Whatever the political realities within Northumbria, the battle of Wednesfield (more commonly known as the battle of Tettenhall) marked a watershed.40 From that moment on, the armies of the ‘Danelaw’ would never again threaten the peace of southern Britain. Instead, in little over fifteen years, the kings of Wessex would establish themselves as the masters of all England; in time they would be counted the overlords of much of the rest of Britain as well. The details of the campaigns which Edward and his sister Æthelflæd waged against those parts of England that lay beyond the boundary their father had drawn with Guthrum–Æthelstan are known primarily from the accounts provided in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, including the regional addendum known as the Mercian Register.41 The bald sequence of events these sources present is stark and authoritarian, a drumbeat of inexorable military dominance and fortress building. To string it all together with connective tissue and verbiage would be prolix. I present it here, therefore, in outline – a summary of the history as reported – with the caveat that, as ever, this was how the West Saxons wanted us to remember it: the glorious, inevitable march towards English unity and nationhood – the red ink spilled, a slow pink stain spreading across the map.
In 910, Æthelflæd, the daughter of King Alfred, sister of King Edward and wife of Æthelred, lord of the Mercians, had a fortress built at Bremesbyrig (unidentified, probably in Gloucestershire). In the following year, her husband Æthelred died. Although Æthelflæd assumed most of his authority in Mercia, Edward claimed lordship in Oxford (Oxfordshire) and London. In 912, King Edward constructed two forts at Hertford (Hertfordshire), and one at Witham (Essex), ‘and a large portion of the folk who were earlier in the power of Danish men submitted to him’.42 In 914, armies from Hereford (Herefordshire) and Gloucester (Gloucestershire) defeated a Viking raiding army from Brittany. King Edward ordered defences to be set along the south bank of the River Severn, which stymied Viking raids at Porlock and Watchet (Somerset). The king also constructed twin fortifications at Buckingham (Buckinghamshire), and Jarl Thurcytel and the chief men of Bedford (Bedfordshire) and Northampton (Northamptonshire) pledged their loyalty to the king. In 915, Edward occupied Bedford and constructed a fortress there, while his sister Æthelflæd built strongholds at Chirbury (Shropshire), Weardbyrig (possibly Warbury, Cheshire) and Runcorn (Cheshire). The following year, in 916, the king constructed a stronghold at Maldon (Essex) and ‘facilitated’ the emigration of Jarl Thurcytel to the continent.
Everyone seems to have been busy in 917. Edward ordered the construction of strongholds at Towcester (Northamptonshire) and Wigingamere (unidentified, possibly Newport, Essex).43 Viking raids from Northampton, Leicester (Leicestershire) ‘and north of there’ tried, but failed, to break down the stronghold at Towcester. At the same time, a Viking army from East Anglia built its own fortress at Tempsford (Bedfordshire) and then marched on Bedford, only to be routed by the Bedford militia. Another Viking army from East Anglia besieged Wigingamere, but was unable to capture it and retreated. King Edward’s army was, once again, more successful, destroying the Viking fort at Tempsford, killing their king (whoever this may have been), as well as Jarl Toglos and his son, Jarl Manna. Another army raised by Edward from Sussex, Essex and Kent then captured Colchester (Essex), slaughtering the defenders. In response, a Viking army attempted to capture Maldon, but was repelled by the defenders who – with reinforcements – destroyed and routed the erstwhile besiegers.
Presumably demoralized by the way things were going, Jarl Thurferth and his followers, ‘together with all the raiding-army which belonged to Northampton, as far north as the Welland’, submitted to the authority of King Edward.44 Taking advantage of this success, Edward restored the defences of Huntingdon (Cambridgeshire), and the local people submitted to his authority. There was more submitting to come: after King Edward had restored the defences at Colchester, the people of Essex and East Anglia swore loyalty to him, and the Viking army at Cambridge (Cambridgeshire) voluntarily adopted King Edward ‘as their lord and protector’.45 To round the year off, Æthelflæd captured Derby (Derbyshire).
