The Vikings (12 page)

At this time the aforesaid Normans invaded the Hibernian island of Ireland with a large fleet, something their fathers had never dared to do, together with their wives and children and the Christian captives, whom they had made their slaves, with the intention that with the Irish wiped out, they themselves could inhabit this very prosperous country.

Anomalies of place-naming in the Outer Hebrides suggest a scenario similar in most respects to that involving Shetland and the Orkneys: the killing or capture and sale as slaves of the original inhabitants, in a process so swift and complete as to leave behind only fragmentary traces of the place-names used by those original inhabitants.
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By the middle of the ninth century the Irish annalists had started to refer to the Hebrides as ‘Na hInnsi Gall’ or ‘the islands of the foreigners’. A second genetic survey of the populations of the Northern and Western Isles, carried out by scientists from the University of East Anglia and published in 2005, looked at both the female mitochondrial DNA as well as the male Y-chromosomal and found that the figure for overall Scandinavian ancestry among inhabitants of the Northern Isles was about 44 per cent for Shetland and 30 per cent for the Orkneys, with roughly equal genetic contributions from Scandinavian males and females.
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Scandinavian ancestry for inhabitants of the Outer Hebrides was lower, at about 15 per cent, and the findings showed a much higher contribution to the gene pool from Scandinavian males than females. The likely explanation is that the patterns of settlement were different. In the geographically closer Northern Isles, Viking settlers brought their Scandinavian families over with them from Norway, while the typical Hebridean settler was a young Viking who took from among the local girls, whether they were willing or not. Males among the local population were deprived of even this melancholy option. The ‘hostage stone’, a slate found in separate pieces and on separate occasions on the Hebridean island of Inchmarnock in 2001 and 2002, shows a crude drawing that probably symbolizes the fate of those who were not killed: three men wearing chain mail, one wild-haired, another armed with a spear, appear to be conducting a shackled man to a waiting longship. He holds what may be a reliquary and his head is bowed as he contemplates the life of slavery that awaits him over the seas.
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After the raids of 806 and 807 the remains of the community at Iona crossed the North Channel to Ireland to begin work on a safe refuge at Kells in Ireland, a retreat that marked a first tangible effect of Viking terror directed against Christian targets. But as we have seen, Ireland itself had already become a target. In 795 the monastery at
Rechru
was burnt, and in 798 St Patrick’s Island was attacked and the Vikings ‘took the cattle-tribute of the territories and broke the shrine of Do-Chonna’.
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The country had been Christian since the fifth century, and it was from Ireland, and the monastery centres of the Western Isles founded by Irishmen, that Christianity was exported to northern Britain in the succeeding centuries. The cultivation of monastic life over three centuries led to the establishment of communities in the vicinity of monasteries with many of the features of trading towns. A seventh-century account of the community that had evolved around the monastery at Kildare refers to the ‘multitudes who live there’, in a place where ‘no man need fear any mortal adversary or any gathering of enemies’. ‘And who could number the varieties of people who gather there in countless throngs from all provinces? Some come for the abundance of its feasts; others, in ill-health, come for a cure; others come simply to watch the crowds go by.’ ‘A great metropolitan city’, a contemporary historian called it.
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By the time of the first Viking raids the practice of working precious metal into altar-vessels, book-covers and shrines had become part of the religious culture of these Irish monastic centres. As a result of the legal functions that fell to them, such as the pledging of agreements, each monastery probably disposed of a collection of valuable objects like brooches.
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Beyond their walls the picture that emerges from the law codes of the political organization of early ninth-century Ireland is of a hierarchy of kings. Chieftains with authority over local areas recognized the authority of a group of about five more powerful regional kings, who in their turn acknowledged the superiority of a yet more powerful ‘king of overkings’, an office associated with the kingdom of Tara on the central east coast of the island, who claimed precedence over them all.
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Map of Ireland showing the locations of some of the early raids and the longphort bases established by the Vikings.

