The Story of England, page 12
All well and good perhaps to write such words from an ivory tower in Europe; the security of Aachen was a long way from the exposed Northumbrian coast. Alcuin saw the moral in terms of God’s will and the nation’s sins, as sermon writers did throughout the whole period. And the attacks, as Alcuin foresaw, continued. Irish annals pick up the tale next with stories of raids on Skye, Iona and Alba and the routine plundering of Irish houses. Through the middle of the ninth century the threat grew to the whole Christian social order which had been created out of the chaos at the end of Rome and the wanderings of the barbarians. The achievements of kingship and the growth of Western economies, the stored-up merchants’ goods and coins in the nascent towns, the jewelled manuscripts and portable treasures in the monasteries – all were easy prey. Soon the Viking armies were growing in size and beginning to act in combination with groups of kings operating together. A mere three ships in 787 became 140 in Ireland in 849; 120 were wrecked off Swanage in 877; fleets of over 200 were soon reported in Ireland; then 700 in a vast combined operation at the siege of Paris in 885. And as they grew in size the armies began to contemplate permanent settlement. In the winter of 855 a Viking army wintered in Sheppey; in 860 they sacked Winchester and compelled the people of Kent and the East Angles to make peace and pay tribute. Then in 866 a large combined force wintered in the territory of the East Angles and received tribute, supplies and horses. This was what Old English called the ‘micel here’: the ‘great heathen army’.
The wanderings of the Great Army during the next few years by land and sea through the islands and archipelagos of northern Britain and through all the regions of England need not be followed in detail here, though to read the year by year account of their movements in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle is to gain a strong sense of the malign threat they represented, their power and the inability of individual English kingdoms to fight against them. All over England the Great Army’s depredations were well-known to the peasantry, who suffered most from its ravaging and plundering. A professional army heavily armed and mobile, with large numbers of horses, it was led by three kings: Ivar (Ingwer), Halfdan and Hubba, sons of Ragnar Lothbrok, who had ruled in Denmark and who seems to have been killed in Northumbria in 865. In 867 they crossed from East Anglia into Northumbria across the Humber estuary. There, taking advantage of a local civil war, they killed both the rival kings and installed a puppet who made peace and paid tribute. In 868 they moved into Mercia, to Nottingham, and made winter quarters there. The Mercians now asked for help from their erstwhile enemies the West Saxons and after ‘severe fighting’ their joint forces made a negotiated peace with the Danes. The mobility of the Great Army, however, made it impossible to restrict them to one theatre of war, or to one peace agreement. They wintered back in Northumbria then rode back into East Anglia. There in November 870 they defeated and killed King Edmund of the East Angles, who according to an early tradition was captured and put to death with particular cruelty, possibly in some kind of pagan sacrifice. Now in their turn the conquered East Angles installed a puppet king and furnished the Danes with tribute and supplies. Then in 871 the Army moved south and fought a costly series of eight battles and skirmishes against tenacious opposition in Wessex, but unable to overcome the West Saxons under their young king, Alfred, they moved back north.
This was the background to the dramatic events at Repton. In 872–3 a combined army moved into Mercia under four kings, who are named in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle as Halfdan, Guthrum, Anand and Oscytel. A fifth mentioned by Irish sources and later Scandinavian tradition is the legendary Ingwaer, ‘Ivar beinluss’, the paramount king who was remembered by the chronicler Adam of Bremen as ‘the most cruel pagan king who everywhere tortured Christians to death’. In November 872 they wintered on the Trent in Lindsey and to buy time the Mercian king Burgred made peace, in the now usual pattern by providing money and supplies.
