Viking activity in the British Isles
Viking activity in the British Isles began with a killing on a Dorset beach in 789. Three ships from Hordaland, in what is now Norway, landed on the Isle of Portland. Beaduheard, the royal reeve from Dorchester, approached them. His job was to identify all foreign merchants entering the kingdom. The visitors killed him instead. That single violent encounter was the opening note of a centuries-long drama. Over the next three hundred years, Scandinavian raiders, settlers, and conquerors would reshape the peoples, borders, and kingdoms of Ireland and Britain. The questions worth asking are not just who these Vikings were, but why they came, how they managed to overturn kingdoms that had stood for generations, and what they left behind when they finally stopped.
Britain and Ireland in the late eighth century were not unified lands. They were a mosaic of competing peoples, languages, and faiths. In the north of what is now Scotland, the Picts spoke the Pictish language, which survives only in Ogham inscriptions, and scholars still debate whether it was Celtic or something else entirely, perhaps even a non-Indo-European tongue like Basque. Most place-names and inscriptions suggest it was Celtic. To the west of the Picts lived the Scots, a tribal group that written sources say had crossed to Britain from Dalriada in northern Ireland during the late fifth century. Further south, the Brythonic-speaking Britons of Cornwall, Cumbria, Wales, and south-west Scotland spoke languages whose modern descendants include Welsh and Cornish. By the mid-ninth century, Anglo-Saxon England had coalesced into four separate kingdoms: East Anglia, Wessex, Northumbria, and Mercia, with Mercia holding the strongest military power of the four. Between half a million and a million people lived in England at that time. Society was rigidly hierarchical, with a king and his ealdormen at the top, then the thegns or landholders, then agricultural workers, and beneath all of them a class of slaves who may have accounted for as much as a quarter of the population. A few large towns had developed, notably London and York, which served as centres of royal and church administration. Trading ports like Hamwic and Ipswich engaged in foreign commerce. Scandinavian traders had already reached these networks: before the raids, Scandinavian kingdoms had developed trade links stretching as far as southern Europe and the Mediterranean, giving them access to silver, gold, bronze, and spices. These same links extended westward into Ireland and Britain. The Vikings arrived knowing exactly where the wealth was.
Lindisfarne, a small island just off the northeast coast of England, was sacked on the 8th of June, 793. The monastery there had been positioned precisely because it was remote, a place where monks could worship without disturbance. That isolation made it a perfect target. Monasteries were wealthy, filled with portable valuables, and defended by no one trained to fight. A document from 792 shows that King Offa of Mercia had already granted privileges to churches in Kent while carving out an exemption for military service against what he called "seaborne pirates with migrating fleets". Raids were already an established problem before Lindisfarne. A letter written between 790 and 792 by the scholar Alcuin to King Æthelred I of Northumbria chastised English people for copying the fashions of the very pagans who threatened them, suggesting close and ongoing contact between the two peoples. After Lindisfarne, the raiders attacked the nearby Monkwearmouth-Jarrow Abbey the following year, though they met stronger resistance: Viking leaders were killed and crews were slaughtered by locals at Tynemouth. This setback pushed Viking attention westward for a time. Iona Abbey, off Scotland's west coast, was attacked in 795, again in 802, and a third time in 806, when 68 people living there were killed. The surviving monastic community abandoned Iona entirely and fled to Kells in Ireland. In 839, a Viking force inflicted heavy defeats against the Picts, killing the King of the Picts, Uuen, along with his brother Bran and Aed son of Boanta, King of Dal Riata. By 840, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle recorded that Æthelwulf of Wessex was defeated at Carhampton in Somerset after 35 Viking ships had landed in the area. The treasure hoards buried across England in this period tell their own story. One discovered in Croydon in 1862 contained 250 coins, three silver ingots, and part of a fourth, along with four pieces of hack silver in a linen bag. Archaeologists estimated it was buried in 872, when the Viking army wintered in London. The coins came from Wessex, Mercia, East Anglia, Carolingian-dynasty Francia, and the Arab world. Some hoards held no coins at all: at Bowes Moor in Durham, 19 silver ingots were found; at Orton Scar in Cumbria, a silver neck-ring and penannular brooch. Historian Peter Hunter Blair argued that the sheer success of these raids, and what he called the "complete unpreparedness of Britain to meet such attacks", made further and larger invasions almost inevitable.