The main literary sources for this field of Viking activity are the
Annals of Ulster
, a fifteenth-century compilation from earlier sources, the
Annals of the Four Masters
, a seventeenth-century compilation from medieval monastic sources that uses the
Annals of Ulster
for some of its later entries, and the late
Fragmentary Annals of Ireland
which, as the name implies, is a collection of the fragmentary survivals of lost annals that ranges from 573 to 914. Preceding and then accompanying the descriptions of Viking activity in Ireland in these sources are references to a close association between the political and religious authorities that fostered rivalries between the neighbouring monasteries and often led to pitched battles in which large numbers of people were killed. In 807 the
Annals of Ulster
report ‘a battle between the community of Corcach and the community of Cluain Ferta Brénainn, among whom resulted a slaughter of a countless number of ordinary ecclesiastics and of eminent men of the community of Corcach’.
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In 831 the fair at Tailtiu turned into a riot that began in some unspecified dissension over holy relics, ‘and many died as a result’.
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By a well-established tradition, family was the crucial factor in succession to church office in Ireland. Feidlimid, son of Crimthann, of the Eoghanacht dynasty of Munster, was both king and cleric who seized power in 820, interfered in the politics of Armagh in 823 and 836 to take the side of a favoured candidate in a succession dispute, feuded endlessly with the Clonmacnoise, carried out the ‘smashing of the southern Uí Briúin’ in 830 and took by force the abbacy of Cork in 836.
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And yet there is just a hint that the parties in such fighting tried in principle to observe certain behavioural limits. In 833 the chieftain Feidlimid executed members of the community of Clonmacnoise ‘and burned their church-lands to the very door of the church’. The community of Dairmag suffered similar treatment, we are told. They, too, had their lands burnt, ‘to the very door of the church’. The annalist seems to be making a point here, that the burning of churches was a transgression unique to the Vikings, and one that was in defiance of a logic that must have told them it would make better economic sense to leave them standing, for their store of replenishable treasures would have been available to steal again that much more quickly. Sanctuary was respected. Where breaches of sanctuary by fellow-Irishmen occurred, compensation was paid to the monasteries involved.
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At the very least there would be formal pronouncement of a curse on the intruders. Nor did the Irish aristocrats who waged war against each other’s monasteries count, among the spoils of victory, the right to sell the defeated into slavery. Viking cruelty was regarded as being in a class of its own. Implying that this was no normal hunting practice, the annal for 828 reports ‘a great slaughter of porpoises on the coast of Ard Cianachta by the foreigners’.
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The Vikings had discovered, either through torture or treachery, the Christian custom of housing the remains of their revered dead in sumptuous containers like the ‘shrine of gold and silver’ which contained the bones of a certain Conlaed; or the ‘gold and silver casket’ in which the remains of Ronan, son of Berach, were placed.
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In 824 they plundered the monastery at Bennchor (Bangor), ‘destroyed the oratory and shook the relics of Comgall from their shrine’. Blamac was an Irish chieftain’s son who had chosen life as a monk of Iona. His martyrdom in 825 at the hands of the Vikings became the subject of a lament by Walafrid Strabo, a scholar at the Frankish court of Charlemagne’s son, Louis the Pious. Blamac had gone to Iona knowing well that the Vikings had already attacked the island several times, and when they did so yet again he took it upon himself to warn other monks to flee for their lives, but stayed behind himself to bury the holy relics of St Columba. Strabo relates that he was tortured to death by Vikings trying to discover their whereabouts. In a raid on Étar (Howth) in 821, at which they ‘carried off a great number of women’, the raiders showed that they had discovered the potential of these territories for the slavery which was to fund so much of their activity over the next two centuries. And they had quickly learnt the significance for Christian communities of the Church calendar, and the advantages to be had from raiding on feast days, when the crowds of people who flocked to the monasteries to trade and buy could themselves be stolen away and traded on.

