Ethically-engaged Early Medieval History-writing. Why it matters and how (not) to do it ... or 'They was asking for it!'

Every year I do a session on 'History and Ethics' with the students on our Public History MA course.  As you know, this is a topic that matters a lot to me, and about which I have blogged before (see posts with the label 'the unbearable weight' and/or 'ethics of history'). 

I like to open these discussions with these two passages written by a well-respected and prominent early medievalist.(1)

The first comes in the context of a passage trying to minimalise the extent or severity of Viking attacks on ecclesiastical persons and property.

In 860 the monastery of St-Bertin was attacked but the community had plenty of warning.  According to the author of a translatio written a generation later ... all the monks fled save four 'intent on martyrdom, save that God had to some extent decided otherwise'.  ... [The Vikings] had been 'hoping to capture some monks' - after subjecting three of the four who were 'older', thin and wasted' to 'painful acts of scorn and mockery' (such as pouring liquid into the nostrils of one of them until his belly was distended) [they] tried to take away the fourth, 'more succulent than the rest'.  The idea was surely to take this one for ransoming.  He was the only one to be killed.  He refused to go quietly, throwing himself to the ground and insisting that he wanted to die on the spot, where he might be buried 'in the cemetery of his ancestors, and his name be entered on the commemoration lists of his brother monks'.  Apparently out of sheer vexation at his obduracy, his captors began to beat him with their spear-butts', then pierced him with spear-points' ... and the cruel game got out of hand.  [I have added emphasis.]

The second comment is in the context of alleged Viking 'pillage, plunder and rape':

Among all the Annals of St-Bertin's references to Viking plunder and pillage, there is no mention of rape, and this is significant, given these Annals twice mention the episodes when the followers of Christian Carolingian kings committed rape, in one case the rape of nuns.  It hardly follows that Northmen never raped: it does seem that they were not notorious rapists. [Emphasis added.]

The second passage in particular tends to shock the students; the first less so (though I think it is every bit as bad).

I am not concerned with the 'Viking atrocity' debate, within which this is situated and about which I have written before.  What concerns me is the ethical implications of this piece.  It is one thing to say that the Vikings were no worse than anyone else (an argument with which I would agree), but this goes far beyond that and into an ethical relativisation of violence, torture and rape.  That, as you might imagine, I find objectionable, offensive and irresponsible.

Let's look more closely at the first paragraph.  Here, above all, the blame is shifted onto the victims.  The monks allegedly had 'plenty of warning', so they should have got away.  Silly old monks!  It was after all the four monks' own 'decision' to stay behind.  Wouldn't they learn?  Then we essentially have the torture (including waterboarding) of frail old men passed over without any comment, other than to quote the description in the contemporary source, which in this passage is in any case explicitly being 'read against', of 'painful acts of scorn and mockery'.  Finally we come to the monk whom the Viking wanted to take away. 'Surely', says the author, this was to ransom him.  Why 'surely'?  If this intention was attested in the source, the term 'surely' would not have been employed.  Why was the intention 'surely' to ransom him, rather than - say - to torture him to death for fun, to rape him (he was after all 'more succulent than the rest'), or anything else?  [Note that rape is only envisaged in this passage in heterosexual terms, although 'painful acts of scorn and mockery' is a broad category.]  And then maybe ransom him?  That interpretation is the modern historian's assumption and that seems to me to be unwarranted.  Why, we are authorised to ask, make that assumption?  Anyway, the monk refused to 'go quietly' and this excuses the Vikings (driven 'apparently by sheer vexation at his obduracy'; why 'apparently?'  Again this begs serious questions) for their act of pig-sticking him slowly to death.  Just to add the icing on the cake, this lengthy and painful murder is described merely as 'a cruel game'.  Boys will be boys, eh?  What can you do?

The second passage requires little by way of commentary.  There is, apparently, rape and then there is 'notorious rape'.  We might call this the 'Ken Clarke view' of history.  Whether the relative mention of rape by Christians and pagans might have other explanations within early medieval textual strategies is not considered.  Here, frequency of mention equals relative notoriety.  Frankly, I don't think much else needs to be said.

So - why does this passage vex me so much (other than the fact that is written by someone who, one would like to think, damn well ought to know better)?

