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  873 The Host moves to Repton and builds a fort; King Burhred of Mercia driven overseas.

  874 The Host returns to Northumbria, winters on the Tyne and ‘overran that land’. The Danish army splits: one part invades Pictland and Strathclyde.

  875 The southern Host evades Ælfred’s forces and camps at Wareham. Hálfdan ‘shares out the land of the Northumbrians’ (or 876: variants of ASC).

  — St Cuthbert’s relics and coffin removed from Lindisfarne: beginning of the ‘Seven Years’ Wandering’ (HSC; LDE).

  876 Ælfred makes peace with the Danes on a sacred ring; they evade him by night and reach Exeter.

  877 Viking army moves from Cirencester to attack Chippenham at Midwinter; occupies Wessex. Many shires submit.

  878 Ælfred flees into hiding in the Somerset marshes and builds a small fort at Athelney. After Easter Ælfred decisively defeats Danes at Battle of Edington. Treaty with Guðrum; his baptism.

  FORESPÆC*

  LIKE THE PAW PRINTS OF A TIGER, THE TRACKS OF A NEW menace stalking vulnerable coastal monasteries in the 790s left the identity of the perpetrators in no doubt. Traders and fishermen from the Baltic lands were no strangers; they brought exotic furs, the tusks of walrus and narwhal, tall tales of ice and the endless darkness of the northern winter. Their gods were recognized as those whom the ancestors of the Anglo-Saxons had revered in these islands more than three centuries previously. Their speech was exotic, but comprehensible.*

  Since no contemporary account tells of the Viking Age from a Scandinavian point of view, historians and archaeologists must piece their story together from fragments. Those fragments reveal the stark, brutal realties of inglorious contact with native populations—and recent archaeological discoveries allow us to paint an increasingly detailed picture of the crime scene. That picture begs the question: why did they come?

  The social and economic forces that propelled these maritime entrepreneurs to take up arms and go a-Viking, to engage in theft, arson, enslavement and murder, may have been opaque even to the raiders themselves. We can say that the inexorable growth of the Christian Frankish empire under Charlemagne led to a fateful clash of cultures between the inheritors of Rome and the Northern world, and that the tribal chiefdoms of Denmark, Sweden and Norway saw the Holy Roman Emperor as a threat. We can also suggest that the limited cultivable lands of Scandinavia were insufficient to provide for a growing, outward-looking population needing land to farm and on which to raise a family.

  We know, too, that by the year 800 something like perfection had been achieved in the Scandinavian art of shipbuilding, the boatyards of its rivers and fjords producing fast, oceangoing vessels superbly adapted to coastal trade, deep-sea fishing, exploration and raiding. And we can point to the inherently inward-looking conservatism of the kingdoms of the British Isles: intently focused on the domestic agricultural cycle of the seasons, on a rigid caste system and on the competitive relations between a well-established church and centuries-old kingdoms. Ritualized warfare and the ancient rules of overlordship maintained a comfortable status quo among their warrior élites. The Vikings, then, had means, motive and opportunity to strike at the vulnerable fringes of the Atlantic islands. But that does not in itself explain the Viking Age: an unstoppable movement of peoples overseas in search of new lands to conquer and settle.

  For the first quarter of the ninth century the interests and preoccupations of Insular† kings remained primarily domestic. The death of King Offa of Mercia, the greatest of the eighth-century Anglo-Saxon warlords, reopened a struggle with the West Saxon kings for superiority over southern Britain. They fought for the right to control the archiepiscopal see of Canterbury; for rights to trade along the River Thames and, in particular, for the financial perks generated by a thriving riverside trading settlement at Lundenwic. By the late 830s the dynasty of King Ecgberht of Wessex was able to assert imperium over many of the Anglo-Saxon, and some of the Welsh, kingdoms while, further north, the Gaelic kings of Dál Riata were beginning to exercise an ultimately successful claim to subdue the kings of Pictland and obliterate their culture.

  Across the Irish Sea a Norse dynasty established itself in a settlement that became Dublin on the River Liffey and founded pirate bases, the longphuirt, elsewhere. From these bases they raided across the Irish Sea with apparent impunity; and a hybrid Norse–Irish culture established the towns that would underpin the wealth and power of medieval Ireland. The Norse conquered Man and left an indelible legacy of settlement, art and language there. In the Hebrides, and further north in Orkney and Shetland, Norse raiders-cum-farmers found much to please them: after subduing or marrying into native communities they built a great diaspora which has profoundly influenced life in the islands over all the centuries since.

