River Kings

by Cat Jarman

  I first saw Torksey one February on a particularly cold weekend, when the country had ground to a halt following a few inches of snowfall; appropriate conditions, as this was almost certainly the season it would have been used by the Great Army. The largely flat but gently rolling landscape must surely have seemed like a promised land for war-weary fighters ready for rest.

  A bank constructed in modern times to protect the fields from the river, in a reminder of its tendency to flood and destroy farmland, yields a real sense of what this place would have been like eleven hundred years ago. The river here is relatively wide, around a hundred metres across, but the banks slope very gently as it snakes away to a well-defined curve in the distance. The water rushes by with surprising speed, the strong winter wind creating small crested waves and a current that makes it clear what an irrefutably good choice the river would have been for swiftly transporting large numbers of people across the country.

  It would have been much quicker to travel between Repton and Torksey by river than on foot: experiments using replica Viking ships show they can maintain an average speed of 4–5 knots (approximately 8–9 km/h) and possibly as much as 9 knots for shorter periods. In fact, in 1893 the imaginatively named Viking, a replica of the Norwegian Gokstad ship, sailed across the Atlantic to Chicago. The ship carried a crew of twelve and was able to sustain heavy seas, with a keel that was exceptionally well suited to open sea travel. The speed of the ship was an average 10 knots and it travelled at up to 12 knots when the weather was good. The distance between Repton and Torksey along the river today is roughly 120 kilometres, meaning the journey could theoretically have been made in around twelve hours or maybe even less. This would surely be considerably quicker than making the same journey on foot in muddy terrain.

  Across the water, the location of the camp is revealed in a small unimpressive rise in the landscape. The camp seems to have had no defensive ditches, fortifications or other means of artificial protection beyond what was naturally provided by the river. Because of this, it would seem that those who camped here in the winter of 872 to 873 were fairly confident that either they would be left in peace or they were at such an advantage in the case of an enemy attack that they didn’t need any elaborate defences. It is clear, too, that whoever had control of the land adjacent to the river would also have controlled movement on the river itself; it is hard to see how vessels could have travelled past this stretch if a large army was situated on either side.

  It’s quiet here now, but just as at Foremark, I try to imagine what it must have been like if you lived along this river, becoming aware of an approaching fleet of Viking ships sailing downstream towards you: the majestic, bow-shaped hulls, perhaps with elaborately carved heads at the stern – dragons and mythical beasts leaving you in little doubt that this was a force to be reckoned with. Or maybe they would have been simpler, more utilitarian: made for speed and efficiency. But they would no doubt have been colourful sights too, with vivid sails in white and red. We have found evidence for this in ship graves and from the sagas, some suggesting that the kings’ or chieftains’ vessels were marked out in a display of wealth and power. There would have been shields too, resting against the side of the ship, reminding you that these were not peaceful visitors arriving only for trade.

  The choice of Torksey as a location for a winter camp was not coincidental but rather a very deliberate and strategic choice by the Great Army. Torksey, like so many other early Viking sites and encampments, was positioned at an important nodal point: where the Trent met a Roman road heading towards Lincoln, which in due course connected all the way down to London, or north-east towards York. This was like an early medieval motorway, with the Trent itself like a waterborne highway. Taking control of this part of the landscape meant that you would essentially be in control of two major transport routes. In fact, it has been argued that it was the strategic use of winter camps as bases with a combination of mobility by ship and by horse that set the Vikings apart, in terms of their military success, from other groups in this period.[5]

  The use of the wintersetl, to use the Old English word for a winter camp, as a strategic element of Viking warfare makes a lot of sense when you see the site at that time of year. Flooding and mud would undoubtedly have made the movement of troops numbering in the thousands a challenge: marching for days on end in the unpredictable British weather could easily have jeopardised the success of a raid. The use of Roman roads in the post-Roman period is well known and if you drive any distance through England today, the chances are you’ll come across one. They are recognisable, first and foremost, by being incredibly straight. Having been well built in the first place, it is not surprising that they continued in use. The importance of being able to move people around in a military context in this period can also be seen in King Alfred’s late ninth-century efforts to create not only defences but also a network of roads known as herepaths – ‘army roads’ – to aid the movement of his forces.

  Another thought that strikes me when I look out over the landscape around Torksey is a statement from the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. The entry for Torksey for 872 says that here the heathen army ‘made peace with the Mercians’, meaning that an agreement of some kind was struck. Seeing how the site is placed in this landscape, and especially how well it relates to the river, some of this likely came down to access. Perhaps violence wasn’t a necessary means of taking control here and it was more a matter of practicalities. We know from other sources that the Vikings were particularly apt at extortion: from the later examples of Danegeld, whereby the Anglo-Saxons were blackmailed into paying vast sums of money in order to keep their homes safe from attack (a case of ‘either you give us your valuables now and you all live, or you give them to us after you’re dead’), to the endless written examples of hostages taken only for ransom. If you were dependent on the river to transport goods or people in any way, you would be particularly vulnerable to taxation for its use. It would have been a little like a modern-day toll road, but with more dire consequences for non-payment.

