Whilst there is little evidence in ninth- and early tenth-century Denmark for raiding, by the later tenth and eleventh centuries there is much more evidence for contact with Anglo-Saxon artefacts and artistic influence. From 990-1040 more Anglo-Saxon coins are found in Scandinavian hoards than are known from the whole of England, demonstrating the significance of the Danegeld payments. They include c.50,000 Anglo-Saxon pennies from Gotland, c.2600-3000 from Norway, and c.15,000 in some 115 hoards from the area controlled by Denmark. English coins are also found as far afield as Finland, Russia, Poland, the Baltic Republics and Germany. These hoards contain little hacksilver, indicating that the raiders were being bought off in coin. Sometimes they appear to represent the modest profits of a common warrior, such as the 34 Æthelred pennies buried beside a large stone in Vestermarie on Bornholm; sometimes they are larger, such as the 600 coins placed in a cowhorn and buried on the beach at List on the island of Sylt. The payment of Danegeld had to be underwritten by a huge balance of payments surplus; this could only be achieved by stimulating exports and cutting imports, itself accomplished through currency devaluation.
5 England, 1013-1066
PHASE 4: POLITICAL CONQUEST, 1013-66
In the early eleventh century, Viking activity in England entered a final phase. In 1013 Sveinn of Denmark arrived with a Viking army, not for the extortion of tribute, but for the conquest of the kingdom. The Chronicle recorded that ‘all the nation regarded him as full king’ and Æthelred fled to Normandy. The next year, however, Sveinn died, and Æthelred was able to return, but in 1016 a new Viking force arrived under Sveinn’s son Knutr. At the Battle of Ashingdon Knutr was victorious, and at the subsequent treaty of Olney it was decreed that he should succeed to Mercia and the Danelaw, whilst Æthelred’s eldest son, Edmund Ironside, should have Wessex. Edmund, however, died shortly after, leaving Knutr as king of England, Denmark, Norway and ‘part of the Swedes too’. Knutr’s kingdom, based at Winchester, reached far beyond the bounds of the old Danelaw. Knutr ruled as a Christian monarch, founded a number of churches, and went on pilgrimage to Rome. The scale of his empire, and the nature of his kingship, are a measure of how far the Viking warrior had become a medieval ruler. On Knutr’s death in 1035 Denmark and England became separate kingdoms again, and remained so, apart from a brief interval from 1040-2 when the English invited Hartacnut, Knutr’s son and successor in Denmark, to be their king. By the time the last great Viking leader, Harald Hardrada, was killed at Stamford Bridge and William of Normandy, descendant of Viking settlers in Normandy, beat Harold at Hastings, the Viking Age in England was really over, although Viking influence carried on.
3
VIKING COLONISATION
Both the impact and the scale of Viking colonisation have been much debated. The traditional view is of a mass migration which overturned existing political, social, and economic organisation, but few scholars now accept that whole regions were overwhelmed; the process is now seen as geographically variable, much more gradual, and involving far more assimilation of native traditions (Hadley 1997). Scandinavian settlers were not pioneers carving farmsteads out of a virgin landscape. The England they found was already intensively farmed, with few open expanses where newcomers could establish their own villages. Nor was the settlement a free-for-all, with individuals seizing land as they chose. Land was allocated by Viking leaders in reward for military service, and they would expect to receive tribute irrespective of whether the land was held by their followers or by Anglo-Saxons. For many peasant farmers the Scandinavian settlement probably just meant a change in whom they paid their taxes to.
SETTLEMENT PATTERNS AND GREAT ESTATES
Before the Viking Age most rural land in England was organised in large estates, sometimes called ‘multiple’ estates, because they typically grouped together several component areas, each with complementary resources, under common ownership (Hadley 1996; Jones 1965; Unwin 1988). These estates are well known in Celtic regions such as Wales, where they have tended to survive longer, but they have also been mapped in Cumbria, Northumbria, and the East Midlands. Their antiquity is uncertain, but they probably developed out of the areas over which petty lords were owed payments of food and services, possibly going back to post-Roman times. These lords also sought to divide up extensive upland grazing and hunting areas and place them under the control of their estate centres in the adjacent lowland arable areas. The great estates in the Kentish lowlands, for example, included woodland in the Weald, and may also have had coastal rights for fishing and salt production. In Middle Saxon England these estates were in the hands of kings, major lordly families, and the Church. The monastery at Lindisfarne, for example, owned extensive tracts of northern England, which would be leased out to farmers, or run by estate managers. Land was rarely owned by individuals, however, being vested in communities or families. Individuals only had a life interest and could not make grants which would, in effect, disinherit their heirs.
