Viking London

Copyright

William Collins

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This eBook first published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2019

Copyright © Thomas Williams 2019

Cover art by Joe McLaren

Maps by Martin Brown

Thomas Williams asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

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Source ISBN: 9780008299866

Ebook Edition © June 2019 ISBN: 9780008299873

Version: 2020-07-08

Dedication

For Pru

Epigraph

The tidal current runs to and fro in its unceasing service, crowded with memories of men and ships it had borne to the rest of home or to the battles of the sea […] Hunters for gold or pursuers of fame, they all had gone out on that stream, bearing the sword, and often the torch, messengers of the might within the land, bearers of a spark from the sacred fire.

Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

Maps

Introduction

I Lundenwic

II Lundenburh

III Lundúnir

IV Lundúnaborg

V Vikings Drink Tea

Footnotes

Notes, sources and further reading

Abbreviations and Notes

Index

About the Author

Also by Thomas Williams

About the Publisher

Maps

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 – a delving into its darkest age, an invasion of its privy parts.

Viking Age London is like an old wound, seemingly long healed and oft forgotten. But sometimes in the winter, when a cold wind blows from the north, it still nags – an ache that will never go away. Stumbling around corners, feet catch on stitches, pull back the skin of modernity – an ancient street name hidden beneath a concrete underpass, a paved void where a church no longer stands, a stretch of the old riverbank crawling out from beneath embankments. For nothing is lost in the city: things just sink further into the mire, deeper into time.

Occasionally, however, those memories break free, bursting upward like the hands of hungry corpses, or shimmering wraith-like through the alluvium. They hover like a miasma in the crypts of old churches or the depths of museum collections, drifting amongst beer cans at the blood-coloured foot of London Wall or blowing across the mud and shingle on the Thames foreshore. In these places the ghosts of Viking London still assemble, the murmur of liðsmen mingling with the banter of Victorian antiquarians, the chatter of tourists, the profanities of drunks. London is a city of spectres, of ghosts walking in the footsteps of other ghosts, and the Viking Age is perhaps its most forgotten hinterland.

And through it all runs the river, that titanic, oily-backed serpent. It winds its monstrous coils through Viking London – through time and place, providing and devouring, poisoning and fattening – before unravelling, unbound, into a mess of estuarine chaos, its mighty body dissolving to the sea.

I

Lundenwic

The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle relates that in the year 842 ‘there was a great slaughter in London and in Quentovic and in Rochester’.1 In an entry for the same year, the Annals of St Bertin, a chronicle compiled in what is now northern France, describes the raid on Quentovic, a trading centre just across the Channel, and names the antagonists as ‘northmen’.2 The Vikings had come to London.

By the 840s Viking raids had been a feature of British life for around half a century. The first raids occurred in Wessex and Northumbria at the end of the eighth century, but from the 830s onward Viking fleets had grown larger and the threat they posed more serious. West Saxon kings had faced Viking armies in pitched battle on a number of occasions; the king of Northumbria lost his life to a Viking raiding army in 844. The earliest raid on London that we know of is that of 842, but it was not necessarily the first. Fifty years earlier, in 792, King Offa of Mercia – the Midland realm that at the time was the most powerful kingdom in southern Britain – had a charter drawn up confirming the exemption of Kentish churches from various obligations that landholders normally owed to their royal overlords. It is an important document that helps to confirm that Offa was, at this stage, firmly in charge of south-east England. Some of the most interesting aspects of the charter, however, are the exceptions made for things that the churches of Kent were still obliged to finance – in particular, ‘an expedition within Kent against seaborne pagans arriving with fleets, or against the East Saxons if necessity compels, as well as bridge and fortress work in Canterbury to see the pagans off’.3

Put simply, the Church still had to pay for defences against pagan raids from the sea, and it seems clear from this that Vikings were already threatening the southern shores of Britain in Offa’s day. It also follows that there were many incidents of violence, destruction and theft which have left no trace in the written record. That does not necessarily mean that London had been targeted by earlier Viking raids, but it could well have been. The threat, at least, had been alive for more than half a century.