  There are many unanswered questions about daily life among the Great Army and those associated with it. Still, our understanding of it has changed, and we know that it wasn’t purely a camp with military associations. As well as the army itself, there was a large group of hangers-on; camp followers who provided essential services like repairing weapons, mending clothes, and producing and supplying craft objects. In some reconstructions, camps are filled with tents lined up with military precision, much like you might imagine a Roman camp to have been. The reality was likely something far less organised. Perhaps it was more like a cross between a migrant camp and a music festival; the Calais jungle meets Glastonbury, but on a harsh day with icy rain.

  One of the very few descriptions we have of a Viking camp from this period comes from the continent, in a source from France written down sometime before 877. Here, in the Miracles of St Benedict, the monk Adrevald describes a camp on the island of St Florent le Vieil on the Loire. The Viking raiders had it ‘organised as a port for their ships – a refuge from all dangers – and they built fortifications like a hut camp, in which they held crowds of prisoners in chains and in which they rested themselves after their toil so that they might be ready for warfare’.[6] Is that what you would have seen if you walked across this field in Torksey in the late ninth century? They must have become like miniature towns, these camps, where you could get hold of what you needed through barter and exchange.

  In fact, it’s been argued that the camps were a form of proto-urbanisation, a step towards the later development of towns both back home in Scandinavia and in the new territories elsewhere. The archaeological evidence from Torksey, Repton and from camps in Ireland now makes it clear that craftwork took place in the camps too. That repairs to weapons, ships and equipment went on doesn’t require too much of a stretch of the imagination: clothes must have been mended and made, shoes repaired and exchanged. Still, some of the finds discovered by metal detectoris
ts in Torksey were more surprising. Among the dirhams, gaming pieces and hacksilver, there was also evidence of bronze objects having been cast, most likely jewellery. We don’t know who the intended buyers of these would have been or if they were made for the army members or for sale or trade externally. It’s hard to imagine, though, that the finds of half-finished Thor’s hammers – some of which match almost exactly the one that hung from a necklace around G511’s neck – were not intended for the army members. The music festival analogy comes to mind again, with buyers strolling past stalls with an array of knick-knacks for sale alongside food vendors.

  An army would have needed people with other specialist skills too, like medicine: someone to deal with battle injuries or who could help you if you caught an infectious disease, had a fever or needed to have a rotten tooth pulled out. We don’t know who served these functions within a Viking army but with so many people living in close proximity, in what were presumably conditions with poor sanitation, it must have been important. A later Icelandic source, Snorri Sturluson’s biography of Magnus Olafsson the Good, an eleventh-century king of Norway and Denmark, tells us that he allegedly selected twelve men with particularly soft hands to bandage wounded soldiers after a battle. In other cases, magic and religion could have been necessary fall-back options.

  Another crucial consideration would have been food: a key concern for any military group. We don’t know what the Viking armies subsisted on; most likely whatever they could get hold of or, rather, what could be stolen. It’s been estimated that an army of a thousand men would have required as much as two tonnes of unmilled flour per day, or the equivalent, as well as fodder for horses and fresh water.[7] Sites like Repton would have been deliberately targeted for attack because they were locations where resources and food supplies could be easily obtained. A monastery or royal estate would have had an available store of food, acquired through taxes (known as feorm, or ‘food rent’) imposed on the local population.

  In fact, the whole strategy of seasonal raiding, in which you set up camp in the autumn, could relate to this. At that time of year, around harvest time, stores would be full of food and it would be an ideal opportunity to obtain enough resources to get through the winter. In Frankia – the largest kingdom in post-Roman western Europe and predecessor of the modern states of France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg and Germany – monasteries and royal estates were specifically equipped to be able to provision armies in addition to food stores they had for their own use: the emperor Charlemagne expected the monastery of St Quentin to be able to offer enough food for three months for a large force should he need it. This type of information must have been a welcome fact for a band of hungry Vikings. Perhaps the choice of camps by rivers was also influenced by the opportunity to catch fish for food.

  Before we picture them as entirely pragmatic in terms of their food choices, though, we should consider another account from France, dating to the year 865, in the Annals of St Bertin, a chronicle from a Carolingian abbey in north-western France. This contemporary document gives a vivid account of the tribulations of the Franks, as well as the strategies that were employed by the Vikings. In this particular year, a band of Vikings was based on the Seine at Pîtres, just south of Rouen. One day, the annals state, ‘those Northmen dispatched about two hundred of their number to Paris to get wine’. Unfortunately for the Vikings, they were unsuccessful and had to return unharmed but empty-handed. It is unclear whether the description is of a raid or some other attempt to get hold of alcohol by violence or if this was a peaceful trading venture, as either would have been a plausible option.

  INTELLIGENCE

  There is another significant commodity that must have been sought – and even bought and sold – in Torksey as well as everywhere else that the Vikings travelled, yet it is one we know little about: information. This would likely have worked on two levels: a higher, strategic and tactical level, and a more personal basis. Crucially, information would have been needed about navigation, travel, and the movements and defences of the enemy. It is likely that scouting and reconnaissance parties would have been sent out in advance of larger moves and smaller outposts created to facilitate information exchange. This highly important idea has received too little attention until now and it informs the sequence of events that led to the beginning of the Viking Age.

