The Viking Great Army in Britain

How did a Viking army transform the very fabric of a nation? In 865, the Viking Great Army landed in East Anglia. For the next 15 years, it shaped England’s destiny with relentless battles, shifting alliances, and the defeat of Anglo-Saxon kings. Unlike earlier Viking raids, this army remained year-round, leaving an indelible mark on England's political, economic, and social landscape. Matt Lewis is joined by Dawn M. Hadley and Julian D. Richards, to discuss the archaeological findings that reveal not only the raids of the Viking Great Army, but their influential settlements, trade, and industry. Gone Medieval is presented by Matt Lewis. Audio editor is Amy Haddow, the producers are Rob Weinberg and Joseph Knight. The senior producer is Anne-Marie Luff. All music used is courtesy of Epidemic Sounds. Gone Medieval is a History Hit podcast. Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe. You can take part in our listener survey here: https://insights.historyhit.com/history-hit-podcast-always-on Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Matt Lewis?

  From long-lost Viking ships and kings buried in unexpected places, to tales of murder, power, faith, and the lives of ordinary people across medieval Europe and beyond. Join me, Matt Lewis, Dr Eleanor Jarniger, and some of the world's leading historians as we bring history's most fascinating stories to life, only on History Hit. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries with a brand new release every week, exploring everything from the ancient world to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com/subscribe.

• 0:43Speaker 01

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• 1:12Speaker 02

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• 1:51Matt Lewis?

  Hello, I'm Matt Lewis. Welcome to Gone Medieval from History Hit, the podcast that delves into the greatest millennium in human history. We've got the most intriguing mysteries, the gobsmacking details, and latest groundbreaking research, from the Vikings to the printing press, from kings to popes to the crusades. We cross centuries and continents to delve into rebellions, plots, and murders to find the stories, big and small, that tell us how we got here. Find out who we really were with Gone Medieval.

• 2:35Matt Lewis?

  Late in the year 865, the Viking Great Army landed in East Anglia. For the next 15 years, battles were fought in all four Anglo-Saxon kingdoms. Peace treaties were made and broken, and at least three Anglo-Saxon kings were deposed or killed and replaced.

• 2:55Matt Lewis?

  While previous Viking armies had raided only in the summer months, the Great Army was a constant presence during the period, which would change the political, economic and social landscape of England forever. Yet, historical sources say very little about it. Now, archaeological evidence is revealing the locations of two of the Great Army's camps and at least 50 other places that it visited. It feels like a great day to be speaking about this. I'm sitting here in the midst of Storm Eowyn, with the gales blustering about me, speaking about the arrival of this hostile force that would change England forever.

• 3:35Matt Lewis?

  I'm joined by Dawn Hadley and Julian Richards, whose book, Life in the Viking Great Army: Raiders, Traders and Settlers, explores what the treasure, tools and weapons found in the camps reveal about how the groups that made up the army lived and the activities they undertook, including the processing and trading of loot, the minting of coins and the manufacture of jewellery. What emerges is evidence of a rich and diverse community, whose impact on England can be traced to the present day.

• 4:12Matt Lewis?

  Dawn and Julian, welcome to Gone Medieval.

• 4:15Speaker 03

  Hello. Great to be here.

• 4:16Matt Lewis?

  So we're going to talk in depth about the Great Viking Army. I wondered if you could just root us a little bit in, when are we and what are we talking about when we talk about the Viking Great Army?

• 4:28Speaker 03

  Well, we are talking about what appears to have been the largest Viking army to come to England in the ninth century, and it arrived in the autumn of eight sixty five. And then it spent a decade or so raiding many parts of northern and eastern England. It engaged in lots of battles, peace treaties, all sorts of political negotiations with English kings, and then it began to settle. It conquered three of the four English kingdoms and it divided out the land amongst many of its followers. And that really is the starting point for Scandinavian settlement in England.

• 5:07Speaker 04

  It's worth saying as well that this was very different from a lot of the previous Viking raids, and that's what marks it out as quite special. Probably not just in its size, but the previous Viking raids that started right at the end of the eighth century were much more like it and run raids with a force of probably a smaller number of ships focusing on coastal sites and then going away with their loot. The difference with what we know as the Viking Great Army, from how it's referenced in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, is that it overwintered. And so the forces didn't go back to Scandinavia, but they were moving rapidly around Anglo-Saxon

• 5:46Speaker 04

  England and staying in different parts, exploiting weaknesses in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms as they chose where to attack next.

• 5:55Matt Lewis?

  So just as England had got used to being hit in the summer but getting a break in the winter, all of a sudden this army arrives and you don't get that break anymore.

• 6:02Speaker 04

  Yeah, exactly.

• 6:03Speaker 03

  That's basically it. It is a year-round problem to deal with.

• 6:07Matt Lewis?

  Yeah. And how far did they reach into England? So I think we associate them most predominantly with the North East and maybe the East Midlands, but how much further than that were they able to spread?