In 918 King Edward built a stronghold on the south side of the river at Stamford (Lincolnshire), and the people inhabiting the stronghold on the north bank submitted to the king. Æthelflæd gained the submission of Leicester, but died later that year. Edward did not hesitate to secure his authority over the whole of Mercia, and ‘all the race of the Welsh, sought him as their lord’.46 The king next captured Nottingham (Nottinghamshire) and reinforced its defences, and ‘all the people that were settled in the land of Mercia, both Danish and English, turned to him’.47 In 919 the king ordered a fortress to be built at Thelwall (Cheshire), and in 920 caused fortifications to be built at Nottingham and Bakewell (Derbyshire). This was apparently the final straw: ‘And then the king of Scots and all the nation of Scots chose him as father and lord; and [so did] Ragnald and Eadwulf’s sons and all those who live in Northumbria, both English and Danish and Norwegians and others; and also the king of the Strathclyde Britons and all the Strathclyde Britons.’ For the rest of Britain, enough had finally proved to be enough.
By 920, Edward, king of Wessex, had become – or wished to be perceived as – not only king of all the English south of the Humber, but the overlord of almost everyone who lived beyond it to the north. This went beyond even the claims of Edward’s great-grandfather Ecgberht, who had asserted his overlordship of Northumbria in 828. (Perhaps it was an attempt to make good on Alfred’s absurd claim to rule over ‘all the Christians of the island of Britain’.48) However, while there is no doubt that Edward had achieved for his kingdom and his dynasty an unprecedented degree of imperium within Britain, quite how realistic the claims of 920 really were remains uncertain; after all, the world to the north of the Mercian border had changed out of all recognition since Ecgberht’s time.
15
Lakeland Sagas
Coniston Water it is called by the public now-a-days, but its proper name is Thurston Water. So it is written in all old documents, maps, and books up to the modern tourist period. In the deed of 1196 setting forth the boundaries of Furness Fells it is called Thorstancs Watter, and in lawyer’s Latin Tiirstini Watra, which proves that the lake got its title from some early owner whose Norse name was Thorstein.
W. G. COLLINGWOOD, The Book of Coniston (1897)1
It is incontrovertible that large parts of Britain were settled by Scandinavians; the evidence, when taken as a whole, is overwhelming. Nevertheless, not one of the specific questions that one might wish to pose – how did this settlement happen and where precisely was it densest; did it start suddenly or gradually; was it continuous or sporadic; how many people were involved and where did they come from and were there women and children among them as well as men? – can be answered satisfactorily.
That does not mean that the subject has been neglected. As one scholarly duo put it, ‘there is in this area such a weight of scholarly tradition that everything seems to have been said, and firmly objected to, before’.2 This is inevitable in cases such as these, where the evidence itself is weak and contradictory. Consider, for example, the state of archaeological knowledge regarding rural settlement in Northumbria: the two most frequently mentioned sites that supposedly display evidence of Scandinavian influence in their design and layout are Simy Folds (Co. Durham) and Ribblehead (north Yorkshire). Among a handful of other Scandinavian features, the buildings excavated at both places seem originally to have been furnished with stone benches that ran along the interior walls, features characteristic of the architecture of Viking colonies in the north Atlantic.3 The size of the Ribblehead farm building also sets it apart from other English buildings of the period, as does its construction method: it has been described as ‘a house which undertakes in stone and timber what elsewhere, i.e. in lowland England, was an earthfast timber form’.4 Such stone-founded homes bear more resemblance to the Viking long-houses of Orkney and Shetland than to the timber halls of Wessex. Even these weak indicators, how
ever, are compromised by the unfortunate fact that we know very little about pre-Viking architecture in northern England, and arguments about size, or layout, or building materials are therefore predicated on an absence of evidence; we just don’t know for sure how to tell a ‘Viking’ house from an ‘Anglo-Saxon’ house.
