deeds of the semi-mythical Viking sailors and warriors that appear in them. The Sagas were enormously popular and influential in Victorian Britain, and indeed across much of northern Europe. Today archaeologists tend to use ‘Viking’ as shorthand for ‘Anglo-Scandinavian’, which is the correct way of describing the Norse-influenced way of life to be found at places such as Jorvík (York). In general terms, what one might term the ‘Viking Age’ ends in England in the mid-eleventh century with the Norman Conquest, but we should not forget that places like the Western Isles of Scotland and the Isle of Man remained under Viking rule until 1266. Orkney and Shetland were Norwegian until as late as 1469.
The warlike reputation of the Vikings was justified, because we do know that they raided extensively in northern Europe, and even crossed the Atlantic to Greenland and Newfoundland in Canada. But there was a great deal more to them than that. Raiding was part of what they did, but it was probably a relatively minor part. In fact they were very much more constructive and, dare I say it, useful. Today many archaeologists question whether there was ever a group of people who saw themselves as distinctively Viking, as opposed to something less immediately identifiable, such as Nordic or Norse. It is also questionable to what extent the term Viking can actually be attached to a defined ethnic group. This is perhaps understandable: viewed from the perspective of a Saxon peasant in eastern England, it wouldn’t matter a jot whether the raiders were members of the same tribe, nation or kingdom, because they were all equally unwelcome.
The Vikings are as popular in print as they have ever been, and some of the more recent accounts are also very well illustrated.2 The Anglo-Saxon Chronicles contain the earliest account of a Viking raid on a British monastery, which took place on 8 January 793 on the island of Lindisfarne, just off the Northumberland coast. The ‘heathen’ raiders sacked the buildings, killed several monks and took others captive. They also desecrated altars and helped themselves to valuables which may have included the richly decorated original covers of the world-famous Lindisfarne Gospels, now in the British Museum.
The picture of heathens from abroad mercilessly raiding Christian shrines is a vivid one, but raiding was characteristic of the times. We know of many raids, especially around the Irish Sea, by British on Irish and vice versa. The Vikings were not the only people doing it. We also tend to think of northern and eastern England – what was soon to be called the Danelaw – as the main object of Viking depredations. But in fact other parts of the British Isles also received many and repeated visits from Viking raiders and settlers. It was a complex picture, not least because the Vikings were coming from many parts of Scandinavia. As a rule of thumb, people from Norway colonised the north and west of Britain, and Ireland. Danes came to eastern England and north-west France (Normandy).
FIG 7 The general pattern of Viking raids and migrations in north-western Europe from just before AD 800 until the eleventh century.
Their non-existent horned helmets aside, the Vikings are justly celebrated for their superbly graceful, clinker-built sea-going vessels, known as longships. The tradition of clinker building in northern Europe predates the Vikings, and was to persist until the fifteenth century for large sea-going vessels, when it was replaced by carvel or frame construction.* The Viking longship was a superb vessel. I remember coming across one in a rather run-down state, very dusty and liberally spattered with pigeon droppings, in a shelter on the shore of Lake Michigan in Chicago. A faded plaque declared that she was a full-scale replica that had been sailed across the Atlantic for the World Columbian Exposition of 1893. The Viking, as she was named, was a copy of the Gokstad ship which was discovered in Norway in 1880. 3Nobody was around, so I had a Viking longship that had crossed the Atlantic all to myself for an hour or so, until it started to get dark. It was an experience I will never forget.
The first thing that struck me about the Viking was her size. She seemed tiny for a vessel that could take the worst that the North Atlantic had to offer. I was reminded of this ten years later when I visited the Viking Ship Museum in Roskilde, Denmark, in 1987. I was on a circuit of Continental tourist attractions as part of the feasibility study I undertook before we opened Flag Fen to the public. I had spent the morning sampling the delights of Legoland, and was eager to escape clever things made from plastic bricks, so I headed out to Roskilde. I was looking across the harbour when I noticed that in amongst the yachts and pleasure craft was a replica Viking ship (a large one, but not one of the ocean-going warships), with another, much smaller boat moored at the shore. By modern standards they were tiny.
Maritime archaeologists have realised that many of the handling characteristics of full-sized vessels can be replicated in half-scale models, with the help of some simple mathematics.4 These smaller vessels also present the shipwrights involved in their construction with most of the technical challenges faced by their ancient counterparts, but at considerably reduced expense. So far half-scale models have been constructed of a smaller Viking-age vessel, the fourteen-metre clinker-built Graveney boat, which it is estimated could have carried a cargo of six to seven tonnes. This vessel, which was abandoned in the mid-tenth century, was carrying a cargo that included (presumably Kentish) hops – comprehensively destroying the myth that all medieval ale was unhopped. The half-scale model of the Sutton Hoo ship, a twenty-eight-metre vessel, has been named the Sae Wylfing. I have seen her in action, and I was particularly impressed by her lightness – she could easily be dragged up onto a sloping beach by her crew, and would not require a quay unless heavily laden. The constructors of the Sae Wylfing were so impressed with her handling in rough water that they were inclined to attribute much of the political success of the builders of her original to such vessels.5 It is thought that the Sutton Hoo vessel was buried within a barrow mound to commemorate or conceal the last remains of King Raedwald of Essex, one of the Wuffingas, the early kings of Saxon East Anglia.
Boat or maritime archaeology has become a sub-discipline in its own right, and landlubbers are advised to walk its companionways with extreme caution. Its practitioners can be as ferocious as Captain Bligh. So the point I want to make has to be simple: yes, ocean-going Viking longships were quite probably the finest open clinker-built vessels ever built, but they were not the only ships afloat at the time – we know of many humbler boats from Viking Britain – and they were not ‘the reason’, as I was taught at school, that the Vikings voyaged abroad. The Vikings came first, the ships second. In other words, the longships were built because the men who sailed them wanted to travel and had the necessary skills to build them.6 It was not the other way around.
It should also be stressed that Viking longships did not appear, as it were, out of the blue. They can be seen to form part of an evolutionary tree whose roots probably extended back to the Early Bronze Age, around 1900 BC, when the first plank-built boats (found at Ferriby on the Humber) made their appearance. These boats could have crossed the Channel, and were probably used for trade along the coast. By the Late Bronze Age (say 1000 BC) trade and exchange around the North Sea was taking place on a regular basis. During Roman times Britain exported huge amounts of grain across the Channel to feed the later Roman field armies. We know that the Anglo-Saxons were excellent sailors, and we have evidence for this in the clinker-built ship from Sutton Hoo, dating to around AD 625. This vessel superficially resembles a Viking longship, and would have been perfectly capable of crossing the North Sea. And of course in the previous chapter we saw the extent of trade throughout northern Europe in the Middle Saxon period and afterwards. So Viking ships, like the Viking phenomenon in general, were part of a process that had roots many centuries old.
Viking warships, and some Viking art, were intended to strike terror into their enemies, and in this they undoubtedly succeeded, because images of Viking ships, such as that in wrought
