Goodbye to the Vikings

The traditional history goes as follows. The Vikings were bold Baltic Sea merchant venturers plying their trade from Russia to north-west Norway. Yet some dissidents voraciously eyed other sources of income in the form of vulnerable monasteries, Lindisfarne being the first great target of these evil marauders in 790. The familiar timeline runs as straight as a die through coastal attacks in the early ninth century on to sacks such as those of Hamwic (Saxon Southampton) in 842 and Dorestad, the emporium at the mouth of the Rhine, in 834. Following the hit and run raids come the invasions of Scotland, England and Normandy. The Great (Danish) Army of 865 – rather like the panzers of 1940 – overwhelmed Mercia and East Anglia and was only halted in Wessex in 878 following a series of Dunkirk-like catastrophes. The Churchillian figure of the age, King Alfred, founded London in 886 and initiated a 1944-like re-conquest of the lost kingdoms of England. His descendants finished the task by 954, ridding England of its Nordic invaders. Meanwhile York, like other emergent markets in the Danish half of ninth-century England, was suddenly prospering under new west Baltic management. As the Jorvik Centre in York proudly illustrates to 750,000 tourists a year, it was a moment of North Sea brotherhood – an image that has readily engaged European Union support. Viking monsters had become good citizens, eagerly creating civilised medieval wealth-generating shops within metalled gridded streets.
 
From time to time historians have pondered how far this traditional picture is pure propaganda issued by the West Saxon court and monastic chroniclers eager to explain how God could have wantonly damned their institutions. Cautiously, historians once chose to believe that they had not been hoodwinked. Then, when faced with the first results of the archaeological evidence in the 1980s and 1990s, they sat on the fence, consigning towns and trade – regardless of their significance to the political economy – to subsidiary roles in defining the age.
Closer study of the evidence reveals a striking binary pattern. The earliest towns in the Viking period like Haithabu, near Schleswig in north Germany, and Birka on an island in Lake Malaren, central Sweden, appear to have been flourishing in the first forty years of the ninth century. Then they seem to have declined. Meanwhile, the evidence for Viking raids appears to complement this picture: their number increases steadily after the period from around 840, something that is confirmed by the large quantities of Anglo-Saxon and Frankish silver coins in Scandinavian hoards from precisely this period. Trade, it seems, was superseded by raid.
 
Coincidentally, the first results of large excavations at the Frankish emporium of Dorestad and at Hamwic demonstrated that these exceptional, monopolistic market-places were actually declining fast when the Vikings first raided them in 834 and 842 respectively. Dendrochronological evidence from Dorestad indicates intense investment in building riverside quays up until the 820s with a vibrant mint until the 830s, after which the place sharply declines. At Hamwic, decline appears to have occurred even earlier. Furthermore, with the discovery of Lundenwic in the late 1980s, centred not in the city but in the heart of London’s West End, the same picture has emerged. The great municipium, described by Bede during the eighth century, was clearly in recession by the middle of the ninth. At least a generation separates the abandonment of Lundenwic and the creation of Lundenburg by King Alfred in 886.