Tag Archives: Danelaw

What was life like in Viking England?

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English histories don’t ignore the Vikings. Who could? As raiders and as invaders, they left a mark that’s hard not to notice. But although the histories I’ve read mention the chunk of England the Vikings ruled, they treat it as if it was surrounded by an electric fence–they walk the perimeter, touch a quick finger to the wire, but then shy away to talk about the real England, which is (why, of course) the one the Anglo-Saxons ruled.

Well, screw that. Let’s go trespassing. I want to know what life was like in the Danelaw.

 

The what?

The Danelaw–the part of Britain ruled by the Danes (or Vikings, or Norse–it was all fluid at this point) and where Danish law was in force. It filled north, central, and eastern England (England didn’t exist yet as a political entity, but let’s use the name anyway) and included London. In other words, this was a big chunk of land. For a while there, it extended up into Scotland as well.

If you want to look like you know something no one else does, you can also spell it Danelagh or Danelaga. The price for that is that no one will know what you’re talking about. I don’t recommend it.

Irrelevant photo: Azalea blossom. In January. Indoors, I admit, but even so…

 

How’d the Danelaw get there?

Most of us first got to know the Vikings through cheesy movies, TV shows, and comic books. (Yes, we’re a high-culture lot around here.) They were raiders with horns on their helmets and they came in long, narrow boats, smashing, grabbing, and terrorizing. They were big, they were hairy, and they were scary.

Except for the business about the horns, that’s not untrue, but it’s also not the whole truth. 

Okay, I can’t vouch for the big and hairy part. They might not have been bigger or hairier than anyone else on the scene. Scary, though? Definitely. 

The rest of the story is that they were also settlers (or immigrants, or invaders–take your choice), farmers, craftspeople, and traders. They timed their raids to the agricultural year, because they were needed at home for the planting and harvesting. 

The raids weren’t England’s first experience of the Vikings. Britain and Scandinavia had a history of trade, and if you want to find cultural similarities, start by looking at England’s Sutton Hoo ship burial. But whatever the relationship was, no one wrote about it, leaving the Vikings to appear in the eighth century as raiders along the English coasts.

In the ninth century the Vikings shifted from raiding to settling in what became the Danelaw, replacing the Anglo-Saxon kings and landlords. It would be fair to say that they weren’t neighborly about those replacements. 

They settled most heavily in York and four other towns (they’re called the five boroughs, and York was dominant) and less heavily in rural areas. Some of them intermarried with the local population, so that it wasn’t long (at least in historical terms) before no clear genetic line could be drawn between Dane and non-Dane.

Not that they knew about genes, but everyone knew about sex. 

In some ways, the incomers adapted to the country they’d conquered. Buildings, for the most part, didn’t take on a Scandinavian style. Scandinavian runic writing disappeared. The incomers converted to the Christianity of Anglo-Saxon England fairly quickly, although a paper from the University of Leeds (sorry–I can’t find the author’s name) notes the difference between conversion and the more gradual process of Christianization and argues that “conversion might not be so much a matter of individual conscience as a question of social and political expediency.” In other words, the formal changes happened faster than the deeper ones. No surprise there.  

 

Language

Discussions about the Vikings’ impact swerve pretty quickly into language. In a period that didn’t leave us much evidence, it’s one of the things that can be traced. So place names get mentioned. The endings -by (village or farmstead), -thorpe (new village), -thwaite (meadow), and -dale (valley) mark a Viking presence. Personal names get mentioned. You can’t tell from a person’s name whether they were of Danish or Anglo-Saxon descent or a mix of both, Word borrowings also get mentioned.

Word borrowings? Tuesday and Wednesday are on loan from the Norse gods, although I’m cheating a bit since it was the Anglo-Saxons who brought more or less the same gods into English before they converted to Christianity. In contrast, Old English outright stole egg, steak, law, die, bread, down, fog, muck, lump, scrawny, and a long list of other words, and we’ve had them long enough that no one’s likely to ask for them back. Skirt, cake, freckle, neck, moss, sister, window, knife, smile, seat, gift, cross, leg, husband, law, and wrong are also ours illegally. So are words that start with SK, like sky and skin. Possession is 90% of the law. 

