Dan Snow's History Hit - How to Survive in Viking Britain

Episode Date: September 12, 2024

Have you ever wondered what it would take to live in Viking Britain? When they arrived and settled in the British Isles, Viking settlers didn't just face a violent death at the hands of disgruntled locals. They had to contend with vicious weather, famine and disease, as well as simply navigating a new and unfamiliar world.Today we're joined by Eleanor Barraclough, a cultural historian and broadcaster. She explains exactly what it would have been like to survive and thrive in Viking Britain.Produced by Mariana Des Forges and James Hickmann, and edited by Dougal Patmore.Enjoy unlimited access to award-winning original documentaries that are released weekly and AD-FREE podcasts. Get a subscription for £1 per month for 3 months with code DANSNOW sign up at https://historyhit/subscription/We'd love to hear from you- what do you want to hear an episode on? You can email the podcast at [e-mail] can take part in our listener survey here.

Hi everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. I'm talking today about the Vikings, one of history's greatest maritime cultures. I've mentioned this before, so regular listeners will have to forgive me, but I'm sure you will, because I want to relate. One of the greatest experiences I've ever had in my life. I boarded a ship, a Viking ship, at Roskilde in Denmark, and we sailed up the Kattegat between Sweden and Denmark on this replica, meticulously built along the lines of one of the ships.

They were covered in the huge Roskilde Viking ship excavations. We navigated by the clouds. We surged forward down foaming waves, powered only by the wind. We ate food, smoked with reindeer droppings. We slept on the heaving wooden pl only by the wind. We ate food smoked with reindeer droppings. We slept on the heaving wooden planks of the ship. And we once beached the ship and went into a supermarket car park, trapped a sapling, and using that sapling, we made a spare part for our steering gear.

It was one of the happiest and best experiences of my life. I was filming a show for the BBC years ago. The Viking world was knitted together by maritime routes. They were able to travel down the rivers of what is now Russia and Kiev, into the Black Sea, into the Caspian. They brought back valuable trade goods from Central Asia. They sailed, they fished, they rowed, they explored, they traveled, they fought on the sea. But this podcast, Unusually for Me, doesn't talk that much about them as a maritime people.

I want to learn more about the Vikings that arrived in Britain and how they lived and thrived here in the British and Irish Isles. They faced a very challenging world. They faced an enemy, Scottish, Irish, English, Welsh, who didn't want them here. They faced uncertain harvests, like everybody, disease, a poor understanding of hygiene. So if you've ever wondered what it would take to survive in Viking Britain, then listen on. This is the wonderful Dr. Eleanor Barraclough. She's a cultural historian, broadcaster, explaining just what it would have been like to live and thrive in Viking Britain.

This is the Charles talk about some of the stuff that isn't necessarily recorded in the Chronicles. This is their lives beyond the warlords, the kings, and the big battles. It's the small acts of bravery, the successes, the triumphs, some of the failures, all of which enabled them to establish Viking states in the British and Irish Isles, which lasted, some of which, for centuries, all of which shaped these isles in an enduring way.

Enjoy. Enjoy. T-minus 10. The atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. God save the king. No black-white unity till there is first and black unity. Never to go to war with one another again.

And lift off. And the shuttle has cleared the tower. Eleanor, thank you very much for coming on the podcast. Such a pleasure. Thank you so much for having me. Oh, we're going to have to talk about that word again. We're going to have to talk about the word Vikings. Where does Viking come from?

Was there such a thing as a Viking? There was such a thing as a Viking. Some people even named their children Viking. That's how much of a thing there was. So it's an Old Norse word. There's an Old English version of it too. Vikinger is the Old Norse version, which is like a raider, basically. And then they go on a Viking.