For one thing it raises the issue, which I have discussed before, of the historical 'statute of limitations': how far back in the past do events have to be before it becomes acceptable to write about them like this?  Let's leave the obvious 'limit case' to one side for now.  Would it be considered acceptable to consider the Austrian troops rather brutally occupying Serbia during the Great War in this fashion, playing down torture and rape because allegedly no worse than what the Serbians did?  At what point does it become acceptable to go beyond the sometimes necessary but nevertheless pretty vapid 'well they were no worse than anyone else' argument(2) to actively playing down violence like this - actively introducing victim-blaming and assumptions about (*relatively*) benign intentions to the aggressors?  When?  Those Serbian civilians: they had plenty of chance to escape you know.  If they didn't flee, well that was their decision.  If they didn't want to 'go quietly' who, I ask you, among us, can blame the Austrian soldiers for shooting or bayoneting a few of them?  At least they weren't 'notorious rapists'.  Transposed to that context, the nature of the writing really becomes apparent.  Don't ninth-century people (and these were, I assume, real people - at least the author assumes so) deserve better?  Don't they deserve the same respect?

When the historicising of violence goes this far - as far as to attempt to excuse the perpetrators - what is the logical implication?  The logical implication is that, in certain contexts (so, why only historical?  why not geographical, social or cultural?) violence - here, murder, torture and rape - can be relativized.  Whenever we are thinking of the public role of history, or of the socially-committed historian (something that the author of this piece not infrequently strikes postures about) it seems to me that implying this sort of thing is the very last thing a historian ought to be doing.  To call this irresponsible would seem to be saying the very least, but I would go further.  I will say, unapologetically, that I find it disgusting.  Why, therefore, we are entitled to ask, is this kind of writing considered unremarkable and acceptable in a book about the ninth century when it would more than merely raise eyebrows if found in a book on the twentieth?

---

(1) You can, if you are interested, find the passages on pp.28-9 and p.47 of this book.  I have not named names directly because, although there is certainly no love lost between me and the author, the point of this blog-post is the general issue of attitude and acceptable methodology - that this sort of writing is seen as generally unobjectionable by the historical profession - not an ad hominem/feminam attack.

(2) My own Viking piece was about why, when the Vikings did the same as everyone else, they got a worse press for it and had demonstrably worse effects.

Playing by whose rules? A further look at Viking atrocity in the ninth century

[This post originally appeared as  ‘Playing by whose rules? A further look at Viking atrocity in the ninth century.’ Medieval History vol.2, no.2 (1992), pp.3-12.

'I'm siiiiiiiiiiiinging in the rain...'

It was only about my third or fourth academic publication, written shortly after my 27th birthday, and I'd still see it as no more than juvenilia.  Nonetheless, the original has been cited in worthy places by serious historians and is very difficult to find.  The journal was pretty short-lived.  Indeed I've often been asked where it can be obtained  - including in the comments on this blog.  So here it is.  I've corrected a couple of grammatical errors but otherwise it is exactly as it was submitted to the journal and I've not bothered to do anything else with it.  at some point I may come back and indicate the page-breaks so that - if for some reason you are so inclined - you can cite it as published, although I can't be bothered to check whether this text is exactly as published...

Please note that the piece was not penned as a particularly serious piece of academic research, making its citation in learned articles a pleasant surprise.  I wrote it for my undergraduates, who often seemed to have difficulty getting a purchase on how historians who were 'pro-' or 'anti-Viking atrocity' all could write such convincing arguments with accurate and scholarly citation of written and other evidence.  This was offered as a way out of the impasse.

I don't guarantee that I still agree with it; I don't guarantee its empirical accuracy!  It's very old.]

      In the court-room of History, things look grim for the Vikings.   Long charged with being mindless, murderous marauders who brought nothing but doom and gloom to western civilisation, a flicker of hope was presented in the 1960s when certain historians, most notably Peter Sawyer,(1) came forward to defend the accused, claiming that they had been 'framed' by biased monkish chroniclers.   Sawyer's defence seemed, for a while, to have won the day, but in the later seventies and eighties historians began to attack aspects of Sawyer's argument and some, such as the small size of Viking armies, cannot now reasonably be maintained.(2)   Furthermore, in the reaction to Sawyer's thesis, the Vikings came to be seen as even more horrible than they had been before, as in the works of Alfred Smyth.(3)   Even if Smyth's ideas have not found universal support, in general the pendulum has decidedly - if perhaps not decisively - swung back in favour of the prosecution.(4)   Most of the debate has, however, been channelled into a rather facile discussion of whether the Vikings were 'A Good Thing' or 'A Bad Thing'.   I suggest we should rather be concerned with asking if, and, if so, why and to what extent, the Vikings were 'A Different Thing'.

