This week’s glimpse behind the paywall…
In the year 789, the king’s reeve – a sort of Anglo-Saxon local government official – made his way to the coast of Wessex, where three ships of “northmen” had landed, so as to welcome their leaders and take them with him to court. They killed him. But no one much cares about council officials, either then or now, so the start of the Viking Age in England is generally dated instead to the attack on the monastery at Lindisfarne, an island off the coast of Northumbria, on 6 June 793.
From then on, the Vikings – who came first to plunder, then to settle, then ultimately, if briefly, to rule – would be a major factor in the history of these islands for more than two centuries. There’s little agreement about exactly when this period ended: the most popular date seems to be 1066, when the defeat of a last attempted Viking takeover by Harald Hadrada at the Battle of Stamford Bridge was followed, almost immediately, by the successful invasion by another bunch of Vikings (who we often don’t think of as such because they’d long settled down and learned French) at the Battle of Hastings. However you measure it, though, that’s over two and a half centuries of history – a period longer than the entire history of the United States – in which fear of terrifying axe-wielding blond blokes was a major theme of life in these islands.1
No surprise then, that the period should have left its mark. Here are a few ways in which it did.
Viking place names. The clues are found in the suffixes. Any place name ending in the Old Norse “-by” (Selby; Whitby) suggests a Viking farmstead/village/settlement; so do those ending in “-thorpe” (Cleethorpes; Sc*nthorpe, which I’ve asterisked for email filter reasons), but with the additional sense that these were probably a satellite of somewhere bigger, on which they relied for protection.
In the same way, “-kirk” (Ormskirk) suggests a church, “-keld” (Threlkeld) a spring, “-toft” (Lowestoft, Langtoft) a building, and so on. These things aren’t always clear cut – the “-ness” meaning “headland” in Skegness is Old Norse, but the one in Sheerness is Old English, while the one in Inverness is the name of a river: the “Inver” is Gaelic, and means “mouth” instead. But pleasingly, by plotting the Norse place names geographically, you do get a fairly clear map of Viking settlement:
There’s a reason for that northern and eastern bias: sometime after the Anglo-Saxon forces defeated the “great heathen army” at the Battle of Edington in 878, Alfred of Wessex agreed a peace treaty with Guthrum, Viking king of East Anglia, which essentially accepted that neither side was going anywhere and divided the country between them. The two kings drew a line along the rivers Thames and Lea to Bedford, and then along Watling Street to Cheshire. South and west of that would be the Anglo-Saxon lands which which would consolidate, over the next few decades, into an expanded Wessex; north and east, the “Danelaw”, a region under Viking rule but divided between multiple kings.
All this, TV or history novel fans may recall, is the background to The Last Kingdom, or the series of Bernard Cornwell novels it’s based on. The Danelaw is where you’ll find most of the country’s Viking place names. Though why there are so few in Essex, I’ve no idea.
Viking places. Many of the settlements mentioned above were founded or refounded by Vikings. The biggest in Great Britain, so far as I can tell – please write in if I’m wrong – is Derby, one of the “five boroughs”, or fortified towns, of Danish mercia. (The other four all seem to have existed before the takeover.) Across the Irish Sea, Vikings settlers also founded Dublin, Cork and Limerick, the three biggest cities in today’s Republic of Ireland.
Yorkshire. The Viking legacy also explains why Yorkshire is so much bigger than any other English county: the bit of the kingdom of Northumbria swallowed by the Danelaw became the kingdom of Jorvik. But because everywhere within it was administered from York, at its centre, when the expansionist kings of what had been Wessex came to incorporate it into their realm, they absorbed it as a single shire, instead of breaking it into pieces. Then, because that made for an absurdly big county, it was later divided into “ridings” – a Norse word for “thirds”.
That brings us onto:
Dialect words with Viking influence. Why is every second street in York a “-gate”, with delightful names like Whip-Ma-Whop-Ma-Gate or Jubbergate? Because those aren’t gates in the sense we’d understand: they’re from the Norse word “gata”, meaning street.
In fact, there are loads of Yorkshire words with Scandinavian cognates, suggesting lingering Viking influence. “Beck” as in “stream”, “fell” as in “hill”, “dale” for valley”, “flit” to move house, “middin” for an outside toilet”, “happen” as in “perhaps” or “maybe”... Even “Hey up” is suspiciously like the Swedish “sey upp”.
