387. The Vikings Invade Britain (Ep 5)

18:41Anita Anand:Welcome back. Now, we come to a crucial twist in the story, because we often think of the Vikings raiding. We don't often so much perhaps think of them settling. But that's exactly what happens in 865. And I've got a personal story here, because as an A-level student, I went down and worked at the dig at Repton. And we found in the Vicar's Garden in Repton, the Viking charnel house, where the SAS, these big strapping lads, all sort of like Norwegian strikers, sort of six foot five, were laid to rest in the first camp of the Great Army after they settled in England. This is the beginning of a move from raids to full-scale colonisation of the north.

19:30Anita Anand:So take us here, dear Eleanor, take us to the Great Army. What are they up to? Why are they deciding to move? What's wrong with Norway? So this is the Mitchell Herre, the Great Army, sometimes called the Mitchell Herre, Nehada, so the great heathen army, as the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle describes it, as you say, arrives in 865. Not a raid, it's a conquest now. So they land in East Anglia, they sweep through Northumbria, they capture York, I think 866, and then they sort of split off and move south and east. And that's a really important part. This isn't one mass. They're really flexible. It's been described somewhere as bands of brothers, which I think is a really clever a description because they're basically, they're coming in these boats and within each of these boats, they already have the units, they have the leader, they have the people who are second in command.

20:21And so they, in a way, can transfer that quite nicely onto land. And so that means that various parties can join up for the big battles, but then they have that flexibility to go off in different directions. And yeah, by 873, they've established a winter camp at Repton, as you say, on the banks of the Trent.

20:38Anita Anand:Which they've sailed up in their longships. I'm so jealous that you got to excavate that.

20:43William Dalrymple:I can't even tell you. If you look at the DNA of some of these bodies, you can see actually a story being told of, you know, this invasion, settlement, and then, you know, generational melding. So this is the really interesting thing, because I think, yes, exactly, there is some evidence in the DNA that we've got sort of various different levels of populations that sort of have more in common with those over the other side of the North Sea. but I was actually talking really recently to a geneticist at the Crick Institute who said actually it's much harder to tell than we think because of the Anglo-Saxon population because the Anglo-Saxons have also come for the most part from the various parts sort of slightly south but also from across the North Sea you've got something that is genetically already very different to you know way back in the midst of time when we're talking about the Britons and the Romans we've got a very different setup already, which is culturally fascinating because that also explains, for example, why they're able to basically point and grunt and use a few words and communicate.

21:49There's a lot in common here. Having said that, when we look at the bodies of the dead themselves, at Repton, at mass burials of young warriors in the context of this time, you do find really really interesting parallels one now this is a little bit later this is from a second wave of kind of viking invasions and tension that comes in the wake of the settlement you've got a mass burial from oxford and that's from around 1000 and they found a young man there who'd been killed violently in this mass burial and they found a second degree relative of his over in denmark i think on odense and so they were able to bring these two together so he was either it's either uncle and nephew or half-brothers or grandfather and grandchild, something like that.

22:39Anita Anand:Antrously.com for the 10th century. Yeah, exactly that. So they brought them together for an exhibition in Copenhagen a couple of years ago. Where we see that sense of settlement in England, let's talk about, but it's true all over the British Isles, is in the language, in the place names. That's where we see that that's not raiding. You don't bring over your language, you don't bring over your place names if you're just in and out and grabbing a reliquary in a gospel book in a couple of months. It's when you're settling, when you become part of that cultural landscape, that we start to see it embedded in the landscape, in the place names, in the words themselves.

23:18William Dalrymple:A lot of people will have heard of Danelaw, you know, the Danelaw, which was this area of Norse settlement. But, you know, what you found actually is that that wasn't the outline, It's a much more dotted outline. And, you know, that Norse settlement extends far beyond Danelaw. The interesting thing about the Danelaw, for a start, that word doesn't get used until a little bit later. I think, just, I mean, not crazily later, but sort of, I think it first starts appearing in maybe even the 11th century, something like that. But what we see is this partition. Now, the era of the great heathen army ends famously with the battles in the West between Gudhrum, who's one of the leaders, and Alfred of King Alfred the Great fame.