• 6:18Speaker 03

  Well, I mean, according to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, which is our main broadly contemporary written source for this period, the Great Army is raiding all over England. We particularly associate them, you're right, with northern and eastern England, because that's eventually where they conquer and settle. But yeah, they're raiding all the way down into the southwest and into Devon and Cornwall, into the western Midlands, really all over England.

• 6:49Speaker 04

  And there are traces of them recorded as fighting with the Strathclyde Brits as well, right up into the north of England and what's that, obviously now Scotland.

• 6:57Matt Lewis?

  Wow. So they really did get into every corner. I mentioned that the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle is our main account of the presence and the activity of the Viking Great Army. Are there any other ways that we've known about where they were, where they came from, what they got up to?

• 7:14Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, there are other written sources. The main one is Asser's Life of King Alfred, which has a lot in common with what is recorded in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, but it amplifies some of the accounts because it is particularly interested in recording the role of King Alfred in responding to the Great Army. So we've got quite a lot of information from the broadly contemporary written sources, but there are lots and lots of things those sources don't tell us, which is what we've been looking at with the archaeological record.

• 7:45Matt Lewis?

  When we think about the Viking Great Army, which part of Scandinavia did this particular force arrive from? Do we know?

• 7:52Speaker 03

  Ah, well, that's a really good question and probably not quite the right starting point, because this army had probably not come directly from Scandinavia. It had almost certainly had some of its members to any rate raiding on the northern part of the continent. They'd probably been there for many years. Some members of the Great Army came from Ireland, they'd been raiding there, and others will have come from Scandinavia. In terms of precisely where, it's a little bit difficult to tell. There are similarities in some of the archaeological evidence with material we've Find in southern Scandinavia, in Denmark, but also further afield in Scandinavia. So it's probably quite widely

• 8:35Speaker 03

  spread its members. They came from a variety of different regions.

• 8:39Speaker 04

  I think it's important to remember that it's not an army in the sense that we would regard a modern army. This was an army of convenience, made up of groups from different parts of Scandinavia and from Europe. Whether, as Dawn said, they'd been raiding before. So it was an army of convenience and each group with its own leader. We believe that probably the ship was the organising principal, the ship's company, both in sailing and in battle. And each ship would have had its own leader and then there would have been higher level leaders above that. But it was an army that came together and then fragmented at different points.

• 9:21Speaker 04

  And there are references in the Anglo-Saxon chronicle to it splitting up at various points and then also being joined by other forces.

• 9:29Matt Lewis?

  Yeah. Is there any suggestion then that the fact that it's lots of different disparate groups coming together who have been raiding in different parts of Europe and Ireland? Could that have been a driver for this change in direction rather than the hit and run for staying? Were we seeing the Viking forces doing that in places like Ireland and Northern Europe? Or was this entirely new in England?

• 9:49Speaker 03

  Well, no, I mean, there had been Viking armies present year round already in Ireland and already on the continent. So this is just a new experience in England. In terms of what brought together those disparate groups, that's really quite difficult to tell. Maybe it's an opportunity that was spotted, a weakness in Anglo-Saxon royal organisation that they thought that they could exploit by coming together. But we know that they were still had their sort of separate identities. And as Julian has said, you know, they divided up at various points and went back off in directions that suited their own interests.

• 10:27Speaker 04

  They do seem to have been very well informed about not just the geography of England, but also its political geography as well and contemporary events. So when they arrive in East Anglia in eight six five, we're told that they very rapidly move northwards. And we believe this, they must have had a treaty with the East Anglian king. And we're told that they're supplied with horses. So he may have paid them to move on. And their interest, their immediate focus then was Northumbria, because they moved rapidly up to York, where there was a separate kingdom at the time.

• 11:04Matt Lewis?

  So sort of a pooling of resources and a pooling of knowledge. And all of a sudden, they've got a new insight and a new method to deal with England.

• 11:11Speaker 03

  Yeah. And I think another point I would make is the Great Army always seemed to find local allies. It was always in somebody's interests, either to pay them to go away, to bother some other kingdom, or to make use of them. Because, you know, if you're in a rivalry with another claimant to the throne in your kingdom, and this army might side with you and assist you in fighting against your rival, you know, that was an opportunity that was clearly, I think, taken up. And the fact that we do have examples of the Great Army disposing of one king and then replacing them with somebody else,

• 11:52Speaker 03

  from what appears to be the local aristocracy or another royal lineage, I think confirms that interpretation that I've just offered to you. And we know that that happened, for example, when they went to Recton over the winter of eight seventy three to four, they drove out the existing King of Mercia, Burgrad, and then they replace him with a man called Chirwulf. We don't know a lot about him, but he seems to be a member of a rival branch of the Mercian royal lineage. So presumably, you know, he benefited, perhaps he was already, you know, seeing an opportunity to gain authority in Mercia by siding with the Great Army.

• 12:36Matt Lewis?

  Yeah, I guess it's quite often tempting to see it as the Vikings versus the Anglo Saxons, but there's so much more depth to what's going on that local rivalries, as you say, are being played out and either using the Vikings to do that or hoping that they'll pass you by. There's so much more nuance to it than just thinking it's the Vikings attacking Anglo Saxon kingdoms. Julian, your research in the book sort of focuses on two main camps that were used by the Viking Great Army. Can you tell us a little bit about where those camps were and why they're important and how they were identified?

