River Kings

by Cat Jarman

  By the time we get to Repton and the Great Army in 873, the Vikings were old news. In the 850s, Viking raiders had begun overwintering in England rather than travelling back home to Scandinavia at the end of the raiding season. According to the narrative in the Chronicle, the Great Army first appeared on English soil in the winter of 865. That year this large force landed in East Anglia, where they were provided with horses by the king in return for peace, overwintering in Thetford. Over the next thirteen years, the army would move across the country, capturing York in 866 and East Anglia in 868. The campaign was a step up for the Vikings, with smaller, hit-and-run raids having been replaced by a thirst for something entirely different, namely long-term political conquest. By the 870s, the pattern of seasonal raiding had become an established military strategy and one that seemed to be successful.

  The Viking camp at Repton has remained one of the most significant Viking sites in England for more than forty years. The excavations carried out by Martin and Birthe initially focused on the village’s Anglo-Saxon church, St Wystan’s[2] – one of the best surviving examples of early medieval architecture in England. In the 1970s, little was known about the Great Army’s presence in Repton beyond an entry in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle for the year 873 stating that ‘here the raiding army went from Lindsey to Repton and took winter-quarters there, and drove the King Burghred across the sea twenty-two years after he had the kingdom, and conquered all that land’. This overwintering was to become a turning point in the story of the Vikings in England.

  While excavating the cemeteries around the church, the team came across a large ditch, cutting through earlier graves and abutting the church wall. Nearby, they found several distinctly Scandinavian-style burials, as well as the broken pieces of a finely carved Anglo-Saxon cross head and a buried sculpture of a mounted Mercian warrior. The ditch was interpreted to be part of a defensive enclosure, showing that with little doubt here was the historically attested winter camp of the Great Army.

  Prior to these excavations, nobody had looked for the Viking winter camp at Repton. Nor, for that matter, had anyone known what it would look like or how to find it. At the time this was quite a common story: despite a wide range of written sources relating to Viking Age England, surprisingly little physical evidence of the Vikings’ presence remained and for the most part this is still the case. Historical records like the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle give detailed, blow-by-blow accounts of battles against the invaders, detailing casualties and lamenting the threat the heathens imposed on the natives. It can be argued that the development of major towns and the unification of England as a country happened in response to Viking incursions, but because there has been a relative dearth of archaeological evidence, the written records have often been used as our primary source of knowledge.

  The archaeological discoveries around St Wystan’s fitted well within this familiar picture of the Vikings. The defensive ditch was thought to represent a D-shaped enclosure similar to examples in Scandinavia, incorporating the desecrated church as a gatehouse, allowing the marauding army time to regroup safely over winter and plan their next attack. The church itself had formed part of a wealthy monastery and was the most sacred burial place of the Mercian royal family. Several noteworthy kings had been buried there and its crypt had become a site of pilgrimage to visit the bones of the sainted Wigstan, a ninth-century Mercian king later known as Wystan. This reveals that the Viking takeover was not only a way to grab the wealth and supplies that would have been found in a monastery, but also a statement of political power. Thanks to the attack, the Mercian king Burghred had been driven into exile in Paris with his wife, never to return. In his place was installed Ceolwulf, described by the Chronicle as ‘a foolish king’s thegn’ – a puppet king. Ceolwulf apparently promised allegiance to the Vikings, guaranteeing to make himself and the kingdom of Mercia available to them whenever they needed it.

  After that winter of 873–4, the Great Army split, with one part moving north into Northumbria, and the other south to fight against Alfred the Great, the king of Wessex. At Repton, the graves with Scandinavian artefacts were placed in prominent positions around the church, perhaps with the aim of legitimising the rule of those leaders who had ‘conquered all that land’, and to claim a more long-term presence. The association with a former ruling elite was a common tactic of the Vikings to emphasise their political and territorial claims.