From the ninth century onwards, however, there were fundamental changes in land ownership which led to the fragmentation of the great estates over much of lowland England and the rise of the private landholder. These changes might still have taken place without Viking intervention, as Anglo-Saxon kings made permanent grants of land to their followers in order to secure their loyalty. Nevertheless, they were undoubtedly hastened by the Scandinavian settlement, and also provided a mechanism for it. Scandinavian colonisation brought about a massive privatisation of land ownership. Viking leaders gained land by conquest and also by purchase, disrupting traditional landholding patterns.
In some cases Viking settlers simply took over existing estate centres, using the established administrative structure to gain control of all the estate. In the north-west, for instance, many of the major territorial divisions bear names of Scandinavian origin, such as ‘copeland’ which means ‘bought land’ in Old Norse. In many cases, however, Viking leaders divided estates amongst their followers in reward for military service. The large number of parishes in the Danelaw, particularly in Lincolnshire and the East Riding of Yorkshire, may reflect Healfdene sharing out the lands of the Northumbrians in 876. The few large parishes which were retained, such as those of Pickering and Beverley, may be those estates which remained under royal or episcopal control.
In 914, following the Battle of Corbridge, Ragnald seized the lands of the Lindisfarne monks, giving some to his followers, Scula and Onlafbal. In the tenth century, charters record the sale of land by Scandinavians in Bedfordshire, Derbyshire, and probably Lancashire. At the beginning of the eleventh century, in a classic protection-racket gambit, Æthelred was forced to grant land in Oxfordshire to a Dane called Toti in return for a pound of gold needed in order to pay Danegeld.
The Domesday Book records the end result of this process of fragmentation, with much of England under the control of large numbers of individual manors. In some areas, frequently those with less evidence for Scandinavian settlement, such as the Kentish Weald, the large estates survived, although Scandinavian settlers were not the only new landholders. There are records, for example, of English lords buying land within the Danelaw. Nevertheless, it was the Scandinavian settlement which paved the way for the buying and selling of small parcels of land in the tenth century.
As a complementary process we might expect to see changes in settlement patterning, with the foundation of local manors and the development of villages and parishes around them. Certainly, over much of England there does appear to have been a shift away from a large number of dispersed settlements to the nucleated villages which are recorded in the Domesday Book. Evidence collected so far however suggests that the precise date of this change varies between different parts of country, and there is nothing to link it directly to the Scandinavian settlement. Indeed, in some areas it has been suggested that the Scandinavian contribution may have been to delay the process of nucleation, and led to the retention of the pattern of dispersed settlement preferred in Norway. In Cumbria, for exam
ple, a combination of cultural and geographical factors meant that the parish system never completely evolved into the small-sized units typical elsewhere. Cumbria retained a dispersed pattern of small hamlets and individual family farms, rather than the nucleated villages of south and central England. Even in the south the fragmentation of holdings was irregular by the time of the Domesday Book, the size of parishes being influenced by the resources available within a given region.
LOCAL GOVERNMENT AND LAND ADMINISTRATION
Whilst Viking colonisation may have had a major effect on settlement ownership and organisation, there is little firm evidence that it led to fundamental changes in the administrative system of England.
The major administrative unit was the county. The boundaries of the English shire counties, as they remained up until the 1974 local government reorganisation, were drawn up in the tenth and eleventh centuries. In the East Midlands they took their names from the burh towns, of Derby, Nottingham, Leicester and so on, and the county may have been that area which was attached to the burh for its defence (see chapter 4). The size of Lincolnshire and Yorkshire may therefore have been a defensive measure against renewed Viking attacks.
Within each shire the basic unit of local government was the ‘hundred’ or ‘wapentake’. ‘Hundreds’ are first mentioned explicitly in a document of Edgar’s reign (959-75); their name was originally based on a taxation unit of 100 hides, each hide being a unit of land required to support one family. Each hundred had its estate centre, or vill, to which the estates’ inhabitants paid their rents and services. Each hundred also had an open air meeting place, where land transactions took place, cases of theft or violence were heard, and some local policing functions were organised. Secklow (Buckingham-shire) is one of thirteen meeting places which have been excavated in England (Adkins and Petchey 1984; Reynolds 1999). It was found to consist of a mound, 25m in diameter, surrounded by a roughly circular ditch, some 1m deep, constructed in the tenth century. Such meeting places were often positioned near landmarks, such as at crossroads, on a parish boundary, or near a prehistoric feature, such as a standing stone.
