A Brief History of the Anglo-Saxons (Brief Histories) by Hindley Geoffrey

Author:Hindley, Geoffrey [Hindley, Geoffrey]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9781472107596
Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group
Published: 2013-02-06T16:00:00+00:00

The Danelaw

In the winter of 872 Burgred of Mercia was forced to negotiate a peace deal with the Danish main force now at Torksey in Lindsey. Late the next year, a detachment of the army had rowed down the Trent, past Nottingham, and seized Repton in Derbyshire, the great Mercian royal minster, burial place of kings and fortified residence. Here they proceeded to fortify three and a half acres (1.5 hectares) with ditches and a 130-metre semicircle of earthworks that incorporated the Anglo-Saxon church and used the river as the base of the ‘D’. With this as their base they raided the surrounding countryside. After a reign of twenty-odd years Burgred abandoned the rearguard defence against the barbarian invaders and fled England; two years later he died in Rome, where he was buried in St Mary’s church in the English borgo.

And yet, suggests John Blair, perhaps these pagans ‘recognized the cultic and symbolic prestige of their victims’ holy sites’.13 Excavations led by Martin Biddle at Repton revealed not only the camp bounded by the Trent and its earthworks, but also Scandinavian-style graves from the 870s, including skeletal remains of a Viking chieftain of high rank buried with an amulet and a Thor’s hammer pendant. The body was close to the relic crypt of the church and surrounded by the remains of 250 other young male bodies in what is now the vicarage garden. At the village of Ingleby nearby there is a site of cremations, indicating pagan rites, and on the hillside fifty-nine barrows.

The increased level of raiders and invaders from the mid-860s onwards produced changes in the human geography of eastern England across the regions we know as Yorkshire, Lincolnshire, the East Midlands and East Anglia. Scandinavian and specifically Danish place names are numerous, but their occurrence is sporadic. So the extent and depth of the changes is difficult to estimate. Even burial practices, though diverse, are not conclusive. We find inhumations with and without grave goods: sometimes in church grounds, sometimes in specially raised barrows, as at Heath Wood Ingleby; sometimes Anglo-Saxon style swords feature in apparently Scandinavian graves. These and other factors may simply indicate the influx of a conquering elite imposing name changes on a subjected population. If there had been a large movement of peasant farmers from Denmark into lands cleared by a ‘Great Army’ or by warlords, then one would expect some trace in the archaeological record. So far there are few Viking grave sites, whether of great men or lesser folk, and nothing like enough to support the thesis of a massive, or even substantial, population shift across the North Sea.

In the absence of archaeological back-up another avenue of research for what one might call the missing ethnic factor has been tried in the form of extensive DNA trialling nationwide. Even here, it appears, the results are inconclusive. So, whatever it was that the ‘Danish men’ featured by the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle sought in the lands of the English race, it does not seem to have been what Germans of a later age called Lebensraum (‘living space’).

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