• 13:07Speaker 04

  So the two camps in question, which weren't really identified before, are Torxie in Lincolnshire and Aldwalk in North Yorkshire, New York. Now, Torxie is referenced in the Anglo Saxon Chronicle as a place where the Viking Great Army overwintered in 872 to 3, the year before Repton. But we'd no idea where that was. Torxie is now just a sort of fairly small sleepy town in Lincolnshire by the Trent. And up to about 20 years ago, there was no knowledge of where the camp was. Then a few metal detectorists showed some of their finds to Mark Blackburn, who was then keeper of numismatics at the Fitzwilliam

• 13:52Speaker 04

  Museum in Cambridge. And he recognised that these were unusual finds because of their richness, particularly the amount of silver, broken silver there. And Dawn and I became involved because Mark recognised that this needed archaeological interest. So we went along, looked at the site, made contact with the metal detectorists, persuaded them to start recording their finds in much more detail exactly where they were coming from. And this led us to realise that the finds were coming from a very large area, about 55 hectares, in fact, that's about 75 football pitches, along the side of the Trent and

• 14:33Speaker 04

  an area of higher ground. And we realised that we discovered this was where the Viking winter camp that we've known about in the Chronicle was in 872 to 3. And then... From collecting all the information from these finds, we recognise what we now regard as a signature of an Viking great army. And we've started to see that in other places. And Aldwark is one of the primary ones, again by a river, by the river of Boos, north west of Bjorg. And there are similar assemblages had been discovered by a different group of metal detectorists, reported eventually to the British Museum, who'd become aware of the importance of the site. And comparing the two assemblages from Aldwark and Torxey,

• 15:18Speaker 04

  we can see that they represent the same group of activities, probably just a few years apart. We believe the Aldwark camp is later than the Torxey one, may relate to when one of the leaders of the army returned north in the mid eight seventies. So in the book, we've been able for the first time to do a detailed comparison of these, the finds from both these camps, and to illuminate the sorts of people that were on the camps, where they'd come from, and the sorts of activities that were taking place.

• 15:53Matt Lewis?

  Incredible, Dawn. I wonder if you could talk just a little bit about what it is that makes those sites so different, so particular, and that identifies them as these sort of main camps for the army?

• 16:04Speaker 03

  The archaeological evidence from Torxey and Aldwark does look rather different from the kinds of archaeological remains that you get from any other contemporary settlement site, whether that's a rural site or an urban site. And it gets characterised by the fact that there is, first of all, a lot of precious metal. There's a lot of silver, there's gold as well on those sites. There's lots of pieces of really quite elaborate decorative jewellery and dress accessories. So that's one component that stands out. Another is the way in which that material is treated. A lot of it is actually very fragmentary, and it's not just

• 16:47Speaker 03

  broken, it's cut up. So it's being processed in some way. Alongside that, then we have

• 16:54Speaker 03

  Items that you really don't tend to see on many contemporary sites. And that are in the form of melted down metal to form ingots of silver and in gold, but also copper alloy as well. And some of those ingots are whole and some of them, most of them actually are fragmentary. They've been cut up. So again, it looks like they're being processed, perhaps weighed out for their metal content. Now alongside that, we have a really large assemblage of weights. These are either lead weights, sometimes plain, sometimes decorated with little bits of those chopped up bits of elaborate and decorative metalwork.

• 17:33Speaker 03

  And we also have little copper alloy weights as well, eight sided weights that ultimately owe their origins to the Islamic world and to their trading materials and the weights that they used. So again, you know, that marks the site out as being different. And that is telling us that what we have in operation on these sites is a bullion economy. So we are seeing the people occupying the camps at Talksee and at Old Oak. They're processing metal, they're chopping it up, they're melting it down, they're reprocessing it and they're weighing it out. And I think then there were other things that are a little bit more subtle that we began to see when we looked in real detail at these assemblages.

• 18:16Speaker 03

  That, for example, the proportions of types of artefacts are unusual. So if we take something quite humble like dress accessories and the strap ends that we would find at the end of belts and the pins that people used in the ninth century to fasten their clothing. Normally, we, you know, would expect to find probably either roughly equal amounts or more pins than strap ends. If you have more need to have pins and strap ends, whereas it's the other way around on these camps. So a much Higher proportions of strap ends than we might normally find. And many of those have been chopped up and are being processed. So we think it's something to do with the way that which they're gathering together some material

• 18:59Speaker 03

  for melting down and the strap ends are sort of bigger and chunkier and they've got more metal that they can work with and process. So it's a range of things, a really striking, you know, evidence for gold and silver and the ingots and the bullion economy. And then more subtle differences between the assemblages and their characteristics and those of contemporary settlements. Perhaps what's most striking though is we haven't strangely got huge amounts of Scandinavian or clearly Scandinavian material culture on these sites. And we think it's partly to do with the fact that we've got an assemblage that's representing processing and they're actually chopping up and reprocessing materials that they've got locally.