Most of those linguistic thefts were of everyday words, arguing (according to one article) that the two peoples lived side by side, passing a cup of flour and a bucket of words over the fence, as needed. They fall into a category of words a language can’t have too many of: nouns, adjectives, that sort of thing. If we have multiple words for tan (and if you’ve ever worked in the garment industry you know how many we have), the language can absorb that. But English somehow borrowed the word they from Old Norse (it was originally a masculine plural, but English got bored and made it gender neutral). Pronouns, it turns out, fall into a different category: the language chokes, coughs, and spits if it has multiples of them. The transfer (according to that same article) seems to testify to a close relationship between speakers of the two languages. In fact, the two languages may have been mutually intelligible–they’re both Germanic–which surely would’ve helped.

Compare all that to the French words that entered the language after the Norman conquest. We have more borrowings from French than from Norse, but they’re about high culture, hunting, law, cooked food as opposed to uncooked animals, and government, not about ordinary things like window, smile, knife, and seat.

Old Norse might have still been in use when the Normans invaded but it had probably dropped out of use by the twelfth century. Its speakers had been absorbed into the general population. 

Some academics argue that modern English is a descendant of the Vikings’ language, Old Norse, rather than of the Anglo-Saxon language, which I learned to call Old English. Other academics say, “Bullshit,” only more politely and at greater length. We’ll keep our hands in our pockets and let them fight that out, okay? May the best argument win.

 

Law

This is another place where the Vikings’ impact can be traced. With a lovely sense of irony, we stole the word law from them, along with by-law. The by there means “town.”

Central to the Viking legal system was the Thing–or in some spellings, Ting: a representative gathering that served as both legislature and court. (If you have nothing better to do, try googling “What is a thing?”)  

Someone accused of a crime could be brought before the Thing, with people stating what they believed to be the facts of the case. Or claimed to believe. Or–well, we’re an imperfect species. That hasn’t changed. 

A law-sayer would explain what the law had to say about the crime, and a jury or 12–or 24, or 36, if the case was important enough–would decide whether the accused was guilty or innocent. A person who was found guilty could be fined or outlawed–banished to the wilderness, denied help from friend and family, and fair game for his (or presumably her) enemies. 

When the old gods held sway, disputes could also be settled with duels, but Christianity put an end to that, introducing the civilized practice of the ordeal by fire. If you could grab a piece of iron out of boiling water and walk nine paces with it, you were innocent. Ditto if you could walk twelve paces over red-hot iron and not have infected wounds three days later. 

To be fair–and I do occasionally want to be fair–having introduced the ordeal by fire, Christianity later abolished it, but it took a while, and left a lot of burned feet.

Even after the Norman invasion, as late as the twelfth century, the old Danelaw area was recognized as having a customary system of laws that was different from the formerly Anglo-Saxon part of England’s.

 

Social structure

Viking women were freer than most women of their age. They could own land, divorce a husband, and reclaim their dowries if a marriage broke apart. With their men so often away pillaging, their role in the family was a powerful one, and some seem to have fought beside the men. 

All that is ripped wholesale out of discussions of Scandinavia, but it’s a fair bet that it carried over into Viking England. 

Solid evidence about women’s role is sketchy, though. Until recently, the assumption was that the invaders were men and that when they settled down they married local women. Recently, though, metal detectorists have found enough Scandinavian women’s jewelry to convince at least some experts that a fair number of women either journeyed with or later joined the men.

The strong impact of Old Norse on English also argues for the presence of Norse women. Language is transferred primarily in the home. A bilingual household is less likely to preserve the incomers’ language.

Or so the theory goes.  

Poor farmers also had more independence in Viking England than they did in Anglo-Saxon England. On the other hand, both the Vikings and the Anglo-Saxons held and traded slaves, so poor farmers weren’t at the bottom of the social scale. 

Nothing’s ever simple, is it? 

I could–in fact, I will–toss a handful of words at you that mark the Viking social structure: sokeman (a small farmer with more independence than the English equivalent), wapentake and sulung (units of tax assessment, which tells us that yes, these big, hairy people did have a governmental structure), jarl (which became earl), riding (an administrative unit that continued into the 1970s). The words hint at social changes that would’ve been significant to the people living through them.

What else do we know about the Danelaw? It experienced growth in industry–mass-produced metalwork; pottery that was thrown on a wheel and glazed–and that may have been due to increased trade.

It’s not much, is it?

 

And then what happened?

Viking and Anglo-Saxon England fought. Anglo-Saxon England paid Viking England not to fight. Everybody fought some more. People were born. People died. Everyone got mixed together in complicated patterns. A handful of English kings were Scandinavian. The last Anglo-Saxon king, the unfortunate Harold–he of the arrow in the eye–had Norse ancestors. 