  As we’ve seen already, the start of the period is ordinarily marked by the unexpected and dramatic attacks on Lindisfarne by a group of people who had allegedly never before set foot on British soil. Yet there is a problem with this idea: how would those first raiders have known where to go and what they would find there? A ship crossing the North Sea on a raiding mission would have needed to know the location of an undefended monastery with the significance and riches of Lindisfarne. The Lindisfarne attack and other similar strikes have been compared to terror attacks; carefully planned targets designed to yield maximum impact. And just as twenty-first-century terrorists rely on extensive networks for information and resources, so too would the Vikings.

  In western Norway, analyses of grave goods suggest that the earliest contact across the North Sea originated from this region, which makes sense as the distance is relatively short.[8] It is here that the first of the loot from Britain and Ireland starts appearing in the archaeological record: fragments of intricately carved gilt book covers torn from the treasures that they no doubt encased and repurposed into fittings and jewellery; relic shrines, stripped of their holy contents and placed in a heathen grave. It’s been suggested that the Northern Isles of Scotland was where the Scandinavians first heard of the riches that could be so easily obtained in undefended monasteries by pagans with no respect for the sanctity of religious institutions.

  In fact, we now have an increasing body of knowledge suggesting that the first attacks on England didn’t come quite so much out of the blue as we have been led to believe. A big problem with that perspective is that it suggests the Scandinavians were strangers to the inhabitants of Britain and Ireland, which is far from true. Take the letter written by Alcuin to Ethelred, the king of Northumbria, for instance, which so graphically described the Lindisfarne attack. For much of his letter, Alcuin launches a tirade against not just the foreign invaders, but also his own countrymen and women (Ethelred included) for the sins and ‘unwonted practices’ they are guilty of. Among these is the following admonishment: ‘Consider the dress, the way of wearing the hair, the luxurious habits of the princes and people. Look at your trimming of beard and hair, in which you have wished to resemble the pagans. Are you not menaced by terror of them whose fashion you wished to follow?’ Alcuin spells it out pretty clearly: people living in eighth-century England were dressing like and following the trends of those vicious pagans who had been subjecting them to terror attacks. How could this be, if there had been little or no contact across the North Sea beforehand? For context, it’s worth remembering that Alcuin was writing in a period when much, but not all, of England had converted to Christianity, meaning that his ulterior motive was to use the Viking attacks as a sign of divine retribution.

  Other documentary sources show the attack was not the first. We already know from the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle that the first properly documented raid on England had taken place six years before, in 787, at Portland on the Dorset coast. A raiding party apparently from Hordaland in south-western Norway brutally slaughtered the king of Wessex’s representative who came to greet them on arrival at a windswept beach near a royal residence. However, more obscure documents, like grants and charters, which documented everything from property rights to demands, conditions and agreements between rulers, churches and other well-to-do households, reveal that measures had been taken to defend citizens against the Vikings in eastern England in the late eighth century. In Kent, a text describes privileges granted by King Offa to Kentish churches and monasteries in 792, freeing them from various dues and services but explicitly excluding military service ‘against seaborne pagans with migrating fleets’.Th
is included building bridges and fortification for defence. If threats from the sea were not a common and established problem, then surely these actions would not have been necessary.

  Yet the sources could also suggest that not all those who appeared from the sea were enemies. Take the Portland attack, for example. The representative of the king, a reeve named as Beaduheard, rode down to meet the three ships with the purpose of forcing them ‘in an authoritative manner’ to report to the royal town, thinking them to be merchants instead of pirates. In other words, nothing in the appearance of these ships – presumably of a Viking type – led him to believe that he should approach armed or with the back-up of a military force. A later charter dealing with property rights in Kent, issued by King Ceolwulf in 822, hints intriguingly that some pagans may, in fact, not have been enemies. The document specifically talks about military service against ‘pagan enemies’; the addition of ‘pagan’ here could be seen to suggest that not all pagans were enemies or even that some enemies were not pagan.[9]

  It seems, then, that information about what could be found in those isles to the west was readily available when the first documented raids took place. But what about how to get there? It is likely that the Vikings used celestial navigation in some way; that they observed stars and constellations and used them as markers for directions and north points. Yet no written records survive and even the saga literature is silent on the exact use of such technical measures. It’s likely that the passing on of information, in lieu of maps, would have been crucial; knowing which markers on land to head for. This is something we do have descriptions of, for instance in the Icelandic Landnáma (‘land-taking’) book from the twelfth century, a sort of Who’s Who or telephone directory of Iceland’s first settlers. The text also contains directions for sailing from a particular location on the western coast of Norway to Greenland: ‘From Hernar in Norway one is to continue sailing west to Hvarf in Greenland. This course will take one so far north of Shetland that one can just sight it in very clear weather and so far south of the Faroe Islands that the sea appears half way up the mountain slopes and then so far south of Iceland that birds and whales will be sighted.’[10]