• 19:41Speaker 03

  Whereas, you know, perhaps a fancier Scandinavian material culture, like the big oval brooches that a woman may have worn in her costume. They're less easy to lose casually, so they're less likely to be found on a site. And they're clearly not being chopped up and processed on the site.

• 19:57Speaker 04

  I think it's also the nature of those finds and where they have come from that tells us about the mixed origins of the army. Because we've got objects that come from Ireland, from Francia, from the Carolingian Empire, as well as Anglo-Saxon artefacts. So that's really, that gives us that information about where the army had been before and the loot that they'd brought from those places to start chopping up in England.

• 20:25Matt Lewis?

  So there's almost a sense in which these are operating as processing plants for the plunder that they're gathering and that they're repurposing or redistributing amongst themselves, rather than it being them bringing lots of stuff over from home and shedding that stuff while they're at the camps.

• 20:41Speaker 04

  Yes, indeed. What we don't see though archaeologically is probably another important part of what they were trading and processing, because we know that slave trading was very important at this period. And there were probably, they were collecting slaves as well. And they may have been held at the camps and then moved on. But archaeologically, they are invisible.

• 21:03Matt Lewis?

  Yeah. And does the operation of that kind of bullion economy, does that tell us anything about what the Vikings are doing during this period? Is it different from the way that they've previously operated?

• 21:14Speaker 03

  In Scandinavia in this period, in the 860s, the 870s, that is a period when we're starting to see evidence for this kind of metal weight economy. So that is about the same period that these kinds of weights that we see at Torxie and Oldwark are appearing in Scandinavia as well. It's when we're starting to see chopped up silver, it's when we're starting to see ingots on settlements as well. So what we're seeing at the Great Army camps in England is something that has already begun to emerge in Scandinavia. Now, one other consideration is whether or not the members of the Great Army who gathered

• 21:55Speaker 03

  from the continent and from Ireland were also engaged in this kind of activity in the places they had been before they came to England. And that's a slightly tricky question to answer. And that's because the regions which the Great Army had gathered together from are places where it is on the whole not legal to undertake metal detecting. So we've got a methodological issue there. The amateur TBCs metal detecting that is legal to be undertaken in England is not possible in the Republic of Ireland or in most parts of the northern regions of the continent. So we've got a bit of a difference

• 22:35Speaker 03

  in evidence types that we can work with. It makes it slightly difficult to answer that question. There is one site, Woodstown in Ireland, where we have got some similar material. And this is a site that was actually identified by excavation in the first instance. It was discovered during road building. But there, the archaeologists were permitted to use metal detectors on site. So that was part of a controlled archaeological investigation. And then as a result of doing that, they found some material that is similar to what we have at Torxie and Oldwark. The dating on that is a little tricky. It is probably

• 23:18Speaker 03

  a little bit earlier than the sites that we see at Torxie and Oldwark, but probably also much longer lived. So it's a little tricky to work out precisely when the sorts of practices we see at Oldwark and Torxie may have started at Woodstown.

• 23:34Matt Lewis?

  So I guess, I guess there's good reasons for it being illegal in other places, but I guess it makes it more difficult for you to contextualise what you're finding in this country.

• 23:41Speaker 04

  Yeah, because we do, I think Dawn said it really, we don't have those assemblages really from Ireland and the continent. The other thing I was going to add, so I don't think we covered it, is that the other importance of the sites at Alderwick and Torxie is the size of them, because they've contributed to a very long-running debate about how large the Viking forces were that raided England. And for many years, many historians tended to underplay the accounts from the written sources and say that these were exaggerated and that the Viking forces

• 24:20Speaker 04

  were very small. And the only previously archaeologically investigated camp at Repton had contributed to this because their very small enclosure apparently had been excavated, which would only have accommodated a force of a few hundred, maybe about four ships. But as we've indicated, both at Torxie and now Alderwick are very large sites. And it's now become clear that that enclosure area at Repton is just part of the Viking camp there, because again, through metal detecting finds have been discovered over a much wider area, going all the way up to a Viking cremation cemetery I excavated a couple of decades ago.

• 25:03Speaker 04

  So again, it's a very large area. And this then tells us that we are dealing with a force that certainly is numbering into the thousands. And also it tells us that that force is as larger than many of contemporary towns, and it's operating almost like a town. It's got to be structured, it's got to be organised. And there's not just warriors and traders there, but there are going to be women and children who are travelling with the army in the camp. So it's a very different sort of community from what we previously envisaged a Viking army camp would have been like.

• 25:50Matt Lewis?

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• 29:07Matt Lewis?

  Yeah, fascinating. We've talked a little bit about the metal finds, but is there evidence of anything going on, and perhaps anything unusual going on, in terms of manufacturing items of wood or less precious metal or textile or anything like that? And how different do we see those being from the surrounding Anglo-Saxon communities?