In 865, something changed. Bands of predominantly Danish Vikings that had previously operated independently joined into a single force and landed in East Anglia. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle called this force the mycel hæþen here, the Great Heathen Army, and named its leaders as Ivar the Boneless and Halfdan Ragnarsson. Norse sagas connect the army's formation to the legendary chieftain Ragnar Lodbrok, said to have been captured by King Ælla of Northumbria and thrown into a snake pit. The sagas claim his sons formed the army in revenge. Historians treat this as legend with no proven basis, but the army itself was real, and its objectives went far beyond plunder. The army crossed the Midlands into Northumbria and captured York, known to the Vikings as Jorvik, in 866. Anglo-Saxon counterattacks ended in a decisive defeat on the 21st of March, 867, and both Northumbrian leaders, Ælla and Osberht, died. By 871, a second Danish force called the Great Summer Army, led by Guthrum, reinforced the Great Heathen Army. In 875 the combined force split: Guthrum turned back toward Wessex while Halfdan took his followers north. In 876, Halfdan distributed Northumbrian land south of the Tees among his men, who, in the words of the Chronicle, "ploughed the land and supported themselves". This was no longer a raid. It was colonisation. The territory would come to be known as the Danelaw. King Æthelred of Wessex died in 871 and was succeeded by his younger brother Alfred. Alfred continued the fight but was driven back into Somerset in 878, where he took refuge in the marshes of Athelney. He then regrouped and defeated the Viking king Guthrum at the Battle of Edington in May 878. The resulting Treaty of Alfred and Guthrum defined the borders between their kingdoms. It survives today in Old English in Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, Manuscript 383, and in a Latin compilation known as Quadripartitus. North and east of the treaty line was the Danelaw; south and west remained under Alfred. Alfred's response to the threat was systematic: he built a network of defended towns called burhs, created a navy, organized a militia system called the fyrd in which half the peasant army stayed on active service at all times, and established a taxation and conscription system known as the Burghal Hidage to fund it all. In 892 a new Viking force arrived: 250 ships landed at Appledore in Kent, and a second army of 80 ships arrived shortly after at Milton Regis. Alfred's fortified kingdom held. By 896, the new invaders had dispersed, settling in East Anglia and Northumbria or sailing on to Normandy.
Alfred's daughter Æthelflæd, who married Æthelred, Ealdorman of Mercia, continued the push against Viking-held territory. Her brother, King Edward the Elder, reigned from 899 to 924 and extended Anglo-Saxon control further still. When Edward died in July 924, his son Æthelstan became king. By 927, Æthelstan had conquered the last Viking kingdom, York, making him the first Anglo-Saxon ruler of a unified England. He invaded Scotland in 934 and forced Constantine II to submit. In 937, a coalition of Scots and Vikings struck back by invading England. Æthelstan defeated them at the Battle of Brunanburh, a victory celebrated across Britain and the Continent and one that effectively ended Viking power in northern Britain. After Æthelstan's death in 939, however, Vikings seized back control of York. The Norwegian Eric Bloodaxe, known formally as Eirik Haraldsson, became king of Northumbria in 947 after the Northumbrians rejected King Eadred of Wessex. Eadred invaded and ravaged Northumbria in response. When the Saxons marched south, Eric Bloodaxe's army caught up with some of them at Castleford and inflicted what the sources call "great slaughter". Eadred threatened to destroy all of Northumbria; the Northumbrians expelled Eric and acknowledged Eadred. They then accepted Olaf Sihtricsson, only to have Eric Bloodaxe displace him and take power again. In 954, Eadred expelled Eric for the second and final time. Eric Bloodaxe was the last Norse king of Northumbria. York was finally and permanently reconquered in 954, nearly ninety years after the Great Heathen Army had first taken it.
Under King Edgar the Peaceful, England grew more unified, and both Anglo-Saxon and Viking populations recognized him as king. That stability broke down with his son Edward the Martyr, who was murdered in 978, and then with Æthelred the Unready. Scandinavian raiders resumed attacks against England in 980. The English government's solution was to pay them off: in 991, the kingdom gave the raiders £10,000. The payments, called Danegelds, kept escalating. On St Brice's Day in 1002, Æthelred ordered the execution of all Danes living in England, an event remembered as the St. Brice's Day massacre. News of the massacre reached King Sweyn Forkbeard in Denmark. It is believed his sister Gunhilde may have been among the victims. In response, Sweyn raided England the following year, burning Exeter and striking Hampshire, Wiltshire, Wilton, and Salisbury. In 1004, his army looted East Anglia, plundered Thetford, and sacked Norwich before returning to Denmark. Further raids came in 1006 to 1007, then Thorkell the Tall led another invasion in 1009 to 1012. In 1013, Sweyn launched a full-scale invasion. Æthelred fled to Normandy. Sweyn took the English throne, but died only five weeks after his victory. Æthelred returned and drove out Sweyn's son Cnut, who came back in 1015 with a fleet of 200 ships. After his victory over English forces at the Battle of Assandun, Cnut and Edmund Ironside agreed to split England between them, with the understanding that whoever outlived the other would rule all of it. Edmund died on the 30th of November, and Cnut was crowned king of England in 1017, ruling both Danish and English kingdoms. After Cnut's death in 1035, the two kingdoms were separated again, except for a brief period from 1040 to 1042, when Cnut's son Harthacnut held the English throne. The England runestones, a group of about 30 stones concentrated in Sweden, preserve the Viking side of this story. Most of the 27 Swedish examples are clustered around Lake Malaren on the east coast. One, the Yttergarde runestone U 344, records that a man named Ulf of Borresta received Danegeld payments three times, the last of them from Cnut himself.