The following year, 873, however, they moved across country into the heart of Mercia and made their base at the Mercian royal church of Repton. At this point Burgred seems to have fought them but was defeated and after a reign of twenty-two years resigned his kingship and fled overseas, ending his days in Rome. The whole kingdom of the Mercians now fell under Viking power. In Burgred’s place the Mercians elected a nobleman called Ceolwulf – ‘a foolish king’s thegn’ it was said contemptuously in the south, though in fact he was of the royal kin and would issue charters and coins in his own name as king. But Ceolwulf was to be the last king of the Mercians. In what one contemporary called a ‘wretched deal’ he agreed to cooperate with the invaders and provided them with hostages and supplies. This took place in a formal ceremony of submission in which ‘He swore oaths to them that what they desired should be ready for them on whatever day they wanted it and he would be ready himself and with all those who remained with him, at the service of the army.’ To us Ceolwulf sounds like a quisling, but in the face of military defeat and remorseless pressure from a hostile and ruthless army composed of heavily armed professionals, it was perhaps the only sensible course for the moment. Against them the surviving Mercian thegns, the lords of estates like Kibworth, were outnumbered and outfought, and the local peasant levies too poorly armed and organized to offer serious resistance.
The fighting which led to Burgred’s defeat may have been near to Repton. It is hard to imagine the Mercian king would not have made an attempt to save this royal cult centre and mausoleum. In 1855 a Viking Age cemetery was found with fifty-nine male burials only two miles away on a rise above the Trent valley. These were cremations burned on boat planking but traces of clothes, possessions and weapons were found with coins datable to the mid-870s. It was perhaps in this warfare that Ingwaer, Ivar, died, whose death is recorded that year in Irish annals as ‘the king of the Norsemen of Britain and Ireland’. Hence it is tempting to associate him with the incredible discovery made at Repton described at the head of this chapter, one of the most dramatic archaeological finds in British history and indeed a find without parallel anywhere in Viking Age Europe.
With the burial of Ivar, the long and eventful stay of the Vikings at Repton was over. In spring 874 the Great Army left Repton and split up, part heading down into East Anglia, part up into Northumbria to the Tyne valley. Then comes the first sign of a momentous change in their tactics. In 876, says the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, ‘the army in Northumbria under King Halfdan shared out the land of the Northumbrians and proceeded to plough and support themselves.’ In the following year, 877, the southern army rode back into Mercia, and in August, around harvest-time, began to share it out, allotting some to Ceolwulf and some to their own rank and file. So less than a century after the great Offa had dominated England, the old lands of Mercia were partitioned. The East Midlands, between Trent and Welland, the Lincolnshire Wolds and the Leicester uplands, were divided up, and members of a Viking army settled and took land alongside the English landowners and their peasantry and ‘began to plough and to provide for themselves’.
Only in Wessex was King Alfred able to hold his own and defeat Guthrum’s army at the battle of Edington in 878. But such was the Vikings’ military power that in 886 Alfred was forced to acknowledge the true state of affairs by agreeing to a treaty dividing England from the River Lea above London all the way up Watling Street to Tamworth: a partition of England right through what had been the kingdom of Mercia. The age of Scandinavian England had begun. Exactly what this meant for the people in villages like Kibworth – what happened, what were the numbers, whether it was a small elite or a mass migration – has been hotly disputed. Inevitably chroniclers writing in Winchester or Northumbria saw only part of the picture. The full story is only now being slowly recovered from archaeology, place names and even DNA.
Slagr ‘the Sly’ and Blath ‘the Blade’
The popular image of the Viking invasions from medieval chronicles to Victorian paintings and Hollywood epics is of blood and thunder, rape and pillage. But as with the ‘coming of the English’ the reality was far more complex and interesting. What did the ‘sharing out’ of Mercia mean? How was the settlement negotiated between the leaders of the Great Army and the Mercian king and his council? Did the Vikings actually buy land and property? Did they simply seize choice estates, or were they allotted uninhabited or marginal land away from the local English? Answers to some of these questions have started to emerge recently from fascinating new place name evidence from the East Midlands.