• 29:27Speaker 04

  Yeah, unfortunately, we can really only infer the non-metal objects. I mean, certainly known there was a lot of manufacturing of metal objects. We have moles, though we know that they were even minting fake coins on the sites as well from test pieces of those. But for the other sorts of things going on, it has to be inferred. We know, for example, that they were probably repairing their ships as they were overwintering. Both these sites have floodplains nearby where the ships could have been drawn out of the water. And for the ship repair, we have the iron clench now.

• 30:01Speaker 04

  Sales which would have hold the plank together. And so we could infer that there was to be woodworking taking place. And we have the iron tools that we use to cut down trees, to shape the timbers, to replace rotten planks in the shits. We assume that they were also having to repair sails as well as presumably clothes as well, because we have textile working equipment. But these are again metal items that are surviving. So we have the lead spindle whirls, we have needles in metal. But unfortunately, because both of the excavated and examined sites are on the type of soil where, unlike in York, wood and textiles and leather doesn't survive. It all has to be inferred.

• 30:45Speaker 03

  Yeah, we also have fishing weights from both of the sites. Showing how, you know, that they were provisioning themselves, not surprisingly, from the river next to which the army had camped. But I think these items make us think about the nature of the landscape around the site. I mean, Julian has mentioned there were woodworking tools. And then you start to think to yourself, well, where were they getting the timber from? And then you realise that they must have been sending out groups into the wider landscape to chop down trees, to process the timber there, to bring it back to the the camp. So they must have had pretty good intelligence about the landscape around them. They must have had access to it.

• 31:28Speaker 03

  These are the kinds of activities that were probably going on when the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle tells us that they made peace with the Mersians or the Northumbrians. Doesn't tell us much more than that, but that would probably have provided the circumstances to be able to provision themselves. Probably to trade as well as to to access the local natural resources. Because, you know, we've got to think about how this community provisioned itself is, you know, they've got to repair things, they've got to obviously provide food for members of the Great Army and its its followers. So it's a really, you know, complex community that we're looking at. And I think it really does reinforce to you that, you know, they got good intelligence, they got good.

• 32:11Speaker 03

  Allies, they probably sent advanced forces um ahead to select suitable places for the the army to to move to. And we don't imagine they just sort of all up sticks one spring and they're all headed off, you know, hoping they might fund some where suitable for the next year. Uh, spend the year. Um, they must have had, you know, advanced parties that were sort of selecting these sites, you know, partly for their defensibility, you know. We know Torxie is is a raised up area above the floodplain of the River Trent, but also they have to select places where there is, you know, the possibility of access to resources. Often these camps seem to be quite close to major churches and royal sites as well.

• 32:54Speaker 03

  So we've always sort of assumed that what they are likely to have done is then to have accessed the tribute and the food renders and so on that would have been normally paid by the local community to those sites which they got hold of when they turned up nearby.

• 33:09Matt Lewis?

  It sounds like there's a really interesting juxtaposition between the macro, what this army is trying to achieve, why they're selecting the locations that they are and the political reasons for that, but also the insight into the day to day operation of something like that. You know, they are processing booty, but they're also fishing and having to live day to day. They're repairing their ships, they go. So there's this big political element to what this army is in England to achieve, but there's also real insight into that day to day working of people living that kind of lifestyle.

• 33:37Speaker 04

  And we we've also started to identify some of these foraging sites that Dawn mentioned as well. And this is via this signature of the Viking Great Army that comes to us from the camps at Torxie and Alderwick. And it's made up of a number of items, a lot of the exotic items such as the fragments of Islamic dirhams, some of the weights, also things that are out of, other things that are out of place, like Anglo Saxon coins from other kingdoms. So in Torxie and Alderwick, we have coins from Wessex, which really shouldn't be there. In Lincolnshire in Torxie, we have Northumbrian small copper alloy stakers.

• 34:21Speaker 04

  Which were therefore outside their area of circulation. And we also have lead gaming pieces, which are a key aspect of the signature of the Viking Great Army. Now, we've started to, using the national database, the Portal Antiquities Scheme database, we've started to look for these items elsewhere in eastern and southern England. And we've now identified, and we write about these in the book, some fifty other sites. Many even will have been these foraging sites where groups from the army have gone out into the countryside. Some of them may be strategic outposts as well. Some of them may be reconnoitering for future areas of settlement.

• 35:04Speaker 04

  They're probably much smaller groups and they're represented by just a few finds. But we can align particularly along some of the pre-existing road networks and transport networks. So for example, we have sites along Waddling Street and Ermin Street. Because those Roman roads were still being used in this period as major transport routes. And also along the river systems as well. You can imagine them sailing out with a few ships from the camp, sailing further at the Trent and identifying other places where they could gather resources from.

• 35:38Matt Lewis?

  And Dawn, one of the things we haven't talked about in all of these resources yet is pottery, which is often quite an interesting thing to find during archaeological digs. Is there much evidence of pottery going on there? And does that tell us anything about what the army is doing?

