Philip Line - The Vikings and their enemies : warfare in Northern Europe, 750-1100

Copyright 2014 by Philip Line

Originally published by Pen & Sword Military in 2014

First Skyhorse Publishing edition 2015

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.

Cover design by Jon Wilkinson

Print ISBN: 978-1-63220-503-2

Ebook ISBN: 978-1-63220-872-9

Printed in the United States of America

Contents

List of Plates

Aerial view of Northey Island and the site of the Battle of Maldon, from the east.

Viking-Age spearhead, shield-boss, ring and buckle from Vestre Slidre, Oppland, Norway.

Two Viking Period swords inscribed with names.

Two Viking Period iron axeheads from Norway.

An arrowhead, spearheads, fragment of ring-mail, a bit, a dagger and an axehead.

Replica of the tenth-century helmet found at Gjermundbu, Norway.

Replica of one of two ninth- or tenth-century helmets found at Gnezdovo, Russia.

Replica of the so-called Wenceslas helmet: tenth-century, Bohemia.

Replica of a helmet of segmented and riveted construction, probably eleventh century.

Picture stone of the late Vendel or early Viking Period, Lrbro socken, Stora hammars, Gotland.

Another picture stone from Lrbro socken, at Tngelgrda, Fnggrden, Gotland, showing a fully manned Viking ship.

The Gokstad ship, early Viking Period.

The runestone U344, found at Yttergrde, which commemorates Ulf of Borrestas expeditions to England.

Two examples of late Anglo-Saxon stone sculpture showing armed and mounted men, one with a shield.

Carolingian horsemen of the late ninth century.

A scene from the Bayeux Tapestry, showing Norman cavalry attacking armored English infantry.

Aerial view of Harald Bluetooths circular fort at Trelleborg, Jutland, Denmark.

View of the rampart and ditch of the Bullcroft area (north flank) of the burh at Wallingford, Oxfordshire.

The reconstructed inner gateway of the late tenth- or eleventh-century imperial palatine fort at Tilleda, Saxony-Anhalt.

The reconstructed ninth-century Slavic fortified site of Gro Raden, in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, Germany, the land of the Slavic Obodrites in the

Viking Period.

Acknowledgements

First of all, I would like to thank my wife, Mervi Mattila, who not only insisted on helping with the laborious task of indexing, but had to endure a considerable amount of complaint (most of it about my own inability to live up to the demands I place on myself) during the process of writing this book. Her brother, Jari Mattila, has also earned my gratitude by turning my draft maps into very good maps and making the photographs look as good as possible. Many thanks are also owed to several friends who research or have an interest in various aspects of the subject and gave me their comments after reading through parts of the manuscript: Aleksandr Koptev, Paul Elvidge, and Karolina Kouvola. I am also grateful to those who have agreed to supply me with the photographs used in this book: Peter Jan Bomhof of the Photodepartment in the Rijksmuseum van Oudheden, Leiden; Ingvild Tinglum of the Department of Documentation/Photo at the Museum of Cultural History, Oslo; Siv Falk of the Historiska Museet in Stockholm; Derek Craig of the Corpus of Anglo-Saxon Stone Sculpture; Dr. Neil Christie, one of the project directors of the Wallingford Burh to Borough Research Project; Terry Joyce; Gabrielle Roeder-Campbell; and Grzegorz Kulig (aka Thorkil) for the pictures of his excellent replica helmets of the period. Finally, I have to thank the people at Pen and Sword: Rupert Harding, the Commissioning Editor, not least for tolerating my shifting deadlines; Sarah Cook, who did such a meticulous job checking through the text in preparation for printing; and the typesetter Noel Sadler. This is their work, of course, but nowadays not all publishers take so much care.

Introduction

There have been many books on the Vikings, and a number on Viking warfare, and the reader is entitled to ask why there is a need for another. The purpose is not to give the chronology or history of Viking expeditions, which have been related in many other works, but to concentrate on some of the aspects of Viking-Age warfare that have either not been dealt with, or have been dealt with inadequately, in previous general books. This includes military organization and contemporary attitudes to war, both among the Vikings and among their enemies in northern Europe, which obviously affected the way wars were fought and even why they were fought. To the Christian lands that suffered from their raids, the Vikings represented a terrifying and alien phenomenon, as they were non-Christians whose activities caused a dramatic increase in the level of pillage, destruction, and slave-trading. Yet none of these practices was unfamiliar to any of Europes inhabitants before the Viking Era. Similarly, although the Scandinavians presented their enemies with some new problems, in many ways their military methods were similar to those of their opponents.

Many previous books on Viking and Anglo-Saxon warfare have looked at the subject entirely from a modern perspective, as if Vikings and their contemporaries were modern soldiers in fancy dress, and have taken the accounts of medieval writers (and often their numbers) at face value, without taking much notice of who they were, why they were writing, or even how long after the events they describe they were writing. As a result, things that are very uncertain have all too often been presented as facts. We all want to know what really happened, and it is easy to fall into the trap of accepting the only account we have of a certain campaign or battle as the truth, but if there is reason to question it, this should be done.

Since the aim of this book is to look at Viking warfare in the context of warfare in northern Europe in general, the discussion covers the period 7501100 and ranges over the British Isles, the Carolingian Empire and its successor kingdoms (including East Frankia, generally referred to as Germany after 917), and the areas north and east of the Balkans occupied by the Slavs. Although they are not fully covered here, there are also occasional excursions into Italy, Islamic Spain, the Byzantine Empire, and the steppes to the southeast of Russia (then inhabited largely by Turkic-speaking nomads).