The closer you get, the more complicated the picture is. You think you can draw a clean line between two groups of people and two cultures, but you can’t.  

Welcome to the real world.

Alfred the Great: his world and his legend

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King Alfred–who you might know as Alfred the Great–could reasonably have expected not to become a king. He was the fourth, or possibly the fifth, son–it’s all a little hazy when you’re looking back that far–of King Aethelwulf of Wessex. But King Alfred he became, although we could also call him Aelfred, or if you want to go completely Dark Ages about it, Aelfraed.

Anglo-Saxon spellings make my teeth ache.

In addition to all those sons, there was a daughter in there somewhere, but she was married off to another Anglo-Saxon king in a political marriage and history doesn’t pay much attention to her. Did you ever wonder why so many women develop a sharp edge? It’s not because of her particularly, but she’s not a bad example of what happens.

Irrelevant photo: A camellia, stolen from something I posted last year. This year’s are out, though.

Back to our point, though: Aelfred was the king of Wessex from 871 to 899 and nobody at the time called him the Great. King was plenty, thanks.

What kind of place did he grow up in and rule? To start with, Anglo-Saxon England was split into an assortment of kingdomlets. Don’t try to count them because the numbers keep changing, especially once the Vikings invaded. They swallowed one, then another. 

Pretty much anything you read about the period talks not just about the Anglo-Saxon kings but also about sub-kings. The sub-kings don’t actually come into our tale, but they’re worth a mention because it’s interesting to know that power was divided up in ways we’re not used to. A king had to move carefully, balancing out the sub-kings’ strength, interests, loyalties, tempers, competence, and possibly incompetence.

Now let’s set them aside and talk about Aelf’s family background, and you should feel free to make fun of the names here because (a) I will and (b) nobody speaks Anglo-Saxon English anymore, so you won’t be stomping on any sensitive toes. 

Aethelwulf (that’s Aelfred’s dad, in case you’ve lost track of him already) fought the Vikings and had a bunch of kids. Then his wife died and he married a twelve-year-old, Judith. Unlike the sub-kings, she’ll come back into the story.

AethelW went on pilgrimage, taking youngest son Aelfred, who’d have been four or five, with him and leaving older son Aethelbald in charge of the kingdom. When he came back a year later, AethelB said, “Sorry, Dad, but I’ve kind of gotten to like being king. Now butt out.”

Instead of starting a civil war, AethelW divided the kingdom with AethelB. Then he died, as people will. Son Aethelberht, not to be confused with Aethelbald–let’s call him AethelB2–took AethelW’s throne. Then AethelB1 married AethelW’s widow, who in our times still wouldn’t have been old enough to buy herself a beer. 

Yes, it was all very weird back then. 

Before anyone had time to say, “It seems perfectly sensible to us,” AethelB1 died and AethelB2 glued the two kingdoms back together. Then he died and brother Aethelred followed him onto the throne. 

This sounds like the fairy tale about the billy goats gruff and the troll under the bridge, doesn’t it? Except instead of the youngest brother coming first, the oldest ones did.

I’m happy to report that neither AethelR or AethelB2 married poor ol’ Judith. She went home and later married someone unrelated to either her first husband or this tale. I hope she was old enough to order a beer by then, but I wouldn’t put any money on it.

And we still haven’t gotten to Aelfred.

You may have noticed that Aelfred is missing a syllable that all his brothers got: He’s plain old Ael-Something while they’re Aethel-Somethings. It’s like that when you’re the youngest kid. By the time you get yourself born, your parents are tired. They don’t have the energy to hand out extra syllables. And in a lot of families, money’s tight. In this one, they didn’t seem to be, but they were running short on thrones. If Aethelred hadn’t died, Aelfred would’ve had to sit on a stool or a bench, just like everyone else.

By the time Aelfred got himself a throne, with a wooden back and arms and everything else that signaled his importance, the Vikings had taken over most of England. The Anglo-Saxons called the Vikings the Great Heathen Army, because (a) they weren’t Christian and (b) it’s a lot scarier to be slaughtered by someone of a different religion than by someone of your own religion.

Aelf’s first task was to fight the Vikings, and we’ll skip the list of battles. We don’t have space for enough detail to make them interesting, and without detail you wouldn’t remember them anyway, would you? 

Okay, maybe you would. I wouldn’t.

