River Kings

by Cat Jarman

  In the end, the results lined up beautifully. In each case the individuals whose dates were too early for the Viking Age were people who had consumed a relatively large amount of fish. This meant that the individual graves and the mass grave bones that were tested all fitted with a date in the late ninth century.[7]

  The new radiocarbon dates brought the Vikings back to Repton and with that, finally the certainty that the objects and artefacts buried with them, like the carnelian bead, must also be linked to their presence. But of course, the dates on their own couldn’t prove that the mass grave contained a group of Vikings – could it not just as well hold their victims? We may never know the answer to this for certain, but some of the other scientific data can help. Carrying out the same oxygen and strontium analyses as on the warrior and his son showed that the people in the mass grave were of mixed origins – only a few could have grown up in the local area. For the most part, they were found to be largely consistent with a group from Scandinavia, even if for many of them, north-western European or British origins couldn’t be ruled out either.

  Crucially, though, the results demonstrated that the people in the mass grave hadn’t come from a single origin, like a raiding party hailing solely from Norway or Denmark. Evidence emerging from other Viking Age sites has shown similar results, suggesting that Viking groups were composite forces under joint leadership that could pick up and lose members along the way.[8] At Trelleborg, the tenth-century fortress of the Danish king Harald Bluetooth, who is credited with Christianising and consolidating Denmark, a similar pattern has emerged. In the cemeteries thought to contain Harald’s warriors, strontium isotope analyses revealed that while many could have been recruited from the local area, a large number came from far away, perhaps seeking employment as mercenaries.[9]

  What was especially peculiar about Repton was that a few individuals had oxygen isotope values suggesting they came from a warmer climate than that of central England: a completely unexpected result. Possible locations could include the Iberian Peninsula and the Mediterranean.[10] If this really was the Great Army, could it mean that it contained people from places we had not previously considered? An important point is that those who were buried underneath the Repton mound were what are called secondary burials, meaning that they had been buried somewhere else first. After their bodies had turned to skeletons, they were moved – we know this because the excavations showed that in places the bones were neatly stacked, with thigh bones placed together in one corner of the room. This means that the bones had been collected from temporary burial places elsewhere, meaning that they might not all have died in or near Repton.

  THE JUVENILES

  There was one more discovery from the Repton excavations that needed explaining. Just outside the mass burial site, the team found another unusual grave. It seemed to have been marked by a kind of post, but all that remained of this were some large stones at the base. Its location near the entrance to the mass grave building meant that anyone going towards the charnel would have walked straight past it. What was so special about this grave was that it contained four children who had been buried together. This was uncommon not only in Repton, where most of the cemeteries contained graves of adults: a single grave with four children together is extremely unusual in this period altogether.

  It was clear that the four had been buried at the same time, and that their bodies had been very carefully and deliberately arranged. One of the dead lay on his or her back, with two of the other juveniles crouched on their sides up against him or her. The fourth child was facing the other way, back to back with one of the others. It is impossible to tell from their bones whether the children were male or female: the differences in a skeleton that relate to sex are not apparent until after puberty. While initially there was no clear evidence pointing to how the children had died, a more recent analysis by forensic pathologist Bob Stoddart revealed that at least two, probably three, of the children’s skeletons showed evidence of violent trauma: in other words, they were most likely murdered.

  At the foot end of the grave, the excavators found a sheep’s jaw, which would be a very unusual find in a Christian cemetery from this time. However, it is not unusual to find animal offerings in Viking graves. Could this jaw, then, suggest that the grave was also associated with the Vikings? Its proximity to the charnel, and the way that it had been marked, would certainly indicate this could be the case. New radiocarbon dates I obtained from the grave showed that it dated to almost exactly the same time as the warrior and his son, namely to between 873 and 885. In their original interpretation of the discovery, Martin and Birthe suggested that these four, who they thought may have been local children, could have been the victims of sacrifice, buried as a part of a ritual related to the closing of the mass grave mound.

  It is almost impossible to prove conclusively that someone, in the distant past, was sacrificed. You can find evidence on someone’s body, even when it’s been reduced to a skeleton, that they died violently, suffering a traumatic death; but unless you have another form of proof, it is practically impossible to prove the intention behind their death. How do you differentiate between somebody who died in a battle situation and someone whose death was caused deliberately for a ritual or religious purpose? But because of the cut marks on their skeletons, it is clear that at least two of these four young people hadn’t died of illness or other natural causes; it would seem unlikely, but not impossible, that they had been caught up and killed in a battle.

  Human sacrifice may have been part of Viking ritual practices; there are written accounts that suggest this was the case. Writing in 1072, the German monk Adam of Bremen told of the horrors he observed on a visit to the temple devoted to Thor, Odin and Frey in Gamla Uppsala in Sweden: every nine years, he wrote, nine males of all living creatures – including humans – were sacrificed there to appease the gods. Similarly, German bishop Thietmar of Merseburg described how at Lejre in Denmark, the Vikings would meet every nine years ‘and offer to the gods ninety-nine people and just as many horses, dogs and hens or hawks, for these should serve them in the kingdom of the dead and atone for their evil deeds’.