In the Anglo-Saxon area the hundreds survived as administrative districts into the post-conquest period and are recorded in the Domesday Book. In Northamptonshire, for example, there were some 28 hundreds. In North and West Yorkshire, on the other hand, the local administrative divisions are described as ‘wapentakes’, although there is no simple correlation between wapentakes and Scandinavian settlement as hundreds were preserved in the East Riding of Yorkshire. In any case the process of government was probably the same, as ‘wapentake’ is derived from the Old Norse vapnatak, which refers to the flourishing of weapons in consent at an assembly.
In the multiple estate system, the central area to which outlying settlements were attached is often described by the term ‘soke’; the ‘sokeland’ comprised those settlements which owed tribute and services to the lord. Such references were once thought to refer only to Viking leaders taking over Anglo-Saxon estates within the Danelaw and settling their followers around them. ‘Sokemen’ mentioned in the Domesday Book were thought to represent those free peasants who were descended from Viking settlers. In fact, the paucity of sokemen in Yorkshire has suggested to others that this is unlikely to be true, and sokes are believed to be of great antiquity; sokemen are now seen to be just as likely to be English peasants as Vikings.
The use of the ‘ploughland’ as a unit of assessment for taxation purposes has also been seen as a Scandinavian introduction, but since there is no evidence for its use in Scandinavia until the thirteenth century, and since the ‘hide’ continues in use in the Danelaw, it is just as likely to represent an eleventh-century fiscal system. Similarly, the duodecimal numbering system of counting in dozens and half-dozens has been seen as a Scandinavian introduction with assessments in multiples of 5 and 10 in the south and west, and more often in multiples of 6 and 12 in the Danelaw. Yet the evidence is far from clear cut, and in Normandy it is the decimal system which is seen as being Scandinavian in origin.
PLACE-NAME EVIDENCE
Each age leaves traces of its settlement pattern in the names given to places and, although the first recorded mention of most place-names is in the Domesday Book, with care it may be possible to identify those ‘Scandinavian’ names given during the Viking Age.
In general, the distribution map of Scandinavian placenames confirms the evidence provided by the written sources (6). Hardly any Scandinavian names, for example, are found south of the Danelaw and the recorded settlements in Yorkshire, Mercia, East Anglia and the Wirral can all be seen to have left their mark. Nevertheless, there are some areas where place-names modify the picture provided by the written evidence. There are some Scandinavian names outside the Danelaw in Northamptonshire and Warwickshire, for example, and a concentration in the Lake District, for which there is no documentary evidence.
Within the Danelaw there is considerable variation in the density of Scandinavian names. Kenneth Cameron (1958; 1965; 1970; 1971) and Gillian Fellows-Jensen (1968; 1972; 1975; 1978; 1985) have each compiled comprehensive regional surveys of Scandinavian place names. They have found, for example, that there are few Scandinavian names in the north-east (Durham and Northumberland) and in Cambridgeshire and the south-east (Essex and Hertfordshire). In the East Midlands, Scandinavian influence is most marked in Lincolnshire, Nottinghamshire and Leicestershire. In Cheshire, Scandinavian names are concentrated in the Wirral (Gelling 1992). Within Yorkshire, a grand total of 744 Scandinavian-influenced place-names are recorded in the Domesday Book, although Scandinavian influence is less marked in what was the West Riding. In the East Riding 48 per cent of names are of Scandinavian influence; in the North Riding 46 per cent; and in the West Riding 31 per cent.
6 Map of Scandinavian Grimston hybrid and -by place-names (after Hill 1981 and Roesdahl et al. 1981)
The type of name may help to identify the origin of the settlers, although care must be exercised as Danish words such as -thorp may have been adopted by Norse settlers. Nevertheless, Normanby, for example, probably denotes a Norwegian settlement. Norwegian names predominate in the north-west, where a 20km (c.12-mile) belt along the Lancashire coast seems to have been reclaimed from sea marshes by Norwegian farmers, possibly expelled from Ireland. English names only appear on the higher ground further to the east, and in east Cheshire and Staffordshire a sprinkling of Danish names may mark the western limit of the Danish conquest of Mercia. In the north-west, Celtic names are also sometimes compounded with Norse ones, such as Aspatria (Patrick’s ash).