(A note at this point: this entry was inspired by someone suggesting I do Viking influence on Geordie dialect. I was worried that wouldn’t be enough material, and then when I started researching it turned out that such influence is in any case contested. The Danelaw stopped somewhere around the Tees – the far north of Northumbria became the Kingdom of Bamburgh, weakened, but still Anglo-Saxon. What looks like Viking influence might in fact be via incomers from Yorkshire or Cumbria, or even Dutch or German loan words that come from the region’s long-standing links with other port cities across the North Sea. At any rate: compared to certain other places, and at risk of getting myself punched next time I’m in the north east, Tyneside simply wasn’t that Viking. More on all this from the Northern Echo’s archive here.)
Of course some of these words – muck, reckon, throng – have since found their way into wider English usage. So to our list we can add:
Perfectly regular words with heavy Viking influence. Literally hundreds of words came to English via Old Norse. A random selection: anger, awe, awkward, bag, beserk, birth, bleak, bloat, bloom, blunder, no hang on if I keep reading the list alphabetically this’ll take forever. Egg. Husband. Knife. Mistake. Nudge. Prod. Outlaw. Ombudsman. Queasy. Rotten. Scowl. You get the point. More here or here.
Viking-fuelled myths. You know Canute, the king who was said to have told the tides to stop to prove that being king didn’t mean the elements obeyed him? Or, sometimes, in popular misunderstanding, to prove that they would obey him? It probably never happened and his name was actually Cnut, but anyway: he was a Viking. And he got to do all that because he conquered England in 1016, briefly making it part of a cross-North Sea empire:
And he could only do that because as the aforementioned Alfred and his descendents had unified the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms against the Viking threat, a century or more earlier. This is the period which gave rise to another almost certainly not true story about an early medieval king, the bit about Alfred burning the cakes. (It may not be a coincidence that Alfred and Cnut are the only two kings of England we ever call “the Great”.) So to our list we can probably add:
The existence of England. Remember how the Danelaw was divided into multiple Viking kingdoms? This may have been one reason why it didn’t stay Viking for that long: instead Wessex kept expanding and that’s where England came from.
So, yay, Vikings, I guess? Unless you’re from one of the many other countries on the planet, I suppose. In which case boo, Vikings, boo.
Oh, yeah, they also didn’t call themselves Vikings? But that’s a whole other story.
More on Viking place names – on either side of the Channel – here, and more on Viking place names here, if you so wish.
Self-promotion corner
Three things:
1) If you’d like to read stuff like the Viking bit above when I write it, rather than when I deign to release it from the paywall and sometimes not even then, my rates are very reasonable. For just £4 a month, or £28 a year, you can get a weekly dose of politics, maps and nerdery like the above, plus some diverting links.
Alternatively, as ever, if you want to read the newsletter but for whatever reason can’t justify the money right now, just hit reply and ask. I always say yes. Really. And if you want to pay up to support my generous approach to these things, oh look here’s another button:
2) The polls keep saying the Tories are on course for their worst electoral result ever. So why aren't we talking about it?
I have broken ranks and written the wipe out column in a mainstream publication (or at least, the New Statesman). Figure if it happens I'll be greeted as a seer.
3) My new book is published in slightly less than five weeks. I have spent much of the last week reading it into a microphone, and I would say that it is pretty good, although some of the sentences could have been shorter and shown more consideration to the needs of whichever poor sod was going to have to read it out.
You can, and should, pre-order here. I’m genuinely quite excited about everyone getting to read this one, I think it might be the best thing I’ve ever done.
Until the next time.
Regular readers may have noticed that my long-standing interest in the Roman Empire has shifted, these last few months, to an interest in early medieval Britain. The roots of this sudden fascination with a period which required rebuilding from scratch after a catastrophic collapse is a matter perhaps best left to my therapist.
Regular readers may have noticed that my long-standing interest in the Roman Empire has shifted, these last few months, to an interest in early medieval Britain. The roots of this sudden fascination with a period which required rebuilding from scratch after a catastrophic collapse is a matter perhaps best left to my therapist.