The Edge of the World: How the North Sea Made Us Who We Are

by Michael Pye

  Human beings paid.

  The Arab world was suddenly desperate for people to work. Plague had wasted the population, and labour was in short supply. A time of peace didn’t help; war had been the usual way to bring in prisoners. Their slave labourers from Africa were alarmingly restive and then rebellious. They were forced to go to the slave markets – as far north and west as Utrecht as well as busy Venice – and they were ready to pay very well; so a slave was worth two or three times the Northern price when she or he had crossed the Mediterranean going east.22 The numbers were enough for the church council at Meaux in 845 to take notice of the merchants of Charlemagne’s empire moving columns of human property through so many cities of the faithful ‘into the hands of the faithless and our most brutal enemies’. The issue was not just the miserable life the slaves faced; ‘they are swelling the vast numbers of enemies of the kingdom’ the council complained, and ‘increasing the enemy strength’. The council wanted to make sure men were sold inside Christendom, which they said was for the sake of their immortal souls.23

  The trade was lucrative, wide and growing; the trader Vikings wanted their share. They were opening their own reliable trade route to the east, through the Baltic, by way of Novgorod in western Russia and then south to the Caspian, the Black Sea and beyond. They had fur, ivory, amber, honey, beeswax and good swords to sell to the Arabs and to the middlemen along the way, Bulghars, Khazars, Russians. Slaves were one more line of business, and a good one.24 They were quite breathtakingly ambitious. Amlaíb, chief and king of the Norsemen at Dublin, went to war across the Irish Sea and came back in 871 with two hundred shiploads of captive ‘Angles and Britons and Picts’. He brought them back for sale in Ireland, at least six thousand of them, because there was simply no market for that many slaves in Scotland or Wales.25

  So when trouble starts, expect the Vikings to loot, to pillage, but more than anything else: to kidnap. For as long as the Eastern markets needed labour, the Norsemen were shipping out human cargo. In doing so, they helped break up all the frontiers, genetic and cultural and political, of the North.

  Hardly anybody had yet seen the Norsemen up close by 800 CE, but they could be beautiful, they could be terrifying and quite often they were simply repellent. They had the habits of men cramped together on long voyages with little water, little shelter and absolutely no idea of privacy; they knew what it was to be bored through long idle winters so they drank; they had the perpetual traveller’s passion for the rituals away from home that make him feel he might still have a home. They carried absolutely all of their culture with them. And curiously, at least in Hedeby on Danish soil, they all wore some kind of indelible cosmetic, which may have been a tattoo, to draw attention to their eyes: men and women alike.26 They wanted people to be afraid of their gaze.

  The Arab merchant Ibn Fadlān said he met them in a Bulghar encampment on the Volga, far east of Kiev. He was there on a mission: to make proper, settled Muslims of a people with shamans, horses and a tendency to wander about the place. He was startled and impressed when the Rūs, the Vikings living in the East, arrived to do business. ‘I have never seen bodies more perfect than theirs. They were like palm trees,’ he wrote. They were tattooed all over with intricate designs in dark green. They were dirty, they hardly washed except in filthy communal bowls, they were ‘like wandering asses’; they had companionable sex with their slave girls in full view of all their companions, and if a buyer arrived at such an inconvenient moment, ‘the man does not get up off her until he has satisfied himself’. Naturally, they drank; and what they drank was probably mead, although it may have been fermented mare’s milk. They knew very well ‘the heron of forgetfulness that hovers over ale-gatherings and steals the wits of men’.27 In time they developed a taste for good wine. When the Danish king, Godfrid, was asked by the Emperor to take control of Frisia in 882 and keep it safe against raiders, including his own Danes, he accepted; but he was back inside three years with a new demand. He couldn’t stay in any land where the wine did not flow freely – ‘this wine which is in such mean supply in Frisia’.28

  If one of the Vikings fell sick, he was put out in a tent far away from the others and left alone; he was welcome back, if he happened to survive. If he died, and he was poor, the Rūs built him a boat and burned him in it; if he was rich, they made sure he was known to be rich and a Viking in their own way, which meant a ceremony of fire, sex and murder.

