Northmen: The Viking Saga AD 793-1241 (18 page)

Conversion and assimilation

Although Rollo was still a pagan when he won control of Rouen, it appears that he allowed what was left of the church to function in the area under his control much as the Danish rulers of York had done. Pagan Vikings were rarely positively hostile to Christianity; sacking churches and monasteries and selling their occupants into slavery was just good business. Even after his baptism in 912 Rollo, like many first generation Viking converts to Christianity, hedged his bets and worshipped the pagan gods alongside Christ. Shortly before he died, Rollo ordered 100 Christians to be beheaded as an offering to the pagan gods, but he also gave 100 pounds (45 kg) of gold to the churches of Rouen. Conversion was the normal price Christian rulers from the time of Louis the Pious onward demanded of pagan Viking leaders and their followers before entering into treaties with them. Many such conversions were probably completely insincere. The custom of giving baptismal gifts of clothes and weapons on these occasions certainly encouraged some Vikings to be baptised more than once. Notker tells the story of a Dane who complained to Louis the Pious about the quality of his baptismal robe, the worst he had ever been given – it turned out that he had been baptised twenty times already. The church was philosophical about this sort of backsliding as it pursued a policy akin to entryism. It was relatively easy for a polytheist to accept Christ as just one more god. Once the convert had got into the habit of believing in Christ, the church could get to work convincing him or her that the old gods were false gods. Most of the earliest Scandinavian converts to Christianity were settlers in countries, like Francia, that were already Christian and baptism marked the first step of their assimilation into the native population.

Rollo died some time around 928 and was succeeded by his son William Longsword (d. 942). As a traditional Viking leader Rollo never imposed his authority on his followers by force – in keeping with Scandinavian custom, their allegiance was entirely voluntary. William took a more forceful line in imposing his authority over the Danish settlers in Normandy. This provoked a rebellion in 933 by settlers who felt that William was becoming too Frankish in his behaviour and was favouring Frankish advisers over Danes. It did not help that he had a Frankish mother, Poppa of Bayeux, and a Frankish name. William reacted forcefully and the rebellion collapsed after he defeated their leader Riulf in a battle near Rouen. William continued his father’s expansionist policy and in 933, King Rudolph granted him the Cotentin peninsula. Cotentin was not much loss to the king as it had not been under Frankish control since 867, when Charles the Bald ceded it to Brittany after his defeat the previous year by a Breton-Viking alliance at the Battle of Brissarthe. The northern part of the Contentin was settled by Norwegians rather than Danes, as in the rest of Normandy. Place-name evidence shows that many of the settlers had previously been living in Gaelic-speaking Ireland or the western isles of Scotland. The arrival of the Norwegians in the Cotentin is undocumented and they may well have arrived before the area formally became part of Normandy. Possibly they were, like the Norwegians who settled north-west England, refugees from the great Irish offensive which saw the Vikings expelled from Dublin and their other bases around Ireland in 902.

Like Rollo, William also aspired to expand into Flanders but he was equally unsuccessful. Tiring of William’s attacks, Arnulf, the count of Flanders, invited him to a parley on an island in the River Somme where Arnulf’s followers ambushed and killed him in December 942. William’s death threw Normandy into chaos. King Louis IV confirmed Richard’s ten-year-old illegitimate son Richard the Fearless (r. 942 – 96) as count but placed him in custody with the count of Ponthieu at Laon as a prelude to restoring full Frankish control of Normandy. Louis occupied Rouen and divided Normandy between himself and the powerful count Hugh the Great of Paris. Some Normans swore allegiance to Louis, others to Hugh, but others remained loyal to Richard. The situation was further complicated by the arrival on the Seine of a new Danish army under Sihtric of Hedeby. This encouraged many Normans to abandon Christianity and return to paganism. Louis defeated Sihtric and his pagan Norman allies near Rouen, but his plans began to unravel when he was captured by the Norman leader Harald of Bayeux. Harald handed Louis over to Count Hugh, who only agreed to release him after he had made territorial concessions. While Louis was imprisoned, Richard was rescued from his imprisonment by a group of Normans led by Osmund de Centville. Richard swore allegiance to Count Hugh and with his backing regained control of Normandy by 947. Perhaps because the beginning of his rule had been so turbulent, Richard abandoned the aggressive stance of his predecessors and concentrated on building his own authority in Normandy. Richard repaid Hugh’s early support in 987 by helping his son Hugh Capet seize the throne on the death of the last Carolingian king Louis the Lazy. Hugh’s Capetian dynasty would rule until 1328, ultimately making France (as it is now usual to call the West Frankish kingdom) Europe’s strongest kingdom.