  By the end of the first quarter of the ninth century monastic communities had been devastated by Viking raids across a whole generation. From the 830s onwards those raids began to be felt more widely and, if they did not yet threaten the state, they began to affect the relations between states and to weaken the institution of the church, already in decline under pressures from a secularizing state. Their effect was also felt on the wealth and productivity of the land: trade routes were disrupted; silver supplies choked off; treasure was stolen, never to be recovered; productive farms and trading settlements went into terminal decline.

  The tiger may have left its prints all over the scene of the crime; but a predator that ghosted in on the dawn tide and was gone at dusk, who could penetrate Britain’s rivers and ride fast along its Roman roads, presented a threat that could not, at first, be countered. It took long and bitter experience, another generation, before the Insular states began to both resist and accommodate their unwelcome visitors. The arrival of a Great Host, crossing from Francia in hundreds of ships, turned raiding into conquest in the 860s.

  As it happens, the two decades of greatest threat coincided with the emergence of Ælfred, the only English king to have earned himself the epithet ‘Great’. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries his reputation as a highly competent and religious—if perhaps unpopular—king was reforged into that of a republican hero. In the nineteenth century statues were raised to another sort of Ælfred of Wessex by Whig protestant imperialists who saw him as a bulwark against barbarism: a noble, moustachioed savage who gave England (and therefore the British Empire) its inherent legal and educational superiority.

  The real Ælfred was a man of his age, obliged to fight in battle at the head of his fyrð,‡ the summoned levies of his people, the West Saxons. He was the survivor of four older brothers, all of them kings in Wessex before him. He learned, through defeat, disloyalty and the humiliation of flight, to counter the apocalyptic threat facing his kingdom. He saw how to exploit adversity to enhance the power of the Anglo-Saxon state: to professionalize it. But Ælfred was also something more: a soldier-philosopher in the mould, perhaps, of Marcus Aurelius; an administrative reformer whose experience with the Great Host taught him the art of the possible; a passionate educator and expert in the deployment of his powers of patronage to initiate his own renaissance. We are lucky enough to have Ælfred’s own words to demonstrate the value he placed on wisdom. From a disastrous defeat that must have seemed as though the End of Days was come, he staged a brilliant fightback and, at Edington in 878, was able to tame the tiger in the smoke.§

  * Forespæc: An Old English word meaning ‘preface’.

  † Insular, as an adjective, meaning ‘of the Atlantic islands of Britain and Ireland’.

  ‡ The levies of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms. For its complexities and development see Richard Abels’s excellent Lordship and Military Obligation in Anglo-Saxon England (1988).

  § The Tiger in the Smoke is the title of a wonderfully atmospheric thriller by Margery Allingham set in the London fogs of the late 1940s and published in 1952.

  LANDSCAPE WITH FIGURES

  A CLASH OF WORLDS—SCANDINAVIAN SOCIETY—THE FIRST RAIDS—THE FATE OF THE MONASTERIES—MERCIAN P
OWER—POLITICS AND THE CHURCH—THE RISE OF WESSEX

  1

  In the 799th year from the Christian incarnation, according to contemporary chroniclers, Pope Leo III was ambushed while riding on horseback from his basilica at the Lateran to St Lawrence’s church in Rome. His tongue was cut out and he was blinded. He escaped, though, and was taken to safety by envoys of Charlemagne, king of the Franks. In the same year, Charlemagne’s Northumbrian scholar Alcuin recorded the first raid by heathen pirates in Francia, on islands off the coast of Aquitaine. The following year, the first of a new century, raiders were said to have destroyed the monasteries at Hartness and Tynemouth on Britain’s North Sea coast;* a certain Godfrið became king in Norðmannia (i.e. Denmark); and on Christmas Day Charlemagne was crowned Emperor of the Romans by Pope Leo, now restored to power, if not health.

