The Edge of the World: How the North Sea Made Us Who We Are (16 page)

It was the Christians who wailed about this
in unison, and carried on wailing. It was as the Prophets had predicted, they said:
‘A scourge from the North will extend over all who dwell in the land.’ The
shrine and abbey at Iona had been raided in 795, and again in 802 and again in 806 when
sixty-eight of the monks were murdered; in 807 a fourth raid made the monastery move its
men to the comparative safety of Kells in inland Ireland. Jerusalem had fallen once
again; Rome had been sacked by the heathen; their shrine, their place, their culture had
been made to run away, and the worst was yet to come.

‘The innumerable multitude of the
Northmen grows incessantly,’ wrote Ermentar, the chronicler of Saint-Philibert de
Noirmoutier, around 855. ‘On every side Christians succumb to massacres, acts of
pillage, devastations, burnings whose manifest traces will remain as long as the world
endures.’
⁷¹
Three centuries later the
Liber
Eliensis
(Book of Ely) was still overexcited by the thought of how in 870 a
‘mob of evil ones’ reached ‘the monastery of virgins’ – the
convent and shrine at Ely on the edge of the English fens; ‘The sword of rabid men
is held out over milkwhite, consecrated necks.’ These things may not actually have
happened, but the rhetoric is real and once again the Vikings were very useful; their
inconvenient ravaging distracted the holy and was the reason monks and monasteries were
imperfect, or so later monks would claim.
⁷²

From across Europe, from an island in Lake
Constance, the monk Walahfrid Strabo (‘the squinter’) denounced the murder
of Blathmac, a monk with very serious connections (‘of a kingly line’).
⁷³
Blathmac had chosen to go to Iona, knowing very well that the ‘heathen mob of
Danes used to call there, armed with all the fury of their
evil’; he was a man who wanted the stigmata, and even
martyrdom, so the danger was the whole point, and the Danes were his best chance of
finding armed and murderous men to oblige. Strabo’s poem about the ‘martyr
of Iona’ has him standing with God on his side, as you would expect, and saying
Mass in a golden dawn when the furious gang of the damned burst in. Blathmac, unarmed,
defies them; he says he has no idea where the bones of Cuthbert are buried in their
shrine of precious metals. ‘If Christ told me, I would never let it reach your
ears.’ He tells the Danes to take their swords, and they do exactly as he says.
They hack off his limbs and tear wounds in his cold body so he has stigmata and
martyrdom, both.
⁷⁴

His triumph, his sainthood, depended on a
victimhood he arranged for himself; without his terrible death, he was just one more
socially presentable holy man. He needed enemies in his binary world: us and them, the
right and the wrong, Godly and devilish. The Roman world was very aware of barbarians at
its limits, but it did not depend on being opposed to be sure of itself; Christians
insisted on a sense that they were being opposed and displaced, even as Christianity
moved into more and more territories, changed people’s minds, changed the
organization of their lives in alliance with kings and lords.

The Irish monk Dicuil wrote in around 825
that hermits from Ireland had been living in holy isolation for almost a hundred years
on islands north of Britain: the Faroes, probably. ‘But,’ he complained in
his geographical treatise
Liber de mensura orbis terrae
, ‘just as those
islands were deserted from the beginning of the world, so now because of the Norseman
bandits they lie quite empty of hermits, but full of countless sheep and far too many
seabirds.’
⁷⁵

That is the familiar story: the destructive
power of the raiding Norsemen, their campaigns against isolated hermits and also against
all the new brilliant towns that were growing around the coasts of the southern North
Sea. Those towns were based around churches, monasteries, convents or else feudal
powers; they were new foundations serving an old kind of power. Attack them, and the
Norse attacked the fragile institutions of the North Sea world. But the
perpetual travellers and pillagers from the North were not
just wrecking and burning. They were also, almost accidentally, creating a new kind of
town that did not depend for its life on king, lord or church: our kind of town.

We can see that in Ireland, which is where
it all began.

‘If a hundred iron heads could grow on
a single neck, if each head had one hundred tongues of well-tempered and indestructible
metal and if each tongue shouted ceaselessly with a powerful and unstoppable voice, it
would never be enough to list all the pain the people of Ireland – men and women, laymen
and clerics, young and old – have suffered at the hands of these pitiless pagan
warriors.’
¹
So a twelfth-century chronicler told the world. It is true the
Vikings came to Ireland with the overture you expect in legends: drought, monstrous
thunderstorms, famine, floods, murrain, dysentery and smallpox. All this, along with a
nasty outbreak of rabies and the constant problem of bloody flux, filled fifteen years
towards the end of the eighth century with proper, apocalyptic thinking.
²

Then the real troubles began. St
Patrick’s Island was burned, the monastery at Inishmurray went up in flames, Iona
was attacked and attacked again in a murderous kind of reconnaissance. Local lords
fought back, and so did local clergy, who were often the relatives of local lords.
Sometimes there would be no raids for years, but after an eight-year pause Howth was
plundered in 821 and the
Annals of Ulster
report that the heathens
‘carried off a great number of women into captivity’.
³
The women most likely
went for slaves, although sailors also needed lovers, wives and expedients.

The monastery at Clonmore was burned to the
ground on Christmas Eve and again ‘many captives were taken’.
⁴
The holy
places at Armagh were overcome and ‘great numbers … were taken
captive’.
Perhaps the pauses and sudden
restarts in the slaving business had something to do with demand in Arab markets.