So basically it's something you do over the summer, mostly. Anglo-Saxons, they've got a version of it. Weeching, which essentially, again, means pirate or raider. And that's what the word is, except when it then gets reintroduced, essentially back in the the 1800s you know the victorians are going mad for things like vikings the meaning starts to expand and it's you know it basically follows up the whole of the the early medieval nordic world which to be fair isn't quite so catchy right so so it becomes the viking age the age when that sort of stuff was

going on. So as a bit of branding, though, it's been incredibly effective. Well, exactly. And there's nothing really, I mean, academics like to argue a little bit about what to use and what exactly it means and everything, but there's nothing anyone's come up with that's better. You can use Norse as a sort of catch-all term for that cultural sphere. It comes predominantly from the language Old Norse that they spoke. They again had their version of that, either Norain, which essentially means Norse, and there's a version of the language as well they referred to as the Dunske Tungu, the Danish tongue. So there's that awareness of a shared cultural sphere. And today that shared cultural sphere

we think of as Viking. But there is a problem, and it's something we should be aware of, that if you refer to any historical period or cultural sphere of activity as a word that is linked to a specific activity, in this case raiding, then the danger is that the whole of that history becomes coloured by that one thing. So if we talked about the ancient Greeks as living in the hoplite age, suddenly it becomes very militarised. So we've got to be careful, but yeah, I haven't come up with anything better. So the Viking Age, I think, is fair enough. And so the Viking Age in the Isles, in the British and Irish Isles, begins at the end of the 700s, the end of the 8th century. Now,

us Southerners like to point out it wasn't Lindisfarne first, wasn't it? It was Portland. It was on the coast of Dorset, we think. Exactly. Well, yes and no. So the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle does say, what is it, like around 787, 789, something like that, three ships of Danes land on the Isle of Portland and the king's reeve comes down to meet them this is all according to the Anglo-Saxon chronicle and

basically I think he wants to take them up to the king and get them to pay some taxes and they don't like that so they kill him so that's it that's fine and it's true but again it's not raiding we don't really know what's going there. And that's why Lindisfarne is such a good date. And it's why it's so memorable, 793, that big raid on the island monastery off the coast of Northumberland. Because the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, again, that's our main source. They talk about dragons over the sky and sheets of lightning and famines. So there's something apocalyptic, sort of biblically apocalyptic about what happens there. And so I think that's why that's a date that people cling onto. And you can see my documentary that I made on the arrival of the

Vikings in Lindisfarne on History Hit TV right now, if you want to go and subscribe. It's an excellent documentary, if I don't say so myself. If after Lindisfarne, there are raids, we English tend to remember the ones in England, of course, but there are raids now right across this archipelago that we live on. There are raids in Scotland and Ireland as well. Yeah, exactly. So 794, we know there's a raid in Monk Wormuth Jarrow, which is sort of very close to Lindisfarne. 795, a place called Recru, it's off the east coast of Ireland, we're not sure, there's a couple of candidates for possible islands there. Then we have Iona, it's attacked, I think like 795, 802, 806, 825, you know, there are plenty of raids going on.

Yeah, it's important to kind of expand it out of that Anglo-centric narrative. It's important to expand it beyond that British-centric narrative and Irish-centric narrative as well. But that's another question. I feel bad because today we are talking about Britain. So you're completely right. Of course, the Norse end up everywhere. Anywhere there's a seal, anywhere there's a coastline,

there's a potential for some long ships. When do they go from hit and run attacks to thinking about settling yeah yeah so we're talking by the 850s by that point the norse is starting to overwinter on islands such as i think thanat and kent is the first one and that's really cunning because if they're there in the winter when it's hard to travel then it means when spring comes they can then penetrate further inland and so you start to see that happening and then 865 anglo-saxon chronicle again note that all these historical textual sources are not norse they're very much by the people that the norse are coming up against you know which is again going to color the narrative

but the anglo-Saxon Chronicle reports the arrival of a pagan force. One version calls it a mithral hadhen hera, a great heathen army. And quite quickly, we see the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of East Anglia, Northumbria and Mercia all toppling. There's a really interesting, you say settlement, there's a really interesting entry from the year 876 that talks about the invaders dividing up Northumbria and starting to plough it, which means, yeah, it's very much turning into settlement and farming. And we have King Alfred, you know, the great of Wessex, famous, possible not, but according to the story, the burner of the cakes. Start of 878, he's basically retreating to the woods and the marshes and the moors of Somerset with his followers. And the following year, they regroup. They defeat the Norse leader Gudrum and his army at the Battle of Eddington.

