Vikings (27 page)

Charlemagne had died in
AD
814. He had planned to divide his empire into more manageable parts but the premature
deaths of sons gifted it in its entirety to his only survivor – Louis. Charlemagne’s unique personality had been necessary to ensure cohesion, however, and his grandsons accepted the inevitability of partition after Louis’ death. The Treaty of Verdun in 843 split the whole into three and in doing so effectively laid the territorial foundations of modern France, Germany and Italy. By 845 Paris was part of the ‘French’ kingdom ruled by Charles the Bald, and he it was who had to endure the humiliation of watching Vikings plunder a whole swathe of territory on both banks of the Seine as well as the fortified Île de la Cité of Paris itself. In the end it required a payment of 7,000 pounds of silver to bring it to a halt. But it was only a temporary respite, and the Vikings would return for more in the years to come.

By the 860s the incessant nature of the Vikings’ activities would move a monk named Ermantarius, in his monastery on the little Atlantic-facing Island of Noirmoutier, to write:

The number of ships grows: the endless stream of Vikings never ceases to increase. Everywhere the Christians are victims of massacres, burnings, plunderings: the Vikings conquer all in their path, and no one resists them: they seize Bordeaux, Périgeux, Limoges, Angoulême and Toulouse. Angers, Tours and Orléans are annihilated and an innumerable fleet sails up the Seine and the evil grows in the whole region. Rouen is laid waste, plundered and burnt: Paris, Beauvais and Meaux taken, Melun’s strong fortress levelled to the ground, Chartres occupied, Évreux and Bayeux plundered, and every town besieged.

The western Franks were hardly alone in their suffering, though, and by the middle years of the ninth century communities scattered along the entire length of the Atlantic façade had reason to fear the Northmen. A number of sources,
including the Frankish Annals of St Bertin as well as records made by Arab and Scandinavian writers, testify to an extraordinary voyage begun in 859 by the chieftains Björn ‘Ironside’ Jarnsida and Hastein. Having sailed down the Loire with a combined fleet of 60 ships they turned south along the French and Iberian coastlines, east along North Africa, and then through the Straits of Gibraltar before finding a safe anchorage at the mouth of the Rhône. From there the Vikings had their pick of targets along the south coast of France and beyond.

In his
Historia Normannorum
– History of the Normans – written over 150 years later, the historian Dudo claimed the pair finally mistook the northern Italian town of Luna for Rome itself and led their men in an audacious attack. Whether or not they were mistaken – and it seems unlikely given their obvious maritime experience and talents for navigation – they also raided Pisa and other Italian towns before eventually withdrawing and turning for home after an expedition that had lasted three years. Although two-thirds of the fleet was lost to Muslim attacks from around the Iberian coastline, those who made it back to the Loire were received as conquering heroes.

Throughout the remainder of the ninth century the Vikings continued to harass the peoples of the western European mainland. Since it was the rivers that gave them access to the interior, fortified bridges proved an effective deterrent. In truth, however, the attackers were just too numerous to be held entirely at bay. Several different Viking armies were abroad in the Frankish realms simultaneously, so that from time to time it was possible for kings like Charles the Bald to recruit one force to provide protection from the others. Broadly speaking it seems this put the raiders in a win-win situation. While the local rulers sought to gain the upper hand by double-dealing, the Vikings may well have come to their own agreements with one another so that large swathes of territory might be divided between them.

While bridges and city walls were partially effective deterrents inland, it was much harder to keep the raiders away from coastal areas and, in particular, the mouths of rivers. The estuaries of both the Rhine and the Scheldt were periodically under Viking control, but it was the Seine that granted one chieftain the greatest triumph of all. Charles the Simple, King of France from 898 and a descendant of Charlemagne, found it impossible to clear out his own infestation of Vikings from their nest around the lower reaches of the Seine. Finally, around 911, he ceded the town of Rouen, together with a whole tranche of surrounding territory, to a princely Viking leader named Rollo. This was the land of the Northmen – the
Nor manni
– that we know today as Normandy.