By 837 there were sixty Viking ships in the
River Boyne, and sixty on the Liffey, and each fleet carried at least fifteen hundred
men: a very organized expedition, perhaps with royal backing, but still mostly
adventurers come down from the Norse bases in Scotland. They battled through the
kingdoms of east-coast Ireland, ‘a countless slaughter’, the
Annals
say. Irish exiles reckoned Ireland was overrun, that ‘the Vikings have taken all
the islands around without opposition and have settled them’. Yet nobody could be
quite sure what Vikings wanted: plunder or territory or both. Nobody could even be sure
to what authority they answered, if any. They worked up the rivers and into the lakes,
they took to spending the whole winter on Lough Neagh: settlers, almost. They may have
used the islands in the Lough as holding camps for their prisoners, because from there
they went raiding for slaves into County Louth and took away ‘bishops, priests and
scholars, and put others to death’.
⁵

The Irish provincial kings were made to
notice that the invaders were not simply landing, pillaging, ravaging and plundering;
they were turning into neighbours, which was just as alarming. The Irish briefly stopped
warring among themselves and defined the Vikings as the enemy; they won battles against
the Norsemen, and for a moment it seemed they might even drive them out of the country.
The victories were obviously splendid because victories always are but they were also
useful in the long term because they formed the basis for a story about a glorious past
– how the great kings disposed of a great enemy – a propaganda that would live for
centuries.

But then in 849, as the
Annals
say,
‘A sea-going expedition of 140 ships of the King of the Foreigners came to
exercise authority over the Foreigners who were in Ireland before them, and they upset
all Ireland afterwards.’
⁶

Instead of a single Viking enemy, worth
uniting to fight, the Irish discovered that foreigners came in at least two varieties.
They had long known the raiders and settlers from Norway who shipped out from bases in
the islands north and west of Scotland: the
Finngaill
, the ‘white’
foreigners. Now there were also the fleets that belonged to
the settled Danish kings carrying the
Dubgaill
, the
‘black’ foreigners, who sailed out from bases in England and Scotland.
⁷
The two
factions seemed to be at war, but they’d been known to work together, so they
could be allies, rivals or enemies and they could always change their minds. They
weren’t some single force of evil; they had politics, like the Irish.

There was a brief time when the Norsemen had
to scrap among themselves to settle who would rule. The Danes took over for a time, then
the Norwegians fought back – at first in 852 with 160 ships, which was not quite enough,
and then in 853 with enough men and sails to take back power. Once control of Dublin was
settled, at least among the Northerners, a remarkable exchange could begin. The lovely
worked metals of Ireland went north; walrus ivory and amber and furs came south. The
Irish were sometimes obliged to pay tribute, but the Vikings on their side gave
hostages. Marrying a Viking became thinkable for the upper-class Irish: the King of
Leinster’s daughter married the Viking King of York, who was later the King of
Viking Dublin, and after that she married the King of Ireland, who was not Viking at
all, so her first husband evidently did no harm to her social standing. The King of
Munster, meanwhile, was married to the daughter of the Viking ruler of Waterford. They
must all have had some kind of language in common.
⁸

Co-existence began.

The Irish had their own settled sense of all
being Irish, something beyond the local loyalty they felt to a chief or a place or a
king; they had songs and laws in common, stories about how things started and family
trees for saints and kings, a particular style of religion. Northerners seemed to be the
same; they understood what each other said, shared laws and gods and stories.

The two sides had other, disconcerting
things in common, which was convenient. The Vikings had their
berserkr
s, who
went about in pairs or groups of twelve, who went into battle ‘without mailcoats
and were frantic as bears or boars; they slew men but neither fire nor iron could hurt
them’. Their frenzy in battle was famous and it could be used.
⁹
The Irish had
their own wild men: the
fían
,
¹⁰
lawless fraternities called the
‘sons of death’, who went about ravaging ‘in the
manner of pagans’. Pagan here does not mean being like
the Vikings; it means like Irishmen before the Christian missionaries arrived.
Fían
were men without a fixed standing in society, unsettled because they
had been exiled as outlaws or they were young or they were waiting to come into their
own. They were alarming all the time, and not least when they planted themselves in
settled communities during hard winters. They were wilderness people out on the moors,
sure they had a right to plunder, warriors who went howling into battle like wolves and
who were said to have the power to change their shape at will (which may have been a
question of dog-like hairstyles). The sons of kings and nobles got their military
training in the
fían
; which meant they might change completely in a day if the
right person died, from outsider to ruler, from landless to magnate.

Like
berserkr
s, such men were also
a useful resource for kings and nobles, who used them as mercenary soldiers, just as
Viking warriors made excellent mercenaries and useful allies for any Irish king whose
power was otherwise all too equal to his rivals. War was more an occupation than an
event, after all, and paid help was required.

The Vikings went on raiding, though, and
Christians were persistently, officially outraged. The priests were shocked that the
Vikings dared to go ‘as far as the door of the church’, that they violated
the temples of God and went into the zone of holiness and sanctuary at the heart of
monasteries. They were especially shocked that when people crowded into a church for
safety, they were not just unprotected; they might as well have helped the slavers by
rounding themselves up.
¹¹
Their objection was not so much to
the sin itself, which was common to both sides, but to who was doing the sinning. It is
true there are lovely brooches with Celtic patterns and workmanship found in Norway,
which prove the Vikings did pillage churches: those brooches began as mountings, which
were ripped from shrines or holy books and conveniently had pins already on the
back.
¹²
But the Irish king, the King of Cashel himself, famous as a scribe and
as an anchorite, or hermit, felt free to burn his first monastery in 822, including its
oratory, and in 832 burned another ‘to the door of the church’.
¹³