And then a peace treaty is drawn up that establishes essentially legal boundaries. It goes from the Thames to the Lea to Bedford and then up the River Ouse to Watling Street, so kind of just north of Birmingham. And we do see these kind of cultural areas of settlement where, for example, most Old Norderived place names are north and east of that line, in the area that then later becomes known as the Danelaw. And so as we get these settlers building lives in what becomes known as the Danelaw, what are the biggest threats to their continued survival? Is it the neighbours who despise them, the Anglo-Saxons, we can call them loosely, or indeed elsewhere, the Picts, the Scots, the Britons, the Welsh, the Irish? Or is it just the gigantic ecological, bacteriological, viral challenges that our species have faced since the dawn of time? We can't know for sure. And every area is going to be different. Every village, every farmstead, there's going to be different challenges and different personalities. So it's really important not to generalise. Although we do see more coordinated attacks, it seems, later on on Scandinavian settlers, but we're talking kind of year 1000 plus by that point. it's interesting the fact that so many old norse loan words end up in the form of english that we now speak suggests that there's a lot of interaction between these different groups because

otherwise you're not going to see that level of say even down to old norse grammatical features ending up in the language that we now speak and later later on, you see the sense of a kind of a culturally mixed heritage in many of the people living in these parts of the world. So there's no sense of big attacks, but there is, in some of the written texts, there are definitely senses of cultural tensions and cultural perceptions. And these, I think, become more prominent and more obvious a little bit later on in that settlement period. So they're not existing full-time in a state of existential battle against the indigenous population, against the Anglo-Saxons, for example?

battle against the indigenous population, against the Anglo-Saxons, for example? No, I think, again, it depends is the sort of slightly arse-covering answer there. But essentially, most of the time, people are just trying to get on with their lives. And, you know, we started off talking about what does Viking mean? Well, most of the people living in the Viking age in that world were predominantly farmers. And, you know, you've got to make sure you get the crops in, you've got to make sure your livestock survives, you've got to make sure the people who you're responsible for are thriving, or at least healthy and getting on with the jobs they're meant to be doing. Those are the predominant concerns, the kind of big narrative arcs of history, sure, sometimes impacts, but it's important not to sort of i don't know project

the macro onto the micro because most of the time there are more immediate concerns i think but having said that there will have been tensions there are always tensions humans you know compete for resources and and a sense of what forms their identity is always a question. And even more so when there are different people sort of coming up against each other. So it's hard to tell, but we've got to be quite sensible about it. Okay. So sometimes they've got an army led by Alfred or his son, Edward, or his sister, Athelflad, or their Edward's son Athelstan's

kicking down the door but other but life is tough enough even without that in the periods of peace talk me through I guess now whether they're Vikings or not but just just the challenges of surviving in this period in Britain yeah so so we've got major threats we've got sort of harsh winters we've got crop failures we've got you know. We've got sort of harsh winters. We've got crop failures. We've got, you know, disease and basically the result of humans living in a pretty fragile, uncontrollable world. That's going to be day to day. these skirmishes between the Norwegian king and his army, so King Halcon, and the Scottish king, Alexander, and his army. And this is a big event, but actually it also coincides with a huge, huge storm. And you think, well, for most people, that's what they're going to be more worried about is just, okay, are the crops going to survive? People who are out fishing, are they going to get back in one piece so there's

that but then there's also the fact that just you know people don't live as long as they're going to there's a huge rate of infant mortality and so if we're thinking about you know an average life expectancy of kind of 40 50 plus years old we're going to see that also very much reflected in what people are having to deal with. And most of the time it's just trying to stay healthy enough and not be in enough pain to actually just get on with the day-to-day business of living in the world. So you're losing a huge number of babies before the age of five. Yeah. If you survive childhood, you have a decent chance you're going to 40 or 50?