Instead, scholarly efforts to pinpoint the extent of Viking settlement have turned on place-names and personal names, language and dialect. We have already seen how elements of Scandinavian legal and administrative terminology were imported into parts of Britain, and in certain English regions the vocabulary of the land feels thick with the Viking past, the countryside rumbling away in Old Norse, or at least with a strong accent. These words and names fall heavily like iron on stone, their sharp cadences catching the glimmer of a low northern sun, salt spray jagging off them on the back of a cold wind: ‘Garstang’ in Lancashire (ON geirr + ON stǫng, ‘spear-post’); ‘Grimsby’ in Lincolnshire (ON grims + ON bȳ, ‘Grimr’s farm’); Micklethwaite in Yorkshire and Cumbria (ON mikill + ON þveit, ‘great clearing’). These are entirely Old Norse words, displacing whatever had preceded them, renaming the land, reimagining the landscape. Elsewhere, however, the Old Norse words are grafted on to an Old English stock – ‘Grimstons’, for example, abound in the corpus of English place-names (ON grims + OE tūn, ‘Grimr’s settlement’), alongside more exotic formulations like ‘Brandesburton’ (ON brands + OE burh + OE tūn, ‘Brandr’s fortified settlement’). In addition, the Norse tongue bled into the everyday words which people, especially in the north, still use to frame the world around them: fell (ON fjall), beck (ON bekkr), tarn (ON tjarn), gill (ON gjel) …
When Old Norse place-names are plotted on to a map of Britain, they present a pleasing picture, clustering with varying intensity across all the regions where the historical record leads us to expect them, even respecting (more or less) the border of Alfred’s treaty with Guthrum. However, satisfying though this may be, it does little beyond apparently confirming that Old Norse-speakers did, indeed, inhabit parts of England at some point in the past. And the closer one looks, more questions than answers arise. Why, for example, are there apparently so many more Old Norse place-name elements in Norfolk than in Suffolk? What is the significance of hybrid place-names as opposed to ‘pure’ Old Norse ones? Why do the most significant places (by and large) retain their English names? What impact have other, post-Viking, changes to landownership and language had over the 1,100 years since the first Viking settlers arrived? How many Norse-speakers would it have taken to effect linguistic change on this scale and in this way? Did the changes come early (in the ninth century) or accrue over time? Did these Norse-speakers come from Denmark, or from Norway, or from some other outpost of the Viking diaspora – Ireland perhaps or the north Atlantic?
And so it goes on, without any real resolution, the arguments highly technical and the conclusions provisional.5 The best that can perhaps be said is that, from the late ninth century onwards, changes wrought through migration were affecting the way people spoke and the way they thought – the world shaped and reshaped by words, mental maps reordered in irrevocable ways. These changes can have been effected only by a sizeable number of Norse-speaking immigrants, though the socially dominant position of these migrants may have meant that their language had an impact that was disproportionate to their number.
Cultural changes are evident across the north and east of England. Among the well-to-do community of moneyers who were responsible for minting coins in ‘Danelaw’ towns during the late tenth and early eleventh centuries, Scandinavian names had become common, if not ubiquitous.6 In places like Thetford, Lincoln and Norwich they were a minority, the Ascetels and Ulfcetels, Grims and Thorsteins still outnumbered by the Ælfwines, Eadgars and Leofrics. In York, however, the picture was reversed, with Norse names equalling if not outnumbering the English. These changes did not only affect moneyers, and were long-lasting. Less than a century later, in 1086, the Domesday survey for Lincolnshire recorded 240 names of which 140 were Scandinavian.7 This doesn’t mean, of course, that by 1086 three-fifths of the Lincolnshire population were descended from ninth-century Viking settlers, any more than the (relative) abundance of Scandinavian and Scandinavian-inspired jewellery found in that county (and in East Anglia) signifies large-scale migration.8 Both names and jewellery, however, do strongly suggest that in cultural terms life in those parts of Britain had taken a Viking turn. Affinity for a transmarine North Sea identity was becoming more fashionable from the turn of the tenth century than it had been at any point since the age of Sutton Hoo in the early seventh century, and was arguably edging out (though certainly not extinguishing) other forms of cultural expression.