  When I first visited Oxford that day in 2012, Martin Biddle introduced me to the so-called Repton warrior, also known as Grave 511. His remains had been carefully placed in three beige cardboard boxes, stacked neatly in a corner of the office: a smaller box for his skull, and two larger, rectangular ones for his remaining bones. I have seen thousands of boxes identical to this, each containing an excavated skeleton that has been removed from the ground for storage in a museum collection. I’d read all the reports I could find about G511 and knew all there was to know about his injuries. Often the evidence that remains of traumatic injury is subtle: by the time a blade has cut through skin, flesh and muscle, its momentum has been lost and the energy remaining has only been sufficient to make a small scratch on the surface of the bone. So as horrific and lethal as an injury might have been to a victim, the bones frequently escape relatively unscathed, leaving us unaware of the cause of death. But in this case the injuries were almost impossible to miss. As I lifted his well-preserved left femur out of the box, I could see the deep cut where the axe had sliced through his hip, the angle of the blade clearly defined, leaving no doubt as to its gruesome impact.

  This man had been thought of as a stereotypical Viking with a capital ‘V’: tall, strong, blond-haired and blue-eyed (although those particular details would not be revealed until several years later). He had been buried with a sword of a Scandinavian type by his side and he wore a silver Thor’s hammer pendant around his neck; artefacts that made his affiliation with the Viking world immediately apparent to his excavators, the hammer being considered by many the ultimate symbol of a traditional Viking warrior. Whoever buried him had placed several other items around him, presumably for use in the afterlife: a key, two iron knives and several buckles and fasteners for clothes. Either side of the Thor’s hammer was a brightly coloured glass bead. Between his legs, a rectangular patch of softer soil may have been all that remained of a wooden box; inside it, a bone from a jackdaw, perhaps symbolic of the god Odin’s two ravens Hugin and Munin. Near his pelvis lay a boar’s tusk.

  Later, when the bones had been taken out of the ground and cleaned, it was discovered that G511 had received a number of gruesome and fatal injuries. He had wounds to his skull, with scars suggesting he may have been wearing a helmet when he died, and a cut into his eye socket. On his vertebrae were cut marks that are consistent with evisceration, i.e. the removal of his guts or internal organs. The most severe injury was the deep, diagonal cut into his left thigh, caused by an axe slicing downwards through the hip joint and thigh bone. Somewhere along the line, it has been suggested that this would have cut through his penis, rendering him emasculated. The boar’s tusk found between his legs, therefore, may have been put there as a replacement to ensure he was complete upon arrival in Valhalla, Odin’s hall where fallen warriors could feast at night, and where a penis would surely be needed.

  Perhaps this is a little creative but, in any case, the grave bears all the hallmarks of that of a warrior,[3] and G511’s grave is significant because his is the only such Viking warrior grave in the whole of England that has been properly excavated. There are no comparative graves with the bones intact, despite historical records informing us that such warriors died here in the hundreds or even thousands. Much about the grave suggests that he was a man of high status, perhaps even one of the leaders of the Great Army. His burial, right next to what was once the mausoleum of a whole dynasty of Mercian kings, demonstrates that those who buried him wanted to assert his (and, by extension, their) power and legitimacy over this territory.

  For my PhD resea
rch, I was re-investigating the Vikings at Repton and a key part of this new research on G511 and the Repton dead was to take samples from several of the skeletons in order to use one of the latest forensic techniques – isotope analysis – to learn as much as I could about who they were and where they came from. In archaeology, isotope analysis has become one of the primary methods used to retrace a person’s geographical origins and background. Traditionally, this would have been done by identifying the origins of grave goods – objects buried with a body – if present. That method has some obvious flaws. For one thing, burying the dead with artefacts was not always common practice, leaving us with very little to attempt to reconstruct a past life. And even when grave goods do exist, the objects a person has been buried with – like a Viking sword or a carnelian bead – could have been traded or exchanged, arriving at the burial destination separately from their final owners. The graves we find are multifaceted: we have no way of knowing whether those items even belonged to the deceased or whether they were gifts placed there by the mourners. They may not even reflect much about the person’s life. As one archaeologist noted: ‘The dead do not bury themselves.’