  Both these accounts could, of course, have been Christian propaganda. To uncover the full story of what happened in Viking Repton, though, it seemed important to try to understand what befell these children. There is a case where something similar might have happened: at Trelleborg, in the settlement near the fortress, several wells were found to contain a mix of human remains and animal bones.[11] Most strikingly, two of the wells each contained two very young children’s bodies, right at the bottom. In both cases, near complete skeletons of either a goat or a dog had been thrown in too. A likely reason for these tragic burials seems to have been human sacrifice.

  The first thing that was certain was that the four Repton children were not all local. One of them could have been: the youngest child, who was crouched in the opposite direction to the others. The other three were more surprising: they came from very different places – not just different from Repton but from each other. One had the most extreme strontium isotope value of all the individuals in the whole project. Put simply, this meant he or she came from an area with considerably older geology. The oxygen isotope values, which can tell us something about the climate they grew up in, indicated that at least two of them could have had origins somewhere milder than Britain. Finally, dietary information from their bones suggested that they had grown up eating different types of food from everyone else buried at the site.

  These results were confusing. Clearly, the four had died at the same time, as shown by their simultaneous burial. But because they were so young, they must have arrived in Repton very recently, otherwise their isotope values would be much more similar. It therefore seemed very likely that they had reached Repton with the Vikings. This wouldn’t have been unusual: we know some Viking armies travelled with children. When King Alfred attacked a Viking fortification in 894, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle explains that he
seized money, women and children, taking the Viking leader’s wife and sons as hostages. In Repton, as the isotope results showed it was unlikely that all these children came from Scandinavia, it seemed unlikely that they had migrated with their parents, accidentally getting caught up and killed in a battle. Instead, another possible, if sinister, interpretation was that the four had been brought to Repton as slaves.

  So this was the situation when the carnelian bead resurfaced that year. Repton had been reaffirmed as part of the Viking camp of 873, and all the evidence pointed to the mass grave being that of a group of marauding Vikings, perhaps led by a blue-eyed, balding warrior and his son, and maybe even accompanied by a group of women. But there were still several loose threads. Why were the mass grave dead from such different origins, and could some of them really have been from places not typically thought of as part of the Viking world? Had those children been sacrificed and if so, where had they come from? And was the evidence from Repton really the Viking camp in its entirety, or were there other traces of these people hidden in the wider landscape? Most importantly, how did the carnelian bead and its links further east fit into this picture?

  The next discovery lay just a few miles downriver.

  2.

  DIRHAM: SILVER FOR A SLAVE

  FOREMARK, C.873

  It’s surprisingly light. The metal has been hammered thin and cut into a neat, large circle, fragile and impractical. The designs on either side protrude from the surface in intricate patterns and your eye is drawn towards them: curves and lines that contort in unfamiliar ways, like snakes that bend backwards and fold in on themselves. The coin belongs to another world. You’ve been told the designs are writing, that they contain names and messages in a language you don’t understand.

  You watch as the sharp iron knife is pressed against its edge, making a tiny peck into its side where, almost impossibly, the material shines even more brightly. As mesmerised by its design as you are though, it is its value you crave; its brightness proving its worth. Later it will be halved, then quartered, weighed out and traded for something even more precious to you.

  EXCHANGE

  It has long been known that the Vikings played a crucial role in the slave trade. Across Europe the Vikings traded in human lives on a grand scale. So how likely was it that the Great Army in Repton was involved in this too, capturing and selling people alongside their raiding activities? Could some of those buried in the charnel and, importantly, the children outside the mound actually have been slaves?

  Nothing in the written sources directly links the Great Army to slave raids, but we do have references indicating that some of those who may have been present there were involved. In the Annals of Ulster, one record in particular stands out: in the year 869, Olaf and Ivar attacked Armagh in Northern Ireland. In actions that one would typically expect of the Vikings, they not only killed and raped the locals but also subjected ‘ten hundred’ of them to slavery. Later, they escaped across the sea, heading for the River Clyde and the Brittonic kingdom of Alt Clut (‘Rock of the Clyde’). Together the two of them captured and besieged the Britons’ island fortress at Dumbarton Rock in 870. After a gruelling four months their water supplies ran out and the fortress fell, forcing the Britons to admit defeat. According to the annals, in 871 Olaf and Ivar returned to Ireland with two hundred ships filled with enslaved Angles, Britons and Picts – people from different kingdoms in what is now England and Scotland.

  While we can’t prove that Olaf and Ivar were ever in Repton, it doesn’t take too big a leap of faith to suggest that in this sort of environment, captives and slaves would have been a common sight there too, only two years later. An absence of anything written about slaves in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle’s entries relating to the Great Army doesn’t mean they weren’t there; it could simply be that the chroniclers had little knowledge of or reason to write about them. In this scenario, considering the highly unusual isotope data and the injuries to their skeletons, it seems very possible that the four juveniles in Repton could have arrived there as captives.

