Free A Brief History of the Vikings by Jonathan Clements

came after portents far more convincing than the omens of the chroniclers. For some time, there had been scattered whispers of trouble, many only recalled after it was too late. An archbishop in Kent wrote to his son ‘of the thick infestations of wicked men in the provinces of the Angles and Gaul’, while Irish chroniclers recorded settlers returning home from island colonies, forced to abandon them ‘for the sake of the thieving Norsemen’. 4 A shield boss of Norwegian manufacture has been found in the Hebrides and dated to before 750 – it might have been a family heirloom, but its arrival in Scotland could have occurred at any point thereafter. 5
    More concrete evidence is available. Four years before the Sack of Lindisfarne, three longships arrived in the harbour of the Wessex town of Portland. They were met by a handful of horsemen, led by Beaduheard, the reeve of Dorchester. Assuming that they were travelling merchants, he berated them for not landing without the permission (and presumably, taxation) of Beorhtic, the king of Wessex. The strangers killed him on the spot, in what was the first Viking attack mentioned in the
Anglo-Saxon Chronicles
. 6 But even this minor incident does not appear to have been so isolated. The Vikings revealed that they were from Hardanger Fjord in west Norway, (at the time, the Norse and Anglo-Saxon languages were similar enough to permit rudimentary communication), and yet other reports called them merely Norsemen, or indeed Danes, suggesting that the slaying of Beaduheard was mixed with other incidents. 7 The Vikings were already known, as traders and, if one monk is to be believed, trendsetters – a letter of Alcuin mentions that Viking hairstyles were all the rage in Northumbria in the years before the attack. 8
    In 792, a year before the ‘surprise’ attack on Lindisfarne, the Mercian king Offa had ordered the construction of coastal defences in the east of England – hardly the act of a monarch unprepared for an attack. Mercia’s preparation paid off, and kept it safe for many years. Northumbria, however, was not so lucky. In later generations, Vikings would attack in England in forces as big as armies, but there is no need to imagine that these first raiders were anything of the sort. It is, perhaps, no coincidence that Norse traders were already in the Hebrides, where could be found Lindisfarne’s parent monastery of Iona. The following year, raiders hit another monastery in Jarrow, south of Lindisfarne, but a substantial number died in a storm.
    In 795, significantly emboldened, a different group went on a spree in the Irish Sea, attacking Iona itself, Rathlin Island off the coast of Ireland, and Morganwg in South Wales. Other attacks followed in the same region. A modern-day criminal profiler would triangulate the attacks and look for an epicentre, concluding that these raiders did not sail each year from Scandinavia at all, but were already based somewhere in the west of Scotland. The Vikings always favoured islands just offshore for their winter bases, and the Hebrides seem to present the ideal location. It is also likely that there were more raids that remain unrecorded – large areas of Scotland and Ireland were poorly defended, and one of the Vikings’ prime interests was in acquiring slaves – an activity that would have ensured no witnesses were left to report these hypothetical earlier attacks.
    It remains possible, although unlikely, that those same three ships that caused the end of Beaduheard were responsible for most of the Viking attacks, including that on Lindisfarne, reported in the period at the end of the eighth century – after all, how many armed warriors would it
really
take to terrorize a church of peaceful scholar-monks? Our sources for theperiod are primarily the records and letters of the clergy, who felt the terror of the Vikings more than anyone else. The scholar Alcuin, then dwelling at the court of Charlemagne and fully aware of what