The Vikings (21 page)

Vladimir’s decision harmonized nicely with certain diplomatic initiatives that were being extended in his direction at about the same time by the Byzantine emperor, Basil II. In 987 two of Basil’s generals had revolted. One proclaimed himself emperor. Basil was in real danger of losing control of the region between the Black Sea and the Mediterranean. Early in 988 he swallowed his pride and sent to Kiev, asking for Vladimir’s support in retaking the city of Cherson which had fallen into rebel hands.
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In return he offered him the hand of his sister Anna in marriage. The rider was a familiar one: Vladimir was to agree to be baptized. With little hesitation, it seems, he agreed. Six thousand Rus marched into Byzantine Crimea and put down the revolt, and the rebel stronghold of Cherson was retaken. Given Vladimir’s reputation as a barbarian womanizer, Anna was understandably reluctant to fulfil the imperial side of the bargain, but in a heartfelt plea her brother persuaded her of the importance of the alliance:

Through your agency God turns the land of Rus to repentance, and you will relieve Greece from the danger of grievous war. Do you not see how much evil the Rus have already brought upon the Greeks? If you do not set out, they may bring on us the same misfortunes.
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She took a tearful farewell of her family and crossed the sea to Cherson with her priests. Vladimir seems to have liked what he saw and in February 988 allowed himself to be baptized in the cathedral of St Basil. Once the marriage had taken place, and he was back in Kiev with his bride, he formally returned Cherson to Basil ‘as a wedding gift’.

Vladimir took personal charge of the cultural about-turn that then took place and mounted spectacular displays of the ritual cleansing and humiliation of the old gods. A statue of Perun was tied to a horse’s tail and beaten with rods by a dozen riders as it was dragged through the streets to the Dneiper. It was thrown into the river and driven through the waves until its purification was deemed to be complete and it was allowed to drift ashore on to a sandbank. Vladimir then ordered his people to attend on the banks of the Dneiper for a mass baptism in the waters of the river, adding that ‘whoever does not turn up at the river tomorrow, be he rich, poor, lowly or slave, he shall be my enemy!’

By all accounts Vladimir’s conversion seems to have been more than just an expedient that gave him access to the real political and economic advantages of marrying into the emperor’s family. He built churches and supported the work of the Greek missionaries within the Kievan state. He is said to have been reluctant to take human life after his conversion, to have become a generous giver of alms, and to have given up his mistresses. The choice of Slavic and not Old Norse as the language of the Rus Orthodox Church made the process of assimilation irreversible. It also opened up Rus society to the profound and enduring influence of Byzantine culture.

In his later years Vladimir put his sons in charge of the major towns of his kingdom. Tmutorokan on the Taman Peninsula, controlling the passage from the Black Sea to the Sea of Azov, in the region that Snorri believed to be the legendary home of Scandinavian gods and people, was given to Mstislav. The gift marked the furthest reaches south-east of the Baltic Viking expansion, though in truth the degree of assimilation was so complete by this time that it is scarcely accurate to describe them as Vikings, or even Scandinavians, any more.

7

The Danelaw I

If, as we have already suggested, the success of the Viking raiders in Ireland is partly to be explained by the fragmentary disposition of power in that country and the way in which this inhibited a coherent military response, then the same might be said of England at the time. From the chaos that followed the Roman withdrawal in the fifth century and the Anglo-Saxon invasions of the sixth century, a number of separate and competing kingdoms had emerged. The largest of these were Northumbria, Mercia, East Anglia, Essex, Wessex, Sussex and Kent. Among the more significant of the smaller territories were the kingdom of the Hwicce, extending over parts of present-day Wor cestershire, Warwickshire and Gloucestershire; Lindsey, between East Anglia and the southern parts of Northumbria; and Bernicia and Deira, which appear to have been located within Northumbria itself. By the time the Viking raids began, most of these smaller kingdoms had been absorbed by larger and more powerful neighbours to leave a nucleus of four regional powers: Northumbria in the north-east, stretching from the Tees to the Firth of Forth; East Anglia on the central and south-east coast; Mercia in the central midlands with Wales on its western border; and, in the south-west of the country, Wessex, the territory of the west Saxons. Sussex and Essex, the territory of the south and the east Saxons, were both absorbed in about 825 by Wessex, which emerged as the major power in the land from a long-standing rivalry with Mercia. Yet regional loyalties remained the dominant factor of political life. In 731 Bede had insisted, in the title of his greatest work the
Ecclesiastical History of the English People
, that an entity such as ‘the English people’ did indeed exist. The reality was, however, that England at the start of the ninth century remained essentially a geographical notion. It was in no sense a ‘united kingdom’.

An incident reported in the
Royal Frankish Annals
for 809 illustrates the absence of a centralized political and military power. Driven from the throne by a rival claimant in 808, the Northumbrian king, Eardwulf, had travelled to Rome to enlist papal and imperial support for his efforts to regain power. He returned with envoys from Leo III and Charlemagne. Later, on the party’s way back to Rome, it was attacked at sea. A deacon named Aldulf was kidnapped, taken ashore and held until the payment of a ransom by the Mercian king, Cenwulf. The
Annals
call the kidnappers only ‘pirates’, but the attack has the hallmarks of a Viking enterprise, and the fact that they were able to hold their captive in England while negotiating his ransom is an indication that there must have been numerous fringes of lawlessness between the few and widely separated regions over which the various English kings had control.