Ireland attracted some of the same Norwegian Vikings that had targeted Northumbria at the end of the eighth century. By
AD
794 The Annals of Ulster recorded ‘the devastation of all the islands of Britain by the pagans’. It was a note that carried a grim portent of things to come, for in 795 monastic communities on Irish soil began to suffer the same fate. The language of the Irish chronicle can be hard even for experts to decipher, but it appears there were attacks either on Rathlin Island in the north-east or on Lambay Island in the east – perhaps both. The remote north-westerly islands of Inismurray and Inisbofin suffered brutal attacks around the same time. Three years later the heathens sacked and burnt the community on the island of Inis Patraic, close by the site later settled and developed as Dublin, and forced the locals in the surrounding area to buy them off with payments in the form of cattle. In 807 the annals recorded Vikings carrying out a second raid on Inismurray – before travelling more than 30 miles inland to attack a monastic community at Roscommon. That the Vikings were confident enough to stray so far from the coast seems to suggest those incidents were more than just hit-and-run raids by opportunists.

Historian Alex Woolf suggests it is the contemporary sources themselves that are misleading – since the monks may only have been bothering to record what happened to their fellow churchmen, ‘so our Irish chronicler recounts the sack of Roscommon as if, like Iona and Inismurray, it were an isolated island and not in the very heart of the kingdom of Connacht. This is a salutary warning of how misleading our sources can be’

Woolf believes it unlikely the Vikings would have departed from the Dublin area in 798 and stayed away from the whole of Ireland, such an attractive source of income, for nine years. ‘Had the Northmen really been absent since 798 or had they simply confined their attentions to laymen – and women?’

Far from it, apparently: these were the Vikings of Horoaland – from the ‘north way’ – the same that knew the Shetland Isles were just a day or two’s sail across the North Sea and that from there they could plunder the neighbouring islands and coastlines at will. By the time of the attack on Roscommon they may well have been operating from all over northern Scotland and the islands, regarding the locals around them – Scots, Irish and English – as prey.

It is even possible the Shetland and Orkney Islands had Scandinavian colonists fully a generation or two before the first raids – and that it was those settlers who made raiding a part of their seasonal round. Prospectors who put to sea from the fjords, where farms were hemmed in along the narrow strips of flat land and clustered at their necks, would have been delighted by the wide open spaces they found in the Scottish islands. The soils and climate were much the same as those at home and men with the necessary will could carve out whole new futures for themselves.

Although not written down until the 1100s, the description in the
Orkneyinga
saga of the activities of one Svein Asleifsson provides the perfect example of what might have been typical
behaviour at the start of the Viking Age:

In the spring he had more than enough to occupy him, with a great deal of seed to sow which he saw to carefully himself. Then when the job was done, he would go off plundering in the Hebrides and in Ireland on what he called his ‘spring trip’, then back home just after midsummer where he stayed till the corn fields had been reaped and the grain was safely in. After that he would go off raiding again, and never come back till the first month of winter was ended. This he used to call his autumn trip.

In stark contrast to much of the eastern Europe encountered by Swedish Vikings, Ireland by the end of the eighth century was a mostly Christian country. Christianity had arrived in much of western Europe under the influence of the Roman Empire, which had accepted the new religion during the fourth century. Having remained outside the Roman Empire, however, Ireland came relatively late into the fold. It was not until the fifth century that missionaries like the famous St Patrick began the process of converting the Irish – subtly accommodating, as they did so, elements of the old Celtic religion, key dates and feasts, so as to minimise any upset or sense of dislocation from the past.

As it happened, the Roman Church did not like this at all. Irish priests tolerated divorce among their flock, and often had wives and families themselves while the Pope demanded celibacy, so that churchmen would have no one to whom they might leave their worldly goods except the Mother Church herself. During the eighth century Ireland was the target of Roman propaganda that portrayed the place as a home to barbarians and all manner of heathen behaviour.