Although Frankish chroniclers described Richard as
piratarum
dux
(‘pirate leader’) it was during his long reign that Normandy began its transformation from a Viking colony into a Frankish principality. Richard introduced Frankish feudal institutions, binding the leading Normans to him as his vassals. Although the archbishopric of Rouen had continued to function at some level through the worst ravages of the Vikings, monasteries across Normandy were abandoned and ruined: Richard refounded them with generous endowments. Apart from a trickle of settlers from England’s Danelaw, Scandinavian immigration all but ceased. However, Rouen retained strong links to the north through trade: coins minted in tenth-century Rouen have been found everywhere along the Vikings’ trade routes from Ireland to Russia. Normandy continued to be part of the northern world under Richard’s successor Richard II ‘the Good’ (r. 996 – 1026), his son by his Scandinavian second wife Gunnor. Richard, the first ruler of Normandy to use the title ‘duke’, was deeply involved in French politics, taking part in King Robert II’s wars with Burgundy, working to reform the Norman church, and forging marriage alliances to bring Brittany within the Norman sphere of influence. However, Richard still maintained strong ties to the north, allowing the Danish king Svein Forkbeard to use Normandy as a base for attacks on England in return for a share of the plunder and recruiting Viking mercenaries into his army. The Norman elite now fought in the French style, as armoured cavalry, however. Norman soldiers also joined Viking armies, fighting in the battle of Clontarf near Dublin in 1014. Richard must have had good contacts in Scandinavia because in 1000 he was able to secure the release of the wife of the count of Limoges who had been captured by Vikings.

In 1002, Richard married his sister Emma to the English king Æthelred, in effect backing both sides in the unfolding Anglo-Danish struggle. After Æthelred’s death in 1014, Emma remained in England, marrying Svein’s son Cnut after he became king of England in 1016. Despite this, relations between Richard and Cnut seem not to have been close and Normandy’s links with the north quickly faded. The last vestige of Scandinavian influence is the visit of Sigvatr, an Icelandic skald (court poet), to the ducal court at Rouen in 1025. Sigvatr’s presence implies that there were still Normans who could understand the Old Norse language but most by now must have spoken French. Most of Rollo’s followers had been single men who, after they took lands in Normandy, had married Frankish women: their children would, therefore, have grown up as French speakers even if they had also learned Old Norse from their fathers. The severing of ties with the north is mirrored in coin hoards from Normandy which, after Richard’s death, mostly contain coins from France and Italy. At the same time, coins minted at Rouen disappear from hoards found in Ireland, England, Scandinavia and Russia. By the time William the Conqueror became duke in 1035, Normandy was culturally and linguistically part of France and the Normans had begun describing themselves as
Franci
or French.

