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- [00:01]
Sponsor/Ad Voice
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- [00:29]
Dr. Eleanor Barraclough
app K Pop demon hunters, Haja Boy's breakfast meal and Hunt Trick's meal have just dropped at McDonald's. They're calling this a battle for the fans. What do you say to that, Rumi? It's not a battle. So glad the Saja Boys could take breakfast and give our meal the rest of the day.
- [00:44]
James Osborne
It is an honor to share.
- [00:46]
Dr. Eleanor Barraclough
No, it's our honor.
- [00:48]
Sponsor/Ad Voice
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- [00:50]
Dr. Eleanor Barraclough
No, really stop. You can really feel the respect in this battle. Pick a meal to pick a side. Ba da ba ba ba and participate
- [00:59]
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- [01:32]
Dr. Eleanor Barraclough
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- [02:02]
James Osborne
Welcome to the History Extra Podcast. Today we're kicking off the latest of our four part Sunday series as Dr. Eleanor Barraclough tells James Osborne about the moment in the 9th century when the
- [02:13]
Dr. Eleanor Barraclough
Anglo Saxon kingdoms face an existential threat
- [02:16]
James Osborne
on a scale never seen before from Viking forces. In the second half of the 9th century, the Anglo Saxon kingdoms were brought to their knees by a wave of unprecedented Viking aggression. I'm James Osborne and in this four part series I'll be joined by historian Dr. Eleanor Barraclough to examine how the Viking Great Heathen army came so close to destroying Anglo Saxon England, how Alfred the Great halted its conquest and the Long Legacy of this story. In this first episode, we'll discuss the arrival of the great heathen army and examine what life was really like for these people who would go on to rampage across Anglo Saxon England. Eleanor, I think you can officially be described as Viking aficionado.
- [03:00]
Dr. Eleanor Barraclough
I am a fan, yeah, let's say I have a keen interest.
- [03:04]
James Osborne
You are the perfect person to ask why is this chapter so consequential in the history of the Vikings and the Anglo Saxons?
- [03:13]
Dr. Eleanor Barraclough
I mean, we just have to look at the language we're speaking today. So many of those everyday words, egg, knife, husband, they come from the consequences of this period. The fact that we end up not only with raids from across the North Sea in Scandinavia, but long term settlement and cultural change. And really the crucible of that is what we're going to be talking about in this series. These few decades where a great army arrives and what they do there is extraordinary. Nothing like this has been done before.
- [03:48]
James Osborne
And this is really a two part story. It's in part the story of the Vikings and the great heathen army and their arrival. It's also the story of Wessex and of King Alfred. But let's start with the Vikings. Who are these people at this moment in time, culturally and politically and religiously? And what is the broader Norse context in this moment?
- [04:13]
Dr. Eleanor Barraclough
So we need to situate them geographically first. And at this point we're really talking about the Scandinavian homeland, so Norway and Denmark and Sweden. But this is a really interesting point in time where through the course of say the 8th century and now the 9th century, we have increasing outward facing expansion. And at the point where we're talking, so in the middle of the 9th century, we're really poised on the edge of quite an extraordinary movement that has its roots further back. So, you know, through the course of the 8th century, we see the establishment of international trading towns in various points in Denmark and Norway and Sweden. Places like Kuipang in Norway, Ribe Hedeby in Denmark, Birka in Sweden. And so they're already looking outwards. This is also an era where we've got this North Sea trading empire, as it were. So we already have a lot of contact between these different peoples. And, and we also have to think so going back to say maybe 750, so 100 years or so before the time we're going to be focusing on, we already see Norse expansion going east, so setting up trading emporia in the northern part of what's now Russia. And then all the way down the Russian waterways. We see also this movement west, we're about to see the settlement, for example of Iceland, which is just after this period in Greenland. We end up at the edge of the North American continent. So Scandinavia at this time, the Norse cultural context here is very interesting, very outward facing in a way. But we also have to remember that it's a time of great political change. You know, people are this slow consolidation of power within the Scandinavian world itself.
- [06:08]
James Osborne
So what we're talking about today is really one chapter in a story that has already had several chapters.
- [06:15]
Dr. Eleanor Barraclough
Yeah, exactly.