  Isotope analysis, on the other hand, allows us to study the skeletons directly, in an attempt to discover aspects of their individual life histories. Although DNA has the potential to do this too, it largely provides information about someone’s inherited markers, not their unique circumstances. If I am buried in the south-west of England when I die, a DNA analysis of my bones would reveal Scandinavian ancestry, which might give you a clue to my immigration history. But you would find the same genes in the bones of my children, who were born and raised in the UK. In other words, DNA analysis cannot discriminate between first and subsequent generation immigrants. Even so, DNA can give us the bigger picture: how we have spread across the globe, how our ancestors have migrated over thousands of years. It can also tell us about family relationships, or help you find long-lost cousins and reveal markers of illness and disease. In the case of the Repton graves, I was interested in whether, like we thought, we could prove that they were immigrant Vikings from Scandinavia.

  We are, quite literally, what we eat. While you are reading this, your body is digesting your latest meal and is taking all the building blocks it can from it to create new cells, new blood and new skin. Since you started the book, that process of change has been taking place throughout your body so that by now even your bones have begun to change subtly: new bone gets laid down to replace fragments of the old, to maintain strength and structure. This is true for practically everything in your body, with one exception: the enamel in your teeth. Once it has formed during childhood, enamel remains unaltered and it’s even strong enough to stay intact in very poor conditions in the ground for thousands of years. For this reason, teeth are the bioarchaeologist’s best friend.

  Because all tissues, while they are forming, are constantly taking up nutrients from your diet, they also absorb traces of substances that can tell us something about what you ate and, crucially, for my purposes: where you ate it. When, as a child, your teeth form, the food and water you have consumed are their building blocks. That food and drink, again, carries with it markers, or chemical variations, that are particular to the environment in which it was produced. Plants, for instance, get most of their nutrients from the soils in which they grow. These soils get their characteristics from the underlying geology. So, in other words, a loaf of bread made from wheat grown in Derbyshire will have subtly different chemical characteristics from a loaf made from wheat grown in Denmark.

  A way to detect this is through an element called strontium that occurs naturally in pretty much everything. Strontium has several isotopes, which are different forms of the same element. The ratio of one of these in relation to another is what varies in different types of geology and therefore in different soils. And that ratio remains the same as the strontium passes up the food chain: from soil to wheat to bread to Viking. And when the strontium ratio becomes a part of the newly formed enamel in a child’s tooth, it is locked in for the rest of his or her life – and beyond. Returning to the Repton warrior, then, it should be possible to discover whether he really was an invading Viking, or if, instead, he had grown up locally.

  I should add here that the issue of identity is a complex one and despite all the incredible promise of these methods, it’s not one that science alone can answer. Even if the isotope data strongly suggest that someone grew up in Scandinavia, that doesn’t make them a ‘Viking’; in fact, there is no such defined identity that scientific methods can conclusively reveal. Equally, seemingly local origins wouldn’t automatically make someone an ‘Anglo-Saxon’.[fn2] Our identities are multifaceted, and we change and manipulate them throughout our lives. I am an archaeologist, scientist, writer, mother and immigrant, but apart from my migration history, none of these identities would be apparent in my bones. So however we interpret the scientific results, we must do so with caution, and always in the context of as many different sources of evidence as possible. Nevertheless, these new techniques have provided us with opportunities to study past lives that we could only dream of a few decades ago.