But even if it had suffered no Viking aggression, London would have been no strange port to Scandinavian mariners. Writing in the early eighth century, Bede famously described ‘the city of London, which stands on the banks of the Thames, and is a trading centre for many nations who visit it by land and sea’.4 His thumbnail sketch of a great international emporium is borne out by archaeological evidence found at various places around London’s West End suggestive of a thriving trade with the Frankish realms and Frisia via their own respective trading sites at Quentovic and Dorestad.fn1 Some of the imports came from further afield – pottery and quern-stones from the Rhineland, figs from southern Europe – and there may have been direct contact with Ribe in Denmark and, by the eighth century, with new trading ports at Kaupang (Norway), Birka (Sweden) and Hedeby (now in northern Germany).

London’s success as a trading centre was bound to the river. From the Rhine estuary, a westward journey pointed straight down the barrel of the Thames. From there the river was a navigable conduit deep into the west of Britain, with the city functioning as the gateway – an entrepôt squatting at the hub of an overland travel network worn into the earth by millennia of falling feet. It was this location that had made London – Londinium – the de facto capital of the province of Britannia for most of the first two centuries of Roman rule in Britain.fn2 Roman technology and organization had turned the trackways into an extensive and well-maintained network of roads, connecting the city with the farthest-flung reaches of the province. Over time, Londinium developed the trappings of a great imperial city: a mighty stone basilica, around 560 feet in length and three storeys high; a seven-thousand-seat amphitheatre; an elaborate temple to Mithras; an imposing governor’s palace complex; a vast circuit of enclosing walls that roughly encompassed the modern City of London, from Aldgate in the west to the Tower in the east, from Moorgate and Barbican in the north to the river in the south, its river wall skirting the edge of the water.

Surviving stretches of Roman wall can still be found in a handful of places, most in the north of the city, imperfectly commemorated in the stretch of road known as London Wall. Turning south onto Noble Street, a stretch of the old masonry can be found submerged in a deep trench, cutting a long rift down the western limb of the road, below the cliffs of glass and steel and pale brick that rise above. The stone is red and raw against the cold sterility of the modern City of London, a livid ridge of muscle exposed where the urban skin has been pulled away by dissecting hands, archaeology as anatomy. A few yards away to the north, a church once stood close to the wall; another wound, this time healed over like a scar, sealed but not forgotten, a sad rectangle of brown brickwork and grass where St Olave Silver Street once stood. First mentioned in the twelfth century, the church was dedicated to a Norwegian warrior-king who died in 1030 – one of several such churches that stud the city.

Like so much of old London, St Olave Silver Street was obliterated by the Great Fire in 1666. Worse was to come, of course. During the 1940s, the war brought unprecedented damage to the body of the city. And what the incendiary bombs failed to claim, the planners and architects of subsequent decades took instead, replacing the surviving fabric with an urban landscape of brutal modernity. Around London Wall the dystopian ramparts of the Barbican Estate rise, grey walkways and balconies, stairwells and underpasses, cold light and hard shadows – a dream of how the future used to look, filtered through the cathode-ray tube and the comic-book pages of 2000AD: all cyberpunk visions, block-wars and ultraviolence.

It is into this world that the Roman wall runs, its broken towers and bulwarks dwarfed by concrete parapets, corralled into a narrow municipal green space that snakes around the side of the Museum of London. The museum is the final repository for much of the reclaimed detritus of London’s many pasts, its Viking Age included. There the recaptured fugitives of lost centuries are confined, trapped uncomfortably by the museum’s awkward modern­­ity. Time has dulled the building’s once-cutting edge, exposing the built-in obsolescence laid by architectural vanity. The collection is now due to move to the covered market at Smithfield, an elegant and functional space that the self-conscious idiosyncrasies of the Barbican Estate could never have accommodated. It is ironic that, in their flight from failed modernity, the relics of London’s past have (one hopes) effected the rescue of the Victorian former meat market from the bulldozer – the General Market Building, designed by the architect Horace Jones and completed in 1883, had at one stage been doomed for demolition and replacement by a seven-storey office block.

The eeriness of lost pasts and failed futures can be felt everywhere in London. The old, the buried and the mutilated jostle uneasily with the weird, the obsolete and the hyper-modern, leaving the humans that pass in their shadows or tramp over their remains to experience a queer haunting – a nostalgia for the past and for those things that never were, for the futures that were foreclosed or failed to deliver on the promises of their architects; it gives rise to both the city’s strange charm and its capacity to unnerve, an arresting ugliness born of a chaotic cycle of trauma, healing and failure, abandonment, recovery and decay. It has been this way since Boudicca massacred the young town’s inhabitants and burned it to the ground in the year 60 or 61, and it is, perhaps, the reason why the Anglo-Saxons reacted to London’s ruins in the confused ways in which they did – both repelled and fascinated.