      Let us begin with a consideration of certain key 'charges' brought against the Vikings; aspects of Viking activity which have generally been seen as marking the Vikings out from their contemporaries.   The Vikings are held to have used strategies and tactics which were in some way 'against the rules' of normal warfare.   Shock, terror and brutality were employed to the full.(5)

      The first aspect we must deal with concerns the allegations that the Vikings put their defeated enemies to death in particularly unpleasant ways, such as in the elaborate ritual of the 'Blood Eagle', where, depending upon whose interpretation is followed, either the victim, perhaps already dead, had an eagle traced on his back with a sword-point, or had his rib cage cut open and the lungs removed and spread across his shoulders, to resemble a bloody eagle.(6)   Here we have to state first of all that the existence of such an inhuman rite has been seriously questioned by Roberta Frank, who claims that it is an invention of later scalds and saga-writers, who wanted to exaggerate the ferocity of their pagan ancestors.   Frank's ideas have, not entirely convincingly, been challenged, but the debate is perhaps irrelevant in any case.(7)   Whether or not the 'Blood Eagle' existed, the Vikings were far from alone in putting defeated enemies to death in imaginative ways.  

      We can, for instance, cite the fate of the Austrasian royal family in 613.   The victorious Chlothar II had all the infant sons of Theuderic II, except one, put to death and had their great-grandmother, Brunechildis, mutilated and then torn to pieces by being tied to a wild horse.(8)   In Visigothic Spain in 673 the usurper Paul was, like Brunichildis, mutilated and paraded through the army's camp on a camel, before being executed.(9)   The pages of Gregory of Tours' Histories abound with descriptions of horrific tortures practiced at the whim of Merovingian kings.  Here, surely, is terror to rival that of Ivarr 'the Boneless'. 

      Pre-Viking kings and leaders could not often expect mercy if they fell into the hands of their enemies.   In the seventh century, Bede tells us the story of King Oswine of Deira.(10)  He was attacked by his cousin, King Oswy of Bernicia, but seems not to have had time to raise a large army.   When he saw the disparity between his forces and Oswy's he disbanded his army and surrendered, only to be put to death by the Bernician king.   There is little to choose between Bede's account of these events and Abbo of Fleury's of the death of Edmund of East Anglia.   The crucial differences are perhaps firstly that in Oswine's case the conqueror was a Christian and his men are said to have shown disgust at Oswy's actions,(11) and secondly that in this case we have no later hagiography or saga to provide (or embroider) the gory details of Oswine's execution.   To this example we can add the fate of the boy-rulers of Wight(12) and Eanfrith of Northumbria.(13)   Later in time, Offa is said to have captured AEthelberht of East Anglia by treachery and had him beheaded(14) and AEthelred of Northumbria dragged the sons of one of his predecessors, AElfwald, out of sanctuary and had them drowned in Lake Windermere.(15)   The same king later had his immediate predecessor, Osred II, executed after he had been taken prisoner, and in his first reign is said to have killed three of his ealdormen by treachery.(16)   The Northumbrian anarchy could probably provide yet more instances.   The murder or execution of rivals, whether captured in or after battle or taken through treachery, was in no way foreign to pre-Viking western Europe.

      Did the frequency of Viking raids, with their attendant plundering and burning, and the enslavement and sale abroad of captives, constitute a new kind of warfare?   The basic nature of Viking attacks, until around 860 at least, can not be argued as being significantly different from the character of pre-Viking European conflict.   Warfare, in particular based upon raiding, plundering and tribute-taking, was a way of life in fifth- to eighth-century Europe.   Scarcely a year went by in the Frankish kingdoms without some kind of military activity, either between the Frankish realms themselves, or against their neighbours.   Plundering raids across the border into neighbouring kingdoms were organised annually in Charlemagne's day.(17)   The Welsh laws of Hywel Dda, suggest similar annual raiding expeditions, as does the Irish evidence, and a closer look at the written sources of 'middle Saxon' England reveals that such endemic war was the norm there too.(18)   Few people lived in security from hostile plundering raids in the post-Roman West.

      We may suspect that the bulk of the Viking attacks on England recorded in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle were not very serious - no different from the usual small-scale actions which were waged by the kings of the so-called Heptarchy and which were generally not recorded.   Can the shock felt at the Viking attacks have, then, been a result of their naval character?   We may, first of all, perhaps even doubt that the first raids really were the 'bolts from the blue' which contemporaries suggest they were.   Leaving aside the unverifiable suggestion that there were Scandinavian attacks on Ireland as early as the seventh century(19) we are forced to think that the northern seas had been calm, plied only by Frisian and other traders, for several hundred years.   The Saxons themselves had been fearsome sea-wolves in the fourth and fifth centuries (until we lose the kinds of evidence which might record their activities), and the attack by the Danish king Chlochilaich, or Hygelac, recorded in both Gregory of Tours' Histories and in Beowulf, is well known.(20)   Are we to assume that these scourges of the northern seas suddenly ceased their activities in the early sixth century?   This would seem unlikely, especially since John Haywood has recently given a very cogent demonstration of the continuity and importance of barbarian sea-power in this period.(21)   To take just one example, Ecgfrith's attack on the Irish in 684 was very obviously a sea-borne raid.(22)   Though the conventional interpretation is that he was referring to the Picts, I would suggest that Bede had pagan maritime raiders at least partly in mind when he warned Archbishop Ecgberht of the dangers of 'barbarian' attacks in the 730s.(23)  