• 35:51Speaker 03

  Well, we don't really have any evidence of pottery on the camps. That doesn't seem to be something that they're really making use of or carting around with them. However, there is a connection to pottery production that we noticed. And we do write about this in the book because the late ninth century in eastern England sees a ceramic revolution. We see new ways of manufacturing pottery. That that region sees the reintroduction of the true fast potter's wheel for the first time since the Roman period. And it Remarkably turns up in those areas where the Viking Great Army was active and where we know it

• 36:37Speaker 03

  went on to settle and divide up territory. So one of the things we took a look at was whether there is a direct connection with the activities of the Great Army. Because what really struck us was that that type of pottery production, while not known in England before the end of the ninth century, was found in the northern part of the continent. And in precisely those regions where we know that Viking armies were active in the middle part of the ninth century and from where we have good reasons to think that some members of the Great Army had arrived from. And so what we think is going on is that

• 37:17Speaker 03

  the conquest of parts of eastern England by the Great Army led to the arrival of potters from the northern part of the continent. So we're talking about northern France and the and the Low Countries. And who set up new industries in parts of eastern England. And one of the places remarkably is Torxey. I think this happens in the years after the Great Army had overwintered there. And the fact that continental craft workers followed the Great Army is something that we know from other sources of evidence. Julian mentioned earlier that there's evidence for the Great Army minting coins. Now, they weren't minting coins in Scandinavia, so the skill set to mint coins

• 38:02Speaker 03

  could only have come either from English moniers or from continental moniers. And then what we see in the years and decades to follow is that continental moniers come into England and mint coins for Scandinavian kings. So we have that one piece of evidence. And we think that the pottery industries that emerge in eastern England are places like Stamford and Thetford, which is another place that the Great Army spent the winter, have their origins in the sort of political developments that occurred after the Great Army had conquered and settled. And they created these kind of new opportunities and these new markets for these potters. And there is some evidence that this sort of wheel thrown pottery.

• 38:46Speaker 03

  It was also making its way into Scandinavia in this period as well. So we see this sort of transformation in pottery production that follows in the wake of the Great Army's activities.

• 38:58Speaker 04

  We have excavated one of the pottery kilns at Torxey, in fact, because the area of the Viking camp is to the north of the modern village, but to the south of the village, there is a large field, which we've also investigated archaeologically. And there we've now got one of the largest concentrations of kilns of the 10th century and a little later from anywhere in England. There's about 40 kilns in total, we know from geophysics. Some of them have been excavated earlier in the 1960s and 70s, but we also excavated one and found the wasters, the broken shirts, sitting in the kiln pit.

• 39:37Speaker 04

  And these were examples of this new industrial form, Torxey ware, which was much more hard-fired, much more resilient, much more standardized forms than any of the pottery that had been manufactured in Anglo-Saxon England before. So we see this nice sort of transition from the army camp to the north of the village and then to the south now, its legacy, the mass-scale industrialized production of pottery, used for transporting items as well as for high-quality consumption. And it travels throughout eastern England and is traded widely.

• 40:25Speaker 02

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• 40:59Speaker 01

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• 41:42Matt Lewis?

  I guess it's fascinating because it's easy to think of the Great Army just being about violence and that they're just tearing through the countryside, destroying. It's interesting to think that they're drawing in almost technological advancements and craftsmen from overseas that wouldn't have come to England otherwise. So there is this sort of cultural legacy to go with the violence that the Great Army did bring.

• 42:02Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's absolutely the case. And one of the most intriguing examples comes from what we know of the career of Guthrum, who was one of the leaders of the Great Army, who is converted to Christianity by King Alfred. He stands as his sponsor at his baptism. And then Guthrum heads off to East Anglia, where he rules as a king. He takes on an Anglo-Saxon name, is known as Appelstan. He then minces coins and some of his first issues are copies of the coins of King Alfred. And then he minces or have minted for him, perhaps to be more accurate, coins in his baptismal name.

• 42:43Speaker 03

  And to all intents and purposes, Guthrum behaves like an English king, a Western European Christian ruler. And I think it's... Those sorts of developments that drives this desire to have the apparatus of kingship. And if that involves minting coins, if that involves sponsoring the arrival of potters to make the kind of pottery that they would have seen the elite and kings and members of society in Francia making use of, that would have informed their idea of what being a king, what being a ruler was like when Guthrum and his followers settled in East Anglia.

• 43:26Matt Lewis?

  I guess it's easy for us to see the Vikings coming and imposing a lot on communities. It's interesting to see them absorbing as well and drawing influences from all other places to alter their own culture while they're in other countries.

• 43:42Speaker 04

  Yeah, and it's clear that one of the things they're very good at is in assimilating into local populations and adapting. And that's actually why when we look into the next few decades in the settlement phase, they almost become invisible, even though there's this massive Scandinavian legacy. But we don't have thousands of Viking warrior burials from across England. And that's because they adopted Christianity initially, just as as one of their other gods, probably. But then they become converted and they are buried in Anglo-Saxon churchyards without grave goods. They adopt other aspects of

• 44:24Speaker 04

  Anglo-Saxon material culture. And so they become very difficult to recognise. But that's because they're very good at adapting and assimilating. And we see this in many of the areas they settle.

• 44:36Matt Lewis?