  In the year 801 Archbishop Æðelheard of Canterbury journeyed to Rome, spending time on the way with the scholar Alcuin in his abbey at St Josse, near the trading port of Quentovic at the mouth of the River Canche in Picardy. He may have arrived in Rome in time to witness part of the basilica of St Peter’s collapse during an earthquake. The same year a serious fire swept through Lundenwic, the trading settlement on the River Thames, and a small, insignificant war broke out between Mercia and Northumbria.

  1. THE DAWN OF THE VIKING AGE: sunrise at Stromness, Orkney.

  In 802 Beorhtric, king of Wessex, died and was succeeded by Ecgberht, son of Ealhmund; a great battle was fought between the Men of Hwicce and the Men of Wilsæte, or Wiltshire; the island monastery of Iona, the foundation of Colm Cille, or St Columba, was burned by heathens; and Harun al-Rashid, Abbasid caliph in Baghdad, sent to his friend Charlemagne a gift in the shape of an elephant called Abul-Abbas.1

  These chronicle entries, sometimes laconically brief, sometimes viscerally detailed, are a narrow window on a world tense with conflict, dynamically interconnected and full of wonder, terror, politics and, above all, populated by tangible people, actors on a grand stage. We know the names of an astonishing 11,000 men and nearly 800 women who lived in Anglo-Saxon England before the year 1041.2 A probably comparable, possibly larger, number of names survives in Irish sources, many fewer in contemporary Welsh and Scottish materials. These are accidents of record and curation, no guide at all to numbers of real people living in the landscape and even less to the sorts of lives they led through those centuries of upheaval. But their survival is a thread joining us to a very real, if remote past.

  Fleshing out the crude sketches of the chronicles requires some imaginative use of evidence from charters, saints’ lives, genealogies, archaeology and place names. Increasingly, these sources allow us to trace a subtler, richer narrative. After that, the unchanging rules of politics and patronage, jealousy, ambition and greed come into play. We can follow the fortunes of popes and kings, queens, archbishops, priests, pirate chiefs, sometimes of lesser nobles and, very occasionally, of the ordinary inhabitants of farm and township and of merchants and moneyers. We can reconstruct the histories of a few places in increasingly fascinating detail, as archaeology reveals glimpses of monasteries and towns, forts and farms, the afterlife and the daily grind of ceorl, peasant, slave and wifman.† Alongside the ordinary, the rational and the inevitable lie traces of the extraordinary, the wondrous, the eccentric and the downright bizarre.

  2. IONA ABBEY: the fragile cradle of Atlantic Christianity.

  Take Charlemagne’s elephant, Abul-Abbas. We cannot say whether it was male or female, African or Indian, where or when it was born. We know that in the spring of 801 Charlemagne, fresh from his coronation as Holy Roman Emperor by a grateful Pope Leo, was at Ravenna on the north-east coast of Italy when word came to him that envoys from Harun al-Rashid had arrived at the port of Pisa. They brought news that Charlemagne’s own mission, sent to the caliph four years earlier, was returning with extravagant gifts; or rather, one of his envoys, Isaac the Jew, was returning; the other members of the party had died. Now Charlemagne learned that one of Harun al-Rashid’s gifts was an elephant (another was an astonishing brass water clock in which mechanical knights emerged from little windows and the hours were marked by bronze balls dropping onto tiny cymbals).3 Returning to his court at Aachen, Charlemagne dispatched a fleet from Liguria to receive the gifts. That autumn, Isaac landed at Porto Venere. By now it was too late in the year to take the elephant across the Alps, so Isaac and his pachyderm spent the winter at Vercelli in Piedmont, halfway between Milan and Turin. According to the Royal Frankish Annals, Isaac duly delivered the elephant to his emperor at the imperial palace of Aachen in July 802.

  We might speculate on the reception of this outsized marvel from the Orient in the capital of the Frankish kingdom, the crowds that must have lined the streets to gawp at its immense size; on the chances of a brave youth daring to reach out and poke its irresistible, leathery flanks; and on the elephant’s own experience of the northern climate and whatever quarters and diet it was given. We would like to know more, much more, than we are told by the official Frankish chronicler.

  The elephant survived eight years at the emperor’s court until it died at a place called Lippeham on the River Rhine, seemingly during the advance of its master’s armies to face those of the Danish King Godfrið. Had Charlemagne hoped to impress his heathen foes, to intimidate them? Was Abul-Abbas a war elephant?