Harald Hardrada, King of Norway, arrived in England in 1066 with 300 longships and 10,000 soldiers. He came during the succession crisis that followed the death of Edward the Confessor, aiming to claim the English throne. His opening moves went well: he defeated the forces of the earldoms of Northumbria and Mercia at the Battle of Fulford. While he was occupying Northumbria and preparing to advance south, King Harold Godwinson force-marched an army from London in a week and arrived with a force of comparable size. At the Battle of Stamford Bridge, Hardrada was killed along with most of his men. The Norman invasion succeeded in the south at the Battle of Hastings around the same time, and historians have described Hardrada's defeat at Stamford Bridge as the end of the Viking Age in Britain.
Viking material culture in Britain survives unevenly. The richest archaeological evidence comes from Shetland, Orkney, the Western Isles, the Isle of Man, Ireland, and the northwest of England. Archaeologists James Graham-Campbell and Colleen E. Batey identified the Isle of Man as the place where Norse archaeology was "remarkably rich in quality and quantity". In Anglo-Saxon England proper, the picture is murkier. As archaeologist Julian D. Richards observed, Scandinavians there "can be elusive to the archaeologist" because many of their houses and graves are indistinguishable from those of the people living around them. Historian Peter Hunter Blair noted that in Britain the archaeological evidence for Viking settlement was "very slight compared with the corresponding evidence for the Anglo-Saxon invasions" of the fifth century. The written sources add their own complications. The primary record of the Viking raids on Anglo-Saxon England is the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, a collection of annals most likely compiled in the Kingdom of Wessex during the reign of Alfred the Great. Graham-Campbell and Batey pointed to a lack of historical sources covering the earliest Viking encounters with the British Isles, which were probably among the northern island groups closest to Scandinavia. The Chronicle itself, as historians acknowledge, functioned as wartime propaganda written on behalf of the Anglo-Saxons, and in many cases it greatly exaggerated the size of Viking fleets and armies to make Anglo-Saxon victories appear more impressive. The Ireland Annals provide accounts of Viking activity during the ninth and tenth centuries from a different vantage point. The Grinda Runestone, Sö 166, found in Södermanland, Sweden, records a Viking named Gudver who not only attacked England but also raided townships in Saxony, a reminder that the men who crossed the North Sea to Britain were operating across a far wider world than any single chronicle captured.
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Common questions
When did Viking raids on the British Isles begin?
The first recorded Viking raid on the British Isles took place in 789, when three ships from Hordaland (in modern Norway) landed on the Isle of Portland on the southern coast of Wessex and killed the royal reeve Beaduheard. The first monastery attacked was Lindisfarne, raided on the 8th of June, 793.
What was the Great Heathen Army and where did it land?
The Great Heathen Army was a large coalition of predominantly Danish Viking bands that united and landed in East Anglia in 865. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle named its leaders as Ivar the Boneless and Halfdan Ragnarsson. It went on to capture York in 866 and eventually established Viking-controlled territory known as the Danelaw.
What was the Danelaw and how was it established?
The Danelaw was the area of northern and eastern England that came under Viking political control following the campaigns of the Great Heathen Army. It was formally established when Halfdan Ragnarsson distributed Northumbrian land south of the Tees among his men in 876. Its boundaries were set by the Treaty of Alfred and Guthrum after Alfred's victory at the Battle of Edington in May 878.
Who was the last Norse king of Northumbria?
Eric Bloodaxe, known formally as Eirik Haraldsson, was the last Norse king of Northumbria. He became king of Northumbria in 947 and was expelled for the second and final time by King Eadred of Wessex in 954.
What were the England runestones and where are most of them located?
The England runestones are a group of about 30 runestones in Sweden that record Viking Age voyages to England. The vast majority, 27, are located in Sweden, with 17 of those clustered around Lake Malaren on the east coast. They were engraved in Old Norse using the Younger Futhark script.
How did Viking activity in the British Isles end?
The Viking Age in Britain is considered to have ended with the Battle of Stamford Bridge in 1066, when King Harold Godwinson defeated the Norwegian king Harald Hardrada, who had invaded with 300 longships and 10,000 soldiers and was killed in the battle along with most of his men.
All sources
20 references cited across the entry
- 2bookAn Introduction to Anglo-Saxon EnglandPeter Hunter Blair — Cambridge University Press — 2003
- 5webViking Raids in BritainJoshua J. Mark — 20 March 2018
- 6webASC 794Britannia Online
- 7bookKent through the yearsChristopher Wright — Batsford — 1975
- 9journalDanegeld: the land tax In England, 991-1162R Cohen et al. — 2018
- 10journalDanegeld and Heregeld Once MoreM. K. Lawson — 1990
- 11journalThe English Danegeld and the Russian Dan'Grace Faulkner Ward — 1954
- 13bookThe Oxford Illustrated History of the VikingsPeter Sawyer — Oxford University Press — 2001
- 15bookThe Oxford Illustrated History of the VikingsSimon Keynes — Oxford University Press — 2001
- 16bookThe Oxford Illustrated History of the VikingsPeter Sawyer — OUP — 2001
- 17bookThe Oxford Companion to British HistoryJohn Cannon — Oxford University Press — 1997
- 22webLast of the Vikings – Stamford Bridge, 106626 August 2008