  They found a volunteer among the dead man’s slave girls (or slave boys) to die with him. The slave drank and sang, drank and sang, in a perfect show of joy. The man’s boat was dragged onshore, and onto a wooden frame. His body was dug up and uncovered when everything was ready, smelling good but turned quite black,29 and put into the boat along with a dog cut in two and horses which had been run to exhaustion and butchered. The slave girl had sex with the master of each of the pavilions built around the boat, and the men all said: ‘Tell your master I only did this for your love of him.’ Since the girl, according to Ibn Fadlān, could just as well have been a boy, it seems the Vikings followed the rules of the sea: the best sex is available sex. They certainly had the half-joshing insults to go with the habit: the great god Thor was dressed up in women’s clothes to steal back a magic hammer, of all things, and terribly afraid he’d be thought a ‘cock-craver’; a rude ogress in the song of Helgi Hjörvardson tells the princeling Atli that ‘though you have a stallion’s voice’ his heart is in his arse.30

  Evening came. There was a frame like a doorway, and the girl was hoisted up to look over it as though it was the door to Paradise: to see first her parents waiting for her, then all her relatives waiting for her, and then the third time her master calling to her. She drank until she did not know what she was doing. On the boat, six men raped her, and then two men caught her with ropes tight around her neck. An old crone came forward, the Angel of Death, and stabbed her until she died. The men kept banging furiously on their shields so nobody could hear the girl’s cries, especially not any girls (or boys) who might one day think of dying with their masters.

  The man’s closest male relative now stripped naked and walked backwards towards the boat, covering his arse with one hand, holding a piece of flaming wood in the other. He threw the wood onto the boat and he was followed by the crowd, each with a piece of burning wood. The boat caught, the tents caught, the bodies burned in a violent wind.31

  Ibn Fadlān got some things right; we know from the uncovered remains of a Viking grave at Ballateare on the Isle of Man. There is the body of a middle-aged man wrapped in a cloak. Higher up in the same grave, a woman, quite young with her arms over her head and her skull broken.32 She had to die so he could be buried.

  Such things startled a devout Muslim. Christians were not just startled; they were contradicted. The Church was busy preaching the unfamiliar doctrine of the family unit, not a tribe or a pack but parents with their own children, and here were loyalties that went in all directions, loyalty shown by slaves as well as daughters, crew as well as sons; it was a quite different way to organize life. The Church was also busy trying to cram sexuality back into the frame of monogamous marriage, and here was a kind of open, public, sacramental sex. As the Danes moved into more polite or at least more Southern society, they even changed the official meaning of marriage. Frankish law in Christian territory allowed first- and second-class wives, not to mention ‘wives of your youth’, an expedient until a man settled on a serious contractual and property-owning marriage, and even concubines; the ninth-century list of penances prepared by Halitgaire of Cambrai condemns a married man who keeps a mistress but accepts a man who has a mistress instead of a wife. This kind of living was called marriage ‘more danico’ – in the Danish, meaning in the Viking, way.33

  Viking women were even more extraordinary: famous for sex, ruthlessness and such military skill that their own lovers did not recognize them in armour. They could make up their own minds, and act accordingly, even when it came to staying married. In the port town
of Schleswig, the merchant Ibr‚hīm ibn Ya‘qūb reported in 965 that ‘women take the initiative in divorce proceedings. They can separate from their husbands whenever they choose.’34 It sounds as though divorce was not much more than a formal declaration in front of witnesses. Naturally, independence in women made men think women must be wonderfully loose. ‘None of their women,’ an optimist said, ‘would refuse herself to a man.’

  They might also be considered fighters, at least in legend and story. In various poems Gudrun avenges her dead brothers, not least because, as she says, ‘we were three brothers and a sister, we seemed to be unconquerable … we hastened our ships on, each of us captained one, we roamed where our fate led us.’35 Women might dress to look like men and train as soldiers; they ‘aimed at conflicts instead of kisses’ according to Saxo Grammaticus in his twelfth-century History of the Danes.36 ‘They devoted hands to the lance which they should rather have applied to the loom,’ he wrote, censoriously. He told the alarming story of Alvid, who really did not want to marry a man called Alf, turned pirate to get away, and was elected captain when she happened upon a pirate crew mourning their dead leader and in need of a new one; she ‘enrolled in her service many maidens who were of the same mind’. When she met Alf in battle, it was only when her helmet was knocked off that he realized ‘he must fight with kisses and not with arms’. Saxo, a very conventional cleric, reports that Alf later laid hands on her more lovingly and they had a daughter.37

