the Strand from overseas would have been Franks or Frisians, it is very likely that Scandinavians were also regular visitors to Lundenwic’s markets. Familiarity may well have spurred the raids on Lundenwic and other North Sea emporia – the Vikings already knew of the wealth to be found in such places, and if they hadn’t been there themselves, they had heard about it from others – from friends and kinsmen, from Frisian traders, from chattering monks bound for slavery. Some, perhaps, hawking their wares on the Strand and filling their shallow-keeled ships with good Lundenwic cloth, had made cold calculation even as they bartered: of profits to be made from ships filled with stolen silver, of slaves taken at the sword’s edge – the risk of death weighed against the reward of plunder.
If they did, and if the raid of 842 was truly the first of its kind, then they had left it very late to roll the die. By the mid-ninth century, Lundenwic was a shadow of what it had been in the eighth century. Occupation seems to have come to an end in many parts of the settlement, and while activity 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’.
In 865, a micel hæðen here (a ‘great heathen horde’) arrived in East Anglia. It was a Viking warband larger than any seen before in Britain, and with extraordinary speed it set about tearing up the geopolitical order, shattering ancient kingdoms the length and breadth of the island: Northumbria (866), East Anglia (870), Alt Clud (870), Mercia (873) – all fell to the conquerors or were transformed out of all recognition. In England, only Wessex remained intact, preserved by good fortune and the fortitude of its rulers.
In 871, returning from Wessex after having been fought to a standstill by Alfred and his brother, King Æthelred, the great heathen horde had made camp at London and remained there over the winter. A hoard of silver found at Croydon can be dated to this period, and may well relate to the comings and goings of Viking warbands from their winter-setl at London. The Mercian King Burgred eventually ‘made peace’ with the Viking army (i.e. paid them off), and they returned to East Anglia. It was to be a short-lived reprieve – the Vikings invaded Mercia in 873, deposing Burgred and driving him into exile. In 878 a different Viking fleet, lately arrived from the continent, made camp at Fulham – then a site to the west of London. It too left after a single winter, travelling to Ghent (in modern Belgium) before rampaging onward into the Frankish kingdom.
There is no record that details activity at either of these camps, and no archaeology to pinpoint their locations or illuminate the day-to-day lives of their temporary inhabitants. ‘It is very difficult,’ as one historian has put it, ‘to gather from these random comings, goings and hibernations any coherent impression of what the occupation amounted to.’1 The circumstances may have varied. The earlier camp might have been either within or without the walls of the city; either around the precincts of St Paul’s or thrown up west of the Fleet River amongst the derelict remains of Lundenwic. The camp at Fulham was perhaps more likely to have been newly built, a freshly laid out site with access to the Thames. Excavated Viking camps at Torksey (Lincolnshire), Repton (Derbyshire) and another site in North Yorkshire suggest that such camps covered extensive areas and hummed with activity. Trade, manufacture, engineering, gaming and family life – the site at Torksey has revealed all of this on a site of over sixty-five acres, more a small town than a temporary barracks.
Whatever conditions were like inside the perimeter of the camps at London and Fulham, relations with the locals were likely tense and probably violent. Raiders plundering the local countryside would have first secured the winter essentials – pigs, cattle, grain, ale – before coming for the horses, the silver, the women. It was a burden felt widely. The bishop of Worcester, Wærferth, was forced to sell off some of his land to cope with the ‘very pressing affliction and immense tribute of the barbarians, in that same year when the pagans stayed in London’.2 Neither camp seems to have lasted more than a season, and the immediate threat of Viking occupation was in both cases transient. But in the fields and farms beyond the city, the world was changing fast, old certainties falling away sharply. In a little over a decade from the advent of the great horde in 865, two of the kingdoms that had traditionally exerted influence over London had been conquered (East Anglia) or dismantled (Mercia) by Viking armies. And although Alfred’s Wessex had endured, the resulting peace had left London on the front line of a volatile border. The story of how Alfred defeated an army led by the Viking leader Guthrum at Edington (Wiltshire) in 878, of how he had dwelt in the fen-fastness of Athelney (Somerset) before returning to smite his enemies like the avenging sword of the Almighty, has been told many times. Like all of the literary products of its time and place, it is replete with Alfredian myth-making.
In the peace that followed