  Yeah. Did you find some evidence in the camps as well of them potentially liking to play board games? Is there some finds that suggest they they had games they played?

• 44:44Speaker 04

  Yes, we did. And this is particularly interesting because from Torxey, we've got over 300 gaming pieces. These are very crudely made, generally of lead, just hand-shaped. Some of them may have been cast. And we do know from particularly from some of the richest Scandinavian. Graves, we have much more elaborate gaming sets, some in in glass, for example. It seems when they were travelling, they made do with materials that they found locally. And we believe that at Torxey, they had access to a lot of lead, which may have come from a Roman villa that was previously on the site. So they made these gaming pieces.

• 45:27Speaker 04

  We have an instrument elsewhere of wooden gaming boards, either scratched into the planks of ships or individual boards. There's a very well preserved one from a crannog in in Ireland, Ballin Derry. And the boards are very much like chess or drafts boards. But we know from later sources that one of the popular games amongst Scandinavians was called Nefetapal. And it involved two sides, one with a smaller number of pieces, but with a king piece, the nefi, that starts off in the centre of the board. And then their opponent has a larger number of pieces that start out round the outside of the board. And their objective is to capture the king.

• 46:09Speaker 04

  So we think that in the long winter evenings, these warriors, as well as telling stories about their great exploits in battle, were playing these games of strategy, a bit like modern chess, the rules aren't exactly the same. But it was probably as well a part of the education of the younger warriors. As we've mentioned, there were children on the camps. We imagine they were playing them as well. Maybe the adults were probably gambling over the outcomes of the games as well. And maybe some of the really small pieces of silver that we find on the camps could even be gambling chips that they were exchanging, calling to the winner of the game.

• 46:47Matt Lewis?

  Yeah, it's too tempting to see Vikings, particularly in armies like this, as just, you know, 12 hours a day, fighting, slaughtering, burning, abducting people and whatever else. It's really interesting to think about them in their downtime and that they did relax and they did have fun alongside what for them was business.

• 47:05Speaker 04

  Absolutely. I mean, when you're sitting in a field in Lincolnshire for a number of months, I think you've got to have other things to occupy your time, other than just processing your loot and repairing your armour and vessels.

• 47:19Matt Lewis?

  As a Dawn, do we have a sense of when the Viking Great Army ceased to be a thing? And where it went? We've talked a little bit about them being absorbed into local communities. Do we have a sense of the army moving on? Or does it just kind of vanish and melt away?

• 47:34Speaker 03

  Yeah, we do seem to see a number of different developments. I mentioned Guthrum earlier, eventually becomes king in East Anglia. So he's sort of king through the 880s there. But I think the key moment is in the year or so after the army overwintered at Repton. So that's over the winter of 873 to 4. And the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle tells us that the army divided in two at that point. And one half kind of went south and continued raiding in Mercia and Wessex. And that's the army led by Guthrum and a couple of other rulers. And the other half went north under their ruler Halfdan, settle and divide out the land

• 48:16Speaker 03

  in Northumbria. But then Halfdan seems to head off into Ireland. I mean, it's a little bit tricky because the name is spelt differently in the Irish sources. But we have a raider of a similar name who's in Ireland and eventually is killed there. So I think that there is a sort of division of the army and some of them kind of carry on fighting and eventually settle, others disappear and leave England for good.

• 48:43Speaker 04

  We also see traces of returning warriors on the continent. So for example, at a site called Hederby and another site near Hederby, archaeologists in there have found examples of these gaming pieces, which are otherwise not known at all in Denmark. So we believe this is an example of a warrior who was in the Great Army in England, who's then returned and may have been serving in a warrior band protecting. The southern frontier as it was of then Denmark. We have another example of some insect weights and possibly gaming pieces in a burial right in the

• 49:27Speaker 04

  in the far north of Scotland, Kloran Bay, where this may be, again, another member of the army who's moved on from England, has settled, has farmed, and then is buried with some of these sort of key heirlooms, almost, or sort of trinkets of his overseas expeditions.

• 49:47Matt Lewis?

  Yeah, it's like the old fashioned having your photo slideshow to show everybody.

• 49:51Speaker 03

  Yeah, there's a really extraordinary example from the Netherlands as well at a place called Zutphen. And I became aware of this. I was out there a few years ago, giving a talk on the Viking Great Army. I mean, assuming people in the audience would think this was really interesting, but it wouldn't really connect very much with what they knew about. And the municipal archaeologists came up to me afterwards and said, oh, there was lead gaming pieces that you were showing. We found some here, which was a bit of a surprise. So I had a look at them. I very liked the sorts of things that we were finding at Torxey. And then I was shown some of the archaeological evidence from Zutphen. And there had been excavation of some buildings dating to the late ninth century, which had been

• 50:34Speaker 03

  burnt down. And there were two kind of burials in the in the base of these buildings, alongside one of which was a Northumbrian stiker, those little copper alloy coins that we said are found in great numbers at Torxey. There we've got evidence for what appears to be a Viking raid. And we know that there were from contemporary written sources were Viking raids in that area in the eight eighties. And we've got this stiker in the base of these burnt down buildings and nearby these lead gaming pieces. So maybe another example of what happened to somebody who'd been with the Great Army, had headed back to the continent, continued engaging in raids. And, you know, some of the material that they had with them that they'd acquired in England ends up being

• 51:17Speaker 03

  lost, left behind during their raiding of Zutphen.