- [06:16]
James Osborne
And we're beginning with the Great Heathen Army. This is a massive force of Vikings that arrives on the shores of Anglo Saxon England in 865. Why is it called that? What is it? Who are these people?
- [06:32]
Dr. Eleanor Barraclough
Yeah, so we get the name pretty much from the Anglo Saxon Chronicle, which is a collection of annals. It starts at the end of the 9th century at the court of King Alfred, who we're going to be talking about. And there in various versions, this great force that arrives on the east coast of it, England, is called the Hadhen Hera, so the heathen army and the Michelher, which is the great army. So traditionally we sort of smash them together and we make it the Mitchell Hadenhere. So the Great Heathen army. But that in itself is significant because that tells us two things. One, that it's pretty big, and the second, that one of the main characteristics, as far as the Anglo Saxons writing about it are concerned, is the fact that these are heathens. And at a time when Anglo Saxon England and most of Western Europe is extremely Christian, that already sets them apart.
- [07:26]
James Osborne
So I've seen it called the great army, the Viking great army. I've seen it called the heathen army. But really those two components are both important. This is the great, that is big heathen, that is not Christian army. And that whole phrase is important.
- [07:42]
Dr. Eleanor Barraclough
Yeah, exactly, exactly. And what's important to remember though is that when we think of sometimes the way that we then interpret that is it's this big bond blob of sort of armed men. And actually, as we're going to see, I suspect it's much more complicated, much more nuanced and much more interesting than that.
- [08:00]
James Osborne
So you've said it's big. Do we have any idea how big we can estimate?
- [08:04]
Dr. Eleanor Barraclough
We don't know for sure. And the problem is that often there's a tendency for these sorts of sources to be a little exaggerating when it comes to numbers. But you know, some historians have thought, well, okay, maybe yes, it's around 100 ships, which might be 2 or 3,000 armed warriors somewhere, something along those lines.
- [08:23]
James Osborne
And these people are mostly Danes, Danish, but there are also some Norwegians and some Swedes that are coming across, too. Is that right?
- [08:32]
Dr. Eleanor Barraclough
Yeah, exactly. And they're not only coming across from Scandinavia, although some of them certainly are. We have to remember that this doesn't come out of nowhere. And so there is a history of these sort of protracted raids that are already taking place on the continent. There have been some raids around the coast of the British Isles, but in. In Ireland particularly, we've seen this already in the decades leading up to it. And so it's quite possible that some of the people who are coming over as part of this sort of extended series of war bands are also coming, for example, from the Low Countries or from northern France, like Frankia, that sort of region. And so they are coming, but this is the point where they coalesce in East Anglia, the kingdom of East Anglia, that coalescence.
- [09:23]
James Osborne
So we have 100 ships, around 3,000 people approximately, from all these different places. It seems to me that you need some degree of leadership in order to coordinate that. Do we know anything about who is behind this? Are there established leaders, or is it not quite as straightforward as that?
- [09:45]
Dr. Eleanor Barraclough
No, no, it's a really good question. There are layers of leadership. So you have to think that the Norse, when they are raiding, when they're fighting and they're on the longships, they're used to that very specific chain of command. There'll be a leader on each of those ships. We see that from ship burials, for example, the Salmi ship burials from around 750 in Estonia, where they come over from Sweden, where, again, you can tell who the leader is because of how he's buried and the weapons he's buried with. And he's buried with a king piece in his mouth from a board game, Nefertuffel. So there's already that very. At that localized level of leaders. But then, of course, when you're dealing with multiple war bands and you have to have some overall leadership, and as far as the Anglo Saxon chronicle is concerned, they have various names. Now, tradition says that these leaders are the sons of Ragnar Lothbrok, Hairy Britches. People might know if they're fans of the TV series Vikings. So it's people like Halfdan, it's people like Ivar, famously called the Boneless people like, I think, Ladies Sigurd, A snake in the eye. There's various characters. And then, of course, there's Guthrum, who is not said to be one of ragnarherybridge's semi legendary, perhaps sons, but comes to play a very important part later on.