  While the methods sound straightforward, it takes months of lab work to get all the necessary data, followed by even more months of wrangling said data into spreadsheets, databases, charts and comparative maps. But the strontium results from G511 were relatively easy to interpret: he definitely could not have grown up in or near Repton. The values from his teeth were consistent with an origin in southern Scandinavia, most likely Denmark, which fitted perfectly with the archaeological interpretation. Yet there was another result from the isotope analysis that was notable too: that of the man he was buried next to. G511 had not been buried alone, but right next to another, younger man, G295. While the actual bodies had been interred separately – the younger man’s body was put in the ground very shortly after G511’s – their graves had been covered by a joint, rectangular stone setting – including a broken-up, finely carved Anglo-Saxon sculpture – which made it clear that they were associated with each other. Double graves like this are common in Viking Age Scandinavia: sometimes couples were buried together and other times two people of the same sex, almost always men. In the latter case, nobody has been able to determine what the relationship was between the two.

  What the isotope results could add was that the younger man had grown up in a location that was almost identical to that of the warrior, isotopically speaking. He too had sustained violent injuries, and may well have been killed in battle, but he had none of the wealthy grave goods of G511 – only a single knife. It seemed likely that these two men came from the same place, quite possibly Denmark. New radiocarbon dates provided a narrow window for their deaths, between the years 873 and 886. This made their association with the Great Army even more likely. It has been suggested that this was the grave of a leader and his weapon-bearer, and even that the younger man was deliberately murdered to accompany his master. Several years later, the reason they were buried together was revealed.

  In a collaboration with geneticist Dr Lars Fehren-Schmitz at the University of California Santa Cruz, we wanted to try to extract ancient DNA from the Repton samples. The aim was to find more proof that these men really were of Scandinavian descent, but also to investigate any possible family relationships, especially to look for a link between the warrior and his companion. Over a decade earlier, other geneticists had tried to do the same, but they had been unsuccessful. Using the methods available at the time, it had not been possible to separate the original DNA in the bones from external contamination by the DNA of all those people who had excavated, cleaned and examined the bones previously. By 2016, technology had moved on so far that not only was it possible to access the uncontaminated DNA, it was also possible to investigate both maternal and paternal ancestry (mtDNA and Y-DNA respectively), as well as autosomal DNA, which is the unique combination of chromosomes that someone inherits from their parents. Lars and his
colleagues discovered that there was a direct, first-degree family relationship between the two men on the paternal side, meaning that they could be either half-brothers or father and son. With the age difference in mind, the latter is more likely. In addition, they had discovered that G511’s eye colour was most likely blue and his hair most likely blond. So, G511 really did live up to the stereotypical image of the tall blond Viking. Perhaps with one exception; the genetic data also told us that he was most likely bald.

  Knowing the family relationship between G511 and his son is important – and exciting – for several reasons, especially that of understanding the dynamics of the Viking world on a broader scale. Historical records and saga literature – prose stories about the Vikings written down largely in Iceland in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries – often deal with specific characters: people who were the actors and antagonists in the stories that make up much of our knowledge of the Vikings. But these sources must be used with some caution. Not only is there a bias in what has been preserved and what hasn’t, but the writer’s motivations also need to be taken into account. The sagas are especially tempting to use as evidence for historical events in the Viking Age. The story of the semi-legendary Ragnar Lothbrok, for example, has enjoyed a popular legacy in England.[4] According to the sagas, Ragnar fought here himself, while his fierce warrior sons are credited as having been significant Viking leaders, even some of those who led the Great Army. However, Ragnar’s story has been patched together from numerous sources, many of which are not even contemporary, and there is no proof that he was the father of the Vikings who captured Repton in 873.

  Knowledge gained from other sources, like objects and bones, can provide a different kind of information (albeit one that is not necessarily more objective), which may serve to verify the historical records. In the case of G511 and his son, the new bioarchaeological evidence verified the sources that describe the significance of patriarchal connections and male descent in Viking society. It also showed that this was a vital element in the movements outside Scandinavia and the taking of new territories. Finally, it demonstrated that these customs were often ultimately expressed through burial rites, as here; a son was brought to Repton to be buried alongside his father, with a monument placed on top of them to show not only their status but also their connection to each other.