The Edge of the World: How the North Sea Made Us Who We Are (14 page)

Viking women were even more extraordinary:
famous for sex, ruthlessness and such military skill that their own lovers did not
recognize them in armour. They could make up their own minds, and act accordingly, even
when it came to staying married. In the port town of Schleswig, the merchant Ibr‚hīm ibn
Ya‘qūb reported in 965 that ‘women take the initiative in divorce
proceedings. They can separate from their husbands whenever they choose.’
³⁴
It
sounds as though divorce was not much more than a formal declaration in front of
witnesses. Naturally, independence in women made men think women must be wonderfully
loose. ‘None of their women,’ an optimist said, ‘would refuse herself
to a man.’

They might also be considered fighters, at
least in legend and story. In various poems Gudrun avenges her dead brothers, not least
because, as she says, ‘we were three brothers and a sister, we seemed to be
unconquerable … we hastened our ships on, each of us captained one, we roamed
where our fate led us.’
³⁵
Women might dress to look like men
and train as soldiers; they ‘aimed at conflicts instead of kisses’ according
to Saxo Grammaticus in his twelfth-century
History of the Danes
.
³⁶
‘They devoted hands to the lance which they should rather have applied to the
loom,’ he wrote, censoriously. He told the alarming story of Alvid, who really did
not want to marry a man called Alf, turned pirate to get away, and was elected captain
when she happened
upon a pirate crew mourning
their dead leader and in need of a new one; she ‘enrolled in her service many
maidens who were of the same mind’. When she met Alf in battle, it was only when
her helmet was knocked off that he realized ‘he must fight with kisses and not
with arms’. Saxo, a very conventional cleric, reports that Alf later laid hands on
her more lovingly and they had a daughter.
³⁷

A woman’s choice might, just
sometimes, even affect the all-important business of family, inheritance and honour. A
daughter could choose to count as a son, and act as a son, if her father had no sons to
compete with her. In Icelandic tradition, Hervör grows up playing well with weapons,
robbing people while dressed as a man, and captaining an otherwise male band of Vikings.
All this begins because of a slight to her honour: a slave who dared to say her father
was a slave. She wants to fight with the family sword, and she argues with her
father’s ghost for the right to use it. The sagas say her father agreed, and
wished her very well: ‘I wish you twelve men’s lives.’ Storytellers,
guardians of tradition, saw nothing very wrong at all with what Hervör wanted. She was
unusual enough for a story, but what she did was thinkable.
³⁸

In 789 a royal official called Beaduherd,
who happened to be in Dorchester at the time, heard that three foreign ships had come
into the harbour at Portland in the English Channel. The law said anyone landing had to
come to town at once and declare how many men were with him, so Beaduherd galloped down
to meet them, ‘thinking that they were merchants rather than enemies’ as
Æthelweard’s
Chronicle
says; merchants were nothing new close to the
great trading emporium at Hamwic, which stood where Southampton now stands.

But Beaduherd was wrong. As the
Chronicle
says: ‘He was slain on the spot by them.’
³⁹

There is another version in the
Anglo-Saxon Chronicle
, which insists he had no idea who was waiting for
him, nor what they were, which is why he wanted them to come as quickly as possible to
the king’s town of Dorchester to identify themselves; but the chronicles all agree
on the killing. ‘These were the first ships of the Danish men which sought out the
land of the English race.’
⁴⁰

Three years later, the skies opened over Northumbria,
‘there were immense flashes of lightning and fiery dragons were seen flying in the
air and there immediately followed a great famine’.
⁴¹
A Viking fleet out
of Norway assembled at its summertime bases in the Orkneys, freebooters with no official
orders. Most of them were planning to sail round Cape Wrath and down to the Hebrides,
but a splinter group went down the east coast of Scotland, looking for soft targets.
⁴²
They
came ashore at the monastery of Lindisfarne, with its rich shrines and its treasury of
gifts from the devout. ‘The raiding of heathen men,’ the
Chronicle
says, ‘miserably devastated God’s church in Lindisfarne island by looting
and slaughter.’
⁴³

The Vikings – and their reputation – had
arrived.