Yeah, potentially. But again, you know, there are so many variables within that. So think about women, for example, and childbirth. That's a huge, huge killer and it always is in any historical period. And it's no less true of this period there's a really

poignant um thinking about the british shell specifically the really poignant burial from the island of rousey which is um in orkney and there there's a there's the burial of a young woman and a full-term infant and it looks likely that they died during or possibly shortly after birth. And that's a really interesting one because, you know, the woman is buried with an extraordinary range of really beautiful, expensive grave goods, you know, jewellery and textile making equipment and a brooch that has, it's like kind of a gilded bronze brooch that has this like leaping animal on it, maybe a wolf, maybe a dog, maybe a lion, that seems once upon a time to have been a decoration on perhaps a gospel book or something like a Christian gospel book. And it seems to be one of the items that may have been raided by some of those very early Norse raiders. And so, but it's been repurposed as a brooch.

And so there it is in her grave with her and the baby and this beautiful little brooch that on the one hand is part of a very personal, very human story. But on the other hand is part of that macro narrative of history that we can quite possibly trace all the way back to those first raids. But yeah, but childbirth was very dangerous. And it's amazing in a way how little evidence for that actually survives. There are these things called biagrunar, like helping runes. And later written texts say that these runes can be carved to help women in childbirth

but actually there's very very little archaeological evidence for that sort of you know attempt to control the uncontrollable make life a little less dangerous but through the power of essentially what sort of runic incantations because you don't have the sort of medical care that you have now, for example. There is, I learned from your book, the boat burial in Skar on Orkney. Oh, yeah. We think it's the body of a 70-year-old woman in that boat. Yes, yes, exactly. And there are certainly burials of people of that sort of vintage.

It's, you know, the Osseberg ship burials in in norway for example burial from 834 is another example the older of the two women was maybe 70 80 years old but what's really lovely about the scar boat burial it dates maybe somewhere like last quarter of the 9th century first half of the 10th century and yeah it's it's on the orcadian island of Sandy and it's it's a boat it's like maybe six and a half meters long and it contained the bodies of yeah as you say this 70 year old woman but then also a 10 year old child and a man about 30 years old and again it's also these wonderful things that are found in the boat so very very famous in fact people might sort of be able to picture what this is it's the scar plaque it's made of whale bone it's got these

two grinning dragon heads with little teeth on top carved as decoration and it's smooth and flat and it's found together with other items that were used to make textiles like comb, shears, spindle walls. So maybe this was also used for smoothing, cutting fabric. And then meanwhile, the younger man, his body has other items buried near it, like a sword and a quiver and arrows and a comb, several gaming pieces. But my favourite fact about this is that they found sand in the boat. And it seems that the sand didn't come from Orkney. It didn't come from Shetland. It didn't come from Scotland.

And so the suggestion is actually these people have come from quite far away, maybe Norway. But no one really knows how they ended up, where they ended up and how they died. So many fascinating mysteries in the archaeology this period i absolutely have always been just obsessed by it so we've got this tough world childbirth is dangerous there are there's crop failure there is famine there's there's pestilence and plague present how does viking society itself, try and sustain itself? Talk me through who's in charge. Is there slavery? Is there quite hierarchical? What does it feel like in a Viking settlement? Well, there's definitely slavery. That's a big thing. That's an important

thing. And it's often the hidden parts of the narrative of Viking Age history. So yeah, you've got people who are enslaved, you've got free people, you've got nobles, and then you've got the kings and the chieftains up at the top. And it is a society, sort of that Nordic society. If we're going back to the Migration Age, the period after the fall of the Western Roman Empire, in the centuries leading up to the Viking Age, it becomes increasingly hierarchical and increasingly linked to petty chieftains and petty kings with increasing amounts of power. So there's certainly that. But on a sort of day to day level, we're talking about the farmstead as the basic social unit. And that farmstead is much more what people are going to be encountering every day. And that's going to probably include maybe a married couple and then some children,