• 51:20Matt Lewis?

  Yeah, fascinating that it gets us so close to the real human stories of the members of the armies as well. I wondered if we could just end on maybe Julian and then Dawn, if you could give us an idea, there's there's so many exciting new finds that seem to be happening, and this is giving us new information.

• 51:37Matt Lewis?

  Is there more to find at these sites? And if there is one question that you could answer at one of these sites, what would you like to know? What would you really like to discover?

• 51:46Speaker 04

  Gosh, there's certainly a lot more to find out about because we're discovering new sites now because of the signature around England all the time. And as a nice example, recently, one of our metal detectorists colleagues discovered that half of an Irish cross-shaped broat had been found at a site north of the River Humber, whilst the other half of it had been found at a site south of the River Humber. So this is an example that shows the actual sort of splitting up of items and parts of the same object being carried by different members of the army to different locations. So that's a relatively

• 52:28Speaker 04

  recent find. So lots of work to do on that. I think the other thing I would dearly love to know more about goes back to the problem that we've had with the soil conditions at Torxie and where animal bone and archaeobotanical remains in particular don't survive. So although we can infer all of this processing of animals and processing of plants and crops, we don't really have the solid evidence for it. So what we really need is a Viking camp, and there are still several of them where we don't know the precise location. But we need one where the soil conditions will mean that the botanics and the animal bones survive because they will tell us a lot more about what was going on.

• 53:13Matt Lewis?

  Dawn, is there any question that you would dearly love to answer at one of these sites?

• 53:17Speaker 03

  I think I would like to know more about the women and children involved in the activities of the Great Army. And we know that they were present. We've got a little bit of evidence for that as well at some of the burials that have been excavated at Heathwood, near to Repton, which is a cremation cemetery. It would be kind of nice if we had some burials in situ alongside a winter camp site. And I'd sort of like to put my...

• 53:46Speaker 03

  You know, questions alongside those that Julian has just outlined, you know. Another issue at Torxie and Old Oak is the fact that these are regularly ploughed sites. So, you know, we did try doing some excavation at Torxie and features had clearly been ploughed out. And, you know, there was a lot that we were, we're not going to be able to see if we excavated. You know, if we had a site that wasn't so disturbed by ploughing and, you know, we could find out about the sorts of, you know, food provisions at the, at the site, but also we had some burials in Situ and they were able to tell us more about the people on the camp, including women and children. I think, I'm not asking for too much there, am I? I think that's the sort of thing that I'd really like to see because we now know what we're looking for.

• 54:28Speaker 03

  Having almost seen it by proxy through the metal detected data from Torxie and Old Oak. It'd be great to get a campsite that hasn't been disturbed and has got better preservation conditions, you know, because there are so many more questions that are prompted by the material that we have been studying from Torxie and Old Oak, that it needs the right kind of site where you can ask these sort of questions and employ the right sort of archaeological methods to begin to answer them.

• 54:54Matt Lewis?

  Yeah, well, I very much hope that you come across a site like that because it's been fascinating to find out what you've discovered so far from these new sites and creating that signature will hopefully help you locate one that can answer even more questions for us. And I look forward to maybe you being able to enlighten us even more about the activity of the Viking Great Army. So thank you so much for joining us, Dawn and Julian. It's been an absolute pleasure to talk to you about this. Thank you. Thank you very much.

• 55:18Speaker 03

  Thank you.

• 55:19Matt Lewis?

  Thank you.

• 55:21Matt Lewis?

  I hope you've enjoyed finding out about life in the Viking Great Army. Dawn and Julian's book of the same name is out now if you'd like to uncover more. There are some great episodes in our back catalogue on Viking Age archaeology, including Eleanor Baraklov's visit to talk about her book, Embers of the Hands. There are new instalments of Gone Medieval every Tuesday and Friday, so please come back and join Eleanor and I for more from the greatest millennium in human history. Don't forget to also subscribe or follow us on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts and tell all of your friends and family that you've gone medieval. You can sign up to History Hit to access hundreds of hours of original documentaries with a new release every week

• 56:04Matt Lewis?

  and all of History Hit's podcasts ad free. Sign up now at historyhit.com/subscribe. Go on, you know you want to. Anyway, I'd better let you go. I've been Matt Lewis and we've just gone medieval with history hits.

• 56:41Speaker 06

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• 57:12Speaker 01

  The Quarter Pounder with Cheese is made with 100% fresh beef, cooked when you order it. Then comes the melted cheese, the slivered onions, the pickles, the ketchup and the mustard. Add hot crispy fries and an ice cold Coke, all for $8. And if things go well, one loose fry at the bottom of the bag. The Quarter Pounder with Cheese meal, now $8. Ba-da-ba-ba-ba.