Viking Britain- an Exploration Read online

  All of which is to say that the whole idea of the ‘Viking’ needs to be handled with care. As it is used in a modern sense (and in this book), the word is largely employed as a term of convenience. It is used to define a period, the seaborne warriors whose activities characterized that period, and the shared cultural connections, ideas and art-styles (mostly, but not exclusively, of Scandinavian origin) that both bound people together and spawned new identities. It is important to recognize that – like the reality of all human life – what we mean by the term is chaotic, contestable and imprecise, resisting easy definition. How that chaos is, and has been, negotiated is in part what this book is about. And thinking about it is important, because the stereotypes can be deadly.

  Norwegian propaganda for the SS by Harald Damsleth, 1940–5

  In the 1940s, hundreds of young Norwegian men, stirred by images of their ‘Viking’ heritage and convinced by nationalist propaganda of the threat from Russian Bolshevism, signed up for the ‘Norwegian Legion’. They were promised that they would be fighting in the interests of a free and independent Norway. Instead they found themselves, barely out of training, ordered by German officers into the meat-grinder of Hitler’s Eastern Front. A hundred and eighty of them (around 20 per cent) were killed before the legion was acrimoniously disbanded. Those few who remained committed to the Nazi cause were integrated into the SS Nordland Division, a force of mainly Scandinavian volunteers which had formerly constituted a part of the SS Wiking Division. These were the men who were inspired by the Viking-themed propaganda images churned out by the Reich and who had listened misty-eyed to Quisling’s fantasies in the supposed burial ground of Halfdan the Black. The men of SS Nordland, convinced of the superiority of their Viking blood, would go on to commit atrocities in eastern Europe which were equal to the crimes of any of their Nazi peers.26

  4

  Shores in Flames

  Bitter is the wind tonight,

  it stirs up the white-waved sea.

  I do not fear the coursing of the Irish sea

  by the fierce warriors of Lothlind [Vikings].

  Irish monk (ninth century)1

  If the raid on Lindisfarne in 793 remains the apocalyptic touchstone for the Viking Age in Britain, it was only the first of many similar attacks that were to rage up and down the coastlines of Britain and Ireland in the years around 800. Viking raiders struck at Iona in the Western Isles in 795, at Jarrow (former home to the monastic scholar Bede) in 796, at Hartness and Tynemouth in 800, at Iona again in 802 and 806.2 The earliest raids in Ireland fell in 795 on Rathlin Island, Co. Antrim (almost certainly the same group that had already hit Iona in that year), at St Patrick’s Isle (Co. Dublin) in 798 and at Inishmurray (Co. Sligo) in 798 and 807.3 The record is patchy and incomplete; but what is certain is that people died and people suffered. There is not much direct evidence of the impact of these early Viking raids, no clear indication of the human cost exacted – of the people, possessions and lives that were snatched away. But there are traces – objects and remains that give terror and plunder a weight and substance that even the purplest of ecclesiastical prose fails to convey. It is here, in the material traces of the Viking Age – in stone and bone and metal – that something of the original purpose and the impact of the Vikings in Britain can be seen.

  A grim and bearded head lies within the collection of the British Museum.4 It is small, made of bronze and dated to the eighth century – a piece of Scottish, Irish or Northumbrian workmanship. It was probably intended to depict the face of a saint (it is strikingly similar to the depiction of St Mark in the Lichfield Gospels). Discovered near Furness Abbey in Cumbria (a region, as we shall see, of later Scandinavian settlement), the head has been adapted as a weight in a manner typical of Viking traders. Stuffed with lead, it has been turned to a new use in the hands of owners more concerned with personalizing their belongings than with piety. The little head, severed from its body, hacked from whatever piece of ecclesiastical treasure it had once been intended to decorate, is a reminder of the material consequences of Viking raids – of the treasured possessions that were broken and stolen, the human heads that were detached from their bodies, of the people taken away from their homes and disposed of far away.