The people of Kibworth were in the main region of Danish settlement, which later became known as the Danelaw. Here, the Middle Anglian lords of Leicester were replaced by Viking rulers, kings or chiefs, whose warriors settled across the Leicester uplands to Rutland. At a local level many estates remained under their English lords – around Kibworth in the Gartree Hundred, several places today still retain the name of an Anglo-Saxon lord, Osulf at Owston, Glor at Glooston, or Cybba at Kibworth. But today’s villages also preserve the names of Viking newcomers who, out in the landscape, attached Scandinavian words to villages, hamlets and farms, fields, watercourses and many smaller natural features. Even in Kibworth itself where the field names remained predominantly Old English, nearly a fifth of place names are from the Scandinavian language, and the pattern of these names shows us what might have happened after the share-out of land by the Great Army after 877.
The chronology of these settlements is also revealed by the place names. From the first phase after 877 are hybrid names like Grimston which combine a Viking personal name with the English word tun (village). Close to Kibworth there are a number of these hybrids, which suggests the appropriation of already existing English estates and settlements by warriors of the Danish Army. Illston on the Hill just north of Kibworth for example is named after a Dane, Iolfr. Nearby Rolleston preserves the name of another Viking, Hrolfr. Others in the vicinity include Slagr, ‘the Sly’, who took over the English tun which is now Slawston; and the tough-sounding Blath, ‘the Blade’, who was a close neighbour at Blaston. Iolfr, Hrolfr, Slafr and Blath may have been original members of the army disbanded in 877, veterans who settled in the Kibworth area, ‘shared the land and began to plough’, backed by the armed force of their friends and retinues – a heavily armed elite who carved out a kingdom in England and farmed land in exchange for military service to their paramount lord, presumably in Leicester, who was now Danish.
Second-stage settlements – those of immigrants who perhaps came into England in the next two or three decades – are indicated by another layer of place names. To the north-east of Kibworth a cluster of names on poorer land contain the Viking word for farm, by, as in Galby, Goadby and Frisby (‘farmstead of Frisians’). These can be connected with a later phase of settlement, one in which more immigrants, family members and women, had come from Denmark and Frisia. But these were not on as good land as the tuns. Little Galby, for example, was never a great success – it was finally virtually deserted in the decades after the Black Death; its name means ‘poor soil’ in Old Norse, and the land is stiff clay and loam. But Galby is surrounded by villages which kept their English names, King’s Norton, Stretton, Burton and Houghton, where evidently the local native farmers had not been dislodged. The Vikings in Galby then had to be satisfied with poor marginal land. Around Kibworth there are a number of these names: Bushby as its name says was a ‘farm in the scrubland’; Thurnby, ‘the farm on thorny land’; Rainby in Goadby parish was ‘a borderland farm’. A further group around Kibworth reveals further outlying Viking farmsteads (thorpe), in Thorpe Langton, Hothorpe and Othorpe – where a field name commemorates another Viking settler called Aki. Thorpes, like tofts, seem to have been from a still later phase of Viking settlement when the squeeze on land for new immigrants had become quite tight. Most picturesquely named is Scraptoft – in Old Norse a thin, poor or even miserable covering of grass: a further hint that some settlers moved round the existing English population to open up new poorer land on the margins, even perhaps buying plots from locals. As regards the settlers, some names may indicate their places of origin. Gauti of Goadby may be as his name implies a man from Gautland. Next door to Kibworth in Great Glen parish the Viking who built himself a small farm at ‘Northman’s toft’ may have been a Norwegian.
These faint footprints of real individuals in the Viking Age are intriguing hints of the treaties and negotiations that happened from day to day as the Viking armies attempted to take some of the rich farmland of the Middle Angles for themselves. The indigenous population though was too large to remove or drive out: things had to be negotiated, and in the end they would have to rub along.
The village reeve and everyone in Kibworth and Smeeton would have warily watched these changes happening around them. On the wrong side of the Watling Street frontier, their overlord after 877 was no longer the King of the Mercians, but the Viking lord, the jarl, of the ‘Army of Leicester’. To see precisely how these things might have worked out in practice in Kibworth we only need to walk downhill out of Smeeton Westerby on the Gumley Road. Here sherds of St Neots ware and Stamford ware pottery were found in the 2009 village dig, attesting to the growth of a wealthy and populous community in the Viking Age from the late ninth century onwards. At the bottom in the valley is a little stream which snakes through a field undulating with medieval ridge and furrow. Standing in the field and looking back to the ridge on which the village sits, Smeeton to the right was already a tun by the ninth century, and its name is English. But only a few yards along the ridge to the left are the farms and weavers’ cottages of Westerby: in Old Norse Vesterbyr, the ‘West farm’ – founded just to the west of Smeeton by Viking settlers at some point perhaps a few years after the disbanding of the army of 877.
