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March 2002

Parish History Episode 11

THE FURY OF THE NORTHMEN

The English Church had, by the end of the Seventh Century, become one Church, overseen by one Archbishop of Canterbury : additional archbishops were later appointed at York, and, for a while, at Lichfield, but a Primacy was recognised in Canterbury, uniting all the English Churches in one polity. But the English nation was still divided between several kingdoms, of which the three most important were Northumbria, Mercia and Wessex.

In contrast to the disunity of the English (and also the Celtic) kingdoms in the British Isles, a large empire, that of the Franks, had grown up, during the Eighth Century, in Western Europe. It embraced over half of modern Germany (roughly the area which became the Bundesrepublik, or “West Germany”, during the post-War partition of Germany; a region which had been largely evangelised by English monks and nuns, who had taken over from the Irish as the school-teachers of Europe), together with those lands to the West of Germany which were Dutch, French or Catalan by speech. The Franks had also taken over Northern Italy, defeating the Lombards and the Greeks, and had freed the Popes of Rome from Byzantine control, and set them up as not only ecclesiastical but also temporal rulers of a zone of Central Italy which became known as the Patrimony of Saint Peter.

In return the popes invested the Frankish rulers with considerable authority over the Church within their own realm, which became known as the Holy Roman Empire. With the help of Alcuin and other Northumbrian advisers (who had already had experience of amalgamating Celtic and Roman traditions), a new Western Church was created, which brought together Celtic, English, Spanish, Roman and Greek customs. Despite the importation of some Eastern practices, such as the singing of the Kyries in Greek, this Western Church began rapidly to develop in different directions to the Church in the East.

This Western Empire was, however, very aggressive, and wars and slave-raids were directed against such neighbours as the Bretons, Basques, Moors, Magyars, Slavs and Danes, usually with the expressed motivation of spreading the Gospel amongst the heathen (though the Basques and Bretons had been Christians, albeit irregular in some particulars, far longer than the Franks). These raids led to retaliation by the unappreciative heathen, and the reprisals launched by the Danes in particular (but also by the Moors, Magyars and others) were soon to bring this “Holy Roman Empire” down into ruin. While Moors and Arabs raided across the Mediterranean, and Magyar horsemen raided across Southern Germany and Central France to the shores of the Atlantic, the Danes made annual voyages up the great rivers of Western Europe - the Rhine, the Seine, the Loire - destroying everything of value that they could not steal, and killing everybody not worth capturing and enslaving. The slaves would be taken to Spain, to be sold to the Moors.

The Danes made a particular practice of attacking the churches. This was partly because they saw the Church as particularly evil, being the agency which had first launched crusades against themselves, but also because the churches (at any rate, the great cathedrals and monasteries) were particularly wealthy, and were well worth looting. Also, although peasants were more plentiful, their bodies were likely to be worn by hard toil and child-bearing, and wasted by malnutrition, while the bodies of monks and nuns tended to be in better condition, and they could more easily be sold for use in Moorish harems, as eunuchs or concubines.

It was little wonder that we hear of a new clause being added to the Litany: 'From the Fury of the Northmen, Good Lord deliver us'.

At first, it would seem, England suffered less than the lands of the Holy Roman Empire, perhaps because it was less wealthy. Lindisfarne was however sacked in 793, and a good haul was made there. The pirates returned the following year and sacked the great abbeys of Tynemouth, Jarrow, South Shields and Wear-mouth.

Raids continued for the next seventy years, until a pirate known as Ragnar Leather-Breeches, who had won fame by sacking the city of Paris in 845, and had then gone on many other expeditions to France, England and Ireland, sailed against York in 864. This time he was defeated and captured, and the Northumbrian king, Aelle II, who apparently bred reptiles for a hobby, had Ragnar deposited, without, one assumes, his leather breeches, in a Pit of Vipers, which he had prepared for his enemies. Ragnar did not survive there for very long.

When news of this execution reached Denmark, it for some reason - even though there were plenty of other atrocities being committed - caused fury, and a council of all or most of the chiefs and earls of Denmark resolved to combine against England for the campaigns of the following year, 865. They combined in “the Great Army”, and landed in East Anglia, and began to devastate that region. The following year they came North to York, sacked that city, and killed King Aelle and all his vipers, and then swept Northwards as far as the Tyne, before returning to York again. The barbarian tide very probably swept over Houghton and numerous other villages that Summer. The area around here was to suffer further destruction in the following years as a remnant of the Northumbrian army had rallied at Bamburgh, had halted the Danes on the Tyne, and then tried to push Southwards to York, but were badly defeated, and had to retire Northwards again, across the Tyne.

The main body of the Great Army had, by 874, moved Southwards to the inland counties of Mercia, hitherto relatively immune from Viking raiding, but two of the Danish leaders, Ingvar the Boneless and Halfdane, had noticed the natural richness and potential of the country in the Vale of York, and Halfdane had resolved to set up a kingdom for himself in that Vale. Halfdane first persuaded Ingvar that they needed to collect livestock and slaves to get the farms going again, so they began a march on York, from Repton on the Trent, where they had spent the Winter of 873-4, by a very roundabout route. They travelled up the West side of England, through Lancashire to Carlisle, “collecting” slaves and farm animals as they went, and then marched East-wards to Tynemouth, where they spent the Winter of 874-5, and perhaps opened communications with their homeland, despatching some of their slaves there, and receiving some reinforcements. Ingvar also seems to have gone home for the Winter, before returning to England in the Summer of 875, to take part in the cam-paigns against Wessex. Halfdane was now alone in control of the Danish forces in the North.

That Summer, of 875, he marched from Tynemouth to York, wreaking huge devastation across a broad swath of what later became County Durham and the North Riding of Yorkshire. He burnt all the villages, took everything of value, including the animals and slaves he wanted for the farmlands on his Kingdom of York, and killed all those people he met who were not worth enslaving. It seems certain that Houghton must have lain on the route of his march. It may well have suffered severely during the campaign of 865, but at this time, 875, the devastation must have been total: its buildings destroyed; its people either slain, driven off into slavery, or in hiding; most of the livestock driven off; the crops burnt in the fields.

The illustration, from a Norwegian book of over a century ago, shows an idealised picture of how Halfdane recruited help for his farming activities. It looks like the modern outline of Houghton Church on fire in the background. The Viking leader in the foreground is wearing a bishop’s mitre in order to enhance his dignity.

The basic authority for the Viking attacks on England is to be found in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (translated into modern English by G.N. Garmonsway in 1953), which makes it one long tale of woe, or in the Norse sagas, particularly Njals Saga and the Saga of Grettir the Strong, both of which have been translated into modern English. Symeon of Durham, a mediaeval monk writing in the Twelfth Century, had access to both English and Norse sources, and seems reliable for the exploits of Halfdane, and the origins of the Danish Kingdom of York. His Latin has been translated into modern English, and is available in paper-back (Llanerch, Lampeter).