- [11:06]
James Osborne
So there are these identified named leaders who we can assume, given the fact that they've been mentioned in the Anglo Saxon Chronicle, we can assume that they are really significant in this. But also, each of these 100 ships is going to have had its own leader. So there are gonna be so many, you know, up to a hundred names who were part of leading this push, who we just don't know about and will never know.
- [11:31]
Dr. Eleanor Barraclough
Yeah, exactly. It's more complicated. From their point of view, it works really well because it means that they can be much more reactive and they can get ahead of the Anglo Saxons very easily because you see, for example, different bits splitting in different directions at various points over the decade, decade or so to come. But usually they are identified by the fact that, say, Guthrim and his forces headed south, or Halfdan and his forces headed north. And so, yeah, there's definitely a sense of overall leadership. There's also possibly a family relation going on. So it's not just these later legendary Icelandic sagas that describe some of these leaders as brothers. Certainly there's a sense that there might be be family dynasties leading some of these forces.
- [12:23]
James Osborne
What really interests me here is that there are so many Vikings who we do know so much about, you know, figures. Like on a different podcast episode before, we've discussed Eric the Red. And I'll link to that podcast in the episode description so listeners can go and hear that conversation. But he's a Viking, who, depending on your perspective, arguably is less influential than some of these figures you've just named. I forgive my pronunciation. Halfdan. Ivar. Ivar. And yet we know so little about them. We can't say for certain if they were related. We don't know what their origins are beyond the fact that maybe they were related to Ragnar Lothbrok. Why is this?
- [13:08]
Dr. Eleanor Barraclough
Yeah, it's a really good question. I think there are probably several reasons. First of all, we just can say luck. There were many, many more sagas and many more poems written about these great heroes than survive. So part of it's just about transmission. The transmission is also interesting because most of our sagas that we know about survive because they're passed down through oral tradition, but then they're written down in Iceland. And so, for example, the case of Erik the Red is a really good one. Erik the Red goes from Norway. He's outlawed for Some killings, he ends up in Iceland, he's outlawed for. Some killings, he goes off to Greenland. And so that's a story that has a big Icelandic connection. In the case of some of these leaders of the Great Heathen army, if they have different sorts of connections to different parts of the Norse cultural diaspora, perhaps that it's less likely that their sagas will survive. Having said that, as we know, some of these leaders do end up in the sagas. They just happen to end up in more legendary sagas. Again, though, having said that, even sagas of characters we know were definitely very historical people like Harald Hardrada, killed at the Battle of Stamford Bridge in 1066. His sagas are full of dragons that he kills at the court of Byzantium and everything, you know, so there's always this strangeness to the sagas and to these. So they're not straightforward in that sense. Guthrum, to my knowledge, has no saga of his own. Certainly, it's possible. That's partly because from the sort of what we know of sagas, the later part of his career isn't particularly sexy. He converts to Christianity, he ends up fairly quietly as a king in East Anglia. And so maybe from that heroic saga point of view, he's just slightly less exciting.
- [14:57]
James Osborne
I was going to compare Guthrum. Guthrum to Harald Hajada. They are vaguely similar figures in that they lead these forces that have a really significant impact on Anglo Saxon England. And yet while we have the saga of Ranald Hardrada, we do not have the saga of Guthrum. So what you're saying is either it's unlikely but possible that maybe we did have the saga of Guthrum, but it was just lost, or it never made its way to Iceland, so that we just don't know any more, or they weren't too inclined to try to remember him because his Viking ness is somewhat lessened by the time he dies.
- [15:37]
Dr. Eleanor Barraclough
Yeah. So in the case of Harald Hardrada, we have to remember he's Norwegian king. The Icelanders have a very close relationship with Norway and they have a keen interest in their kings, not least because by the time the sagas come to be written down in the 13th century, the Norwegian kings are agitating for control of Iceland. So Harald Hardrada, within that context, it makes perfect sense that his saga would survive. And indeed, lots of other king sagas, particularly Norwegian kings, sometimes Danish kings, also survive in a compilation called Heimskringla, which is the circle of the world. The thing is, with Guthrum, he's not A king before he gets to England. And his kingship, when it arrives, is very much couched within Anglo Saxon terms. We do sometimes see other Anglo Saxon kings for sure in sagas, but they are more likely to play bit parts. So we have King Athelstan, for example, crops up, but it's in of Egill, who's this belligerent drunken poet, Icelandic poet. And Egl is very much the star of that saga, not the king.