  A woman’s choice might, just sometimes, even affect the all-important business of family, inheritance and honour. A daughter could choose to count as a son, and act as a son, if her father had no sons to compete with her. In Icelandic tradition, Hervör grows up playing well with weapons, robbing people while dressed as a man, and captaining an otherwise male band of Vikings. All this begins because of a slight to her honour: a slave who dared to say her father was a slave. She wants to fight with the family sword, and she argues with her father’s ghost for the right to use it. The sagas say her father agreed, and wished her very well: ‘I wish you twelve men’s lives.’ Storytellers, guardians of tradition, saw nothing very wrong at all with what Hervör wanted. She was unusual enough for a story, but what she did was thinkable.38

  In 789 a royal official called Beaduherd, who happened to be in Dorchester at the time, heard that three foreign ships had come into the harbour at Portland in the English Channel. The law said anyone landing had to come to town at once and declare how many men were with him, so Beaduherd galloped down to meet them, ‘thinking that they were merchants rather than enemies’ as Æthelweard’s Chronicle says; merchants were nothing new close to the great trading emporium at Hamwic, which stood where Southampton now stands.

  But Beaduherd was wrong. As the Chronicle says: ‘He was slain on the spot by them.’39

  There is another version in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, which insists he had no idea who was waiting for him, nor what they were, which is why he wanted them to come as quickly as possible to the king’s town of Dorchester to identify themselves; but the chronicles all agree on the killing. ‘These were the first ships of the Danish men which sought out the land of the English race.’40

  Three years later, the skies opened over Northumbria, ‘there were immense flashes of lightning and fiery dragons were seen flying in the air and there immediately followed a great famine’. 41 A Viking fleet out of Norway assembled at its summertime bases in the Orkneys, freebooters with no official orders. Most of them were planning to sail round Cape Wrath and down to the Hebrides, but a splinter group went down the east coast of Scotland, looking for soft targets.42 They came ashore at the monastery of Lindisfarne, with its rich shrines and its treasury of gifts from the devout. ‘The raiding of heathen men,’ the Chronicle says, ‘miserably devastated God’s church in Lindisfarne island by looting and slaughter.’43

  The Vikings – and their reputation – had arrived.

  Alcuin of York knew what this meant: his whole history, the Saxon people coming to England and the triumph of his Christian faith, was rapidly going to fall apart. Alcuin was settled in the very heart of the court of Charlemagne, which was the very heart of power in Europe; he was scholar and cleric and adviser, ‘the most learned man anywhere to be found’, according to Einhard’s Life of Charlemagne. When Alcuin heard the news from Lindisfarne, he wrote to Ethelred, King of Northumbria: ‘it is three hundred and fifty years now that we and our fathers have settled in this lovely land, and never was such terror seen before in Britain, such suffering at the hands of the heathen.’ He mourned ‘the church of St Cuthbert splattered with blood, treasures pillaged, the heathen despoiling the most holy place in Britain’.44 To Higbaldus, the Bishop of Lindisfarne, Alcuin wrote again of his horror that ‘the heathen defiled God’s holy places, and spilled the blood of saints all around the altar, destroyed the house of our hopes. They trod on the bodies of the saints in God’s temple like they were treading on shit in the open street.’45

  A few years earlier, he’d casually asked an Anglo-Saxon friend ‘what hope there is of the conversion of the Danes?’46 Now he was looking at the Danes and the Norsemen as the unconverted, undoubted enemy. The Danes clearly meant to change the world, and if they did, it must be because they were heathen. They burned and killed, ruined monasteries and churches, just because they could do nothing else to stop the advance of Christ.

