Viking London. Thomas Williams

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       Introduction

      Wherever their ships ploughed the water, the Vikings made needles of rivers: a hypodermic rush of systemic devastation and steroidal vigour, wracking the veins of nations with the germ of change. In Dublin, York and Kiev, Iceland, Normandy and Russia, the Vikings planted the seeds of new realms and great cities, stoking the furnaces of trade, technology and industry wherever their keels ground the shingle and markets echoed with the jangle of slave-chains. They remoulded the world for ever, violence and commerce riding the whale-road from the north: twin sea-stallions of the Viking Age. In Britain the impact was profound: the Vikings remade the geopolitical map, changed the language, up-ended the dynamics of power and trade. Monasteries and settlements burned, ancient dynasties were extinguished. And nowhere in these islands was subjected to more aggression than London.

      Between 842 and 1016 London was assaulted by Vikings on at least a dozen separate occasions. Sometimes it burned and sometimes it surrendered, mostly it stood firm when all others had given up hope; and throughout it all the city endured, remaking and remodelling itself, growing strong in adversity, unique in economic power, a crucible of cultures, enterprise and political intrigue: a maker of kings, the heart of a North Sea empire. This book is a sketch of London in the Viking Age, how it remade itself, how it was transformed by immigrants and natives, kings and commoners into the fulcrum of national power and identity. London emerged as a hub of trade, production and international exchange, a financial centre, a political prize, a fiercely independent and often intractable cauldron of spirited and rowdy townsfolk: a place that, a thousand years ago, already embodied much of what London was to become and still remains.

      This book is also, however, a confrontation with the city that still sprawls beside the Thames СКАЧАТЬ