Alcuin of York knew what this meant: his
whole history, the Saxon people coming to England and the triumph of his Christian
faith, was rapidly going to fall apart. Alcuin was settled in the very heart of the
court of Charlemagne, which was the very heart of power in Europe; he was scholar and
cleric and adviser, ‘the most learned man anywhere to be found’, according
to Einhard’s
Life of Charlemagne
. When Alcuin heard the news from
Lindisfarne, he wrote to Ethelred, King of Northumbria: ‘it is three hundred and
fifty years now that we and our fathers have settled in this lovely land, and never was
such terror seen before in Britain, such suffering at the hands of the heathen.’
He mourned ‘the church of St Cuthbert splattered with blood, treasures pillaged,
the heathen despoiling the most holy place in Britain’.
⁴⁴
To Higbaldus, the
Bishop of Lindisfarne, Alcuin wrote again of his horror that ‘the heathen defiled
God’s holy places, and spilled the blood of saints all around the altar, destroyed
the house of our hopes. They trod on the bodies of the saints in God’s temple like
they were treading on shit in the open street.’
⁴⁵

A few years earlier, he’d casually
asked an Anglo-Saxon friend ‘what hope there is of the conversion of the
Danes?’
⁴⁶
Now he was looking at the Danes and the Norsemen as the
unconverted, undoubted enemy. The Danes clearly meant to change the world, and if they
did, it must be because they were heathen. They burned and killed, ruined monasteries
and churches, just because they could do nothing else to stop the advance of Christ.

The logic is very particular. Alcuin tried to console
Higbaldus that ‘the more God punishes you, the more he loves you’, that even
Jerusalem had fallen once and so had Rome; so the attacks meant that Higbaldus was
right. Alcuin thought other people’s sins had caused the problem in the first
place, he worried about incest and adultery and fornication flooding the land,
⁴⁷
but
more than anything he worried about the Church, how the Church in Britain was ‘to
keep its self-esteem when St Cuthbert and such a number of saints do not defend
it’. He tried to enthuse Higbaldus: ‘Be manly, fight strongly, defend the
places where God has settled.’ To missionaries, after all, God is also a migrant,
moving to new territory and liable to challenge from even more recent newcomers like the
Vikings.

He was also very concerned about manliness,
about modesty, about propriety. In his next letter to Higbaldus he denounces excess and
display and he insists that ‘vanity in dress is not fitting for men’.
⁴⁸
He
wants a plain kind of virility, able to fight to keep the successes of the past
centuries, able to be moderately Viking in face of the Viking menace. But this virility
cannot simply be a military matter. Alcuin also wrote to a priest from Lindisfarne who
had been captured by the Northmen and then ransomed, and told him he should move away
from the ‘din of arms’ and practise solitary prayer.
⁴⁹
Piety was a
weapon.

The next year Offa, King of Mercia, gave the
churches of Kent all the privileges they could want, including their old freedom from
taxes, an exemption that went back at least as far as the laws of Wihtred, King of Kent,
in 695, whose first ruling was that ‘The church is to be free from
taxation.’
⁵⁰
This time, though, the Church had
to pay up in one situation that was very serious and very pressing: ‘expeditions
within Kent against the seafaring heathen, the fleet that moves from place to
place’. This ‘moving’ is not plain travel by sea; it is
‘migration’, and it means heathen who mean to settle.
⁵¹
Fighting those
heathen was written into grants of land for the next two hundred years; it was the
reason for granting the Abbess Selethryth land in Canterbury as a refuge, and a duty
mentioned even when a king was giving land to an archbishop in return for a gold
ring.
⁵²
The state was a state of war.

The Orkney fleet went through the Hebrides: ‘the
devastation of all the islands of Britain by gentiles’, as the
Annals of
Ulster
put it. They did not have everything their own way. In 796 a small fleet
put in to the estuary of the Tyne and went against the monastery at Jarrow but this time
the monks were ready for them. The Viking leaders were killed, the crews fled on board
their ships only to be forced ashore at Tynemouth and slaughtered.

