River Kings

by Cat Jarman

  The story of Melkorka isn’t the only reference to an Irish woman ending up in a Viking settlement like Iceland and, intriguingly, modern scientific evidence may well back this up too. In 2005,[1] a DNA study looked at ancestry among men and women in Iceland and the northern isles of Britain, using modern DNA samples obtained from the existing populations. The study investigated two different types of ancestry: the male lineage via Y-DNA, and the female via mtDNA, which traces female ancestry as specific markers are only passed down from mother to child. The results showed that while the majority of Icelandic men (75 per cent of those analysed) had Scandinavian ancestry, a majority of women (62 per cent) appeared to have originated in the British Isles – including Scotland and Ireland. This was very different from what the researchers found on other, smaller islands in the North Atlantic, such as Shetland and Orkney, where Scandinavian ancestry was more equal among men and women. In other words, the study suggested that in Iceland in particular, women of Celtic origin had ended up interbreeding with Scandinavian men. However, while this scientific evidence seems compelling, especially as it appears to back up the historical sources so well, this certainly isn’t proof that those women arrived there as slaves. We have no way of knowing whether or not they travelled voluntarily. Still, to unravel the questions of enslavement, the observed gender difference is important; as is a consideration of how genetic material is passed on. To be able to leave a genetic legacy, those who were forcefully taken would have had to reproduce to pass on their DNA. Isn’t it more likely that enslaved women ended up as concubines or wives, and therefore had children, than enslaved men becoming husbands or lovers to do the same? In other words, even if equal numbers of men and women had been taken as slaves originally, the genetics would only show this if both sexes had reproduced at an equal rate.

  Yet this is precisely what a new study of ancient DNA appears to show. Here the researchers analysed DNA from Icelandic archaeological skeletons dating to the Viking Age to see whether the individuals had Scandinavian or Celtic (Irish or Scottish) ancestry. They found examples of both origins, but they didn’t find the same differences in the sexes as had appeared in the study of modern DNA, meaning that there was no evidence that more women had moved from the British Isles than men, in contrast to what the modern DNA study suggested. What is particularly intriguing, though, is that by comparing genetic data from the ancient and modern populations, they were able to show statistically that those with Scandinavian ancestry did, in fact, seem to have been more successful in passing on their DNA than those with Celtic ancestry. Even though this might not prove that those who arrived from Scotland and Ireland were slaves, it does quite convincingly show that many of them belonged to a different level of society from that of their fellow migrants who had come from Scandinavia.

  In any case, it is clear that there was a demand that the Vikings were able to supply. We know that the trade in human lives was extensive in other parts of the Viking world, so the question is to what degree these same operations were carried out on a large scale in western territories like Britain and Ireland too – and especially in England. And what was the incentive; what did the Vikings get in return? This is where there is a strong link to the Islamic world, and it turned out that for our understanding of how this related to the Great Army a vital clue lay only a few miles from Repton.

  RIPPLES FROM THE EAST

  One January I had come to a pub in Derbyshire not far from Repton to meet a local metal detectorist, after a chance comment made on Twitter. A few weeks earlier I had been tipped off about a local enthusiast who believed he had found evidence of a brand-new Viking camp. This was exciting for two reasons. First, because I had never heard of Viking artefacts turning up nearby, despite long-held suspicions that there was another Viking site in the area, and second, because I had struggled to make contact with the local metal-detecting community.

  Metal detecting is legal in England if you have the landowner’s permission and it is a hugely popular pastime, which most carry out responsibly. The relationship between detectorists and archaeologists, though, is complex and at times fraught. Without a licensing or training system in place, in principle anyone can pick up a detector and dig artefacts out of the ground, and even sell them on without ever sharing what has been discovered and where. This could, of course, mean a huge loss to historic knowledge. However, certain types of objects are classified as ‘treasure’, meaning that they need to be reported to the government: this includes hoards of coins, objects of silver and gold that are more than three hundred years old, and certain prehistoric artefacts. There is currently no requirement, other than with those treasure items, to report your discoveries to archaeologists or museums, which, for a very long time, meant that a vast amount of knowledge was lost to anyone other than the finders.

  This has been particularly problematic for the study of the Viking Age because of the dearth of physical evidence for the Vikings’ presence in England. Apart from Repton and other major sites like York, where archaeological excavations back up the written sources’ evidence for Viking conquest and settlement, staggeringly few sites can be securely connected to the Vikings. We have no excavated Viking settlements, no farmsteads, no houses, and only a handful of Viking graves across the country. There are place-names that suggest where speakers of Scandinavian languages settled, but on the ground there is hardly a trace of them.

  However, a recent systematic way of recording stray metal-detected finds has pretty much revolutionised what we know about Viking Age England. In order to combat the loss of information from those individual objects found by detectorists, a voluntary recording system called the Portable Antiquities Scheme (PAS) was established in 1997. Anyone who finds an archaeological artefact can take it to a local ‘finds liaison officer’ to add to a central database. As of 2020 more than 1.4 million objects have been recorded and the results have been extraordinary, revealing not only stunning artefacts but also hitherto unknown patterns of occupation and sites that have escaped the written records, from Roman villas to deserted medieval villages.