  In this unlikely episode the Islamic Caliphate, Rome, Francia and Scandinavia are visibly linked by the presence of an exotic gift, by diplomacy, by sea power and military campaign. The elephant stands for all those less tangible threads which connected the far-flung worlds of the Early Medieval period. If elephants could travel such distances, what of the traders, priests and warriors, the pottery, books, swords, bundles of wool and precious gems whose histories are often harder to trace?

  Where the annals fail, archaeology picks up the pieces. A fabulous hoard of metalwork buried by its owner on the banks of the River Ribble in Lancashire around the year 903, either for safekeeping or through fear, and unaccountably never retrieved, contains coins from Anglo-Saxon England, from Francia and the Arab lands, and silver arm rings from Ireland and the Baltic, recording the cumulative movements of nameless traders and raiders. A marginal note, written in an elegant Old English hand in a Latin Gospel book, records how it was stolen by the heathen army and ransomed from them by a wealthy ealdorman of Surrey as a pious gift to Christ Church, Canterbury. The timbers of a Viking longship, retrieved in the 1960s from the shallow waters of Roskilde Fjord in Denmark, reveal that it had been constructed not in a Scandinavian shipyard but in Ireland, on the banks of the River Liffey. A sherd of pottery from a monastery on the north-east coast of Scotland, destroyed by fire in about the year 800, came from a Roman amphora. A stone carving in a modest Cumbrian church depicts a scene from Norse legend in which the god Thor goes fishing for a sea monster, using an ox-skull for bait. As I write, the first ever example of a Viking boat burial from the British mainland has just been reported from Swordle Bay, on the remote Ardnamurchan peninsula in Scotland.4 One day, we must suppose, archaeologists digging somewhere in the back gardens of Aachen on the Dutch–German border will find the unlikely bones of Abul-Abbas. The story of the Viking Age is as much a tale of labyrinthine connections as it is of wars and the destinies of kings.

  The collision of the Frankish and Scandinavian worlds in the year of the elephant’s death in 810 can, in retrospect, be seen as a catalytic moment in European history. Charlemagne had gained sole control of the kingdom of the Franks on the death of his brother Carloman in 771. He forged strong links with the papacy and with the empires of Islam and embarked on an aggressive programme of expansion, bringing neighbouring territories under his control. He successfully defeated or marginalized rival claimants to the throne. His wide-ranging and efficient diplomatic, military and cultural progress across a forty-year period was the first genuinely unifying national movement in post-Roman Europe. He exploited and encouraged trade within and beyond Francia—his c
orrespondence with the Mercian King Offa reveals a complex and sophisticated use of economics as a political tool. He was united with the papacy in wishing to see the revival of an empire of Christians, sidelining the historical primacy of Constantinople as the legitimate successor of the late Roman state and defending Christianity against heathens of varying hue.

  Early Medieval kings were ruthless. Charlemagne committed his fair share of murders and atrocities: forcibly converting heathens, massacring armies, laying waste swathes of farmland and deporting native peoples. But he also inspired a cultural renaissance in literature, art and architecture; the palatine chapel of the royal complex at Aachen survives as a unique expression of his vision. He attempted to construct a canal linking the rivers Rhine and Danube, built bridges and fortifications and laid plans for the empire to survive his death.

  By 804 persistent campaigning in the lands of the Saxons between the Rhine and Elbe had extended Charlemagne’s dominions almost to the base of the Jutland peninsula. In that year he is said to have deported all the Saxons living north of the Elbe and given their lands to his allies the Obodrites, whose territories flanked the Baltic coast of what is now Germany. His empire now abutted the southern border of Denmark, a country resistant to Christian missionaries and reluctant to be absorbed into Charlemagne’s imperial dominion. Franks and Scandinavians were now neighbours. Danish kings were no imperialists: they had enough on their plate managing the disparate factions and communities of the western Baltic. But Charlemagne’s northerly progress was a threat that could not be ignored. King Godfrið’s response was to send a fleet and army to Sliesthorp, at the head of the River Schlei, almost the narrowest part of the neck joining Jutland to the Continental plain. The two kings exchanged embassies.5 Hostilities were avoided.