Gareth Williams - Viking Warrior Vs Anglo-Saxon Warrior

During the period 865 to 1066, England faced repeated attacks from Scandinavian seaborne warriors, generally known today as Vikings. Such attacks were not new. The Anglo-Saxons themselves had invaded the area and settled there in the 5th and 6th centuries, having travelled by sea from southern Scandinavia, northern Germany and parts of the Netherlands. At the time of their arrival, what is now England was divided into a number of British (i.e. Welsh-speaking) kingdoms, which to varying degrees retained some influences from the Roman Empire, the forces of which had been withdrawn from Britain in the early 5th century. The Anglo-Saxons conquered many of those kingdoms, establishing many of their own, including the important kingdoms of Mercia, Kent, Northumbria, the East Angles and the West Saxons. Although the term Anglo-Saxons is used as a general term for these peoples today, it was only in the late 9th century, with the beginnings of the unification of England, that the idea of Anglo-Saxons was used to create a sense of common identity in the face of the Viking invaders.

The Anglo-Saxons were aware of their own origins, and these were consciously recalled in the famous description of one of the first recorded Viking raids, an attack on the coastal monastery of Lindisfarne (Holy Island) in Northumbria in 793, preserved in a letter of the Northumbrian churchman Alcuin responding to the event: Lo, it is nearly 350 years that we and our fathers have inhabited this most lovely land, and never before has such terror appeared in Britain as we have now suffered from a pagan race, nor was it thought that such an inroad from the sea could be made (Whitelock 1955: 776). Around the same time, there was also a raid on the coast of Dorset, recorded in the series of annals known as the Anglo-SaxonChronicle:

In [King Beorhtrics] days came first 3 ships of Northmen from Hordaland: and then the reeve rode there and wanted to compel them to go to the kings town because he did not know what they were; and then they killed him. These were the first ships of the Danish men which sought out the land of the English race. (Swanton 1996: 55)

Other early raids are recorded in Northumbria; and although there are no surviving accounts of specific early raids in Kent, reference in Kentish charters in the 790s to military service against seaborne pagans indicates that the Vikings were raiding there as well. There are also records of early raids around the coasts of Scotland, Ireland, France and the Netherlands.

These raids came from both Denmark and Norway, but the sources are often unclear as to the origins of particular groups involved. There was a recognized kingdom of the Danes, which probably at this point included most if not all of modern Denmark, together with parts of south-east Norway, southern Sweden and northern Germany, but the term Danes was also used as a general term for all Scandinavians. Similarly the term Northmen is sometimes used specifically to mean Norwegians, but again is more often used as a general term. Norway at the time was divided into several small kingdoms, and the kingdom of the Danes may also have contained small sub-kingdoms, and most people would probably have identified with their own kingdoms and regions. These identities occasionally appear in the foreign sources that provide most of our information about Scandinavia, such as the Westfaldingi (people of Vestfold in Norway) who raided along the River Loire in France in 843, but more often they are described in a more general sense as Danes, Northmen, heathens, pagans, foul men or even simply pirates. These are the people that we know today as Vikings.

Part of an early medieval gravestone from the monastery of Lindisfarne (Holy Island), Northumbria. The warriors may represent Vikings, especially as the axe was a more common weapon among the Vikings than the Anglo-Saxons. (Photo by CM Dixon/Print Collector/Getty Images)

The word Viking was not used as a general term for whole peoples at the time, but both the Old English wicing and Old Norse vkingr seem to have been used to mean pirate or raider. The difficulty of distinguishing the exact origins of different groups of Scandinavians in this period means that Viking has taken on a broader meaning in modern English, to cover all the peoples of Scandinavia in the period c.7501100. With that sense, modern scholarship has noted the many more peaceful achievements of the Vikings, and that they were more than just raiders and warriors. For the purposes of this book, however, there is little distinction between the two meanings.

Early Viking raids were mostly carried out on a small scale, targeting coastal monasteries and trading centres in search of loot, and fleeing quickly before a defence or reprisals could be mounted. Both the size and frequency of such raids seem to have increased dramatically over time, and from the 830s onwards Anglo-Saxon, Irish and Frankish sources all report independently the presence of large Viking fleets in Britain, Ireland and western Europe. These fleets numbered hundreds of ships, and thousands of men. Instead of raiding only seasonally and returning home, the Vikings began to over-winter in hostile territory, forcing temporary truces with the rulers of the surrounding area and resuming their raids early in the following year.

The Vikings in England, 8651066

MAP KEY

The Viking micel here (great raiding army) which arrived in England in 865 moved from kingdom to kingdom, over-wintering in a different place each year, but eventually settling across much of northern and eastern England. Following the defeat of part of the micel here at Edington in 878, Alfred of Wessex (r. 87199) established a network of burhs (fortifications) across his kingdom, while the Viking settlers also established a series of fortified towns, each one probably representing the strong-point of the territory of a different force within the micel here. Later Viking raids ranged over many different parts of England, but the areas of Viking settlement retained a distinct identity even after the unification of England under Edgar I the Peaceable (r. 95975), reinforcing the separate identities of the earlier Anglo-Saxon kingdoms. This sense of a separate identity in Northumbria in particular was one of the features that led Harald Hardrada (Hard-Counsel), king of Norway, to believe that he would gain support locally when he landed in Yorkshire in 1066.