  The logic is very particular. Alcuin tried to console Higbaldus that ‘the more God punishes you, the more he loves you’, that even Jerusalem had fallen once and so had Rome; so the attacks meant that Higbaldus was right. Alcuin thought other people’s sins had caused the problem in the first place, he worried about incest and adultery and fornication flooding the land,47 but more than anything he worried about the Church, how the Church in Britain was ‘to keep its self-esteem when St Cuthbert and such a number of saints do not defend it’. He tried to enthuse Higbaldus: ‘Be manly, fight strongly, defend the places where God has settled.’ To missionaries, after all, God is also a migrant, moving to new territory and liable to challenge from even more recent newcomers like the Vikings.

  He was also very concerned about manliness, about modesty, about propriety. In his next letter to Higbaldus he denounces excess and display and he insists that ‘vanity in dress is not fitting for men’.48 He wants a plain kind of virility, able to fight to keep the successes of the past centuries, able to be moderately Viking in face of the Viking menace. But this virility cannot simply be a military matter. Alcuin also wrote to a priest from Lindisfarne who had been captured by the Northmen and then ransomed, and told him he should move away from the ‘din of arms’ and practise solitary prayer.49 Piety was a weapon.

  The next year Offa, King of Mercia, gave the churches of Kent all the privileges they could want, including their old freedom from taxes, an exemption that went back at least as far as the laws of Wihtred, King of Kent, in 695, whose first ruling was that ‘The church is to be free from taxation.’50 This time, though, the Church had to pay up in one situation that was very serious and very pressing: ‘expeditions within Kent against the seafaring heathen, the fleet that moves from place to place’. This ‘moving’ is not plain travel by sea; it is ‘migration’, and it means heathen who mean to settle.51 Fighting those heathen was written into grants of land for the next two hundred years; it was the reason for granting the Abbess Selethryth land in Canterbury as a refuge, and a duty mentioned even when a king was giving land to an archbishop in return for a gold ring.52 The state was a state of war.

  The Orkney fleet went through the Hebrides: ‘the devastation of all the islands of Britain by gentiles’, as the Annals of Ulster put it. They did not have everything their own way. In 796 a small fleet put in to the estuary of the Tyne and went against the monastery at Jarrow but this time the monks were ready for them. The Viking leaders were killed, the crews fled on board their ships only to be forced ashore at Tynemouth and slaughtered.

  For forty years, there were no more attacks on En
gland, but the enemy was not forgotten. There had to be a designated enemy that could be judged and condemned, an opponent who could justify the righteous armies and the Godly monarchs who had, as it happens, more or less the same habits and tactics. A man could no more forget the Vikings than his own bloody image in a mirror.

  The Church proposed a proper enemy, daemonic, unconverted and bloody, the kind anyone could be proud to defeat or at least unashamed to suffer, since being a martyr was most respectable. In the Annals, the Vikings become just such an enemy, no longer a rival out after the same plunder and advantage. Those records are known because they were kept in institutions which survived century after century, monasteries or cathedrals, which had an interest in recording who they were, what they did and what they owned; and which were so deeply entwined with kings and states that at times they performed as a kind of bureaucracy when a ruler had no way of organizing, let alone paying, his own. Official, useful to people’s reputations and carefully conserved, their story blocks out all the other stories.

  But consider what Charlemagne, enemy of the Vikings, did, and his imperial successors. His armies had to be supported out of whatever they could steal and whatever tribute they could demand; their loyalty was bought with regular gifts of horses, silver, gold or arms. When there was a true emergency like the Viking raids, the great Emperor found himself bidding and dealing with the men who would fight for him and taking what he could get: cutting back on his demands for military service from those who did not have much property, allowing minor landowners to nominate just one of their number to fight for them all. Such men, when they turned up, had to be rewarded. In order to move fast they had no baggage train, which meant they were so poorly supplied with basic goods that they ruined the lands they crossed in order to keep eating; famously in 860, when three of the Emperor’s underlings met at Koblenz, their armies were left to hang around for a while, and laid waste to a large zone of perfectly friendly countryside. And like the Vikings, these armies loved easy gold, and were ready to wreck other people’s holy places. They took gold and silver from the great Saxon tree temple, the Irminsul, before burning it to the ground. Once or twice they even managed to raid the Vikings back; in 885 a Frisian army beat off a Viking band and found ‘such a mass of treasure in gold and silver and other movables that all from the greatest to the least were made wealthy’.53