  Direct evidence for the sort of violence recorded by monastic writers is rare and often equivocal; a number of skeletons excavated from the ditch of an enclosed settlement at Llanbedrgoch on Anglesey, for example, were long believed to be local victims of Viking raiding until chemical analysis of the remains revealed several of them to have grown up in Scandinavia: not, in itself, any reason to believe that they were not the victims of raiding, but enough to complicate the narrative considerably.5 In only one place in Britain – at the former monastery at Portmahomack in Scotland – has good evidence for the violence of Viking raiding been uncovered; it is a place, moreover, that is not mentioned in any written source that has survived from the Viking Age.

  ‘The further north you go in the island of Britain, the more beautiful the scenery becomes, the hills wilder, the skies wider, the air clearer, the seas closer. Even for those not born in Scotland, you feel as if you are driving towards your beginnings.’6 This is how Professor Martin Carver described his journey to Portmahomack. The small fishing settlement lies at the north-eastern tip of the Tarbat peninsula: a finger of land that points emphatically north-east, separating the Moray and Dornoch Firths. It is the shard of crust marking the end of the Great Glen, the weirdly rectilinear fracture that shears a diagonal fissure through Scotland, scoring a damp line that puddles along its length into Loch Ness and Loch Linnhe before dispersing into the Firth of Lorne. There is a sense up here, as elsewhere in the far north of Britain, of land dissolving at the margins, like the edge of pack ice giving way to the ocean, splintering and drifting into ragged and provisional forms. To travel there is to a find a place – not of journeys ending – but of transitions and embarkations: a terminus, rather than a homecoming.

  The monastery that Carver discovered at Portmahomack was revealed in a series of archaeological investigations between 1994 and 2007. It is, just for the fact of its existence, a supremely significant addition to our knowledge of the early medieval north. No record of it exists in any written source, and it is – so far – the only monastery discovered within the notional bounds of the Pictish kingdom; indeed, it lies close to its heart. At the height of its wealth and productivity in the eighth century, the monastery was producing prodigious quantities of vellum for the production of manuscripts as well as high-quality liturgical metalwork such as chalices and pyxes (containers for holding the consecrated bread used in the Eucharist). There was obviously a limit to the number of such objects (particularly of the latter sort) that a single church required, and so the workshops probably served newer, start-up monasteries elsewhere in Pictland and perhaps beyond. It is precisely this sort of wealth and activity that drew attention to Portmahomack and probably sealed its fate. For at that time, and in that place, the attention of outsiders was something that no one would have wanted to attract; at some point around the year 800, the monastery burned.

  The parts nearest the sea went first, the blaze ripping through the workshops of the vellum-makers, immolating timber, straw and heather. The severity of the fire can be judged by the condition of stone fragments, cracked and reddened in the heat of the burning. Carver’s team discovered that most of these stones, strewn on top of the fire, had been part of a great cross-slab (a flat rectangle with a cross carved upon it in relief). The stone, which had originally stood at the edge of the monastic graveyard, had been toppled and obliterated – pulverized with a calculated malice more reminiscent of the violence done by Islamic fundamentalists to ancient artefacts than of any casual vandalism. This was destruction with a purpose – the work of people with motive and intent, who had an understanding (whatever that was) of what such a monument stood for. It was not the only one: other stone cross-slabs (at least one, probably three) were broken down and shattered on this
site.7

  A famous example of the sort of thing that was broken at Portmahomack can be seen just 5 miles away at Hilton of Cadboll. The stone that stands near the chapel there is an imposing monument, nearly 8 feet tall and 4½ feet wide, heavy and overbearing. The images that decorate its surface – like those discernible among the fragments from Portmahomack – are stunning in their quality and execution, renderings in stone of the types of imagery more familiar from illuminated manuscripts like the Book of Kells. It is a replica, the original stone having been moved from here in the mid-1800s and ultimately finding its way to the National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh.8 The imagery that survives on the original monument is almost all on one side. Scenes of aristocratic life – hunting dogs and a deer run to ground, mounted men with spears and others blowing horns, a woman riding side-saddle – are surrounded by a frame of twisting vines and interlacing animals. Surmounting it all are the idiosyncratic hieroglyphs known as ‘Pictish symbols’ – in this case the ‘crescent and V rod’ and the ‘double-disc and Z rod’, as well as the ‘comb and mirror’, tucked into the corner of the figurative hunting scene. Nobody really knows what these symbols represent, but they certainly had their origins in a distant past. The best guess at present is that they signify the names, and perhaps ranks or affiliations, of Pictish aristocrats.9