24:02And after their final battle, they come to a peace agreement where Gudhrum is going to be baptised. He's going to be given a Christian name and he's going to be sent off to rule East Anglia. But very crucially, Alfred stood in as his sponsor, his godfather, when he was baptised. And so Alfred is very much, should we say, he's got the upper hand, which helps. Now, they draw up a bit later a very famous peace agreement where they talk about the line that's going to separate their legal territories. And it's sort of this line that goes up through the Thames, up what's basically Watling Street. It's kind of going from southeast to northwest across the country.

24:44And north of that line or up from that line, that's what we think of as the Dane law. So it's the East Midlands, it's East Anglia, it's Yorkshire, it's Lincolnshire. And that's where we get this concentration of place names.

24:57Anita Anand:Are we thinking of it a bit like partition of India and Pakistan? Are the populations moving in different directions? I think there is definitely movement between. We have even in that agreement, they say things like, we won't harbour each other's slaves, for example, or we'll make sure that the amount of money, the wehrgeld for killing someone, is the same on both sides. And so it's not this sense of, here is a line, you will not cross it. And that's why that Christian element, that conversion of Gudrum, now Athelstan, is so important, because we need that sense of parity, that sense of movement.

25:34But on the other hand, in terms of settlement, yes, there There are Norse place names away from that line, but there's not many.

25:43William Dalrymple:So Eleanor, what I want to know is what place names here in Britain do we get directly from the Vikings? So obviously Twat. We're starting with Twat.

25:52Anita Anand:Always a good start. But it's a version of Thwaite, which we might be more familiar with from further south, sort of Yorkshire area. It means basically a meadow, a cleared area, something like that. And then you've got anything with a B-Y at the end. And Biu, that just means farm. So Grimsby, Whitby, Selby, Naseby, Darby, Crossby, Rugby. Thorpe. Thorpe. Yeah, so sort of Scunthorpe, that sort of thing. Again, it's those kind of farming areas, which is important. We think of Vikings reasonably as raiders, but here we are, have them as settlers and therefore farmers, and that's more important. We've all got personal names as well.

26:28Grimsby, Grimers Biu. Grimur is a name and it's his farm. Grimmsby is a really good example of it. So, yeah, but I mean, we can't not start with twat.

26:40Anita Anand:And then we also have, just to move on from twat without pausing, we're moving on to Dingwall in Scotland, which is the place for the parliament, the thingar. Dingwall, it's thingvatlur, the parliament or assembly planes. And if anyone's been to Iceland or if anyone is a geologist, they'll know Thingvetlir, which is the place in Iceland where they had the original parliament. I think it's 934. They establish it, making it the oldest continuous parliament anywhere in the world. And it's the place where the two tectonic plates are moving apart, hence the vetlir, the plains word. But yeah, we've got one in Scotland as well.

27:18Anita Anand:And Ness, that's another. Loch Ness as in Nessie is actually a Norse name, isn't it? Yeah, so Ness is another one. And there are a few like this where there's a sort of, There's a Norse version and there are other equivalents that do the rounds because these have really ancient origins. But yeah, it's very interesting that we have lots of our oldest water names and mountain names in the British Isles in particular are actually Britonic. They're from even before the Romans come. Because people don't change the names of rivers. They found a farm, but the river's always there. Exactly, exactly. But then you get this new and the interesting thing with some of these is that they are in parts of the British Isles that look more Nordic.

28:08Maybe we might say sort of more Norwegian in particular, you know, have the long fjords and the fells and the mountains. So where it gets more dramatic, we start to see some of these new layers coming into those place names.

