Chapter 21
The Vikings
For many hundreds of years, Vikings had a grisly reputation. One remembers the prayer offered up in churches all over Europe during the ninth and tenth centuries 'From the fury of the Northmen, good Lord deliver us.'
They left their farms in Scandinavia for regular annual foraging journeys overseas made necessary by the land shortage and poverty of their homeland. Archaeological evidence for an early Viking raid has been uncovered at Tarbat, a Pictish monastery at Portmahomark in Scotland. It apparently occurred during the eighth century. On site a wide selection of fine Pictish sculpture has been discovered that survived the vandalism.
Very often the Vikings played two roles. A Viking was reputed to have carried a sword in one hand and a pair of scales in the other, ready to rob or trade as the situation offered. But this cannot have been true for every Viking. Some must have traded exclusively and others eschewed commerce like those who raided Hamwic in 940 and 942 and disrupted the trade in the central English Channel with their piratical activities. Later, Vikings became settlers, the Danes conquering parts of Normandy and England, the Swedes parts of Russia and the Norse settling in Scotland, southern Ireland, Iceland, Greenland and Newfoundland.
It is as traders and settlers that they have left their most permanent impression in the archaeological record. They established trade routes that stretched from Constantinople in the east via the great rivers of Russia and their trading towns of Kiev and Novgorod to their newly-established towns of Dublin, Waterford, Cork and Limerick in Ireland. In between were places like Birka in Sweden and Hedeby in north Germany both of which have been excavated.
The discoveries made at Hedeby on the Schlei estuary are typical of the remarkably uniform data obtained from other Viking trading posts. Rows of wooden residences and warehouses, workshops and yards, timber trackways, wells and fenced property divisions were uncovered in the excavation. Trade goods and materials included pottery from the Rhineland, basalt quernstones from the Eifel quarries further south along the same river, soapstone from Norway, metal objects from Ireland and the Baltic and many coins from as far afield as Constantinople and the Moslem caliphates. Arabic coins were common currency in Scandinavia for a thousand years and a recent find on the island of Gotland was a hoard of twenty-three Persian coins dating from AD538 that were minted by a king of the Sassinid Empire.
By the early ninth century, Hedeby was producing its own coins. In the craft quarter of the town bone combs and antler spoons, needles and spindle-whorls were carved. Pottery and perhaps glass was made, while the metalworkers used iron, bronze and gold. The Vikings were consumnate makers of silver jewellery and textile manufacturers of quality cloth although none of this latter material has survived at Hedeby and only a little elsewhere.
In York, captured by the Vikings and renamed Jorvik, a portion of the settlement has been simulated on the original site at Coppergate and provides visitors with the experience of wandering through a portion of the Viking town.
The secret of their extraordinary mobility was their skill in shipbuilding born of a long tradition in Scandinavia that stretched back at least to the Hjortspring boat around 300BC. By Viking times boats were provided with a keel, fixed cross-beams to stiffen the hull, greater breadth and the ability to carry both mast and sail. Ships like the Gokstad grave ship with an overall length of 38.7 metres could have been used for ocean voyages.
Other less glamorous vessels were used on trade routes. Excavations in the fjord at Roskilde in Denmark have produced the remains of vessels sunk there around AD1000 to bar the channel entrance against attack. Five of them are housed in a museum alongside the fjord and include a merchant type with mast and decking fore and aft and a vessel that has been copied and sailed as far as the Viking foundation of Dublin.
Non-urban sites like farmsteads are found in Scandinavia and in all other areas of Viking settlement. An example at Jarlshof in Shetland is typical, consisting of a stone farmhouse and ancillary buildings. Elsewhere, Viking construction could be either in stone or in timber. At Red Wharf Bay on Anglesey (North Wales) a settlement comprising two large halls with central hearths dates from the eighth/ninth centuries and was built in timber on stone footings. The inhabitants were craftsmen working in iron, bronze and antler as well as being farmers and also had time for trade, for a set of weights and a quantity of scrap silver were amongst the finds.
Orkney was another place settled by the Norsemen. At Earl's Bu a Norse 'Hall', a ruined twelfth church and a horizontal mill can be seen. Recently at Scar on the island of Sanday a Viking boat burial was found. Three individuals were laid to rest in the six and a half metre boat with a collection of grave goods including a sword in a wooden scabbard, arrows, a bone comb, an iron sickle, a ninth-century equal-armed brooch, a pair of scissors and gaming pieces. Alongside these objects was found, for the first time in Britain, an ironing board made out of whale-bone!
Most Viking burials in the British Isles are in north-western Britain and the Isle of Man where at Balladoole a ship burial dating from c1000 was excavated some years ago containing, amongst the grave goods, objects from the Carolingian world that indicate that, apart from their activities in northern Europe, the Viking settlers in the north had trade links with the south. But there are a few Viking burials elsewhere in the Danish settlement area of Danelaw: they occur in native cemeteries but a recent individual discovery at Cumwhitton in Cumbria is of six tenth-century graves containing four men and two women buried with jewellery and a drinking horn. They had clearly been wealthy individuals living in a settled, peaceful community but people who were probably still pagan. If the Viking settlers were mainly men they would have looked for mates in their new homeland and their wives would almost certainly have badgered them into adopting the Christian faith. One Viking cemetery has been found at Heath Wood, Ingleby, near Repton in Derbyhshire and turned out to be a barrow cemetery covering an earlier funeral pyre with the sacrificed remains of animals. The barrows contained some metal objects, possibly broken as part of the burial ritual. Not far away there was a mass grave at Repton. Bones of dozens of people were piled in and around a building that may have been a mausoleum for the Mercian royal family which had been subsequently covered with a low cairn. A central Viking burial had been robbed and it was likely to have been that of a chief for fragments of gold and silver, a sword, axe and post AD871 coins were found in the excavation. The mass of bones presents a problem for the excavators. Over 80% of them were males between 15 and 45 years of age, the age of soldiers, and were buried at times between the eighth and the tenth centuries. Perhaps they were gathered up from many Viking graves in the area and brought to the spot to form a memorial for the chief whose grave was subsequently looted. The memorials date from some time in the tenth century.
Four fortifications are known in Denmark to be associated with Sven Forkbeard's mobilization of his country in the early part of the eleventh century. These perhaps were part of the preparations for his conquest of England. Of the two sites excavated, Trelleborg has been investigated more thoroughly than the larger site on the north shore of the Limfjord. It consists of a circular earthwork containing four blocks of buildings built to a scale of Roman feet. They are interpreted as barracks holding a force of 1200 men. Outside, within an exterior earthwork, are a row of smaller buildings and a cemetery that includes the bodies of women and children, presumably dependents of the soldiers quartered inside the fort.
In Britain, Viking fortifications are suggested at Repton, Wimbleton and Shillington (Beds). They consist of D-shaped earthworks with a river on the long side and are provisonally dated to the end of the ninth century. In eastern England. Some circular earthworks have been suggested as Viking but there has been no excavation.
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