These trends didn’t last for ever, but they were surprisingly durable. The Norman Conquest of 1066 ultimately reorientated English culture decisively, and by the late twelfth century moneyers across England mostly had names like Hugo, Robert, Walter or William. But even as late as the 1180s, during the reign of Henry II (the first Plantagenet monarch), there were moneyers named Rafn, Svein and Thorstein working at Lincoln, and there was still a ‘Turkill’ (Thorkell) minting coins in York during the reign of Richard I the Lionheart (r. 1189–99). Although the vogue for Norse names would ultimately die out, there were other changes that could never be undone. As the English language – rapacious omnivore that it is – ruthlessly harvested and absorbed the Scandinavian speech that was introduced to England, it was irrevocably changed by it. Old Norse words in English are not confined to those that we might consider proper to ‘Vikings’ (‘berserk’, ‘ransack’ and ‘skull’, for example, are all words of impeccable Old Norse provenance), but even fundamental linguistic building-blocks like the pronouns ‘their’ and ‘they’, and outrageously mundane words like ‘husband’, ‘egg’ and ‘window’, are rooted in the speech of Scandinavian immigrants.9
This northern onomasticon was thrilling to an early generation of antiquarians, in particular the place-names that compounded still tangible features of the landscape with Scandinavian personal names. During the nineteenth century, surveys were conducted and beautiful hand-inked maps plotted that conjured the ghosts of the Norse-speaking country-folk, summoning them to reclaim the familiar lakes, farms and fells.10 Some of these antiquarians, like W. G. Collingwood and Charles Arundel Parker, spun sagas of their own out of the place-names with which they were most familiar, the Cumbrian Lake District becoming a subject of particularly intense study and fascination. Tales like Parker’s The Story of Shelagh, Olaf Cuaran’s Daughter (1909) and Collingwood’s Thorstein of the Mere (1895) and The Bondwoman (1896) are practically forgotten today, the stilted tenor of late Victorian narrative militating against their enduring popularity, but they are fascinating for what they reveal about the intellectual climate in which they were written – as enthusiasm for the Viking past developed in the latter decades of the nineteenth century. For what is so striking about writers like Collingwood is their willingness to marry their romantic attachment to the places, languages and objects of the Viking Age past to the pioneering academic study of them. It was scholarship as both art and science – the attempt to conjure the wonder of a lost world back into existence through the combination of patient study and literary and artistic invocation.11
Frontispiece to Thorstein of the Mere, drawn by W. G. Collingwood, 1895
Collingwood, who had been intimately acquainted with the Lake District from an early age (he was born in Liverpool), came to live at Gillhead (Lake Windermere) in 1883. But he had been, and remained, closely associated with Coniston; from 1880 he worked as personal assistant to John Ruskin during the long twilight of the latter’s life – twenty years during which the great man’s powers inexorably dimmed, his mental health failing, his beard growing longer and whiter as his relevance diminished. It was, in Collingwood’s own words, a ‘very pleasant servitude’, often staying one night a week at Ruskin’s home, Brantwood, overlooking Coniston Water, the Old Man looming on the far shore. But t
here can be little doubt of the emotional and practical demands that Ruskin placed on the younger man’s shoulders. ‘Nobody knows how awful these times are,’ he would write of Ruskin’s mental degeneration (in 1889, the year before the latter’s death).12 The bond between the two men was a strong one. When Ruskin died, Collingwood designed Ruskin’s gravestone (the Ruskin Cross), which stands in the graveyard of St Andrew’s Church in Coniston, its elaborate neo-Anglo-Saxon stylings perhaps a more fitting legacy to Collingwood’s own life’s work than to that of his celebrated patron. Collingwood’s own gravestone stands just feet away, modest and plain by comparison, deferential even in death. It is poignant that a man of his talents should be remembered in this way, struggling to break free from a persona as overwhelming as Ruskin’s – a young, glittering star, shackled to the orbit of a grotesquely swollen giant, obliterated by the embrace of its sickly dying light.13
After Ruskin’s death, Collingwood produced a great deal of valuable work; the bibliography of his works – running to seven pages in Matthew Townend’s definitive study – speaks for itself. Several of these represented major breakthroughs for early medieval scholarship. His Northumbrian Crosses of the Pre-Norman Age (1927), for example – with its meticulously hand-drawn contents, catalogued and described with a breathtaking precision and care born of love – is described by Townend as ‘a triumph, a great scholarly achievement, and one that has been enormously influential in the subsequent study of pre-Conquest sculpture’.14 This was, in many ways, the culmination of Collingwood’s antiquarian career – a mature work, published five years before his death in 1932. More remarkable, in some ways, is his much earlier book Scandinavian Britain, published in 1908 by the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge. It has sat on my desk throughout the writing of this book, a reminder that I walk on paths trodden before by others, whose efforts to clear away the brambles and the boulders has made my journey much easier than theirs.15
Viking Britain- an Exploration Page 25