For forty years, there were no more attacks
on England, but the enemy was not forgotten. There had to be a designated enemy that
could be judged and condemned, an opponent who could justify the righteous armies and
the Godly monarchs who had, as it happens, more or less the same habits and tactics. A
man could no more forget the Vikings than his own bloody image in a mirror.

The Church proposed a proper enemy,
daemonic, unconverted and bloody, the kind anyone could be proud to defeat or at least
unashamed to suffer, since being a martyr was most respectable. In the
Annals
,
the Vikings become just such an enemy, no longer a rival out after the same plunder and
advantage. Those records are known because they were kept in institutions which survived
century after century, monasteries or cathedrals, which had an interest in recording who
they were, what they did and what they owned; and which were so deeply entwined with
kings and states that at times they performed as a kind of bureaucracy when a ruler had
no way of organizing, let alone paying, his own. Official, useful to people’s
reputations and carefully conserved, their story blocks out all the other stories.

But consider what Charlemagne, enemy of the
Vikings, did, and his imperial successors. His armies had to be supported out of
whatever they could steal and whatever tribute they could demand; their loyalty was
bought with regular gifts of horses, silver, gold or arms. When there was a true
emergency like the Viking raids, the great Emperor found himself bidding and dealing
with the men who would fight for him and taking what he could get: cutting back on his
demands for military service from those who did not have much property, allowing minor
landowners to nominate just one of their
number to fight for them all. Such men, when they turned up,
had to be rewarded. In order to move fast they had no baggage train, which meant they
were so poorly supplied with basic goods that they ruined the lands they crossed in
order to keep eating; famously in 860, when three of the Emperor’s underlings met
at Koblenz, their armies were left to hang around for a while, and laid waste to a large
zone of perfectly friendly countryside. And like the Vikings, these armies loved easy
gold, and were ready to wreck other people’s holy places. They took gold and
silver from the great Saxon tree temple, the Irminsul, before burning it to the ground.
Once or twice they even managed to raid the Vikings back; in 885 a Frisian army beat off
a Viking band and found ‘such a mass of treasure in gold and silver and other
movables that all from the greatest to the least were made wealthy’.
⁵³

Consider Charlemagne’s habits and you
see the Vikings not as an assault but as another set of players in the same very violent
game. Norsemen demanded tribute; Charlemagne demanded not just tribute but also tithes
for the Church that was so closely allied with his power. Charlemagne raided across
borders just as Vikings did, plundered if he couldn’t stay long enough to demand
the regular payment of tribute, accepted tribute if he didn’t want to settle and
occupy the land. The difference lay in the way the Vikings ruled and used the sea.

Their raids began just as Charlemagne had
broken his most irritating neighbours, the Saxons: who made a habit (so his courtiers
said) of murder, robbery and arson; who were obstinately pagan and didn’t think
like Christians and were therefore unpredictable. They were a constant threat to the
Frankish need to control the Rhine and the trade which went up and down it. They seemed
to be on excessively good terms with various other peoples that the Franks were
determined to subdue, especially the Frisians. They also managed to organize their lives
without kings, and were rather proud of the fact; earlier Bede reported that they cast
lots when war was imminent to choose one lord whom everybody would obey for the
duration, but when war ended ‘the lords revert to equality of status’. That
was an affront to a man like Charlemagne who was very willing to be obeyed, and a
practical problem for a king who wanted to rule them.

By
800, Charlemagne had won so well he could even be a little magnanimous about recognizing
Saxon laws, but he also knew that he had to be more than a king to keep them in
line.
⁵⁴
On Christmas Day in Rome he went into pray before the tomb of St Peter
and the Pope put a crown on his head and the crowd wished him ‘life and
victory’ in his new rank with his new name: Augustus, Emperor of the Romans.
Charlemagne said (or at least his biographer Einhard said he said) he would never have
gone to church if he had known what was going to happen.