There are four main categories of ‘Scandinavian’ placenames. Firstly, there are some 850 by-names, such as Aislaby, Balby, Brandsby, Dalby, Ferriby, Kirby and Selby, containing the Old Danish word by, meaning a farmstead or village. The English equivalent was to use the ending -ton, as in Beeston, but the new word passed into English and is used in the term ‘by-law’ to mean the law of the village. We can compare, for example, the place-names Osmondiston and Aismunderby, representing Osmund’s tun and Asmund’s by respectively. There are some 220 -by names in Lincolnshire, and some 210 in Yorkshire. In Lincolnshire they are concentrated in the Wolds and have been interpreted as farmsteads of immigrants who had sailed up the Humber estuary. In Yorkshire they are concentrated in the Vale of York. In Derbyshire, Leicestershire, and Nottinghamshire there are a further 85 -by names, with 22 in Northamptonshire, 21 in Norfolk, and 3 in Suffolk. Many of the -by names are compounded with a Scandinavian personal name. In Yorkshire, of the 119 -by names which comprise a personal element 109 (over 90 per cent) are Scandinavian, 7 are Old English, and 3 are Old Irish.
The second place-name ending which has been interpreted as indicating a Scandinavian settlement is -thorp, as in Bishopthorpe, Danthorpe, Fridaythorpe, Newthorpe, and Towthorpe. The Old Danish word -thorp is generally taken to indicate some form of secondary settlement, and these sites have been seen as representing subsequent exploitation of marginal land, or as outl
ying dependencies of estates which had their centres elsewhere, and that may have been detached from those centres by the Vikings. In Yorkshire there are some 155 place-names ending in -thorp recorded in the Domesday Book, and 109 in Derbyshire, Nottinghamshire, Lincolnshire and Leicestershire. The -thorp names are less frequently linked with a Scandinavian personal names, and have therefore been regarded as being later than the -by names.
Thirdly, there is a class of place-names known as ‘Grimston hybrids’ which combine a Scandinavian and an English element, such as a Scandinavian personal name with the English -ton in Burneston, Catton, Saxton, Scampston, Wiggington, as well as Grimston itself, or -hide, as in Olaveshide. In Lincolnshire and Yorkshire there are some 55 Grimston hybrids; in Derbyshire, Leicestershire and Nottinghamshire some 50. These names are often thought to represent English villages that were acquired by Scandinavian settlers, but perhaps remained outside direct Scandinavian control.
Finally, changes in the pronunciation of Anglo-Saxon place-names, to avoid un-Scandinavian sounds, have also been taken as evidence for Scandinavian settlement. Thus the Anglo-Saxon Shipton becomes Skipton, and Cheswick becomes Keswick.
The high proportion of these four classes of Scandinavian style place-names recorded in the Domesday Book has been used as one of the main arguments in support of a substantial Scandinavian colonisation of England. It is argued that even if it is accepted that the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle’s account of the size of Viking armies is exaggerated, there must have been a substantial secondary migration of colonists in order to account for the large number of Scandinavian place-names.
However, there are two difficulties with this argument. The first problem is a linguistic one. We cannot be certain that individual Scandinavian place-names were coined by Viking Age settlers. Few place-names are recorded before the Domesday Book of 1086, some 200 years after the Scandinavian settlement, and as distant from them as we are from Napoleon. In the intervening years the English may have adopted many Scandinavian words into common usage, and may have adopted Scandinavian naming habits themselves. We do know that Scandinavian names were being coined as late as the twelfth century. Given that it is now accepted that there were Scandinavian elements in the fourth- and fifth-century Anglo-Saxon invaders, it might also be possible that some Scandinavian names may have been adopted earlier. Even if we could be sure that the Scandinavian names belong to the Viking Age, rather than earlier or later, we still cannot be certain that they were coined by Scandinavians. Indeed, the people responsible for naming a settlement will not usually be those living in it, but those from neighbouring sites who need to refer to it, or tax it. Thus the name Ingleby might suggest a village of the Angles, named by Danes.
Viking Age England Page 4