28:20William Dalrymple:We haven't talked about Ireland, though, have we? I mean, you know, Waterford, Limerick, Wexford, Cork. I mean, how have the Vikings left their fingerprints all over these places? That's a really interesting one because, yeah, Dublin, Waterford, Limerick, yeah, as you say, Wexford, Cork, all those, they are established sort of properly. It's not that there's no one living there before, but they're established as these sort of Longfort, these ship camps in the ninth century. So that same era as the great heathen army. And then they become permanent trading settlements quite quickly, sort of within a generation or so.

28:51Some of these place names are very Irish, Celtic language elements. But sometimes you end up with Norse versions of those. So Dublin, Duflin, it's like the dark pool. And then you have a Norse version of that, Duflin, and then we have modern Dublin. But there are a few that are north. So I think Waterford, it's not quite clear. It might be something like Vedr Fjordr. So it's a sort of ram fjord, something like that, a weather. We get the same thing, Weatherby, you know, sheep farm, basically. Same thing. My favourite, and I really hope this is true, but this is my understanding, is Carlingford.

29:29So Kerlinger Fjordr. And a Kerling, a Kerling, is an old hag.

29:36Anita Anand:Nothing to do with the lager. No, weirdly, I kind of always assumed it was, but I think it's something to do with those three peaks. It's like the three nuns peaks, but you often have, they don't bother with nuns. They often have like the old woman, the old man, the hag, yeah, the troll. That's the sort of Nordic version of that. I also, I should say, I have a very personal connection to one of them, which is Hoth, which is that peninsula on the north side of Dublin, which is from old North Hoth, so it's like Head, basically. Apparently, my grandfather was conceived on that very peninsula on a wild night out once back in, I don't know, back in the 1920s or 30s.

30:12So that was his middle name. Did your granny tell you that lovely story?

30:17William Dalrymple:How do you know? They gave it a middle name. It was like, you know, like Brooklyn and Bethlehem sort of thing. It was obviously a good night. Your family gatherings have very different conversations to mine. It's just that sort of thinking.

30:28Anita Anand:Orkney is somewhere which I always grew up thinking of as being the most sort of Nordic of all the places in Scotland, where until, what, the 17th or 18th century, they spoke Norn, which was a kind of version of Norwegian. Yeah, exactly that. Exactly that. So Orkney and Shetland, so the Northern Isles, absolutely. Those are Nors. And they continue being Nors. So when we think of, you know, when is the end of the Viking Age? Well, we've got these important Norse settlements off the northern coast of mainland Scotland going into the 15th century. And exactly as you say, there's a form of Old Norse that's still the main language there until I think it's about 1800 or something like that.

31:08You see it in the place names. I mean, the most obvious example would be something like Kirkwall, which is on the mainland. And it's sort of where you have St Magnus Cathedral, very much a kind of Viking or at least Norse cathedral because of the... St. Magnus, yeah. And Kirkwall is just Kirkjewauger. It's the church bay, basically, after that. So, yeah, that's a very, very strong connection that keeps on going. And it's still part of that. You go to the airports at Kirkwall, you've still got runes that they've put over the top. So Kirkwall is pulled out in runes.

31:40Anita Anand:Brilliant.

31:41William Dalrymple:Eleanor, so, you know, with all of this settlement going on and displacement, if you like, of what was there before, What happens to the monasteries? I mean, wherever the Vikings go, the monasteries don't exist anymore. I mean, just give us an idea of what happens. You have the ones that suffer repeatedly early on. We've mentioned Iona and Lindisfarne and then Clon MacNoise and Quark and all the armour. But the interesting thing is that as Norse settlement becomes permanent, that relationship between the settlers and the surrounding community also changes. And of course, that surrounding community also includes the local religious communities.

32:20Anita Anand:We're going to be doing a lot more on the next episode. We're still holding out for zombies, but certainly going into mythology and all this amazing syncretism, which I did not grow up with at all. The idea that you get people preaching parallels between Christianity and the North Smiths, but that's for the next episode. But just give us an idea of how it pans out. By the 10th century, when these guys are settled, they've got the Dane law, what is left of the old Anglo-Saxon world and the old Pictish world? Yeah, so this is a really, so I mean, I'll leave the picts to Gordon, definitely. But it's not that this, so the problem is that we have this other layer that is much fainter, to mix my metaphors, a much fainter echo than the Norse stuff in terms of that pre-Christian religious belief and practice.