As the relentless nature of the new threat became apparent, some among the approximately 150 kings of Ireland, great and small, began to engage the Vikings in battle. A militarized Church leadership joined in, putting abbots into the field at the head of their own monastery armies. In 811 there was ‘a slaughtering of the pagans at the hands of the Ulaid’ that came to the admiring attention of the
Royal Frankish Annals
in the following year, and Viking forces were beaten twice more in 812. The annalists continue to note sundry atrocities and encounters: in 821 the Vikings occupied the islands of Wexford Harbour, in the same year as the annalist reported the abduction into slavery of the women of Étar. In 823 and 824 they invaded Bangor, and in 824 raided the remote hermitage of Skellig Michael, off the Kerry coast, carrying off a hermit named Éitgal who shortly afterwards died of hunger and thirst, whether from deliberate maltreatment or in self-denial the annals do not say. Indeed, by contrast with the makers of the
Anglo-Saxon Chronicle
, the Irish annalists are almost conventionally reticent, though that very reticence conveys the fate of a harmless individual like Éitgal, and of all those taken away into slavery, perhaps better than outrage would. When he tells us that the captives were ‘led away’, or that they were ‘brought to the ships’ or ‘taken away’ and sometimes ‘taken away to the ships’, we realize that these are stoicisms and not euphemisms. In 831 the Vikings raided Conaille in County Louth, captured the king and his brother and took them back to their ships as prisoners. In 832 they discovered the wealth of the Armagh monastery and attacked it three times in one month. Churches at Mucnám, Lugbad, Uí Mécth and elsewhere were plundered, more monasteries and churches burnt, more people abducted into slavery. Just occasionally one of those ‘led away’ makes a reappearance in the annals. In 845 Forannán, abbot of Armagh, with his collection of relics, was captured by the Heathens ‘and brought to the ships of Luimnech’. The following year, without further explanation from the annalist, the same Forannán returns ‘from the lands of Mumu [Munster] with the halidoms of Patrick’. He resumed his previous post but retired two years later and a final entry records his peaceful death in 852. Probably only a very few of the abducted were as fortunate.

Thus far the Vikings had confined their attacks to coastal targets. From about the 830s onwards they began forcing their way ever deeper inland as a prelude to larger and more organized raiding that was probably also an investigation of the possibilities of settlement and/or colonization. In 837 two fleets of sixty ships each arrived on the Boyne and the Liffey, a likely raiding force of between 3,000 and 4,000 men. They ‘plundered the plain of Life and the plain of Brega, including churches, forts and dwellings’ and brought ‘havoc in all the lands of the Connachta’. The death at the hands of Cianacht of a chieftain named Saxolb (Old Norse
Saxulfr
) is noted in that year, the first Viking name to appear in the written record after some forty years of incessant raiding. It was progress of a sort, a sign that the two sides were at least in communication with each other. But with no monarch seeking the tangible prize of a coherent kingship to take over, the sides seemed doomed to decades of intermittent and inconclusive warfare.

 

If the fragmented nature of secular power in Ireland and the ad hoc nature of the chieftains’ military organization made a territorial takeover of Ireland an impractical goal, these conditions did provide an opportunity for Viking leaders to become involved in regional conflicts between the great families that could help them force a legitimate way into the native power structures. In the late 830s a Viking army was defeated at Derry by a force whose leaders included Murchad mac Máele Dúin, a deposed king of Ailech. This Murchad was father to a son named Erulb. Linguists suggest this may be an Irish version of the Norwegian name
Herulfr
, indicating that the child may have been the result of a marriage alliance. And with intermarriage came bilingualism, religious flexibility and all the subtle yet profound effects that follow when cultures that collide violently wheel, like colliding galaxies, into accommodation with each other.
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In due course Olaf, the first king of Dublin, is said to have married a daughter of an Irish high-king, Aed Finlaith. When a later king, Ivar, died in 873 the annalist wrote that he ‘rested with Christ’, though whether this was merely formulaic or not is impossible to tell. Marriage between a Heathen and an Irish princess must have involved the Viking in some kind of conciliatory gesture towards Christianity. At the least he was probably asked to submit to the ceremony of the
prima signatio
or ‘prime-signing’, the ‘first marking with a cross’ that became, throughout the Christian world, an important tool of correspondence for those on both sides who were determined not to let religious belief stand in the way of business and power politics. Prime-signing was a preliminary to baptism. In one of its fuller forms the priest would lay his hand upon the catechumen’s head, breathe on him to drive out evil spirits, make the sign of the cross on his forehead and place a corn of salt on his tongue to symbolize his purification in Christ. With this provisional ceremony out of the way Christians might trade and interact with Heathens as they wished.
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