some of which might belong to both of them or one of them or be foster children. There might be older relatives or aunts, uncles, freed workers, perhaps. And then depending on the size of the farmstead we are going to have slaves now what's interesting is that obviously again it's a kind of archaeological truism the further up the pecking wars you go the more chances you have of leaving essentially trace in the archaeological record so i mentioned this ship burial in osseberg in norway from 834 the two women one of them much older, is buried and the bling in this boat burial and, you know, tapestries and jewellery and wagons and sledges and artwork. The problem is you can find plenty of archaeological material that might have been

used by enslaved people, for example, but say you've got a whalebone stool or a shovel. Well, how are we going to know if those everyday artefacts of sort of working life, predominantly on the farmstead, were used by enslaved people or people who weren't enslaved? So that's one of the hardest types of evidence to find if we're looking at that social hierarchy. that's one of the hardest types of evidence to find if we're looking at social hierarchy. And, you know, we might expect to find, you know, metal chains, but actually they're pretty rare. You tend to find them in trading centres. And there's only a very small handful of those because actually the number of people who were captured, traded on or ransomed, actually metal is expensive and life is relatively cheap by comparison so

it wouldn't make sense for most people to be tied up in chains when you know rope is perfectly good unfortunately but you know there are other examples so there are burials where it looks likely that because of the nature of how people are buried or the fact that someone is buried in great style with grave goods but then other people maybe have been decapitated to join them you think okay this might be an enslaved person sacrificed to join their master or mistress in the next life but there is one really incredible piece of evidence from a little island off the coast of western Scotland near the Isle of Bute and Arran. So those are those are better known. But the island of Inchmarnock, which isn't, you know, people don't live there now, but there used to be an early medieval monastery.

And there, down by the seashore, they found a piece of slate and there are doodles drawn like scratched into the slate and what the image appears to depict is a little figure who appears to be maybe a monk maybe a novice being led by a rope bound by someone with this like wild punk hair and chain mail to longships down by the water. And so here, we don't know if this depicts an actual event, an actual individual, but you have at least pictorial evidence for something we know that was going on an awful lot. And it wasn't just the Vikings doing it, by the way, at all. Anglo-Saxons, for example, they had plenty of slaves too. But we have evidence for these people that are so hard to find in the archaeological evidence other than that so your sense is that there's as you said wealth and status and survival dependent on farming land working the land yeah so your sense that slaves doing a lot of that that

work and there are sort of free men farm sort of yeoman farmers who are the next level up is they're the kind of organizing principle yeah just sort of ordinary farmers for the most part just getting on with it it's it also we've got to remember we're talking about a really broad cultural area and we're talking about several centuries and so what's true of one place may very well not be true of another place. So, you know, one of my favourite parts of the Norse or the Viking Age world is Greenland. And there we're very much talking individual farmsteads quite far apart because land isn't brilliant and there's certainly no big organising principle. You will have major farmsteads and

people will be coming to those for, you know, celebrations, maybe religious rituals, burials, feasts. But for the most part, yeah, you're just talking farmers on their lands trying to get on with things. And they're presumably also then they're supplying the class of foot soldier, are they? They can be called up. They would be handy with a spear and a shield. class of foot soldier are they they can be called up they would be handy with a spear and a shield yeah yeah but but again it depends it's such a cop-out isn't it but you know for example when we're talking about those first raids what's increasingly being suggested is that the people who are doing those first raids are i suppose you might say kind of second tier young males back in scandinavia essentially the ones who haven't inherited the big farmsteads and the land and the wealth but want to make a

name for themselves younger sons yeah really interesting exactly so so later on they get they get you know sent off to to join the army or become priests. Well, that's certainly not true in the Viking age. They get sent abroad and what they bring back is portable wealth. And that's really important. And yeah, the suggestion is that actually a lot of it is about finding someone who's willing to marry you and make babies with you. And then you can build up a farmstead and you can build up a life and it's probably no coincidence in those cases that it's often in female burials from that early period that in Norway that you find the looted gear particularly the reliquaries that have been taken you know that used to house the the kind of fragments of saints in these Christian establishments. But they're brought back because