33:14because, of course, the Anglo-Saxons also came in as pagans and then they become Christianised. And so you're sort of seeing this rebooting of the same thing under the Norse. I already mentioned how Gudrum, one of these leaders of the great heathen army, is converted to Christianity and then is allowed to become king, very much an Anglo-Saxon king of East Anglia. If we look at his coins, we can see, you know, it's got his name on the coins, but they're absolutely Christian, Anglo-Saxon style coins. He's got a cross in the centre. But having said that, you've got some really interesting, slightly later examples where there are still hints of this syncretism.

33:52So there's a really good example of this from York. And this is, it's called the St. Peter's Pence. And it's a coin. And I think it's, I want to say like the early 10th century, something like that. And you have a Christian cross on it. It's very obviously Christian, but you've also got a little Thor's hammer just there, just put on there, just like worked into the lettering. And so it's a sense there that maybe this is about religious belief, but it's also saying something about cultural identity that's very important.

34:23William Dalrymple:We were talking about how Bath is one of those places that transfixes reluctant small people. And York is another one, Jorvik, because it is an absolutely fascinating and in-your-face synergy between cultures. Can you tell us a little more about Jorvik, York? Yeah, there is nothing like York. So Irfowicz, which is the old English name, becomes, as you say, Jorvik, the old Norse equivalent. There were these incredible excavations, the Coppergate excavations in the 70s and 80s. And what's really unusual about that is that they revealed this thriving urban settlement, which isn't typical. We think of typical or representative.

35:04It really isn't. It's so unusual in terms of its density, the complexity. We've got workshops producing amber and jets and antler. We've got metal objects. We've got evidence of long distance trading with Byzantium and the Islamic world and Scandinavia, of course you know so and we've got my absolute favorite and i'm sorry it's not horny zombies but i am going to bring down the tone because we can't not talk about the lloyd's bank coprolite which is the biggest fossilized human poo i think anywhere in the world and it is a chunky monkey it's over 20 centimeters long i think it's about five centimeters wide something like that and it's fascinating because it's one person's turd from Viking Age York it tells us that you know they were eating bread and meat they had a hell of a lot of intestinal worms my favorite fact about it is that about 20 years ago there was a school party visiting it the teacher was allowed to hold it dropped it and broke it into three pieces and so this yeah if you see it it's it's been glued

36:09William Dalrymple:back I have seen it I didn't really I didn't see the glue marks so I mean the thing is York York has done this so beautifully. I don't know whether we talked about this before, but when I took the kids, we went on that, you know, they excavated down to the Scandinavian sort of layer, you know, the Norse layer. And you go on this little train journey past these mannequins who are reliving, and it's meant to have sort of smell-o-vision, and you go through quite a whiffy little bit. I mean, it's brilliantly done, and considering it's really old, I mean, I don't know when they they did this when they built this but you you go down you are part of that world you hear the noises and then you learn about the the poop and um i mean it's all fabulous i think it's one of the best best places it's fantastic and it lasts so you know from the time of the great heathen army so i don't know about 866 and it comes and goes you know there are there's lots going on there but we get to the middle of the 10th century and that's when it's likely now the problem is he is swathed in the mists of historical mystery, but we don't quite know what's going on.

37:15But Erik Bloodaxe.

37:17Anita Anand:We haven't had Erik Bloodaxe. We've got to have Erik Bloodaxe.

37:21William Dalrymple:Who was he? Tell us, who is Erik Bloodaxe? Erik Bloodaxe is said to be the last Norse ruler. He's really shadowy. I think much more shadowy as a figure than people realise. He also appears in some of the Icelandic sagas, so Eil's saga in particular, where Eil ends up, they're terrible enemies. And there he's given this incredible wife, I think she's called Gunnhildr, and she's a magical practitioner. She transforms herself into a bird and sings at a window all night to stop Eil from composing the poetry that will save his life. So he's a figure that all sorts of amazing myths and legends spring up about.