This apparently isolated episode is the only bridge between the raids on the north-east of the 790s, and an attack in 835 on the marshy island of Sheppey, off the coast of Kent in the Thames estuary, which marks the opening of a second and very different phase of Viking activity in England. From this point onwards, scarcely a year goes by without a reference in the
Anglo-Saxon Chronicle
to a Viking raid, or of a battle fought between English forces and the ‘Heathen men’. In 838 Egbert, king of Wessex, triumphed at Hingston Down over a ‘great naval force’ that had sailed up the Tamar and made common cause with an army of Cornishmen. In 840 a fleet of thirty-three ships was defeated at Southampton by alderman Wulfheard. Fortunes were reversed in a battle later in the same year at Portland; fifty years earlier, the murder there of the reeve Beaduheard by Norwegians from Hordaland had signalled the start of the violence that was to follow. There was a ‘great slaughter’ in London and Rochester in the east in 842, presumably by Danish Vikings, and in 843 a fleet of thirty-five Viking ships triumphed again in a battle at Carhampton, near Mine-head, in the Bristol Channel. Two years later the men of Somerset and Dorset were victorious in a battle fought at the mouth of the river Parrett.

So far the raiding had been a seasonal activity. The fleets would arrive in the spring, raid throughout the summer and early autumn, and head for a safe base with the approach of winter. For the raiders in the west this would probably be one of the arc of
longphort
bases along the east coast of Ireland: Dublin, Wexford, Waterford and Cork; the home-base of the Vikings who concentrated on the Thames as their point of entry was probably Denmark. All this changed in 851, when a fleet numbered by the
Anglo-Saxon Chronicle
at 350 ships entered the Thames and attacked London and Canterbury and drove King Brihtwulf of the Mercians and his army across the Thames into Surrey. Afterwards they made camp at Thanet and for the first time spent the winter in England. An attempt by a combined force of men from Kent and Surrey to drive them off failed and both of its leaders were killed. In 855 the Vikings moved their winter quarters a step closer to London and made camp on Sheppey. In the south-west of the country, a large Viking force that had been active on the Somme crossed the Channel and penetrated as far inland as Winchester before being halted and driven back over the Channel again.

By the time of the invasion of the Great Heathen Army in 865 England consisted of four main kingdoms: Northumbria, Mercia, East Anglia and Wessex.

The desultory violence of the years since 835, and the wolfish escalation of the threat that came with the establishment of winter camps, were all a prelude to the arrival in East Anglia, in 865, of a force that evidently surpassed all previous forces in size and discipline. The
Anglo-Saxon Chronicle
referred to it as ‘the Great Heathen Army’, and its arrival altered completely the terms of the Viking presence in England, for it came with grand territorial ambitions that it was able to realize in a little over a decade. For most of those years its activities became, understandably, the obsession of the chroniclers. It was under the command of brothers named Halfdan and Ingvar, believed to be the sons of Ragnar Lodbrok. Horses were obtained locally and the army, seemingly following a plan of action, rode north across the Humber estuary and headed for York. Two claimants to the throne of Northumbria, Osbert and Aella, were so preoccupied in fighting each other they failed to recognize the severity of the outside threat until it was too late and the city had fallen. Though they succeeded in breaking back into York both were killed in the subsequent fighting, the Northumbrians were compelled to recognize the invaders as their overlords and the Viking kingdom of York became an established fact. A puppet ruler named Egbert was installed on the throne.

In 868 part of the army marched back into Mercia and the fortress at Nottingham was taken. The rivalries of living memory were irrelevancies by this time and at the request of Burgred, king of the Mercians, the Wessex king, Ethelred, and his brother Alfred both took part in a failed attempt to starve the army out. In 869 the army returned to York and remained there for a year before moving back down the coast to East Anglia. Edmund, the East Anglian king, confronted it on 20 November and his forces were defeated and he himself killed. In 871 the army moved against Wessex. The winter of 870-71 was spent in Reading and in the spring Halfdan and a leader named Bagsecg led their men against Ethelred and Alfred. A series of bloody engagements followed - at Ashdown near Crowborough, at Basing in Hampshire, Englefield near Reading, and
Meretun
. Bagsecg was among the many raiders killed at Ashdown, but the army seemed to have an inexhaustible supply of men and good leaders. The results were indecisive, but this was Wessex heartland, and the willingness of the Viking army to engage so often and so far from its base must have been daunting for Ethelred and Alfred.
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Ethelred died that year and was succeeded by his brother. Four weeks after his crowning, Alfred faced the army again, its ranks swollen by the arrival of a ‘great summer army’ that had arrived in the region, and had to concede defeat. At the close of a year which had seen nine full battles south of the Thames, Alfred and the Danes made a peace settlement. The following year the army asserted its superiority over Mercia with the imposition of another peace agreement.

In about 873 King Egbert of York was deposed and fled to Mercia with the archbishop, Wulfhere, and for the next three years King Ricsige ruled, possibly as a Viking puppet, although this is not certain. In 874 the Mercian King Burgred was driven abroad. Here, as they would do on other occasions, the Vikings showed a political shrewdness in their dealings with the conquered. They split the opposition by handing the crown to Ceolwulf, a member of a rival dynasty with a valid claim to the Mercian throne, though the
Anglo-Saxon Chronicle
preferred to dismiss him as ‘a foolish king’s thegn’, who gave his masters hostages and promised them the disposition of the kingdom whenever they should require it and his full military support.
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Still a large, disciplined and coherent force, and now under the leadership of Halfdan, Guthrum, Oscytel and Anwend, the army rested for the winter of 873-4 at Repton, on the banks of the Trent, just south of Derby. Repton had been a Christian cult centre and a seat of Mercian royal power from the late seventh century.
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As such it would have been the focus of a well-organized network of supply and tax-gathering that the invaders could exploit with the minimum of effort. St Wystan’s Church itself was incorporated into the D-shaped structure the army dug to defend itself, with its straight side using the cliff that would, in those days, have been the south bank of the river. In what may have been a symbolic display of contempt as much as a practical necessity the church’s tower was used as a gate-house.
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