  Engraving of the Hilton at Cadboll stone by Charles Carter Petley, 1812 (Wikimedia Commons)

  Missing from the original Hilton of Cadboll stone is the feature that, at the time of its making, would have been its definitive attribute: the huge and elaborate cross that once decorated its eastern side (a reconstruction of this cross can now be seen on the replica, sculpted by Barry Grove). This cross was deliberately defaced, methodically, carefully and totally; but not by Vikings. In 1667, or a little later, the redressed stone was inscribed with a memorial to one Alexander Duff and his three wives (one assumes that these were consecutive, rather than concurrent, relationships). In the febrile religious climate of seventeenth-century Scotland, it seems possible that the ostentation of this cross was enough to make it a target for iconoclasts. No one knows whether it originally carried an image of the crucified Christ; if it did it would have been even more offensive to Protestant sensibilities – nothing says ‘Popish’ quite like an enormous ornamental crucifix embellished with vine scrolls and animal interlace. At the very least it was clearly not considered worth preserving such an object, pregnant as it was with associations that ran counter to prevailing cultural, political and religious norms.10

  In 1640, the Aberdeen Assembly (the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland) determined that ‘in divers places of the Kingdome, and especially in the North parts of the Same, many Idolatrous Monuments, erected and made for Religious worship are yet extant’ and should be ‘taken down, demolished and destroyed, and that with all convenient diligence’. Such stones, in other words, in the seventeenth century, were inescapable reminders of a regional, native identity that was partly defined and sustained by its religious affiliations. For the men of the Aberdeen Assembly, such reminders were intolerable – on religious grounds, certainly, but perhaps also as memorials to an aristocratic, kin-centric and local way of life, deep-rooted and old-fangled things that lay far beyond the systems and controls of civic assemblies, national government and kirk. At the time of their making, however, these stones were billboards proclaiming the political and cultural dominance of the prevailing local dynasties, and clearly could be no less provocative. Around the year 800, not long after the monuments at Portmahomack and Hilton of Cadboll were erected, a new power was plying the coastal waters of Pictland. This power, founded in raw military strength and impressive maritime technology, was unimpressed by the strictures, injunctions and symbols of the British Christianity it encountered. Moreover, it had a vested interest in challenging the strident Pictish identity that those stones gave voice to. It was a power determined to frame the landscape in its own terms, without reference to local landmarks and the bigwigs who had built them. For Viking warlords – seeking, perhaps, to consolidate their spheres of influence – the Pictish monuments of Portmahomack may have represented an intolerable challenge to their mastery of the northern oceans. This perhaps was the reason why they suffered so badly.11

  It was not, of course, only the stones that suffered. Although it is the damage done to buildings and to things that endures in the archaeological record, and although it is the irretrievable loss of cultural heritage that grieves the historian most acutely, for the monks who were present at the monastery on the day it burned there were corporal and existential issues at stake. Excavation of the monastic cemetery revealed the skeletons of three men who had suffered extreme personal violence. One of them (number 158 in the excavations report) was struck in the face with a sword, a wound which cleaved through his flesh and into the bones of his skull. Somehow he survived to die another day. Another monk, number 152, received three blows to the head with a heavy bladed weapon. He was less fortunate than his brother. ‘As two of the cuts were on the back of the head,’ Carver explains, ‘it is likely that the assailant attacked from behind. Given that one of the fractures was on the crown of the head, the individual may have been below the assailant at one point (e.g. kneeling). As injuries with larger weapons are more likely to produce terminal fractures, it is possible that a weapon such as a large sword may have been used to produce these fractures.’12