- [16:44]
James Osborne
So what we're saying is that when we're talking about these Viking leaders, there is just so much we don't know and can't know. Partly because their stories were never recorded from a Viking perspective. They were only recorded from the Anglo Saxon Chronicle and from the biography of Alfred the Great by the monk Assa. We're only seeing the Anglo Saxon perspective.
- [17:08]
Dr. Eleanor Barraclough
Yeah, really. And certainly textually speaking, yes, I can completely imagine there would be oral stories circulating within sort of Britain itself, within the Norse camps, within the settlers, about characters such as Guthrim. But we always have to remember sources are never unbiased and they're never complete. And so we are seeing a very one sided account of who Guthrum is and what he gets up to. Now that can be, you know, we then have archaeology and that tells us a different sort of picture about what's going on. But it's not likely to. Well, sometimes it does, but for the most part that tells us a different type of information rather than the biography of a war leader who then becomes an essentially Anglo Saxon, a king of East Anglia.
- [17:57]
James Osborne
It's interesting because we're dealing with biased sources here and actually this is true of all of this story. When we talk about Alfred, his biography is also coming from biased sources. So that's a really interesting point just to note and stick a pin in and remember this moment when this great heathen army arrives in 865. This is about 70 years after Lindisfarne and in those 70 years, Anglo Saxon England, the monasteries along the coast, they've been subjected to basically constant raiding parties from the Vikings, haven't they? Why does that change? Is there a specific objective or reason why they decide actually, rather than just hitting and running, let's hit and stay?
- [18:43]
Dr. Eleanor Barraclough
Yeah. Doesn't sound quite so catchy, does it? Well, so again, I think this comes back to a broader picture. We have to open it up past England, past the British Isles and Ireland and think about what's going on on the continent at this time. Because similar sorts of warfare, sorts of hit and stay, you know, Right. That we See, then happening from around 865, they've been going on for several decades on the continent. So the context there is that, you know, in the Carolingian Empire under Charlemagne, and then the Frankish Empire under his son Louis the pious, from 814, I think, and then his three sons take over and the kingdom is split and it all gets a bit messy. Now, that seems important because at those points of political tension and flux within the Frankish Empire, the Vikings do basically what they end up doing in England. They take advantage of that instability. And we see, for example, overwintering on islands. We see them coming in on the waterway systems long before that happens in England. And so that dates 865 with that arrival of the great heathen army in East Anglia is significant, but it's possibly. It's a bit like, you know, 793 Lindisfarne. It's a good date, it is an important date, but it's certainly not the only date. And it's not like it comes out of nowhere. And so we have to think, okay, this is more of a slow buildup. This is more of a pattern developing. And of course, by the time this is happening, so the first overwintering in England that we know about from the Anglo Saxon Chronicle is 850. So we've got some quite nasty raids and we've got some sort of major figures killed in the couple of decades up to that 850, we have the first recorded overwintering of Viking forces on the Isle of Thanet. So, again, we're talking very much that lower part of the east coast of England. And from there they're able to get in much more easily. And so it's this slow accruing of information about what's going to work in England that is also drawing on their experience on the continent. And so what changes? Well, things are changing slowly, but also their knowledge is changing. It's a more gradual process than sometimes we think, because obviously when they hit, they hit hard. And our textual sources for what happens from 865onwards is very much written in retrospect, written at the court of King Alfred and onwards, with knowledge of just how far this is going to go and how awful it's going to go to become from the point of view of these Anglo Saxon kingdoms.
- [21:39]
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- [24:14]
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- [24:45]
James Osborne
The historian Thomas Williams, he recently wrote an article for History Extra magazine talking about this great raid that's going down the Mediterranean and. And they're trying to sack Rome. So this is part of a broader trend of change, where these Vikings are realising, oh, we don't have to leave, we can be more ambitious, like, we can stay if we want to and extract more wealth and enslave more people and take those back with us. So it's part of a broader trend.