  Finding definite evidence for the existence and extent of the Viking slave trade is exceptionally hard: the archaeological record is, understandably, almost silent. How do you prove that someone was held in captivity, that they were unfree and perhaps had been taken by force from a home country far away and forced to migrate? Even in more modern times, most of our evidence for past slavery comes from written sources. Similarly, several historical sources give us clues about the Vikings’ involvement in the slave trade but unfortunately none of them is very detailed. The Vikings certainly weren’t the only ones taking slaves in early medieval times. As early as the 580s, Pope Gregory the Great apparently came across fair-haired slave children from what later became England in an Italian marketplace, and gave his famous response to the description of them being Angles (people from Anglia) that they were ‘Not Angles, but angels’. Nonetheless, it does seem – at least from the written descriptions – that the Vikings were among the most prolific slave traders.

  One place to start the search is to look at what we know about slaves in the Scandinavian homelands. Much of our knowledge about the Viking Age class system, and the existence of slaves in Scandinavian society, comes from the poem Rigstula, or the List of Rig, which is thought to have been written down in the tenth or eleventh century. In the poem, Rig, a pagan god, describes the mythological origins of three distinct social classes, namely slaves, freemen and nobles. From both this and the Icelandic saga literature it is clear that enslaved people were an integral part of Viking society, in which these people were referred to as a trell or thrall (the root of the modern word ‘enthral’). Trells were essentially unfree, owned by somebody else and had no legal rights. They were unable to own property and were not protected from violence or abuse, although if somebody injured or killed another person’s slave, they would be liable to pay compensation to the owner. It was possible to be freed from slavery, either through an act of generosity or practicality; otherwise this freedom could be bought. Yet most of the evidence we have from the written sources in Scandinavia seems to relate to how the slaves fitted into society, rather than how they were obtained in the first place. Little is known about how the buying and selling of slaves took place, or about the slave raiders themselves.

  One thing that’s clear is that many of the victims of slave raids were women and children, because this is often spelt out explicitly in historical records. One of the earliest of these relates to Ireland, where the Annals of Ulster have an entry for the year 821 of a Viking raid near Dublin in which, among other things, ‘a great booty of women was carried away’. In a similar way, the Royal Frankish Annals also mention raids by the Vikings in the 830s, including one that specifies the captives included ‘multas feminas’: many women. References like these have been hugely influential in creating the popular image of burly Viking raiders selectively picking out women for capture.

  Perhaps that was true. An especially striking reference can be found in a thirteenth-century Icelandic account, the Laxdæla saga: this is the story of Melkorka, an Irish princess, whose fate reads much like a modern-day fairy tale. Here one of the protagonists, the Icelander Ho˛skuldr, travels to a market somewhere in Scandinavia on the pretext of buying building materials for his farm. While there, he meets a man called Gilli, a particularly wealthy merchant known to have traded with the kings of the Rus’, who has now turned to the business of selling slaves. Ho˛skuldr decides he is not content with just his wife, who is looking after the farm at home while he is away, and wants to acquire a concubine. He proceeds to buy the most expensive of the slave girls that Gilli has for sale. After sleeping with her, he takes her home, not minding the fact that she appears to be mute. It is only after the girl has given birth to a son that she is first heard speaking – in Irish – at which point she proclaims herself to be an Irish princess named Melkorka. Ho˛skuldr’s long-suffering wife is, understandably, not too pleased with the appearance of Melkor
ka and her son, so the erstwhile princess is given her own farm to run. Her son ends up leading a very successful life and a relatively happy ending is ensured. Despite the clearly romanticised elements to the story, parts of it are particularly informative: the trader from the east selling slaves at a Scandinavian marketplace, the purchase of a woman to be a concubine, and the appearance of a slave with Irish origins.

  It’s likely that in a new territory such as Iceland, which was first settled by Scandinavians in the 870s, slaves would have been needed for a number of reasons, not least to provide labour in a fledgling settlement. Between the early ninth and eleventh centuries the Irish annals record scores of large-scale raids in which the Vikings took prisoners, presumably captured for the purpose of enslavement. A question to consider is to what extent this whole venture was planned: was slavery the product of well-organised, professional slave merchants or of more haphazard, small-scale opportunists? Some sources suggest Dalkey Island, just off the coast of Dublin, was a holding point for captured slaves before they were led to their final destiny, which indicates a degree of organisation and forward planning. One source from the tenth or eleventh century, the Life of St Fintan, indicates something similar in telling the story of a slave in the ninth century who was sold from one ship to another until finally ending up travelling to Norway or the Orkneys. In many cases, those who were taken never actually ended up in slavery at all: their capture would best be described as kidnapping, with the raiders determined to blackmail the victims’ families rather than take them away. This type of ransom-taking appears to have been prolific and a lucrative way of generating income without the responsibility of keeping slaves alive, something that could be both expensive and demanding logistically.