For the literate elite, Roman settlements retained an allure of sorts: a memory of former grandeur, of their status as bastions of imperial power and burgeoning Christian hierarchy – suitable settings for the renewal and preservation of faith. At Lincoln, for example, the church of St Paul-in-the-Bail – situated within the old Roman precincts – can be dated to the seventh century, and the town may have retained significance as the seat of a bishop – an oasis of relative civilization amongst the ruins. Things took a similar course within the walls of Londinium, where ideas of Romanitas guided the aspirations of bishops, popes and kings. The original church of St Paul’s was founded – according to Bede – in 604. It was constructed for Mellitus, its first incumbent bishop, an Italian who had travelled to Britain with Augustine’s fateful mission to convert the English to Christianity.5 Writing to Augustine from Rome, Pope Gregory I had expressed his desire that London should become the primary see of a revived Britannia, the capital of a province restored to the Christian Imperium that he envisaged: an Empire of Christ with Rome at its heart and Britannia at its periphery on the new frontier of Roman Christendom.6

Political realities in Britain interfered with Gregory’s vision. When Mellitus was eventually installed at London, it was as a bishop subordinate to the archdiocese of Canterbury. The real power in southern Britain was King Æthelberht of Kent (with the apparent acquiescence of his nephew Sæberht, king of Essex). Æthelberht was quite content for his own trading emporium at Canterbury to remain the pre-eminent centre of Roman Christianity in Britain (Augustine himself had been recognized as the first archbishop of Canterbury in 597). Nevertheless, the symbolic importance of London had been recognized, and the church of St Paul’s was duly built within the walls. No trace of the original building survives, no indication of its size or grandeur, nor even whether it was raised in stone or timber; but somewhere below the vast hulk of Wren’s cathedral, down through the remnants of the great gothic building that burned in 1666, some shattered trace of that Saxon church may yet lie.

Mellitus did not have long to enjoy his episcopal power. When Kings Æthelberht and Sæberht both died in 616–17, the former was replaced by his son Eadbald, and the latter by his own three sons: Sæward, Seaxred and Seaxbald. Unfortunately for Mellitus, all of these men were initially unenthusiastic about the whole idea of Christianity. The sons of Sæberht kicked Bishop Mellitus out of London, and King Eadbald promptly kicked him out of the country. When Eadbald eventually revised his religious opinions and allowed Mellitus to return to Kent in 618–19, the bishop discovered that Kentish royal power had found its limits. Returning to London to resume his ministry, he must have been dismayed to find that its townspeople were not at all pleased to have him back, preferring – as Bede put it – ‘their own idolatrous priests’. Faced with the ‘refusal and resistance’ of London’s defiantly pagan townsfolk (backed, we must assume, by the recalcitrant heathen princes of Essex), both Kentish king and Church of Rome were rendered powerless.7 Armed with enviable geopolitical advantages, the townsfolk did what generations of Londoners have done ever since: they slammed shut the (probably metaphorical) gates and told the bishop to bugger off.fn3

These anecdotes comprise the earliest written mentions of London in the early Middle Ages, and introduce themes that run throughout the city’s history. Poised between kingdoms – Kent and Essex, East Anglia and Mercia, Wessex and, later, the ‘Danelaw’ – early medieval London was able to routinely exploit the political tensions that ran through and focused on the city. This position at the convergence of frontiers, on the fault lines of effective authority, enabled London to grow prosperous. It could be a meeting place and a bargaining chip, a market place, a hub for intrigue, a centre of international commerce. Its liminality also fostered a sense of independence amongst the city’s populace – a belligerence and bloody-mindedness that would, over the centuries, manifest itself repeatedly in the teeth of unwelcome demands and unwanted guests. The same attributes, however, would also make the city desirable – an economic and political prize worth any amount of blood and treasure to capture or defend.