      Why, if this was the case, should the Viking attacks of the 790s have been seen as so startling and unusual.   The answer here is probably to be sought, as Sawyer suggested, in developments in shipping technology.(24)   The shock felt at the sack of Lindisfarne was a result not of the mere fact of a sea-borne raid but of the fact that a ship could for the first time strike straight across the North Sea, rather than having to tack down the north German and Frisian coasts, make the short crossing to Essex or Suffolk, and then sail along the English coastline, with subsequent loss of surprise.   Hence Alcuin does not say that no one believed a naval attack was possible but 'nor was it thought that such an inroad from the sea could be made' (my italics).(25)   Raids now possessed greater elements of surprise, and greater ease of escape.   What cannot be denied, however, is that there was also a sudden and substantial increase in the level of such activity in the 790s, the reasons for which lie outside the scope of this paper.

      The sacking of churches and the killing of churchmen is the Scandinavian activity which seems to characterise best the image of the Vikings as ruthless breakers of the rules of war.   In England it is true that we have little enough evidence of the Christian English attacking religious establishments before the Viking sack of Lindisfarne in 793, but such events were not entirely without precedent.   Ecgfrith of Northumbria had attacked Irish churches in 684, 'sparing neither churches nor monasteries from the ravages of war.'(26)   According to the poetry, Cynddylan's Christian Welsh seem to have killed English clergy at Lichfield, whilst the Annales Cambriae record the burning of Saint David's in 645.(27)   It has long been pointed out that the Irish attacked churches before the coming of the 'Foreigners'; twenty-seven possible instances of such activity are recorded in the annals between 612 and 792.   O Corrain says that church-burning was 'an integral part of [Irish] warfare.'(28)   In Francia attacks on church property and ecclesiastical persons were far from uncommon.   In Gregory of Tours' Histories we find Bishop Praetextatus of Rouen being stabbed to death in his own cathedral in 586, allegedly on the orders of Queen Fredegund.(29)   The Austrasian Franks of Theuderic I ravaged the Auvergne some time between 525 and 532, destroying the churches of the region and killing priests in front of their altars.(30)   In the seventh century there are more examples.   In 607, Theuderic II had Desiderius of Vienne stoned to death.(31)   Ebroin, the Mayor of the Palace, had Bishop Leudegar killed in 675(32) and the murder of archbishop Aunemund of Lyon is recorded in 658.(33)   Desiderius of Cahors' elder brother and predecessor as bishop was killed by his citizens in a feud.   We must return to the question of attacks on churchmen and ecclesiastical property, but for now it seems reasonable to state that such activity was well-known in Europe before the appearance of the Vikings.(34)

      So far it has been suggested that Viking military activity was not generally any different from that of other early medieval peoples.   Here we are returning to Sawyer's currently unfashionable thesis, that Viking activity was 'an extension of normal Dark Age activity, made possible and profitable by special circumstances.'(35)   At this point we must address the question upon which any defence of the Sawyer thesis, or the line of reasoning proposed above, surely turns; why, if Viking attacks were generally the same as those waged by other early medieval rulers, did they receive such different treatment in contemporary sources?   Here we must not be fooled into believing that, because our best-known sources are primarily ecclesiastical in origin, this dread of the Vikings was restricted to churchmen.   There is every reason to suppose that the fear of the Northmen expressed in these documents was widespread throughout society.

      Any answers to this question have to conceive of the Viking attacks as a clash of cultures.   What means of communication, and here I am not simply referring to questions of language, existed between the Vikings and their Christian victims?   Communication, or discourse, between two groups of people, must be founded on mutually accepted norms of behaviour and conduct.   To use a fundamental linguistic example, for two people to engage in conversation requires that they both accept the meanings of the words, and the rules of grammar, that they are using.   If not, they would not be able to understand each other; although both are involved in the basic act of speaking, neither knows what the other is saying.   The same is true of human actions.   Most areas of human activity, even those concerned with conflict, are governed by codes of behaviour.   To make sense of, and 'reply' to, these actions requires some shared knowledge of the norms upon which they are based.   But what happens when, as when the people of Christendom were confronted by the Vikings, the two parties involved do not share the same norms; the same rules of conduct?   The result is a lack of comprehension and fear.   And the fear of that which we do not understand (and thus cannot control) is the greatest terror of all.