  Still, as the scheme is voluntary, a lot has slipped through the net. I have spent hours trawling the database for Viking artefacts discovered around Repton, without success. Along with many of my colleagues, I had been wondering for some time if the discoveries from the excavations in the 1970s and 1980s really could be it: could a large force like the Great Army truly have descended on Repton and left no other artefacts nearby, and not a single trace of their presence in the wider landscape? Or was it simply that things had been found but not reported? Does an absence of evidence equate to evidence of absence? Surely, with the number of active metal detectorists around Derbyshire, somebody must know something. Despite working in the area for half a decade, I had absolutely no idea – nor did anybody else – what might have been found and not recorded. Until that day in January.

  When I met him, Rob, who had spent endless weekends trawling the Derbyshire fields, picking up a wealth of local knowledge in the process, had brought along several of the finds he had discovered nearby. The first object he showed me was a fairly obvious one: a Thor’s hammer. A partially broken pendant made of silver, it was a near match to that in G511’s grave.

  Although the hammer suggested a Viking presence, on its own it was not enough to prove this was a Viking camp or settlement. Other items found in the same location included Viking-style brooches and Anglo-Saxon jewellery, some of it having been deliberately cut into pieces at some point in the past, a practice common in the Viking world. Taken together, these finds did point to a substantial Viking presence in the area. However, the last objects that Rob showed me were the most important: several fragmented Islamic dirham coins. These were precisely what I had been hoping for as they represented one of the missing pieces of the puzzle.

  Dirhams as single finds are relatively rare in England and to date in 2020, the PAS database lists only fifty-six such entries. Others have been found in larger quantities within
hoards – hidden deposits of coins and other precious metals buried in the ground for safekeeping and later retrieval – but the PAS examples are individual coins found in isolation, as casual losses or from a disturbed hoard scattered by a plough. With a typical diameter of around 2.5 cm, these coins are significantly larger than the Anglo-Saxon coins that were in circulation in the same time period. Made of silver, dirhams have several lines of text on both sides and usually an inscription in Arabic (Kufic) script along the coin’s outer edge and in the centre. The coins are often exceptionally informative, typically carrying not only the name and date of the ruler at the time but sometimes also details of the year and location in which it was minted and who it was minted by. They are so important because they are direct evidence of contact and trade with one of the most powerful empires in the world at the time of the Vikings: the Islamic caliphate.

  Yet this was a world with which, according to our traditional understanding, early medieval England had very little contact, and certainly not in areas like this, in the middle of rural Derbyshire. Coins such as these dirhams would have been of little use to your regular Anglo-Saxon farmers in the ninth century and consequently there is no obvious reason why they should be found in those contexts. Their presence in England appears to be entirely related to the Vikings and demonstrates not only the vast networks that they were part of, but also something crucial about the global stage on which their actions were played out.

  Some two centuries before the Great Army appeared on English soil, an event took place in the Middle East with immeasurable effects on world history: in the year 622, the prophet Muhammad set out across the desert of Arabia with his followers, heading from Mecca to Medina, and this marked the foundation of Islam. Fast forward to the late seventh century, and an increasingly prosperous Islamic caliphate led by Caliph Abd al-Malik began creating silver versions of its gold coinage, the dinar. The new silver coins quickly became an established currency as the Islamic government sought to improve and establish control over its monetary system. It doesn’t seem to have taken long before the coins started to circulate far beyond the spheres in which they could be used as legal tender and in the ninth century they were beginning to appear in large quantities in Scandinavia.

  It is important to understand exactly what the dirhams represented to the Vikings and why the coins are found in such great quantities in the Viking world: the Scandinavians were interested in the coins’ silver content, rather than their monetary value. Throughout the late ninth and tenth centuries, a relentless hunger for silver fuelled much of the Vikings’ expansion. You could argue – and many have – that beyond a desire for political conquest and resettlement, a large proportion of Viking raids and attacks was driven by their insatiable need for this precious metal. Silver became a very important part of the Viking dual economy system, in which over time, ordinary coinage began to be used alongside a weight-based payment system referred to as a bullion economy. Much of the silver obtained by the Vikings was melted down pretty rapidly into silver ingots: small bars of metal that allowed for the silver to be saved, stored and traded. Silver fragments – either complete or cut into pieces known as hacksilver, like those found by detectorist Rob – have been discovered in hoards or as chance finds across Scandinavia and wherever the Vikings are known to have travelled.