By the middle of the sixth century Christianity – Gaelic,
Celtic Christianity – was nonetheless deeply embedded within Irish society. It was from there that the faith would be transported first of all to the west of Scotland and then throughout the whole country. Ireland was a land of little kings and kingdoms, and the monasteries – presided over by Church leaders who were themselves aristocrats, often drawn from the same families as the kings – were the religious, cultural and economic centres of society. As well as providing spiritual leadership the abbots were also warriors, often with their own armies and well practised in leading their forces into battle in support of one side or another in the endless, endemic dynastic wars. Columba himself was a scion of the Uí Néill clan and left Ireland to bring Christianity to Scotland, via Iona, only because his warlike style of conversion had culminated in a bloodbath that could not go unpunished. It was therefore as an aristocrat in exile, a zealot, that he set out upon the mission that would make him a legend.

By the eighth century the dominant Irish dynasty was that of the Uí Néill clan, but everywhere there were other families and other loyalties, vying for a say. Every petty king wanted to be the High King, with power over all the others, and the ceaseless warring had given rise to a dizzyingly complicated pecking order that dictated just who owed loyalty to whom. The American writer P. J. O’Rourke summed it up when he imagined meeting one of the minor monarchs in ‘the Ireland of Zero AD’: ‘I’m the king – from this rock down to the creek and from that cow to the tree. And this is my wife the Queen and our dog Prince.’

So while it is often tempting to imagine helpless monks cowering in the face of heathen Vikings, in Ireland the churchmen were more than capable of giving as good as they got. In truth they faced just as great a threat from each other as they did from any foreigners. While the Irish chroniclers recorded some
26 Viking attacks on monasteries during the first quarter of a century of the Viking Age, nearly 90 more were inflicted upon various religious communities by the Irish themselves.

Norwegian Vikings attacked a stretch of the Kerry coastline in the deep south-west of Ireland in 812 – and were messily butchered for their troubles. It was far from being the only setback the incomers experienced at that time. Apart from anything else the raiders learnt during the early years of their Irish adventure, they were made to understand that the local population was far from helpless. Still they persevered and the chroniclers reveal that by 821 the Vikings had circumnavigated the whole island – so that by then they were picking off targets on both the east and south coasts. In that year they attacked Howth, in County Dublin, and carried off ‘a great prey of women’ for use and sale elsewhere as slaves.

This is the period regarded by historians as the first phase of Viking attacks upon the Irish. Whether or not the raiders in question were operating from bases elsewhere in the British Isles, they brought only brief interludes of violent drama before disappearing once more. It is not until the second phase, starting in the early 830s, that there is evidence of much larger-scale operations – and of Vikings putting down roots on Irish soil. In 836 there was a wholesale slaughter of Christians in County Meath and the rounding up of ‘many captives’. The following year a fleet of 60 ships sailed up the Boyne River with 1,500 warriors aboard; a similar force appeared on the Liffey around the same time. The kingdoms of the east coast were the targets and the warriors of the Uí Néill kings fell ‘in a countless slaughter’. For the first time the raiders began appearing during the short days of winter and those attacks – almost always focused upon the capture of slaves – reveal it was no longer necessary for them to return to Norway at the end of autumn. Somehow they had found a way to remain in enemy territory for as long
as they wanted.

Far from home they had to develop ways of making themselves – and at least as importantly, their ships – secure against retaliation by hostile locals. During a day spent with Irish archaeologist Eamonn ‘Ned’ Kelly I learnt just how the Vikings went about making all of that possible for themselves.

While the chroniclers began to describe the appearance, during the ninth century, of Viking fortifications they called
longphorts
– long ports, or ship camps – no archaeological evidence for such sites has been recorded in the modern era. But at Vicarstown in County Laois, where the Barrow River is joined by a tributary called the Glasha, Kelly has been investigating a site he believes fits the bill.

Known as Dunrally Fort, it has long been classified as an Iron Age ringfort – typically Irish fortifications built, in the main, between 800
BC
and
AD
400. This understanding of the site is based on the presence of an oval enclosure measuring 50-odd yards along its long axis and 40-odd along the shorter, and comprising an earthen rampart within a water-filled ditch. Kelly, however, together with local journalist John Maas, has recently re-examined the site. They now identify the enclosure as just the central ‘citadel’ within an enormous area enclosed on one side by a curving water-filled ditch and bank and by the Barrow and Glasha rivers on the other.