      Let us look at the question of warfare first of all.   It has been argued that there existed certain 'rules of war' which existed to govern most of the endemic warfare within the 'Heptarchy'.(36)   The Vikings, though they may have had similar codes themselves, were not aware of these.   The Anglo-Saxons may have had clearly prescribed routes which armies followed, as indicated by geographical names such as Fyrd straet ('militia street') and Hereford ('raiders' ford').   Striking directly over the sea, the Vikings followed none of these.   In land warfare, kingdoms were generally only attacked by their immediate neighbours (wars where one side crossed intervening kingdoms to attack an enemy had not been common since the seventh century, and had hardly been usual even then), meaning that the number of times a region was likely to be attacked was fairly limited.   Furthermore, in such land warfare, the raided kingdom would take revenge upon the attackers by launching a reprisal raid over the border.   This endemic border warfare operated according to much the same mechanisms as feud; A raids B, B raids A as revenge, A raids B in revenge for B's raid, and so on.   The potentially never-ending nature of such warfare (which nevertheless served a number of useful purposes for the English kingdoms) meant there had to be rules governing its conduct and limiting its effects.   Not only were the Vikings not generally aware of these rules, they did not consider themselves to be bound by them in any case, because they did not share the cultural norms upon which they were based.  

      Sea-borne attacks could, what is more, be launched by any number of Scandinavian territories upon the same English coastal region, port or monastery.   This not only increased the number of times that an area was likely to be attacked but, crucially, it meant that the English could not, according to their system, launch reprisal attacks since they were unaware of which community was to blame for the raiding.   They did not know against which group of people revenge attacks were justified.   This situation can only have baffled and terrified the English, and can only have been made worse when the perpetrators of the attacks were not static land-based communities but quasi-permanent, peripatetic and nebulous pirate fleets, as seem to have existed from around 850.   Faced with this enemy who would not play by the rules, it is hardly surprising that the Anglo-Saxons regarded this new menace as particularly horrible.   It has been argued that the sporadic outbursts of major warfare in middle Saxon England demonstrated their difference from the usual endemic raiding by deliberate rule-breaking.   If so, it must have seemed to the English, as to the Irish, Welsh and Franks, who had their own rules of behaviour, that, whatever they were doing, the Northmen were always waging 'no-holds-barred' all-out warfare.   No wonder they seemed ruthless and barbaric.   The Vikings were, however, not deliberately breaking any rules; they were playing to a different rule-book.  

      All this is especially true when we turn to consider the crucial question of attacks on churches, recently and usefully addressed in this journal by Sarah Foot.(37)   For all its local variations, Christianity was of course the cultural norm par excellence upon which rules of conduct in all spheres of pre-Viking European life were based.   The Vikings were not Christians.   Though, as mentioned, the Irish attacked churchmen, church-property and monastic enclosures before the coming of the Vikings, these attacks were 'qualitatively' different in that the actual church itself was often spared; Feidlimid of Cashel in 833 'burned [the monastery of Clonmacnoise's] ... area of inviolable sanctuary up to the door of the church.'(38)   Clearly, as Foot says, there was 'some recognition of the holiness of the church building itself.'   Violence by Christians against churches and churchmen could, however, be alleviated, limited and punished, and reparations enforced, by threats of divine retribution, eternal damnation and hellfire, and by the operation of religious sanctions, excommunication, penance and so on.  

      The recognition of a church's sanctity - of its status as sanctuary - and the ability to use excommunication as a weapon rely of course on the acceptance, by the aggressors, of Christian norms and rules of conduct.   Pagan Vikings did not accept these any more than Charlemagne's Franks had accepted the sanctity of the pagan Saxon Irminsul in 772.(39)    This is not to argue that the Northmen had no notion of what Christianity was, though this could well have been true of Vikings from the more remote parts of Norway and Sweden.   After years of contact with the Carolingian Franks, the Danish aristocracy at least must have been well aware of certain aspects of Christianity.   But even if the Vikings could distinguish a church or monastery from any other repository of large quantities of movable wealth (and, if ninth-century opinions of the church's decadence were founded on more than rhetoric, this might have been easier said than done!), the fact that they did not accept the basis of its religious character would mean that they would see no reason to spare it from their depradations, or to distinguish the clergy from any other element of the opposing population.

      The Church could not restrict or control the attacks of the Vikings.   This explains why Viking attacks upon Christian clergymen were described as, and perhaps were, more horrific than attacks by Christians on churchmen.   It in no way, however, implies any deliberate rule-breaking by the Vikings, and, as Foot argues,(40) nor does it show that they were waging a deliberate, religious - let alone proselytising - war against Christian establishments and officials.  