  Occasionally, we get glimpses into the intricate web of connections represented by the silver that the Vikings collected and with that, the networks stretching towards the east. An extraordinary example is the Vale of York hoard that was discovered by metal detectorists, dating to a few decades after the Great Army. In 2007, David Whelan and his son Andrew were out detecting in a field in North Yorkshire. What started as an inconspicuous bleep from a detector turned out to be one of the most important finds of its type discovered in over 150 years: a gilded silver cup holding 617 coins, 67 silver objects and a single gold arm ring. The hoard is thought to have been buried in late 927 or early 928. At that time Athelstan, king of southern England, had just reconquered parts of the country – including York – which for decades had been under Viking control. York had first been captured by the Great Army in 866 and used in part as a seasonal base on and off until 878. Then, from the late ninth century, it became part of a wider region in the north and east of the country that was under Scandinavian control, sometimes (though imprecisely) referred to as the Danelaw. In the 920s, though, conflicts between Vikings and Saxons caused instability, which may well have been the cause of treasures such as this being buried in the ground for safekeeping.

  The individual items in the Vale of York hoard have highly diverse origins: the cup was made in France, perhaps raided from a Frankish church or paid as enforced tribute. The coins within it, however, varied from locally issued Anglo-Saxon coins to Carolingian currencies from the Frankish empire that dominated much of central and western Europe, alongside unusual Anglo-Scandinavian types. One of the latter is a so-called St Peter’s penny, dedicated to the patron saint of York, which features a Christian cross on one side and a Viking sword and Thor’s hammer on the other; emblematic of the hybrid identities forged by the early tenth-century Scandinavian settlers. Alongside these a large number of silver ingots and pieces of hacksilver show that the silver economy was also alive and well more than half a century after the arrival of the Great Army.

  The international connections in the hoard are even more interesting: it contained fifteen dirhams, including one from a mint in Samarkand, in modern-day Uzbekistan, a key location on the Silk Roads. Another two objects can be linked to the east: a brooch pin similar to those found in a Viking hoard in Gnezdovo, Russia, and a fragment of a more unusual item called a Permian ring. These were given their name because they are most commonly found in an area near Perm in Russia, on the banks of the Kama river by the Ural Mountains.

  The Permian fragment is part of a band with an incised design snaking its way around a rounded silver rod. It would once have been part of a large ring, designed to be worn around the neck. Complete neck rings like this have been found in Scandinavia, on islands in the Baltic and in eastern Denmark where many have been dated to the earliest years of the Viking Age. Most of the rings that have been found intact have been wound into smaller spirals, to be used as arm rings by the Vikings. Here’s what’s so interesting about these, though: while made to be worn either around the neck or the arm, they were specifically used as wearable currency, because the intact rings always correspond to a multiple of a specific weight standard. This standard is based on some multiple of 100 grams: Russian examples often weigh around 400 grams and in Scandinavia, lighter versions are found that weigh 100 grams and 200 grams. The Vale of York fragment weighs 26 grams, roughly a quarter of that 100 gram standard. The York fragment also exhibits testing nicks, four in total, showing that the silver had at some point been checked and traded. It’s been suggested before that the number of nicks in an item of silver can give you an idea of how long it would have been in circulation, and I wonder if each nick represents a transaction; silver for a slave, four times over.

  In the Viking homelands, weight-based and barter payment systems were the norm until the turn of the millennium, as the striking of coinage happened only on a small scale up to that point. Elsewhere in western Europe, the situation was a little different. In fact, between the eighth and tenth centuries, a relatively sharp division could be seen on the continent, with a boundary running roughly along the River Elbe in what is now Germany, by the eastern extremity of the Carolingian realm: to the west of this, a coinage-based economy was the norm while to the east, bullion-type economies took precedence. Intriguingly, the distribution of dirhams across northern Europe corresponds to this division, which suggests that the coins arrived almost exclusively via direct eastern routes and not through the Mediterranean.

  In England, while coinage had flourished under the Roman Empire, in the centuries that followed coin production had practically ceased to exist. In the late seventh century a small amount of
coinage began to be produced but it was not until the eighth and ninth centuries that coin-based currencies started to form a significant part of the Anglo-Saxon economy. King Offa, who ruled the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Mercia between the 750s and 790s, reformed coinage through the introduction of the broad silver penny: a coin he used as an instrument of both his political and his economic dominion. Rulers also used coins to assert their power through artistic invention and remarkably Offa even produced a gold coin that imitated an Arabic dinar of Caliph al-Mansur, ruler of the Islamic Abbasid dynasty (754–75), though it is thought that this was mainly to be used for trading purposes in the Mediterranean. In fact, analysis has shown that many gold objects at the time were made from recycled scrap metal.

  In any case, up until the reign of Alfred the Great in the last quarter of the ninth century, the use of money in England was generally confined to the eastern parts of the country; on a wider scale, payment was typically made by an exchange of goods throughout these centuries. However, by the time the Great Army arrived on the scene in the middle of the ninth century, the Vikings would undoubtedly have been very familiar with the place coinage had within the prevailing economic system, even if at that point they weren’t producing any themselves. This means that they knew of and were part of two quite distinct payment systems, and the dirhams were emblematic of the second.

  One way to discover whether artefacts were taken and used for their metal content is by looking for the test marks on silver objects: little nicks or pecks in the surface that show someone has tested the quality of the metal for its purity, no doubt unsure if they could trust the trader standing opposite. The test would both show whether the metal was of the correct hardness and reveal if the object was made of a cheaper material plated with silver.