Lesson 13. Video Lesson. Beowulf
Lesson 14 -15. Vikings
The Vikings Conquerors and Colonizers
It was a June day in the year 793 C.E. The monks on the small island of Lindisfarne, also called Holy, off the coast of Northumberland, England, were quietly going about their business, unaware of the sleek, low ships approaching rapidly over the waves. The ships slid up onto the beach, and fierce-looking bearded men wielding swords and axes jumped out and ran toward the monastery. They fell upon the terrified monks and inflicted a great slaughter. The raiders looted the monastery of gold, silver, jewels, and other treasure. Then they headed out into the North Sea again and vanished.
The pillagers were Vikings, and their brutal hit-and-run raids thrust them onto the public stage of Europe and marked the beginning of the Viking era. Soon the Vikings evoked such terror that throughout England echoed the prayer: “From the fury of the Northmen deliver us, O Lord.”
Who were these Vikings? Why did they suddenly appear on the pages of history as if out of nowhere, remain prominent for three centuries, and then seemingly vanish?
Farmers and Pillagers
The Vikings’ ancestors were Germanic peoples who, some 2,000 years before the Viking era, began migrating from northwestern Europe into Denmark, Norway, and Sweden—Scandinavia. Like their forebears, the Vikings were farmers, even those who went on raids. In colder parts of Scandinavia, they depended more on hunting, fishing, and whaling. Viking merchants lived in larger communities, and from these they plied Europe’s trade routes in their robust sailing craft. What, then, would take such seemingly innocuous people from obscurity to notoriety in just one generation?
One possibility is overpopulation, but many historians feel that this would have been true only of western Norway with its limited arable land. The Oxford Illustrated History of the Vikings says: “Most of the first generations of Vikings were seeking wealth, not land.” This was especially true of kings and chieftains who needed a substantial income to retain their power. Other Vikings may have left Scandinavia to escape family feuds and local wars.
Another factor may have been that it was common for wealthy Viking men to have more than one wife. As a result, they had many children. Usually, however, only the firstborn son received the family inheritance, leaving his younger siblings to fend for themselves. According to the book The Birth of Europe, disinherited sons “made up a large and dangerous warrior йlite who were obliged to make their own way by any means, be it conquests at home or piracy abroad.”
The Vikings had the right vehicle for hit-and-run raids—the longship. Historians praise the longship as one of the finest technological achievements of the early Middle Ages. Of shallow draft and powered by sail or oars, these sleek vessels made the Vikings the masters of every sea, lake, and river within their sweep.
Viking Expansion
Some historians say that the Viking era dawned in the middle of the eighth century, just prior to the Viking raid on Lindisfarne. Whatever the case, the Lindisfarne raid helped bring the Vikings into the public consciousness. From England they turned to Ireland, once again targeting treasure-filled monasteries. With their longships filled with loot and slaves, the Vikings sailed home for the winter. In 840 C.E., however, they broke with tradition and wintered in their plundering grounds. The Irish city of Dublin, in fact, began as a Viking enclave. In 850 C.E., they also began to winter in England, their first base being the Isle of Thanet at the mouth of the Thames River.
Soon both Danish and Norwegian Vikings arrived in the British Isles, no longer as raiding parties but as armies in flotillas of longships. Some of these ships may have been 100 feet long [30 metres] and may have carried up to 100 warriors. In the following years, Vikings subdued northeast England, an area that came to be known as the Danelaw because Danish culture and law were dominant there. However, in the south of England in Wessex, Saxon King Alfred and his successors held the Vikings at bay. But then, after a great battle at Ashington in 1016 and the death of King Edmund of Wessex later that same year, the Viking leader Canute—a professed Christian—became sole king of England.
Vikings from Sweden sailed east across the Baltic and into some of the great waterways of Eastern Europe—the Volkhov, Lovat’, Dnieper, and Volga rivers. These eventually took them to the Black Sea and the rich lands of the Byzantine Empire. Some Viking merchants even reached Baghdad by way of the Volga River and the Caspian Sea. Eventually, Swedish chieftains became the rulers of the vast Slavic lands of the Dnieper and the Volga. The invaders were called the Rus, a term that some hold to be the origin of the word “Russia”—“Land of the Rus.”
As Rome withdrew its legions from Britain, Germanic peoples - the Anglo-Saxons and the Jutes—began raids that turned into great waves of invasion and settlement in the later 5th cent. The Celts fell back, into Wales and Cornwall and across the English Channel to Brittany, and t ie loosely knit tribes of the newcomers gradually coalesced into a heptarchy of kingdoms (see Kent, Sussex, Essex, Wessex, East Anglia, Mercia, and Northumbria)
Late in the 8tn cent., and with increasing severity until the middle of the 9th cent, raiding Vikings (known in English history as Danes) harassed coastal England ana finally, in 865, launched a full-scale invasion They were first effectively checked by King Alfred of Wessex and were with great difficulty confined to the Danelaw, wnere their leaders divided land among the soldiers for settlement. Alfred's successors conquered the Danelaw to form a united England, but new Danish invasions late in the 10th cent, overcame ineffective resistance (see /Ethelred, 9657-1016). The Dane Canute ruled el! England by 1016. At the expiration of the Scandinavian line in 1042, the Wessex dynasty (see Edward the Confessor) regained the throne. The conquest of England in 1066 by William, duke of Normandy (William I of England), ended the Anglo Saxon period.
The freeman (ceori) of the early Germanic invaders had been responsible to the king and superior to 'he serf Subsequent centuries of war and subsistence farming, however, had forced the majority of freemen info serfdom, or dependence on the aristocracy of lords and thanes, who came to enjoy a large measure of autonomous control over manors granted them by the king (see manorial system). The central government evolved from tribal chieftainships to become a monarchy in which executive and judicial powers were usually vested in the king T he aristocracy made up his witan, or council of advisers (see witenaqemot). The king set up shires as units of local government ruled by earldormen. in some instances these earldormen became powerful hereditary earls, ruling several shires. Subdivisions of shires were called hundreds There were shire and hundred courts, the former headed by sheriffs, the latter by reeves. Agriculture was the principal industry, but trie Danes were aggressive traders, and towns increased in importance starting in the 9th cent.