an armed garrison that could conduct harassing operations. Alfred’s plan was clearly to tie up and wear down any attacking Viking force, before fighting a pitched battle with his new field army, if and when he so chose.

It worked pretty much to perfection. Again, as in the 860s and 870s, the returning Viking armies of the 890s came in several groups. One force of over two hundred ships landed in east Kent, fortifying a base at Appledore, while a second force landed not far away in the Thames estuary, establishing itself at Milton Royal near Sittingbourne. Even though some of the Danes of Danelaw made common cause with the newcomers, three years of campaigning brought the Scandinavians little reward, and the contrast with the first Great Army is very striking. Whereas it had marched the length and breadth of England, and could even, as in winter 877/8, penetrate freely into the heart of the Wessex kingdom, the second failed to win the pitched battles against Alfred’s revamped field armies, and its attempted raids lost all momentum because of a mixture of counterattack and failed sieges. As a result it was largely confined to the fringes of Wessex – parts of Kent and Essex – and worn down too by shortages of supply. Generals are famous throughout history for coming unstuck by basing their plans for future wars on how to fight the last one, but in Alfred’s case the wars were close enough in time and character for the planning to pay off. As the
Anglo-Saxon Chronicle
reports, ‘afterwards, in the summer of this year [896], the Danish army divided, one force going into East Anglia, and one into Northumbria; and those that were moneyless got themselves ships and went south across the sea to the Seine’.
¹¹

The main action then switched back to the continent, where those Vikings who had failed to make enough money to settle in England were joined by further reinforcements. By the late ninth century, the Viking presence in Ireland had evolved into a limited number of fortified coastal enclaves, the major ones being Limerick, Wexford, Waterford and, above all, Dublin. In the last decade of the century, the Irish kings united against even this limited presence. The separate Viking forces of Limerick, Wexford and Waterford were all defeated
individually, and in 902 even the Dublin Vikings were thrown out of their stronghold. Some of the refugees settled on the Isle of Man and the west coast of the British Isles, not least in Cumbria and Wales. But the expelled Irish Vikings probably also contributed to the events that now unfolded in northern France.
¹²

Unfortunately, the continental sources become much too fragmentary at this point to reconstruct a historical narrative. Even annalistic sources like the
Anglo-Saxon Chronicle
tended to be written as celebratory pieces to preserve the deeds of kings, but the early tenth century was a period of great political fragmentation in western Francia, with the descendants of Charlemagne losing power in the regions to a whole series of more local lords. In this context, no one was writing connected history and the detailed progression of events is lost to us.

We do know, though, that substantial Viking inroads were made. The independent kingdom of Brittany was submerged beneath Viking attack in the 910s, some of its political leadership fleeing to the court of Wessex in search of asylum. Viking control then continued in Brittany for twenty years, until the native dynasty reasserted itself in 936 under Alan II. This Viking interlude had virtually no lasting impact upon place names, but did generate the wonderful pagan ship burial found at Île-de-Groux (Plate 24). Faced with this kind of pressure around the northern and western fringes of his domains, the King of the Franks resorted to an old stratagem. In 911, land in and around the port of Rouen at the mouth of the Seine was granted to a Viking leader by the name of Rollo. From his line and this settlement would eventually evolve the Duchy of Normandy. A second Viking settlement was licensed at Nantes in 921, at the mouth of the Loire, although this one lasted for only sixteen years. Both settlements were designed to establish tame Viking leaders who would help control the greater Viking threat. But such settlements were only part of the story. In the same era, other Viking groups were establishing themselves on the Cotentin peninsula and upper Normandy around Bayeux. What we don’t know, and probably never will, is which particular Viking groups from England and Ireland contributed to the settlements at Rouen and Nantes, and whether there were still more Vikings coming directly from Scandinavia at this time.

These, however, are essentially matters of detail. A combination of forced and licensed settlements in England, Ireland and northern France in the first two decades of the tenth century tied down most of
the armed drifters from Scandinavia who had arrived in the west at the tail end of the ninth.
¹³