- [25:22]
Dr. Eleanor Barraclough
Yeah, exactly. And that raid, what, four years earlier or something, the Bjorn Ironside raid, or at least he's one of them. That is really important because exactly as you say, that pulls out that picture. Bjorn Ironside is another one who is sort of traditionally linked to these bands of sort of the leader brothers, the semi legendary Ragnar posse, as it were. And exactly as you say, it's partly. It's a case of degrees of intensity. So, yeah, why not get a bit more ambitious? Oh, okay, we see this works here. Well, let's try that here. Maybe we can start looking at land. And that's an important difference. This is the point, this is the lead up to where they actually start taking land for themselves.
- [26:04]
James Osborne
So Bjorn Ironside, forgive my pronunciation, you are much better than me, but Bjorn Ironside, he's gone down to the Mediterranean and then possibly after that he's come back up and gone, hey, let's do this here, what I just did down in the Mediterranean, sacking all this land. Let's do that on Anglo Saxon England. That's possible.
- [26:21]
Dr. Eleanor Barraclough
Yeah, exactly. It's the same thing as I say, when the great heathen army tips up, they're coming from different places. So you've got your Bjornia sides, whatever they are coming up saying, hey, this worked here, or this nearly worked, worked here, maybe it'll work here. But you're seeing that also say Vikings who've been raiding along the Seine and saying, well, you know, we tried this and this worked really well. And actually, so what's really funny, I always think of Vikings as being a little bit like stray cats in this period. You know, you try to get them to go away by feeding them milk or treats and then the stray cats keep coming back. They're like, that was a Nice treat. I'd like another one of those. And so you see that happening in the decades leading up, up to 865, on the continent, particularly where the Frankish kings are trying all these different strategies to try and work out how best to deal with this Viking threat. So do you pay them off? One of the earlier, earliest examples, I think it's Charles the Bull. I think it's after the siege of Paris. So that'd be 8, 4, 5. He pays them, I think, £7,000 of silver to get them to go. Well, what do you do if you've got £7,000 of silver? You come back the next year and you say, I'd like 8,000 pounds of silver now, or maybe 10,000, you know, so that doesn't really work. You can try making them your ally. You can try sort of seeing if they want to be Christian, baptizing them, giving some land, maybe that will work. You can try fighting them, you can try blockading them so they can't get past the rivers. And so you see all these different techniques that different parts of Europe have tried to deal with the Viking threat. But we have to remember that while the sort of the kings, the leaders, are trying to find ways to deal with the Vikings, the Vikings are also learning. They're learning what war works. And so exactly, as you say, when it comes to England, they think, well, I wonder if this will work here. And indeed it does.
- [28:10]
James Osborne
And there also might be, and I put the bold on might. There might be a personal reason why these Vikings are coming over as well. I did see there are some suggestions that perhaps these sons of Ragnar Lothbrok who are leading this push, their father was possibly killed in Northumbria.
- [28:34]
Dr. Eleanor Barraclough
Yes.
- [28:36]
James Osborne
So this is perhaps an act of revenge. I mean, this is from highly dubious sources, but it's possible. That could be a possible reading.
- [28:47]
Dr. Eleanor Barraclough
No, no, it is. So it's definitely according to these later legendary sagas. So the tale of, or saga of Ragnar Lothbrok himself and then the tale of his Ragnar's sons. That's exactly what they're saying. So they come in, 865 to East Anglia, and then they go north after that, and they end up in, as you say, Northumbria, around York. Now, the situation there is that there are two warring kings who would both like to rule. One of them is quite famous because of what you say is purported to have happened. He's called Alla and Allah, it's said, puts Ragnar Lothbrok in a pit full of snakes. And that's how he dies.
- [29:33]
James Osborne
Nasty.
- [29:34]
Dr. Eleanor Barraclough
Yeah. Really, if it happened, very nasty. The thing is, there are other legendary stories about other people being put in pits full of snakes to die. I do wonder, on a purely practical level, how many snakes are knocking around York that, you know, it just occurs to me I've never seen that many snakes.
- [29:51]
James Osborne
You know, having lived in York, I can say I never saw a snake.
