continued it was no longer as coherent or as wealthy as it had been; it was fragmented, knots of buildings and associated smallholdings scattered over the site of Lundenwic, separated by wasteland and punctuated with rubbish pits. Serious fires had taken a toll – in 764, 798 and 801 – but there should be little doubt that Viking raids were largely responsible for the severe economic malaise that settled in the first half of the ninth century. This is not to say that Lundenwic was no longer important. It was clearly important enough to call down the Viking raid of 842, and a hoard of 250 coins buried around the same time (and possibly related to the Viking threat) stands testament to the wealth that still flowed through the settlement.fn7 Substantial ninth-century ditches, dug at Maiden Lane and the Royal Opera House, bear witness to both a heightened sense of danger and to the continued presence of something in the region of Covent Garden that was worth labouring to protect. Nevertheless, a lack of security depresses economic growth and investment – as true then as it is now – and the risk to places accessible by water was only growing stronger.
In 851 another Viking fleet entered the Thames. According to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, 350 ships slid into the estuary, sacking Canterbury before moving on to London. There are no surviving Viking ships that date to the mid-ninth century. The closest parallel to the vessels that attacked London in 851 is a ship recovered from a burial mound at Gokstad near Oslo in Norway. Constructed in the 890s, the Gokstad ship is a beautiful object, a masterpiece of technology and design. The strakes of its clinker-built hull taper with the smooth curves of living trees up to the razor-edged prow: a sleek and deadly serpent of the waves. Broad enough in the belly for a substantial crew and cargo, but still fast and lethal under sail and oar, the Gokstad ship could have carried around thirty-five rowers, all of whom would probably have been expected to fight. If ships of the fleet that entered the Thames in 851 were of similar size, and if the numbers provided by the Chronicle are accurate, this Viking warband could have fielded up to 12,250 warriors.
This is a large number by any measure, and the reported size of Viking fleets and armies has been repeatedly called into question over the years, with suspicions that the numbers were inflated by monastic writers to heighten the sense of existential danger and to excuse Anglo-Saxon defeats. Nevertheless, it is likely that this was a serious threat. From the 850s onward, the nature of the Viking threat to the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms had changed. Large forces, bigger than those that had raided the coastline of Britain in previous decades, began to ‘over-winter’ – that is, to set up camp rather than go home over the off-season, maintaining a pattern of raiding and mounting ever more damaging and ambitious campaigns. The raid on London in 851 was effectively the dawn of this grim new day: it is recorded in the same Chronicle entry that ‘for the first time, heathen men settled over the winter’.19 It also marked the effective end of Lundenwic, both in reality – within a couple of decades the settlement had become archaeologically invisible, covered by a layer of dark earth – and in the minds of near-contemporaries.fn8 According to the retrospective account in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, written in the 890s, the attack of 851 was launched not against Lundenwic, but against Lundenburh: against ‘fortress London’.
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