That desire for the city – the urge to possess it, to exploit it, to wield authority within and from it – had revealed itself from the beginning as an animating force. It was not, as the story of Mellitus reveals, a desire founded solely in worldly ambitions and practicalities. Of all the former imperial cities of Britannia it was Londinium that Pope Gregory had imagined should form the head of a new Christian province. It was a romantic vision, an image of the Roman Empire reborn as a great commonwealth of faith with Rome at its heart. In that vision, the old cities and provincial capitals would rise from chaos as beacons of religion, learning and orderly government – miniature reflections of the heavenly Jerusalem. This dream of restored empire, fluttering in the breasts of kings and ecclesiarchs, would keep London’s weak pulse beating throughout the darkest years of its decay – an image that would sustain it in the minds of those whose deeds would shape its destiny in the years ahead. Two centuries after Mellitus, London remained, in the words of a charter of King Coenwulf of Mercia, ‘a famous place and a royal town’.8

Yet when those words were written in 811 – and thirty-one years later, when Viking ships sailed past the walls in 842 – the ruins of Londinium had still not been reclaimed. Rotting beside the Thames for more than four centuries, the walls were the relics of a world as far removed from the Viking Age as the Renaissance is from our own. The sight of them may have been something of a novelty for people hailing from lands that had never been yoked to Rome; it might have seemed to them – as it had to the Anglo-Saxons – a ghost town, filled with the shades of fallen empires. The wilful neglect, avoidance even, of the old city of Londinium, indeed of most Roman urban settlements in Britain, is one of the great puzzles of the early Anglo-Saxon period. Some of this reluctance to make use of the old urban environment was no doubt informed by practicality – Londinium’s river wall was not very conducive to water-borne trade, and the repair and maintenance of masonry buildings required specialist skills and materials that were hard to acquire. But as a blanket explanation for a widespread phenomenon, this sort of functionalist reasoning feels unduly reductive – and not a little patronizing. Even the rudest of fantasy barbarians could surely find the wherewithal to balance stones one atop the other – or to demolish them when they got in the way.

In truth, the Anglo-Saxons possessed a deep intellectual and emotional sophistication, a clear capacity to make philosophical and aesthetic choices untethered from base economic calculation and utilitarianism. Their imaginative world was rich and complex, their poetry tightly structured yet poignant – sparsely drawn but deeply allusive. Like a bright spring bubbling from the mountain rock, the glittering stream of verse speaks of worlds unseen, of vast caverns and subterranean rivers flowing with forgotten myths and half-remembered pasts.

Well-wrought this wall-stone, weird broke it;

Bastions busted, burst is giant’s work.

Roofs are ruined, ruptured turrets,

Ring-gate broken, rime on lime-work,

Cloven shower-shields, sheered, fallen,

Age ate under them. Earth-grasp holds fast

The noble workers, decayed, departed

in earth’s hard-grip, while a hundred times

the generations pass.9

The Ruin, the Old English poem from which the lines above are translated, describes the remains of a Roman city. The poet here has turned the experience of living amongst ruins into an elegiac romanticism weighed down with fate – what the English knew as wyrd (‘weird’) and the Norse as urðr; it was a sense, shared amongst the peoples of northern Europe, that all roads led inevitably into darkness – ‘that all glory’, as Tolkien put it, ‘ends in night’.10

The environments that played host to these great turnings of the cosmic wheel were therefore not happy places, not conducive to the building of bright futures. The ruin and decay was a reminder of failure and hubris, of the striking hand of fate and the erasures of history, haunted by the workings of time and by the memories of giants. It is for these reasons, as much as for any practical purpose, that the former Roman cities of Britain were shunned. In Londinium, only the small area around St Paul’s seems to have remained in use at all, the rest of the city crumbling, filth-strewn and insect-infested. Some of the clearest evidence for a human presence has been found in the shape of two strange corpses, two women of the eighth century whose bodies were disposed of in bizarre circumstances near Bull Wharf, between the river and the walls. The first had died a violent death – her head smashed in with a weapon or a tool, laid on a bed of reeds, covered with moss, enclosed in tree bark, surrounded by wooden stakes. This was not normal. Fifteen feet away another woman lay buried in a narrow grave; a more conventional burial, but still – in its location, its isolation, its association with the weird – a deviation from Anglo-Saxon normality. These corpses speak to us of the ways in which the old city was regarded: as a fitting place for aberration, as a harbour for the dangerous, uncanny dead.