      Again, the fact of the 'difference' of the Vikings is to be explained in terms of a clash of cultures, by the lack of shared norms between them and their Christian enemies, and not by some kind of innate Viking ferocity.   The treatment of Christian clergy, sanctuaries and liturgical objects by the Vikings was, in any case, much more restrained than that meeted out to 'pagan' religious officials, cultic sites and objects by Christian armies and missionaries.   This is not to suggest that the Vikings were necessarily more tolerant or moderate in their religious beliefs than their Christian counterparts.   It was probably motivated by hard-headed economic motives; why stamp out a monastery completely when leaving it to recover means you can come back and raid it again?   It cannot be disputed that, as Foot argues, the ninth-century Viking attacks had serious detrimental effects upon the Church, and were rightly regarded by ecclesiastics as an important threat.   What we must not do is take the Vikings' awareness of the existence of Christianity as another people's religion, and take them to task for their subsequent refusal to respect the persons and property of the Christian church.   Historians often treat this refusal as indicative of - in our terms - a real "Machiavellian" (for want of a better word) brutality and ruthlessness.  This, however, is to castigate the Vikings for not showing a degree of cross-cultural toleration and understanding which would be unusual in the twentieth,(41) let alone the ninth, century.

      Another aspect of Viking behaviour often held up as indicating their double-dealing and cunning, is their alleged 'oath-breaking'.   Vikings are often described as faithless breakers of oaths.   Faithlessness - infidelitas - is part of the standard vocabulary of political insult in early medieval Europe.   The distinction between the use of the word to refer to someone not sharing the writer's religious beliefs, and to refer to someone who had broken faith or trust - between, so to speak, Faithlessness and faithlessness - was rather more blurred than is sometimes believed.(42)   The Franks regarded the Basques and Bretons, and even southerners in general, as 'faithless oathbreakers.'   This has been plausibly interpreted as a result of cultural differences, rather than of any real "Machiavellianism" on the part of Basques, Bretons or Acquitanians.(43)   The same is doubtless true of the Vikings' alleged 'faithlessness'.   Why should a Viking leader have considered himself bound by oaths sworn on things which he did not recognise as holy?  

      As an example of this, let us take the events which occurred outside Wareham in late 875, where the West Saxons under King Alfred had cornered the Danish Great Army.(44)   Perhaps in recognition of their paganism, the West Saxons forced the Danish leaders to swear on a 'Holy Ring', possibly a non-Christian object.   Asser, however, says they swore 'on all the relics in which the king [Alfred] placed the greatest trust, after God Himself'.(45)   Perhaps Alfred swore on the Christian relics whilst the Danes swore on the holy ring.   If not, or if the ring was one of Alfred's Christian relics, this would explain why the Danes broke the oath in Spring 876.   The West Saxons' failure to establish some mutually accepted basis upon which oaths could be sworn, and truces and treaties validated, sums up in microcosm the nature of the problem which the Christians had in coping with their Viking enemies.

      Seeing the Vikings as culturally different from their contemporaries in England, France and Ireland permits us to sidestep ultimately fruitless questions of the relative ferocity of the Vikings.   It does, however, allow us to see more clearly why their contemporaries saw them in such a bad light.   The implication of this argument is not merely to show that the reasons for the Vikings' 'difference' go beyond a simple, abstracted, difference in religious credo; it is rather to show the huge and widespread practical implications which the absence of a shared faith had when ninth-century cultures came into conflict.   I have, for this reason, restricted my discussion, to the period before the late ninth and early tenth centuries which saw the beginning of significant Scandinavian settlement in Christian Europe, and the subsequent conversion of the newcomers.   An investigation of exactly how attitudes to the Vikings changed when physical proximity of settlements and the beginnings of a shared religion created common understandings would be valuable indeed.

      This argument, in a sense, both agrees and disagrees with Sawyer.   As we see it from a distant, late twentieth-century viewpoint, Viking activity looks indeed pretty much like any other warfare of the period.   We cannot reasonably make any claims that the Vikings were any more ferocious than anyone else.   In important respects, however, Viking raids were not like 'normal Dark Age' warfare, for they introduced an aspect of cultural conflict which was absent from most fifth- to eighth-century north-west European warfare.   The unusual absence of, and inability to create, common understandings between the protagonists meant that there were no norms in this kind of war.   From a Christian point of view, therefore, these attacks were most definitely not normal.

      To argue that Viking activity was or was not 'normal Dark Age activity' is, then, to view the question from only one side.   We can only agree with Sawyer if we accept that we are imposing an abstracted modern viewpoint on the nature of eighth and ninth-century warfare, and ignoring contemporary viewpoints.   By the same token, we can only agree with Sarah Foot's statement that 'Alcuin's laments after the sack of Lindisfarne could not apply to any 'normal Dark Age activity''(46) if we recognise from the start that the norms upon which our definition of 'normal' is founded are, like Alcuin's, those of eighth-century Christian Europe.

