Viking Britain: A History. Thomas Williams

rest of the building give clues to the various uses to which the apparently communal spaces were put: whetstones and spindle whorls, sword fragments, iron tools and arrow heads indicate the sorts of activities that men and women would have undertaken from and in the building – weaving, hunting, farming and preparations for the possibility of violence. There were also a number of what are known in archaeological circles as gullgubber – thin gold foils struck with images that are most commonly believed to depict mythological scenes – leading to the suggestion that the communal activities that took place here included religious or ritual functions as well as social and practical ones.13 The evidence seems to suggest that, unlike the hierarchical and authoritarian structures of the Christian Church, with its professional priesthood and purpose-built temples, Viking religion – at least at the beginning of the Viking Age – was personal and domestic. It is probable that, at places like Borg and elsewhere (such as Lejre in Denmark or Gamla Uppsala in Sweden), the principal heads of individual estates would have adopted the role of cult leader alongside their more prosaic responsibilities, perhaps taking the lead in making sacrifices of animals (blót) and in depositing the valuables that have been discovered in earth and water in these places. Gullgubber, precious objects already invested with mythic symbolism, would have made appropriate offerings.14

      It has been suggested, with varying degrees of emphasis, that religion played a role in the violence doled out to churches, monasteries and Christian communities – that the Vikings, aware of the impending threat posed by aggressive Christian nations, turned on the most visible and accessible symbols of this religion in a sort of pre-emptive strike (or not so pre-emptive if, as one might argue, Charlemagne’s Saxon wars were regarded as the first demonstration of what awaited all their pagan neighbours). In such a war of cultural self-preservation, it would have mattered little whether the churches and monasteries were situated in Frankia or in Britain. The symbols were the same, and thus – it is argued – the political identity of their creators would have been regarded as part of a homogeneous bloc, a united threat to tribal culture and independence. Indeed, such was Charlemagne’s power that the whole of Christian Europe, Britain included, can in some respects be seen as lying within a Frankish sphere of influence.15 It is hard to imagine how the events of the late eighth and early ninth century could have failed to leave a deep and negative impression on communities around the Baltic, particularly about the nature of Christian faith and the character of its practitioners – violence, terror and subjugation would have seemed the inescapable outriders of the cross.

      The destruction of the cross-slabs at Portmahomack can, from this perspective, be seen as evidence for an ideological component to Viking raiding. Just as a raiding army might harass the lands and dependants of an enemy king in order to force a confrontation, the Vikings – it could be argued – were directly and deliberately targeting the houses of God and his personnel. It is, it must be said, easy to get carried away with the idea that the Viking Age began as a pagan religious war. But as even the most frequently cited exponent of this thesis – Bjørn Myhre – has pointed out, Christianity should be seen in the light not just of its spiritual content but of the political affiliations it affirmed.16 For Charlemagne, as for many other European monarchs, Christianity represented a powerful toolkit of symbols, hierarchies and rituals through which he could emulate the political and military achievements of the Emperor Constantine and, by extension, Roman imperial power as a whole; simple soul-food it was not. Cultural vandalism directed by pagans towards those same symbols (if that is what Carver uncovered at Portmahomack) might therefore be better interpreted as a statement of defiance against rampant Frankish imperialism – not anything ‘anti-Christian’ in the strictly religious sense.

      However, what seems to have been much more important than any of this was the acquisition of wealth. This term is a little abstract – in modern culture ‘wealth’ tends to be measured by fairly crude standards: the amount of money in a bank account, the relative value of share prices, projected tax receipts, quantity and quality of property, land, assets.17 ‘Wealth’ in the early Viking Age, however, can be seen as a rather more expansive concept. Luxury goods – such as the English and Frankish glassware also discovered at Borg – were highly prized for their intrinsic quality and usefulness, and ownership of them was, as now, one index of achievement. But such assets also performed key social functions, and their ownership hinted at broader networks or the potential to forge them. In the early Middle Ages, gift-giving between lords and their retainers (as well as between rulers) was the basic agent of social cohesion and a measure of relative political substance; in return for weapons, jewellery and luxury items (and the expectation of more), men would pledge loyalty to their lords as warriors. This relationship was the fundamental basis of the war-band, and bonds thus forged were subsequently invested with and cemented by solemn oaths and a code of heroic ethics.

      The system was very similar in Britain and had endured for centuries: the Old Welsh poem Y Gododdin (describing events of the fifth century, but written any time between the sixth and thirteenth centuries), for example, describes the operation of a war-band of this nature – its constituents paid in advance for their loyalty and support in battle with mountains of food and rivers of booze.18 In Old English and Old Norse poetry, however, this relationship had developed into a material exchange, driven in part by the desirability of the goods being produced in Frankish and, to a lesser extent, Anglo-Saxon workshops. By the Viking Age this had crystallized into a general expectation of the role of a monarch, expressed most succinctly in Old English maxims (‘the king belongs in his hall, sharing out rings’),19 but also repeated through a mind-boggling number of ‘kennings’ in skaldic verse – an economical means by which to emphasize the virtue of any given ruler: ‘lofty ring-strewer’; ‘thrower of gold’; ‘eager, wolf-gracious bestower of friendly gifts’ …20

      The ownership of precious objects was thus a symbol of the quality of one’s social connections – not merely personal riches, but a visible symbol of the patronage of a powerful lord; perhaps even, ultimately, signifying the potential to dole out gifts to one’s own dependants. The ability of important individuals to acquire prestigious objects was, therefore, an absolute prerequisite to the exercise of power, and generosity was seen as one of the two fundamental pillars of exemplary lordship. The other pillar, however, perhaps less immediately appealing to modern sensibilities, was the ability to provide an unending diet of human corpses to satisfy the sanguine cravings of wolves, ravens and eagles.21 The king or warlord who could demonstrate himself to be both open- and bloody-handed was likely to cement his reputation – ideally in verse – and the ownership of portable wealth spoke to both of these qualities.

      Happily, these two traits dovetailed neatly. It is quite obvious how a Viking warlord, seeking to improve both his reputation and the size of his war-band, could kill two birds with one stone by violently extracting wealth from foreign shores and doling it out among his followers. Such a socio-economic system, however, has its drawbacks. Though its mechanisms are straightforward, its demands necessarily mushroom: increasing war-bands require increased resources, increased resources require larger and more frequent raids, larger and more frequent raids require larger war-bands, and so on.22

      Of course, there are other ways of acquiring portable wealth, and it seems that Scandinavian traders were pioneers in exploiting the trade networks that had developed around the North Sea during the eighth century. We have seen already the keen interest that Godfred took in securing access to Baltic and North Sea trade, but there is no reason to separate the acquisition of goods through trade from the violence enacted elsewhere. Books, exhibitions and school textbooks often make a great deal of the characterization of Vikings as either ‘raiders’ or ‘traders’, with the public encouraged to view the Vikings through one or other of these lenses. This irritating meme is, in essence, a product of the academic debates of the 1970s and 1980s – debates which,