- [29:53]
Dr. Eleanor Barraclough
Zero snakes. Right, yeah, there we go. So, who knows? But so the story goes, his sons then come exactly as you say, to take vengeance for their father. The problem is also the interesting thing about this source material, which is that there is before sagas, you have skaldic verses. They often get embedded in the sagas, but they're older and the thought is they're a bit more reliable because they're so tricky and they're so tightly structured, it's quite hard to mess around with them. Seems that this idea of what the blood eagle is actually comes from an earlier poem about the death of Allah at the hands of these leaders. And it says that it's really tricky. I can find the old Norse and we can do an old nurse reading as well, but either that they carved the shape of an eagle on his back, and then later on another version of this becomes. And they rub salt in it and it's all very horrible and that's how he dies. But the eagle is also known as a beast of battle. And so it's this idea, not that they kill him that way, but that basically the eagle scratches at his back because the eagle is a carrion bird that's getting food and the food is dead King Allah. So. So it's one of those really interesting stories that we're not quite sure what that kernel of truth is, or whether it's just a poetic misreading, which is possible.
- [31:25]
James Osborne
So whether it's purely pragmatic reasons of simply coming for land and money, or whether or not there are more personal ambitions behind this, about avenging their father. These people, the. This great heathen army has landed in East Anglia in 865 AD. Up to 3,000 people. This huge, unprecedented force, unprecedented in Viking terms. I would love to talk about what that actually looked like. So we have this great heathen army and it roves all around Anglo Saxon England, up and down. Life in this great heathen army must have been so chaotic and so full of danger, but also moments of normality. You wrote a brilliant book called Embers of the Hands, in which you looked at the ordinary lives of ordinary Vikings. I wondered if we can try to imagine what life in the great heathen army might have looked like, because it wasn't just the warriors. There were most likely women and children. This is a massive force. It's very much like a mobile town. So what would it have looked like?
- [32:34]
Dr. Eleanor Barraclough
Yeah, mobile town is a really good way of describing it. The really great thing is we have archaeology now, and this is quite recent. This is within the last couple of decades. So much has emerged to tell us more about what ordinary life looked like as part of these war bands. And there's a really good example from Torksey, I think, in Leicestershire, which is on the River Trent. So, again, you want Vikings, you look for the waterways, or indeed they do, then can get horses, you know, in East Anglia, famously. And then they're able to use the old Roman road systems, but basically want a Viking look for the river system. And Torksey is one of their overwintering sites. It's sort of towards, I think it's 8, 7, 3 to 4 or something. So we're talking nearly a decade after they first land. But what's really interesting there is, yeah, we can see evidence for, say, there might have been, I don't know, anything up to. To maybe even a hundred longships of various sizes moored up, pulled onto land. We know that the ground was very, very marshy. So it's almost like being on an island, which is really good for security. The Vikings definitely had the advantage because of that. There's only going to be a few ways through the wet onto the island and therefore into the camp, the camp itself. We have to think, okay, there would have been canvas tents, there might have been furs and textiles making, you know, these warmer because we're over winter. So, again, this is always. These overwintering camps would have been quite grim places in a way, because the weather wasn't good. There'd be rain, there'd be wind, snow, whatever there might be. But what we have to think about is, yeah, these camps could support, you know, a few thousand people, potentially warriors, definitely. Yes. But also exactly as you said, women and children and enslaved people, some of whom might have been taken when they were, were in England itself, others who might have been bought at the slave markets in Britain, Ireland, further afield, children, some of whom would have basically spent their young lives traveling with the heathen army, because lots of children would have been born in these camps and on the marches. The women, some would have come over from Scandinavia with their men folk. Others might have been local Women, because that's the other thing. We see evidence of Anglo Saxons in these camps as well. But then you have to think, think, okay, there's really basic things like you need to eat. And so there's lots of evidence for the sorts of food they would have had. They would have been raiding and should we say otherwise, extracting food from the local surroundings. We have evidence of those raids. So he thinks things like, I don't know, beef and pork and mutton and hens, you know, they're all in there fishing. We know that they're fishing. There's evidence of those fishing weights. So we know that sort of food. It's winter, so, so vegetables, fruit, not quite so great, but some of those