River Kings

by Cat Jarman

  The question of Scandinavian ancestry is more complex; as was the question of whether we could further narrow down their identities. A big problem is that we still haven’t found a way to conclusively separate Viking Age migrants from Scandinavia from those who came across from north-western, continental Europe (Angles, Saxons and Jutes) just a few centuries earlier. It is for this reason that we haven’t yet been able to use DNA analysis to accurately estimate the size of the Scandinavian settlement in England. A few years ago, a large-scale survey of modern DNA from Britain analysed genetic clusters in order to identify past migration events. The researchers concluded that they couldn’t find any clear genetic evidence of a Danish Viking occupation of large parts of England. This, they said, meant that Viking migrants had left very little of a genetic legacy, and could therefore have arrived only in very small numbers.

  This presented a problem: the result was at odds with so much other evidence, like the impact of the Vikings on Britain’s language, place names and much of the archaeology: these sources all suggested that the Vikings had had a considerable influence that could only have come from a sizeable migration. The issue was that the researchers hadn’t adequately taken into account the fact that many of those they defined as Danish Vikings came from exactly the same region as those they defined as Anglo-Saxons migrating before them, and the statistical modelling had not been able to separate the two. When other researchers took the overlap into account with the same dataset, they were able to estimate a much more realistic total settlement of 20,000–35,000 people, which was consistent with other forms of evidence.[5]

  The size of the Great Army has been debated too, with estimates ranging from it being comparatively tiny to many thousands strong. Part of this relates to terminology. In the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, the words used to describe it are the micel here – where micel means ‘great’ and here is translated as ‘army’. This may be a bit imprecise because, according to a seventh-century law code, technically the word here was used to mean any group bigger than thirty-five men that was involved in some kind of violent raid or robbery. It’s possible that this word was used deliberately by the chroniclers as a way to belittle the invading forces, making them sound more like violent thugs than organised military units. Getting a sense of the scale of the Great Army is important because soon after Repton raiding turned to settlement: from the late 870s those who had formed part of the marauding armies divided out land and started farming for themselves. It’s very possible that some of them settled near Repton itself. Only a few miles away, there is a large-scale cemetery at a site called Heath Wood. Here almost sixty burial mounds sit on top of a hill, each containing one or more cremation burials. Many of them included Viking type grave goods and animal offerings; it is possibly the cemetery of a nearby Scandinavian settlement.

  In the case of Grave 511 and his companion the DNA evidence could not help directly. There are no known, living relatives to compare them to, and with more than eleven hundred years having passed since their deaths, if they have descendants at all, these would count in the tens of thousands if not more.[6] At present the only way to narrow down the alternatives is to look for individuals named in the historical records who might be a good fit.

  In the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, four leaders are named as having been at Repton: Halfdan, Guthrum, Anund and Oscatel. We know that Halfdan and Guthrum survived that winter and for many years beyond, so they are unlikely candidates. Anund and Oscatel disappeared from the records and are not heard of anywhere else, meaning that they could be a fit. Yet there are other intriguing possibilities. Searching through all the named Vikings in historical documents for fathers and sons who fit the timeframe and the ages at death, leaves us with a good match. The Annals of Ulster describe a man named Amlaib (usually identified as Olaf) as one of the foreign, Viking kings active in Ireland and Britain from 853 onwards. He is described as ‘the son of the King of Lochlann’ (a location that hasn’t been pinned down, thought to be either Norway or somewhere in Scotland or the Northern Isles) and became a dominant person in Irish affairs during the 850s and 860s, essentially establishing himself as the Viking ruler of Dublin. This Olaf frequently raided alongside Ivar (sometimes identified as the semi-legendary Ivar the Boneless, son of Ragnar Lothbrok). The two may have been brothers.

  In 874, Olaf was killed in what is now Scotland by Constantin, King of the Picts. There is no evidence for what happened to his body, but the timeline fits with the Repton burial. Having first arrived in Ireland in 853, he was likely in his forties or a little older by the time he died. This matches the forensic analysis of G511. But what makes the identification more compelling is that Olaf had a son named Eysteinn, about whom the Annals of Ulster state, for the year 875: ‘Eysteinn son of Óláfr, king of the Northmen, was deceitfully killed by Hálfdann.’ This Halfdan is believed to be none other than the Halfdan who was at Repton in 873 and, incidentally, Eysteinn’s own uncle.

  These sources, then, give us a father–son pair of the right age, dating to precisely the right time. The overwintering at Repton would have lasted until 874 and the archaeology shows that the younger man was buried slightly later than the father, which could conceivably have been the year after. While neither Olaf nor Eysteinn can be linked directly to Repton, other than by the presence of Halfdan, it is very possible that Olaf’s body was moved there after his death in Scotland. In 874, Repton lay in Scandinavian hands and would have been a fitting location for a former Viking ruler. The forensic evidence might support this, as the osteological analysis carried out by forensic pathologist Dr Bob Stoddart showed that G511 had been disembowelled around the time of his death. This was something that was often carried out in the early medieval period in order to move a corpse, because it would stop the body from decomposing so rapidly. For example, Charles the Bald, emperor of the Carolingian Empire who died in the Alps in 877, had his entrails removed and buried on the spot to stop his body from rotting before it was moved to Paris for burial. This possible identification – while unprovable – is potentially a really exciting discovery as it provides a link between the Great Army and the early Viking rulers of the Irish Sea region.

