Viking Age London is like an old wound, seemingly long healed and oft forgotten. But sometimes in the winter, when a cold wind blows from the north, it still nags – an ache that will never go away. Stumbling around corners, feet catch on stitches, pull back the skin of modernity – an ancient street name hidden beneath a concrete underpass, a paved void where a church no longer stands, a stretch of the old riverbank crawling out from beneath embankments. For nothing is lost in the city: things just sink further into the mire, deeper into time.
Occasionally, however, those memories break free, bursting upward like the hands of hungry corpses, or shimmering wraith-like through the alluvium. They hover like a miasma in the crypts of old churches or the depths of museum collections, drifting amongst beer cans at the blood-coloured foot of London Wall or blowing across the mud and shingle on the Thames foreshore. In these places the ghosts of Viking London still assemble, the murmur of liðsmen mingling with the banter of Victorian antiquarians, the chatter of tourists, the profanities of drunks. London is a city of spectres, of ghosts walking in the footsteps of other ghosts, and the Viking Age is perhaps its most forgotten hinterland.
And through it all runs the river, that titanic, oily-backed serpent. It winds its monstrous coils through Viking London – through time and place, providing and devouring, poisoning and fattening – before unravelling, unbound, into a mess of estuarine chaos, its mighty body dissolving to the sea.
The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle relates that in the year 842 ‘there was a great slaughter in London and in Quentovic and in Rochester’.1 In an entry for the same year, the Annals of St Bertin, a chronicle compiled in what is now northern France, describes the raid on Quentovic, a trading centre just across the Channel, and names the antagonists as ‘northmen’.2 The Vikings had come to London.
By the 840s Viking raids had been a feature of British life for around half a century. The first raids occurred in Wessex and Northumbria at the end of the eighth century, but from the 830s onward Viking fleets had grown larger and the threat they posed more serious. West Saxon kings had faced Viking armies in pitched battle on a number of occasions; the king of Northumbria lost his life to a Viking raiding army in 844. The earliest raid on London that we know of is that of 842, but it was not necessarily the first. Fifty years earlier, in 792, King Offa of Mercia – the Midland realm that at the time was the most powerful kingdom in southern Britain – had a charter drawn up confirming the exemption of Kentish churches from various obligations that landholders normally owed to their royal overlords. It is an important document that helps to confirm that Offa was, at this stage, firmly in charge of south-east England. Some of the most interesting aspects of the charter, however, are the exceptions made for things that the churches of Kent were still obliged to finance – in particular, ‘an expedition within Kent against seaborne pagans arriving with fleets, or against the East Saxons if necessity compels, as well as bridge and fortress work in Canterbury to see the pagans off’.3
Put simply, the Church still had to pay for defences against pagan raids from the sea, and it seems clear from this that Vikings were already threatening the southern shores of Britain in Offa’s day. It also follows that there were many incidents of violence, destruction and theft which have left no trace in the written record. That does not necessarily mean that London had been targeted by earlier Viking raids, but it could well have been. The threat, at least, had been alive for more than half a century.
But even if it had suffered no Viking aggression, London would have been no strange port to Scandinavian mariners. Writing in the early eighth century, Bede famously described ‘the city of London, which stands on the banks of the Thames, and is a trading centre for many nations who visit it by land and sea’.4 His thumbnail sketch of a great international emporium is borne out by archaeological evidence found at various places around London’s West End suggestive of a thriving trade with the Frankish realms and Frisia via their own respective trading sites at Quentovic and Dorestad.fn1 Some of the imports came from further afield – pottery and quern-stones from the Rhineland, figs from southern Europe – and there may have been direct contact with Ribe in Denmark and, by the eighth century, with new trading ports at Kaupang (Norway), Birka (Sweden) and Hedeby (now in northern Germany).
London’s success as a trading centre was bound to the river. From the Rhine estuary, a westward journey pointed straight down the barrel of the Thames. From there the river was a navigable conduit deep into the west of Britain, with the city functioning as the gateway – an entrepôt squatting at the hub of an overland travel network worn into the earth by millennia of falling feet. It was this location that had made London – Londinium – the de facto capital of the province of Britannia for most of the first two centuries of Roman rule in Britain.fn2 Roman technology and organization had turned the trackways into an extensive and well-maintained network of roads, connecting the city with the farthest-flung reaches of the province. Over time, Londinium developed the trappings of a great imperial city: a mighty stone basilica, around 560 feet in length and three storeys high; a seven-thousand-seat amphitheatre; an elaborate temple to Mithras; an imposing governor’s palace complex; a vast circuit of enclosing walls that roughly encompassed the modern City of London, from Aldgate in the west to the Tower in the east, from Moorgate and Barbican in the north to the river in the south, its river wall skirting the edge of the water.
Surviving stretches of Roman wall can still be found in a handful of places, most in the north of the city, imperfectly commemorated in the stretch of road known as London Wall. Turning south onto Noble Street, a stretch of the old masonry can be found submerged in a deep trench, cutting a long rift down the western limb of the road, below the cliffs of glass and steel and pale brick that rise above. The stone is red and raw against the cold sterility of the modern City of London, a livid ridge of muscle exposed where the urban skin has been pulled away by dissecting hands, archaeology as anatomy. A few yards away to the north, a church once stood close to the wall; another wound, this time healed over like a scar, sealed but not forgotten, a sad rectangle of brown brickwork and grass where St Olave Silver Street once stood. First mentioned in the twelfth century, the church was dedicated to a Norwegian warrior-king who died in 1030 – one of several such churches that stud the city.
Like so much of old London, St Olave Silver Street was obliterated by the Great Fire in 1666. Worse was to come, of course. During the 1940s, the war brought unprecedented damage to the body of the city. And what the incendiary bombs failed to claim, the planners and architects of subsequent decades took instead, replacing the surviving fabric with an urban landscape of brutal modernity. Around London Wall the dystopian ramparts of the Barbican Centre rise, grey walkways and balconies, stairwells and underpasses, cold light and hard shadows – a dream of how the future used to look, filtered through the cathode-ray tube and the comic-book pages of 2000AD: all cyberpunk visions, block-wars and ultraviolence.
It is into this world that the Roman wall runs, its broken towers and bulwarks dwarfed by concrete parapets, corralled into a narrow municipal green space that snakes around the side of the Museum of London. The museum is the final repository for much of the reclaimed detritus of London’s many pasts, its Viking Age included. There the recaptured fugitives of lost centuries are confined, trapped uncomfortably by the museum’s awkward modernity. Time has dulled the building’s once-cutting edge, exposing the built-in obsolescence laid by architectural vanity. The collection is now due to move to the covered market at Smithfield, an elegant and functional space that the self-conscious idiosyncrasies of the Barbican Centre could never have accommodated. It is ironic that, in their flight from failed modernity, the relics of London’s