around bread, particularly if they could pillage some grain from the local granaries. So you've already got those smells, but then you've also got a lot of industry and craft work. And that's an element that has become increasingly apparent because the archaeologists have found evidence of essentially metalsmiths melting down the loot that these, you know, that they're taking from the local environs. There's a really interesting example of those because sometimes the metal, as far as the Vikings are concerned, it doesn't matter if it's nice looking or not, not because they're planning to melt it down. There's one example of an ealdorman, possibly from sort of the London area, who ransoms back a beautiful gospel book which the, the Viking raiders have taken in this period. Not obviously because of the beautiful gospel and the illustrations, you know, all the rest of it, but because it's got a nice metal cover and again, you can sell that on or you can melt it down. So in these camps there's huge amounts of industry. There'll be blacksmiths, they'll be making rivets to repair the ships, but they'll also be shoeing horses or sharpening swords. And so you've got to think of the smoke and the smells, obviously they've got to be latrines of some sort there. There's going to be a lot of smells that not going to be as good as the smell of cooking food, put it that way. There's also going to be illness, to be people dying there over the winter. There's another site at Repton where we have evidence, a lot of evidence of, you know, the dead from the Viking army in its various capacities. And so you really have a sense, I mean, it's been described in various ways as sort of like a heavy metal festival, a Music festival. If it were like a festival, it's not like a festival I would ever want to spend any time in. I think it could be quite a dangerous place, quite a violent place, particularly if you've been sort of kidnapped and taken there as a hostage from the local environs. But at the same time, we have evidence for gaming pieces. For example, people are playing games, they're singing songs, maybe playing instruments. You know, they're telling stories around the fires. So it's a very, very noisy, bustling place. And we have to remember from the point of view of the people living in the area surrounding this is going to be visible because of the fires and because they're high up on an island in this example and also others. But it's also gonna be audible from quite some way off. So it's very much quite a. I'd imagine a very unsettling presence in the landscape, particularly when you know that there are hungry mouths that are going to need feeding in that camp.
- [38:17]
James Osborne
So I'm imagining the smell of smoke, the smell of latrines, the sound of blacksmiths clanging, people trading and negotiating and shouting over each other, the sound of chickens run. It actually sounds like for all that it was dangerous and for all that it would have been a quite horrible experience for a lot of the enslaved people especially. Of course, this is quite a normal slice of Viking life, I think.
- [38:44]
Dr. Eleanor Barraclough
More so than in the past we might have anticipated, you know, from the evidence that's now coming out from the archaeology. Yeah, it's more all human life is here than this sense of. Obviously when you have those very early hit and run raids, it's for the most part it's going to be male, it's going to be a handful of ships, maybe 1, 2, 3 ships, something like that. There's going to be small, you know, they might have to camp sometimes, but for the most part, they're going to be sticking to the coastlines on their ships, getting in and out. But here, yeah, it's. It's much more complex in terms of what we're seeing, in terms of that social makeup of what those camps look like.
- [39:28]
James Osborne
In the next episode, we'll be talking about the fall of Anglo Saxon England and the rise of Alfred as the figurehead of the resistance. If you enjoyed this episode and want to go beyond the podcast, you can visit the History Extra app, where I've curated a list of wider content that explores the intersection of the Viking age with the world of the Anglo Saxons, including More from Dr. Eleanor Barraclough. You can find a link to that in the episode Description Foreign.
- [39:57]
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- [40:18]
Dr. Eleanor Barraclough
Months.
- [40:18]
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- [40:56]
Dr. Eleanor Barraclough
Liberty. Hi, there we are. James and Dan. 2 thoughts of the Hit UK Podcast
- [41:04]
James Osborne
no such Thing as a Fish.
- [41:06]
Sponsor/Ad Voice
Each week we get around the microphones with our four favorite facts that we've learned over the last seven days and sit down to blow each other's minds.
- [41:12]
Dr. Eleanor Barraclough
Yeah, here's a fact for you, Dan. In knot theory, a circle of rain rope without a knot is technically a
- [41:18]
James Osborne
knot, but it's called a knot knot.
- [41:21]
Sponsor/Ad Voice
Very good. I go on here as well. In 2019, a marathon runner with the words Jesus Saves written on his bib had a heart attack but was revived by a man called Jesus.
- [41:30]
Dr. Eleanor Barraclough
That is amazing. If you want to hear more facts like that, search for no such thing
- [41:34]
James Osborne
as a fish wherever you get your podcasts.