38:00But it looks like he was a real person. And then he's killed at Stainmore out in the wilds, possibly fleeing from York, possibly fleeing to, not sure, but he's killed there. And so we then have it, I think, you know, reverting from Norse hands. But what's interesting is that the city that emerges from that good century of Norse rule is still absolutely there. We walk around, You know, there's Gudrum Gate, Gudrumsgata, gata means street. There's Mikkel Gate, big streets, Copper Gate, Koprigata, I think it's the...

38:35Anita Anand:Woodworkers. Woodworkers, yes. All the Norse names. So it's this sense that it is permanently transformed. It's not just those layers of archaeology that are in themselves so fascinating.

38:47William Dalrymple:You know, at the beginning, we were talking about what happened in Lindisfarne and the fact that the people fled, you know, the monks fled, their worshippers fled, and they carried with them the body of St. Cuthbert. We kind of have left them alone. I mean, how long have they been wandering around with this coffin and what happens to it eventually? Okay, so the community of St. Cuthbert is really, it's a remarkable story within this remarkable period. They don't immediately abandon Lindasvarn at all after that famous sack of 793. they stay for it's a good century after that nearly but then I think it's 875 there's more Norse pressure and so they leave we've got Cuthbert we've got the Lindisfarne Gospels I think we've got the relics you know various various saints relics as well you know so they're wandering around for several years they're moving through Northumbria Cumbria they're looking for somewhere safe to settle they you know they're at Chesterly Street for a while in County Durham and then about a century later, there's more threat.

39:49This time I think it's Danish. They move again and they finally settle in Durham in 995. And you think of Durham, it's the Bailey. It's almost completely surrounded by water, this huge, very defensible hill basically. And so that's where they settle. And so the Lindisfarne Gospels survive this and the relics survive, the community survive. It's only just, this is a remarkable survival. It was much more likely that that wouldn't happen, but it did.

40:19Anita Anand:It's all still there, isn't it? You go to Durham Cathedral, the pectoral cross, the fragments of the coffin, you can still see little incised images. It's wonderful. Ella, you described this catastrophe and it turns out to be much more complicated. What does the Viking impact on the sacred world of Britain and Ireland look like to you from the vantage point of a historian, leaving aside now all the zombies and everything else? When you think of it in your scholarly hat, what does it look like to you? I think it's not just one thing. I think it's about, yes, destruction, but also transformation.

40:57And it's really important that we're able to carry those two ideas together. So, you know, The destruction is real and we can't, as we said up top, we can't minimise what was lost at Iona and Lindisfarne, the lives, the culture. It was traumatic and that's really important to say in terms of how the communities experienced them. But then that later transformation is equally real. And so the world that emerged from the Viking Age, and we've got Norse Irish cities, we've got the Danish place names, we've got the Danelaw place names, we've got the Earldom, that Jardom on Orkney. It's richer and it's stranger and it's more various than I think we sometimes give it credit for because they are interacting with different people in so many different ways.

41:45And it's this idea that the islands in some ways sort of absorbed the Vikings, but in all these different flavours of what that looks like and what those interactions look like.

41:57Anita Anand:Thank you so, so much. Now we're going to stay with Eleanor, our wonderful guest, in the next episode. And we're going to look specifically at the Norse effect on the religion of the island. And this series is all about the gods and the transformations that take place with these different waves of migration. And this extraordinary world where you've now got the Vikings in York, all over Cumbria, all over what's now Scotland and much of Ireland. How does it affect the religious faith and the beliefs and the mythologies of the people in these islands? And we'll be back for that in the next episode.

42:38William Dalrymple:And if you can't wait, you know what to do. empirepoduk.com empirepoduk.com Join our club you get early access and loads more besides. Till the next time we meet it's goodbye from me Anita Arnand

42:51Anita Anand:And goodbye from me William Durrenpool

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