What matters is that Aelf lost, and by 878 he’d been pushed back to a corner of the Somerset Levels, where he and a small band of fighters hid in the marshes, working to gather reinforcements. Eventually he had enough warriors to go on the offensive, defeat the Vikings, and as part of the peace settlement demand that Guthrum, the Viking king, become a Christian. Religion doesn’t seem to have been about deeply held beliefs but about–well, it strikes me as being more like joining a football team and agreeing to follow its rules. 

The Vikings eventually all converted to Christianity. Did that bring peace between the Anglo-Saxons and the Vikings? Hell no. It just meant Christians were fighting Christians instead of non-Christians. It meant everyone who died was killed by a co-religionist. You can see how that was a great improvement.

The peace between Aelf (for Wessex) and Guthrum (for the Danelaw, which is what they called Viking England) held for a while, but it wasn’t a stable peace, and Aelf built up his military, fortifying towns, building up a navy to face up to Danish ships, and generally preparing for the time they’d be at war again.

Danish, by the way, was another way to say “Viking.” 

Aelf’s theory was that the Viking invasion of England was a result of Anglo-Saxon England’s moral failings, so he set out to remedy them, in part by focusing heavily on education. One step was to demand that anyone in government had to be literate. Another was to set up a court school for–okay, the article I’m working from here  says “noble-born children.” I haven’t found anything that says the wording only meant boys, but I haven’t found anything that says it didn’t. Women were freer under the Anglo-Saxons than they would be later, under the Normans, but that’s a relative freedom, not an absolute one. 

The school also welcomed “intellectually promising boys of lesser birth.” 

It was under Aelf’s rule that the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle was begun. This was a year-by-year account of events, and it continued to be written for some time after the Norman invasion in 1066. It’s one of our few sources of knowledge about the period and a remarkable piece of work.

Aelf also wrote an ambitious law code, which was a mix of new and pre-existing law, threaded through with bits out of the Bible. In it, he wrote, “Doom [meaning judge; it’s pronounced dome] very evenly! Do not doom one doom to the rich; another to the poor! Nor doom one doom to your friend; another to your foe!”

We can learn from this that he was even-handed and just and placed a high value on exclamation marks. Assuming, of course, that they weren’t added by the translator, because however antiquated that sounds, it’s not Anglo-Saxon English.

Aelf was either wise or canny enough to appoint a biographer, which is one reason he’s come down to us as perfect in all ways. Aelf’s biographer wasn’t independent; he worked for Aelf. That can’t help but color a writer’s work. So Aelf was pious, brave, learned, truthful, a man who ate not five but six helpings of fruits and vegetables every day. Even kale, which wasn’t in the supermarkets yet. Supermarkets weren’t even in the supermarkets yet.

And I say that without diminishing his stature. He seems to have been a far-sighted guy, but let’s not get suckered into the propaganda.

In spite of all his wonderfulness, Aelf was never made a saint, and this meant he disappeared from sight for a while. When the Normans took over England, they played up their connections to the Anglo-Saxon kings, but they leaned toward the ones the Church had made saints of, ignoring the ones who were merely saintly. That meant they ignored Aelf.

Much later, when England broke away from the Catholic Church, finding a saintly-but-unsainted king who just happened to have had a good biographer came as a gift to a country struggling to redefine itself. And there Aelfred was, unsullied by Catholic approval. They dug him out, turned him from Aelf (or Alf, by then) into Alfred the Great, and used his writings and translations to prove that the Anglo-Saxon church had been pure before the Normans came along and made it Roman Catholic. As Barbara Yorke puts it, “With a bit of selective editing, [the Anglo-Saxon church] came to bear an uncanny resemblance to Elizabethan Anglicanism.” 

The Tudors weren’t the only folks to do some selective editing. In later centuries, Aelf was rewritten in an assortment of ways no one would have predicted. The Victorians held him up as an example to kids–the perfect, and probably deadly dull, person they should all model themselves on. (Go hole up in a swamp and eat kale, children, until you’re strong enough to defeat the Vikings.) He was also dragged into racist arguments to demonstrate how great the Anglo-Saxons were and how inferior everyone else was. 

How did Alfred feel about all this? He was past caring–or at least past letting us know his feelings and opinions. I mention it to remind us all that historians aren’t impartial reporters of history. Some start with the story they want to tell then choose their facts to fit it. Others play fair, but even they shape the story. 

And I do the same thing. If you don’t shape the story, you don’t have one, you have a scrambled mess of facts.

Besides, I’m not a historian, I just play one on the internet.

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My thanks to the Tiny Potager’s oldest kids for suggesting both this topic and next week’s.