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Chapter 20

The Vikings

The Vikings for many hundreds of years 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. Very often they played two roles, for the Viking was said to have had a sword in one hand and a pair of scales in the other, ready to rob or trade as the situation demanded. But this cannot have been true of 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 that they have left their most permanent impression in the archaeological record.  They established trade routes in northern Europe that stretched from Constantinople in the east via the great rivers of Russia and their trading towns of Kiev and Novgorod to their freshly-established towns of Dublin, Waterford, Cork and Limerick in Ireland. In between were places like Birka in Sweden and Hedeby in north Germany. Both places have been excavated.

Discoveries made at Hedeby are typical of the remarkably uniform data obtained from all other Viking trading posts. Rows of wooden residences and warehouses, workshops and yards, timber trackways, wells and fenced property divisions were uncovered. 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. 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 consummate makers of barbaric jewellery and textile manufacturers of quality cloth although none of this latter material has survived at Hedeby and only a little elsewhere.

In York which was 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 unusual experience of being carried 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 to the Hjortspring boat dating to around 300BC. By Viking times boats were provided with a keel, fixed cross-beams used 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 employed 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.

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 farmers and also found 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-wheel 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 a six and a half metre boat alongside 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 but there are a few elsewhere including the mass grave at Repton dated to AD873-4. The bodies were laid in and around a building which may have been a mausoleum for the Mercian royal family. 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, but apparently none of them died of wounds. 

Four fortifications are known in Denmark which are 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 which includes the bodies of women and children, presumably dependents of the soldiers quartered inside the fort.

Post-Roman Times
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