Notes

1.  See, above all, Sawyer, The Age of the Vikings. and Sawyer, Kings and Vikings.  Full references are given in the bibliography at the end of the article.
2.  For the rebuttal of Sawyer's arguments on this, see Brooks, 'England in the ninth century: the crucible of defeat.'
3.  Above all, Smyth Scandinavian Kings in the British Isles, 850-880.
4.  See, most notably, Wormald, 'Viking studies: whence and whither?'   In this journal, a useful summary of the debate, and of the 'prosecution's' position, is given by Foot, 'Violence against Christians? The Vikings and the Church in ninth-century England.'
5.  For a very clear statement of the idea that the Danes deliberately used such 'terror tactics' to bring about the collapse and conquest of English kingdoms, see Smyth, 'The Vikings in Britain.' pp. 107-9.
6.  Smyth, Scandinavian Kings in the British Isles, chs.14, 16 and 17 discusses the rite, and alleged instances of its use, in full gory detail.
7.  Frank, 'Viking Atrocity and Skaldic verse: The rite of the Blood Eagle.';  Einarsson, 'De normannorum atrocitate: Or on the execution of royalty by the Aquiline method.' is the counter-argument.
8.  Fredegar, Chronicle IV.41.   Throughout the foot-notes to this article, for ease of reference, only English translations are cited.
9.  See Collins, 'Julian of Toledo and the royal succession in late seventh-century Spain.' p.43.
10.  Bede Ecclesiastical History [hereafter H.E.] III.14.
11.  Compare, however, the reasons given for the murder of Sigibert of East Anglia in H.E. III.22: he forgave his enemies too readily.
12.  Bede, H.E. IV.16.
13.  Bede, H.E. III.1.
14.  Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (hereafter A.S.C.) sub anno 792 (recte 794); Whitelock, English Historical Documents (hereafter EHD), doc.1.
15.  Simeon of Durham History of the Kings, sub anno 791. EHD doc.3.a.
16.  The execution of Osred is recorded in Simeon of Durham History of the Kings sub anno 790; the killing of the three ealdormen is mentioned by Simeon, sub anno 778.
17.  See the Royal Frankish Annals; Scholz (trans.) Carolingian Chronicles.
18.  Halsall, 'Anthropology and the study of pre-conquest warfare and society; the ritual war in Anglo-Saxon England.'   This is an overstatement in places, and is rather carelessly argued, but the gist of the argument is, I think, on the right lines. [Nowadays I'd say it was an embarrassing piece of juvenile nonsense, all copies of which ought to be destroyed!]
19.  See O Corrain Ireland Before the Normans. p.81.
20.  Gregory of Tours Histories III.3; Beowulf line 2354 ff., Bradley (trans.) Anglo-Saxon Poetry.
21.  Haywood, Barbarian Naval Power.
22.  Bede, H.E. IV.26.
23.  Translated in Sherley Price (trans.) (rev. Farmer) Bede. A History of the English Church and People.  and in EHD, doc.170.
24.  See, eg., P.H. Sawyer, 'The causes of the Viking Age.'
25.  Alcuin's letter to AEthelred, King of Northumbria. EHD doc.193.
26.  Above, n.22.
27.  Cynddylan's attack is discussed in Brooks, 'The formation of the Mercian kingdom', p.169.   The Annales Cambriae are translated in Morris, Nennius. The British History and the Welsh Annals.
28.  D. O Corrain, Ireland Before the Normans, p.85.
29.  Gregory, Histories, VIII.31.
30.  Gregory, Histories, III.12-13. Gregory of Tours Life of the Fathers IV.2.
31.  Fredegar, Chronicle IV.32.
32.  Fredegar, Chronicle, Continuations, 2.
33.  Eddius Stephanus, Life of Wilfrid, ch.6, where Aunemund is confused with his brother, Dalfinus.   Webb &  Farmer (trans.) The Age of Bede.
34.  Foot, 'Violence against Christians?' pp.5-6 gives more examples of English, Irish, Frankish and Breton attacks upon churches.
35.  Sawyer, The Age of the Vikings. pp.202-3.
36.  Halsall, 'Anthropology and the study of pre-conquest warfare and society.'
37.  Foot, 'Violence against Christians?'
38.  K. Hughes, Early Christian Ireland: Introduction to the Sources. p.155; Foot, 'Violence against Christians?' p.6.
39.  Royal Frankish Annals sub anno 772.
40.  Foot 'Violence against Christians?' p.10.   But does early Germanic Christian art 'depend entirely upon Christian symbols' (my italics)?   What exactly is an exclusively Christian or pagan symbol in such art?   In sixth- and seventh-century metalwork, how, for example, does one distinguish Daniel in the lions' den, from Man threatened by evil spirits?   Early medieval art was usually deliberately ambiguous in this respect.
41.  As manifested in the present strife between Croats and Serbs.
42.  G. Halsall, 'Bandits, brigands and outlaws in the early medieval West: A study in the definition of legitimate and illegitimate violence between c.450 and c.820.'
43.  James, The Origins of France. p.143.
44.  A.S.C. sub anno 876; EHD p.194, n.7.
45.  Asser, Life of King Alfred ch.49; trans. in Keynes & Lapidge Alfred the Great, pp.65-110.
46.  Foot, 'Violence against Christians?' p.16.