In the farmland below the village the field names are a mix of English and Scandinavian. The little stream at the foot of the hill occurs in tithe maps as the Fleet: fliotr in Viking; by its banks there’s a carr, in Old Norse kjarr – a boggy flat covered with brush – and out in the fields there are wongs, slangs, flats, tofts, holms and siks. In some parts of the East Midlands and north these words are all still used in farming speech. Holme, a familiar northern place name, occurs across the parish of Kibworth, as do gates (in northern speech meaning not an opening gate but a street or track) and siks (in Scandinavian speech a watercourse or ditch between fields which in time becomes a grassy division between field strips). These words still exist in farming speech in the surviving open-field village at Laxton in the East Midlands. The survival of such field names is a strong indication that over the generations Scandinavian dialect spread quite widely among English as well as Viking farmers, and probably that Viking speech was spoken for some generations among a minority of the population even in Kibworth. Perhaps the most notable minor field name in Smeeton, last recorded in the 1960s, but found in documents from the Victorian age back to 1636, is Crackley, whose earlier forms in the seventeenth century reveal the Scandinavian word craca = kraka, the Old Norse ‘raven’, with the Old English leah – a suitably Viking name in an English field, ‘Raven’s Wood’.
Numbers: elites or mass migration?
The Viking settlement depicted in such lurid terms by monastic chroniclers was not an act of ethnic cleansing; nor did it involve the driving out of the native population. The population of England was still low after its peak in the late-Roman world, kept in check by plague, disease, war and natural catastrophe. The countryside was far less crowded, and there was plenty of land available for newcomers, especially in the margins which now began to be cleared for cultivation. Anglian-speaking areas, not Saxon, were favoured for settlement – even Essex was not, despite its proximity to Jutland and Frisia – perhaps because of the linguistic closeness of Anglian and Danish. On the numbers of the settlers modern opinion is divided. Recent historiography has argued for a very small elite. But place names and documents are evidence of transformation by sizeable immigration. In terms of the whole population DNA experts have suggested an addition to the English gene pool of 1 per cent Norwegian and 4–5 per cent Danish; a total of over 5.5 per cent of the total population for the newcomers nationally, though in this part of the East Midlands the figure was probably higher, around 10 per cent. In a national population of one million 5.5 per cent would represent over 50,000 immigrants, twice that if the population was 2 million.
So following the Britons, Romans, Angles and Saxons, the Vikings were added to the racial and cultural mix. Again they were a minority, a few tens of thousands in one to two million. But they will bring important changes in the law, language and customs of northern and eastern England. By the eleventh century the countryside will have been opened up to near its full potential so that in late-Saxon Kibworth there was almost as much arable land as there was in the nineteenth century. All this was to meet the demands of population growth after the Viking Age.
‘A farmer needs a wife’
In the families of Kibworth and many places like it, the Viking settlers left a long-lasting mark. The stories of the families descended from the Great Army and later waves of migrants can be traced into the period after the Norman Conquest when detailed documents emerge for the first time in the history of the village. Many common Midland names – Tookey, Pauley, Chettle, Gamel, Herrick for example – are Viking in origin, and in estate documents and tax rolls from Kibworth and Smeeton starting in the 1200s some of the most common family names are Scandinavian. One or two, like Thurd or Thored, are only found in this region in Kibworth itself. These people constitute a landowning class of small farmers, freemen or ‘sokemen’, who are prominent at local level in later manorial documents and tenaciously hold their position in the next centuries to become part of the yeoman class in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.