  A HOUSE FOR THE DEAD

  Important as he was, G511 didn’t represent the most remarkable discovery in Repton. Next to the church, in the vicarage garden, a shallow mound had perplexed the locals for centuries. In an account from the seventeenth century, antiquarian Simon Degg described a workman digging into a ‘hillock’ somewhere near St Wystan’s church, finding inside it a large stone coffin containing the ‘skeleton of a humane body nine foot long’. Around the body lay ‘one hundred humane skeletons, with their feet pointing to the stone coffin’. After removing the skull of the central figure, the workman swiftly covered the grave over at the instruction of the lady of the manor, who was clearly shocked at the horrors that had been found at the bottom of her garden and stated that she could not bear to have this charnel exposed. Later, in the nineteenth century, others had dug into it again, discovering not only bones but also ancient weapons, yet apparently leaving most of the deposit in place.

  It was Martin and Birthe’s excavations in the 1980s that were the first to suggest a link to the Vikings. Excavating the mound, they found a partially destroyed two-roomed Anglo-Saxon building underneath that likely dated to the time of the Anglo-Saxon monastery. Inside one of the rooms, they found exactly what those antiquarians had uncovered centuries before: a large mass of jumbled up human remains. At first, there was no way of knowing how old the bones were. But among them, they found artefacts: numerous corroded fragments of metal, some of which they immediately recognised as weapons, including several knives and, crucially, an axe head. The latter could be identified as being of a specific Viking type. But it was the discovery of five silver pennies found together that provided the conclusive evidence. The coins were taken away to be identified by a numismatist, who placed their date between 872 and 875 – precisely the time when the Great Army had camped in Re
pton. The whole context of the burial fitted with this Viking association and slowly the pieces fell into place. Who else would tear down and desecrate what was likely a high-status, religious Anglo-Saxon building and convert it into a mortuary chamber, covered by an elaborately formed mound?

  It seemed that there had been two phases to the use of the building. First, it had been ravaged and used as part of the Viking camp: there were fragments of decorative plaster, broken window glass, traces of metalworking waste and the remains of butchered animals, the likely leftovers of someone’s lunch. At the time, the excavators referred to this as the ‘squatters’ deposit’. It was mostly discovered in the first room you came into, which had steps going down to it from the outside. In a second stage, the second room had been turned into a burial chamber. Here the squatters’ detritus had been swept away and a layer of clean, red sand laid down as a surface on which the bones were placed. This suggests that they were put there at a single point in time, in a deliberate, ceremonial act. Somewhere among all this, one of the excavators, whose identity is now as lost as those to whom the bones belong, discovered my tiny orange bead, though it would not come into my possession for almost four decades.

  During that summer of 1982, when the Repton charnel deposit was discovered, considerable work was carried out on analysing the bones to try to understand whose bodies they belonged to. Each bone was taken out and cleaned in a large tent set up on the vicarage lawn. There, volunteers washed every fragment carefully and laid out thousands of remains to dry on egg cartons. Local doctors and dentists joined the team to count and understand the remains. In the end it was determined that the room had contained no fewer than 264 individuals, based on a count of adult left femurs (as we each have only one left thigh) and a smaller number of juvenile arm bones. There were seventy-two skulls and, when it was possible to determine age, it was clear that there were practically no children, very few old people, and the majority had been aged between eighteen and forty-five. They were also, remarkably, very tall, with most bones being of a considerably larger size than those excavated from Anglo-Saxon graves in the cemetery nearby. With the context taken into account, then, everything pointed to this being a burial site associated with the Viking Great Army. The bones were presumably those of the war dead: warriors who had died in battle and been given a communal grave.

  But the ongoing analysis of the bones was to throw up one more surprise. Where the specialists were able to determine an individual’s sex (something that is typically only possible if you have a skull or a relatively complete pelvis, as that is where sex-based differences can be seen on a skeleton), it was clear that not all the individuals were male. In fact, around 20 per cent of those buried in this grave were women. This was wholly unexpected for the team at the time as the Viking warriors, by definition, should all have been male.

  Publishing the results, Martin and Birthe suggested that the women could have been local wives of the male Vikings. This was supported by the bone analyses indicating that unlike the men, who were taller than the average Anglo-Saxon, the women were shorter than contemporary Scandinavian women were expected to be. This fitted with general assumptions at the time that the Viking invasions consisted primarily, if not wholly, of all-male raiding parties.