References.

A. Primary Sources in English Translation.

The Age of Bede. trans. J.F. Webb & D.H. Farmer (Harmondsworth [Penguin Classics], 1983).

Alfred the Great.  trans. S. Keynes & M. Lapidge (Harmondsworth [Penguin Classics], 1983).

Anglo-Saxon Poetry. trans. S.A.J. Bradley (London, 1982)

Bede. A History of the English Church and People. trans. L. Sherley Price (revised D.H. Farmer) (Harmondsworth [Penguin Classics] 1991).

The Fourth Book of the Chronicle of Fredegar and its Continuations. ed. & trans. J.M. Wallace-Hadrill (London, 1960).

Gregory of Tours. The History of the Franks. trans. L. Thorpe (Harmondsworth [Penguin Classics], 1974).

Gregory of Tours. Life of the Fathers. trans. E. James, 2nd edition (Liverpool, 1991).

Nennius. The British History and the Welsh Annals. trans. J. Morris, (Chichester, 1980).

B.W. Scholz (trans.) Carolingian Chronicles. (Ann Arbor, 1970).

D. Whitelock (trans.) English Historical Documents Volume 1, c.500-1042. 2nd edition (London, 1979)

B. Secondary Literature.

N.P. Brooks, 'England in the ninth century: the crucible of defeat.' Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 5th series, 29, 1979, pp.1-20.

N.P. Brooks, 'The formation of the Mercian kingdom' in S. Bassett (ed.) The Origins of Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms. (London, 1989), pp.159-70,

R.J.C. Collins, 'Julian of Toledo and the royal succession in late seventh-century Spain.' in P.H. Sawyer and I.N. Wood (eds.) Early Medieval Kingship. Leeds 1977, pp.30-49,

B. Einarsson, 'De normannorum atrocitate: Or on the execution of royalty by the Aquiline method.' Saga-Book of the Viking Society for Northern Research vol.22, pt.1,1986, pp.79-82,

S. Foot, 'Violence against Christians? The Vikings and the Church in ninth-century England.' M.H. I.3, 1991, pp.3-16.

R. Frank, 'Viking Atrocity and Skaldic verse: The rite of the Blood Eagle.' English Historical Review 1984, pp.332-43.

G. Halsall, 'Anthropology and the study of pre-conquest warfare and society; the ritual war in Anglo-Saxon England.' in S. Chadwick-Hawkes, Weapons and Warfare in Anglo-Saxon England. (Oxford, 1989), pp.155-77.

G. Halsall, 'Bandits, brigands and outlaws in the early medieval West: A study in the definition of legitimate and illegitimate violence between c.450 and c.820.' Forthcoming. [This never did come forth.  In the end I incorporated the decent bits into the introduction to the collection of essays I edited on Violence and Society in the Early Medieval West.]

J. Haywood, Barbarian Naval Power. (London, 1991).

K. Hughes, Early Christian Ireland: Introduction to the Sources. (Cambridge, 1972).

D. O Corrain, Ireland Before the Normans. (Dublin, 1982).

E. James, The Origins of France. From Clovis to the Capetians, 500-1000. London 1982

P.H. Sawyer, The Age of the Vikings. 2nd edition (London, 1971 [1st edition 1962])

P.H. Sawyer, Kings and Vikings. (London, 1982).

P.H. Sawyer, 'The causes of the Viking Age.' in R.T. Farrell (ed.) The Vikings. (Chichester, 1982), pp.1-7.

A.P. Smyth, especially Scandinavian Kings in the British Isles, 850-880. Oxford 1977.

A.P. Smyth, 'The Vikings in Britain.' in L.M. Smith (ed.) The Making of England. The Dark Ages. (London, 1984), pp.105-16,

C.P. Wormald, 'Viking studies: whence and whither?' in Farrell (ed.) The Vikings. (Chichester, 1982), pp.128-53.