Viking Britain: A History. Thomas Williams

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ might find themselves shackled and transported. Descriptions of the seizure of people are commonplace – particularly in the Irish chronicles. The year 821, for example, saw the ‘plundering of Etar [Howth in Dublin] by heathens; from there they carried off a great number of women’. Ten years later, in 831, ‘heathens won a battle in Aignecha against the community of Armagh, so that very many were taken prisoner by them’. In 836 came ‘the first plunder taken from Southern Brega by the heathens […] and they slew many and took off very many captive’.26

      Monks may have been of less value as sex-slaves, and men were probably valued primarily as manual labour, often carried back to Scandinavia to work the farms of landowners where they, as well as female slaves, would have been expected to undertake the hardest and foulest work. Recent research has even suggested the institution of slave ‘plantations’ in parts of Scandinavia, where imported workers were housed in cramped conditions and forced to mass-produce textiles for the export market.27 There they were known in Old Norse as þrælar (‘thralls’), a word which survives in modern English with something close to its original meaning (to be in ‘thrall’ to something is to be captivated by it). The low regard in which these unfortunate folk were held can be gauged by a poem, written down – in the only surviving version – in the thirteenth or fourteenth century, but probably preserving a much older text and ideas.28 It describes the mythologized origins of social castes in Scandinavia and lists the sort of pejorative names and menial tasks thought suitable for the children of a thrall (‘slave’; ON þræll) or thrall-woman (ON þír):

      I think their names were Big-mouth and Byreboy,

      Stomp and Stick-boy, Shagger and Stink,

      Stumpy and Fatso, Backward and Grizzled,

      Bent-back and Brawny; they set up farms,

      shovelled shit on the fields, worked with pigs,

      guarded goats and dug the turf.

      Their daughters were Dumpy and Frumpy,

      Swollen-calves and Crooked-nose,

      Screamer and Serving-girl, Chatterbox,

      Tatty-coat and Cranelegs;

      from them have come the generations of slaves.29

      Slavery was an institution across Europe, as it had been in the days of the Roman Empire, and persisted into the Norman period. In 1086, some 10 per cent of the English population was recognized as being unfree, and Anglo-Saxon slave-owners had the power of life and death over their slaves until the late ninth century.30 The capture of defeated enemies was also a feature of inter-kingdom warfare in both Britain and Ireland before and during the Viking Age. In 836 (the same year that Vikings took captives from Brega), Fedelmid mac Crimthainn, king of Munster, attacked the oratory at Kildare ‘with battle and weapons’, taking the abbot Forindan and his congregation captive: they were shown, according to the chronicler, ‘no consideration’.31

      What was different about the Viking slave-trade was its integration into long-distance commercial networks that connected the Irish and North Seas with the Baltic, Black, Caspian and Mediterranean Seas. No longer could slaves taken in Britain and Ireland expect to remain within a reasonable radius of their erstwhile homes, surrounded by people who differed from them little in speech or custom, and who respected social and cultural norms that were mutually understood. Instead they faced the possibility – if they weren’t shipped directly to Scandinavia or to more local Viking colonies – of being transported like livestock over vast distances, to be sold in the markets of Samarkand or Baghdad, or – perhaps – to meet a horrific death on the banks of the River Volga. If they survived that journey and made it to market, they may well have found themselves, prodded and manhandled, forced to watch as their price in silver was carefully measured out – the scales tipping with the heft of weights, gleaming with ornaments ripped from the books and treasures that had once adorned their homes and churches.

      5

       Beyond the North Waves

      What is a woman that you forsake her,

      And the hearth-fire and the home-acre,

      To go with the old grey Widow-maker?

      RUDYARD KIPLING, ‘Harp Song of the Dane Woman’ (1906)1

      Explaining the beginnings of the Viking Age is to enter into difficult and contentious territory. We can observe the Vikings’ arrival in the written sources, and glimpse what they wanted and how they went about getting it. But to question why people from northern Europe suddenly began to risk their lives on the wide ocean and brave the unknown dangers of foreign lands is another matter. To make progress on this front requires consideration of where the Vikings came from – not just geographically, though this is important for understanding the economic and political pressures that affected them, but also culturally. The structure of society in the pagan north, the shared values and beliefs – these were critical factors in pushing people towards the ‘Viking’ way. Ultimately, these are questions to which there can be no firm answers, only suggestions and reconstructions and ideas placed in the minds of people we cannot hope to know, but by doing so we can perhaps inch a little closer to understanding what made the Vikings tick.

      Despite the very limited information provided by the written sources, it is clear that the people who were raiding Britain at the turn of the eighth century came from somewhere in the ‘Danish’-speaking (that is, Old Norse-speaking) north-east and – most importantly from the perspective of Christian writers – were heathens. In the year 800, the Baltic was a pagan lake. The people who had turned their attention to Britain came from the west of this region – from what is now Denmark, Norway and Sweden – but all of the neighbouring lands to the east were also inhabited by pagan peoples, by Baltic and Slavic tribes in (moving clockwise around the Baltic coast) modern Finland, Russia, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Russia (again), Poland and Germany. It would be wrong to draw very firm distinctions or borders between these groups – as in Britain, it is better to try to forget everything we know about the way that the storms of history have left their tide lines on the map. The formation of modern north-eastern Europe – its political geography and its religious and ethno-linguistic fault-lines – has been the result of more than a millennium of often catastrophic upheaval that lasted well into the second half of the twentieth century. The people who formed Viking raiding parties could have been (and in later centuries demonstrably were) drawn from all over this wider region.2

      To the south and west was the Carolingian Empire, a great swathe of Europe – corresponding to most of modern France, northern Italy, western Germany and the Low Countries – united under a Frankish king (the Franks were a Germanic tribe who had begun to settle the Roman province of Gaul in the fifth century and who give their name to the modern nation of France). That king, in the same year, had been crowned emperor of the Romans by Pope Leo III, a title that confirmed him as the sanctioned champion of an aggressive Christianity and the successor to the authority of the long-defunct Roman СКАЧАТЬ