The end of the Viking Age in Francia

Following the establishment of Normandy and the failure of the Viking colony in Brittany, Viking activity in the West Frankish kingdom declined rapidly. Occasional raids continued into the eleventh century, but these were mere irritants compared the great raids of the ninth century: by
c.
950 the Viking Age in Francia was effectively over. Francia was no longer an easy place to raid. This had nothing to do with a resurgent Frankish monarchy. The authority of the West Frankish kings continued to decline throughout the period. When Hugh Capet seized the throne in 987, his authority did not extend beyond the Île de France. The counts and dukes who ruled the rest of his kingdom paid homage to the king as vassals, but his resources were so slender that he was powerless to enforce their obedience. The counts and dukes ruled their principalities in virtual independence, waging private war on one another, and obeying the king only when it would serve their interests. No Frankish king of the tenth or eleventh centuries could have reconstituted Charlemagne’s coastal defence system, even had they wanted to.

The lack of strong central authority, however, did not mean that the West Frankish kingdom was weak. The decline of royal authority freed the Franks to take their defence into their own hands. Towns were free to build defensive walls (or, often, to refurbish old Roman walls) and small earth and timber castles proliferated across the countryside, providing refuges and secure bases for harassing invading Viking armies. The counts and dukes may have paid scant attention to their kings but they often ruled their own principalities effectively and could react more quickly to an attack than the more centralised Carolingian system. The decline of royal authority was accompanied by the growth of feudalism and the appearance of a new military class of professional armoured cavalrymen or knights. Only the very wealthiest could afford to equip themselves to fight in this way so most knights were vassals of the counts and dukes, who granted them estates for their maintenance in return for military service. In battle, Frankish knights invariably proved superior to even the most determined foot soldiers, as the English would discover to their cost in 1066. It was this combination of castles and cavalry that had turned Francia into a no-go zone for Vikings. How far the Vikings were responsible for the changes in Frankish society is a moot point. The driving force of the break-up of Charlemagne’s empire was dynastic and the Frankish laws of partible inheritance made this more or less inevitable. However, the decline of royal authority that accompanied the empire’s break-up was at the very least accelerated by the Vikings, who time and again had demonstrated the Frankish kings’ powerlessness to defend their subjects.

CHAPTER 4

I
ONA
, D
UNKELD AND
O
RKNEY

V
IKINGS IN
S
COTLAND
795 –1064

Scotland’s Viking Age began, like England’s, with attacks on exposed monasteries, but the raiders were very quickly followed by settlers who put down deep roots: the Viking influence lasted longer here than anywhere else in the British Isles. No part of Scotland was immune to Viking attacks, but it was the northern and western isles that bore the brunt of the early raids and then, after their colonisation by Scandinavian settlers, became bases from which raids could be launched further south. While the Viking armies that ravaged England and Frankia were dominated by Danes, Scotland, with Ireland, was always in the Norwegian sphere of interest.

At the beginning of the Viking Age, Scotland in the modern sense did not exist. The greater part of the modern country, from the Firth of Forth north to the Shetland Islands was occupied by the kingdom of the Picts, descendents of ancient Britons who had held out in the north against Rome. The south-east of the country was part of the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Northumbria, while in the south-west was the Welsh kingdom of Strathclyde. In the west, the district of Argyll and the Hebridean islands were occupied by the Scots, a Gaelic-speaking people who had immigrated from northern Ireland under the Dál Riata dynasty at around the same time that the Anglo-Saxons were arriving in Britain from northern Germany. Despite frequent wars, a stable balance of power existed between the four kingdoms: this would be shattered by the arrival of the Vikings.

St Columba’s island

No historical annals that were actually written in Scotland have survived from before the late tenth century. Most of the contemporary records of Scotland’s Viking Age were written in Irish monasteries and they have a strong bias towards events on the Gaelic-speaking west coast and to the sufferings of their brother monks. The first recorded attack on Scotland came in 795 when Vikings plundered St Columba’s monastery on the small Hebridean island of Iona before going on to raid in Ireland. Thereafter, raids in the Hebrides became almost annual events, with monasteries bearing the brunt of the attacks. Vikings returned to Iona in 802 and this time they burned the monastery after they had plundered it. There is no mention of killing during these raids, but in the course of a third raid in 806, sixty-eight monks were slaughtered. Just a year later, Iona was sacked for a fourth time.