  While the interpretation of the bone deposit as that of a Viking army was well received, one issue led to considerable confusion. In the early 1990s, the material was radiocarbon dated at a lab in Utrecht, in full expectation of dates in the late ninth century to fit with the context of the grave and its interpretation. Yet it turned out that many of the bones dated to much earlier: in fact some two hundred years earlier, meaning that they could not possibly all have belonged to the Great Army. For a long time this cast doubt over the whole interpretation of Repton – surely it couldn’t really be a Viking war grave if it contained the bones of people who had died centuries before? A number of explanations were suggested, both by Birthe and Martin and later by others, to explain the anomaly. Could the older bones be those of the Vikings’ ancestors, whom they had carried with them to a new homeland? This wasn’t unheard of from the Icelandic sagas: examples of ancestor veneration exist, in which skeletal remains were either kept on display or buried in or near the home. Alternatively, and more commonly accepted, was the suggestion that the older bones could be the disinterred remains of the Anglo-Saxon monks who had been buried in Repton before the Vikings arrived. In digging their vast defensive ditch, it was suggested, the Great Army may also have stopped to gather the contents of graves they had disturbed, collecting these and transferring them to a new mortuary chamber.

  The problem was that none of these explanations was particularly satisfactory. And as long as the riddle of the bones remained, so did the doubt over Repton as a final resting place for members of the Great Army. This, in turn, cast doubt on the carnelian bead and its origins: if the mass grave couldn’t be securely associated with the Vikings, neither could the bead.

  Martin and Birthe suspected that there was another likely explanation for the radiocarbon date anomaly, but in the 1990s the science behind this was not well enough understood to find out exactly what that might be. It turned out that resolving the Repton radiocarbon dates all came down to a matter of fish. After radiocarbon dating was invented in the 1950s, it quickly became one of the most significant contributions to twentieth-century archaeology. The method made it possible to fairly accurately get a scientific date out of pretty much any object with an organic origin, from a log or a burnt seed to an antler comb or a human bone. Every living organism absorbs carbon while alive. This happens either directly from the atmosphere, as in plants photosynthesising CO2, or indirectly, as in animals and people consuming carbon-rich plants and other foods through their diets. The process takes place constantly as we eat and breathe and therefore the supply of carbon in our bodies – our bones, skin and hair – is maintained.

  Just as with other elements like strontium, carbon has several isotopes, with a radioactive isotope, 14C, being one of them. When we die, we stop accumulating new carbon while the carbon already in our bodies begins slowly and subtly to decay. So when we die, the clock starts ticking. Crucially, we know how fast it ticks; the rate at which this process takes place. Radioactive decay is measured in something called a half-life, which is the time it takes for the original amount of the element to decay by half; for radiocarbon, that is 5700±30 years. In other words, it will take more than five millennia for the 14C in your body to be reduced to half of the original amount. This means that we can measure the radiocarbon remaining in a sample and work back to find out how long it has been since that organism died. While this is a pretty reliable method, the problem with the Repton remains was that nobody had ever taken into account the source of the carbon in those bones. And the fact that some people may have been eating rather a lot of fish.

  In recent decades a number of sites have yielded similarly inconsistent dates to those from Repton, whereby the 14C dates clearly haven’t matched the remaining archaeology. The reason for this relates to diet and physiology. As the radiocarbon in human bodies comes largely from the food that we eat, we need to follow the carbon trail back through the food chain. If you eat only land-based foods – either meat or a vegetarian diet – then the carbon in your body will come from plants that fix carbon into their tissues directly from the atmosphere. However, if you eat fish or other seafood, some of that carbon will come from marine or freshwater sources, and that’s where it becomes a little more complicated. The carbon in our oceans is different: most of it comes from the atmosphere but when it reaches the water, it stays there and circulates in the ocean for several hundred years. This means that when a fish eats plankton, it is consuming carbon that is considerably older than the carbon a sheep consumes by eating grass. On average, this age difference is around four hundred years, which means that if a Viking were to kill a fish and a sheep on the same day and bury them in the ground for you to find a millennium later, it would look to you l
ike the fish died four centuries before the sheep. This difference is passed on up the food chain, meaning that someone eating a substantial amount of fish will also be consuming a lot of older carbon.

  While scientists have known about this principle for a long time, the full impact it has on dating archaeological samples wasn’t fully realised until very recently. This is especially pertinent for relatively modern material (and considering the full history of humankind, the Vikings are very much modern), when even an extra fifty years can make a huge difference to the interpretation.

  The next step in resolving the Repton riddle was to estimate how much seafood each individual was likely to have eaten while their bones were being formed. We can do this now with some confidence: other isotopes can tell us about how much of a person’s diet comes from marine or terrestrial sources. Non-radioactive or stable carbon isotope (13C) ratios that we also find in organic materials vary in different environments. This means that a value measured from a sample can be matched against the expected result from a fish consumer or a terrestrial food consumer. On a fundamental level, it’s quite a straightforward idea: if you have a mixed diet, we can work out the relative percentage of each type of food that you’ve eaten. It’s a bit like estimating how much white and red paint you used to obtain a particular shade of pink. This, in turn, allows us to work out how much of that four-hundred-year marine offset needs to be taken into account.