  Here are the Vikings we think we know – hacking apart the head of a fleeing monk, shearing open his skull from behind as he drops to his knees. Did he stumble in his flight – driven by the burning terror that had spewed up out of the ocean? Or did he drop to his knees in prayer, facing death as a martyr with the Pater Noster on his lips? This we cannot know. What we can say with certainty, however, is that someone cared enough about him in death to remove his bloody corpse from the smoking ruins and inter it with dignity within the confines of the monastic cemetery. These were hardly likely to be the actions of his killers. They, presumably, were long gone, in ships laden with silver chalices and the gilded covers of holy manuscripts, their precious painted vellum leaves left to burn in the smouldering wreckage or used to stoke the camp-fires at their next stop along the coast. Not that the Vikings would leave this corner of Britain alone. There were other islands, and other sources of wealth, to be won.13

  The island of Inchmarnock, lying off the Scottish coast among the other islands of the Clyde, is not much of anything really, not now at any rate: a smear of wooded hillside between the coast of Bute and the Kintyre peninsula, a few fields caught napping when the tide came in too fast. These days it is privately owned by Lord Smith of Kelvin, who breeds highland cattle on the island; there are no other human residents.14 Twelve hundred years ago, however, Inchmarnock was thriving. Excavation in and around the medieval ruins of St Marnock’s church has revealed evidence of early medieval metalworking, and – most significantly – of what has been interpreted as a monastic schoolhouse. Dozens of fragments of slate, scratched with graffiti, patterns and text, seem to be the work of students, copying or practising writing and carving: a longer Latin text in a neat insular minuscule is perhaps an exemplum – passed around for copying – and fragments of cross-slab monuments imply the ultimate intended expression of the artistic skills being taught here.

  One can imagine a clutch of young boys, seated cross-legged on a hard earth floor, stifling their yawns as an older monk tries patiently to explain the importance of making sure their half-uncials are all the same height. A little way from the main group, one boy sits apart. He doesn’t join in with the covert attempts of the others to turn their practice slates into gaming boards,15 or to flick pebbles at the brother’s back when he gets up to go for a piss. Instead he silently persists in his own project, scratching at the lump of grey schist he keeps tight in his left hand, pressing down hard, his muscles taut. He hasn’t been long on the island – he came with some older monks from Iona; something had happened there, apparently, but the oth
er boys weren’t told what. The new boy won’t speak, and the monks won’t tell them. ‘Just keep on eye on the sea,’ they say, ‘just watch the sea.’

  Among the slates found on Inchmarnock, one stands out as utterly unlike anything else found there.16 It depicts four figures, all in profile, facing to the right as if moving together resolutely in the same direction. Three of them – only one of which is complete (the upper-right portion of the image has broken away and is presumably lost, or perhaps still somewhere under the surface of Inchmarnock or in the foundations of its ruinous buildings) – appear to be armed men dressed in mail shirts, the cross-hatching on their legs perhaps indicating the tight wrappings that were worn to gather the loose material of fabric trousers. They surround the image of a ship, its multitude of oars giving it the appearance of an unpleasant, scuttling invertebrate. The central figure in particular dominates the composition – large and commanding, a shock of long hair streaming from his bristly, oversized head. He leans forward slightly, propulsive and determined, in total contrast to the pathetic figure behind him. Stunted and unfinished, his head is barely outlined – just a jumble of lines; he is indeterminate, without identity: a nobody, a blank. What gives him purpose is the object attached to him, shackled to him in fact, hanging from an arm that pushes forward, reaching out. There is something terribly poignant about the gesture – drawn so clearly, where the face is absent, the fingers delineated and the hand open. It is on the object, however, that interpretation of the image turns. It could be a lock or a manacle; several such objects have been discovered in Ireland and around the Baltic. The object seems to be chained to the body of the figure in some way, and perhaps to the waist of the warlike central figure as well. Lines extending from the shoulder of the latter figure also seem to imply a captive being dragged into bondage – dragged, perhaps, to the waiting ship and a long journey east.17