they're pretty and, you know, nice box and they're given to women. And then, in fact, there's one that's even got a woman's name that's been, she's written it in runes on the bottom, Ranveig. She's just scratched name. It's like, no one is getting their hands on my beautiful piece of treasure. Thank you very much. So you know there's there's something going on there and even later on when we get this great heathen army well again increasingly what's suggested is that army this hera word in old english it's not the most useful to describe what's going on it's more like portable war bands they're much more mobile they might come together in bigger groups but they might then spread out and go in different directions. And it's much more flexible and it's much more efficient. And so you've led me to my next question there, which is these sort of

slightly more amorphous groups that come together, these warbands. We're not talking about a very strictly hierarchical Christian medieval society where you have a king and all patronage and authority flows from him down to his nobles. And people can make it in the Viking world, can they? So someone can rise up, command a kind of ad hoc band, gain wealth, call themselves an earl, call themselves a chief, call themselves a king. Is it more fluid? It's not always easy to say. I think it is more fluid than it is later on. And I think sort of that layering in of Christianity just complicates the hierarchy and the social structure so much. I think it's more fluid than that. It's tricky. So for example, enslaved people could be free,

it's more fluid than that. It's tricky. So for example, enslaved people could be free, but even after they'd been free, that stigma of enslavement could carry them through their lives, but also potentially through the lives of the generations that came after them. And there was still this sense of legal obligation to the people or the families that had once owned them. And that's crazy. It's You know, and that's crazy. It's like several generations legally that could continue. Not always. I do wonder, there's also then the case of Iceland, which is a bit complicating in that sense,

because they have no king. They have, and that's very deliberate, you know, in the later narratives and their sagas that are written down in the 13th century that are based on older oral stories about those first generations of settlers to Iceland. The narrative, their origin myth is very much about King Harald Fairhair of Norway who wanted to take everyone's land and they said, we won't live under this king and so off we go to Iceland and we'll settle there and we won't have a king. But again,

over the centuries, I mean, for a start, even when they tip up, the first people who get there get the best land and the most land. Part of the problem is that then later on when people arrive, they don't have so much land that they have to get poorer land. So there's already a social hierarchy being set up. Then there's the sense of these chieftains. The word for chieftains is gaudy, and that word gaudy is linked to the word for gods. So again, there's a religious function there. But again, there's a local gaudy, there's a local chieftain, and you owe loyalty to that chieftain. And that might not affect you in your day-to-day life, but there's certainly that sense of someone is in charge here and someone is

you know hopefully looking out for us if they're good but if they're not good then we've got problems as the centuries go on power becomes increasingly concentrated in the hands of several powerful families so by the time you get to the 13th century in Iceland, you have a civil war breaking out and it's basically between these warring, powerful families. And it's no coincidence that that's the time when the sagas start to be written down because actually the Norwegian king is hovering on the wings, really hoping to be able to take over Iceland. And some of these powerful families think, yeah, if I'm on the Norwegian king's side then this is going to help me out as well and eventually it's that same Norwegian king King Haakon who

we also see skirmishing with the Scottish king for control of the West Niles Battle of Laags, 1263, we see him eventually and his son Magnus taking over Iceland. And that's very much with the support of some of the Icelandic chieftains and the powerful families. And so it's never a socialist utopia of equality, I think. I wish humans were set up for that, but I think possibly history has made me too cynical. You listened to Dan Snow's History. Don't go anywhere. There's more to come. I'm Matt Lewis. And I'm Dr. Alan Orjanaga. And in Gone Medieval, we get into the greatest mysteries.

The gobsmacking details and latest groundbreaking research. From the greatest millennium in human history. We're talking Vikings. Normans. Kings and popes. Who were rarely the best of friends. Murder. Rebellions. And crusades. Find out who we really were.

By subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit. Wherever you get your podcasts. So we've got a bit of a social structure. What about living conditions? I mean, we've heard of the Viking longhouse, but from the evidence that you've seen, let's talk about Britain because we have evidence of Viking settlement from Newfoundland all the way across to, well, I've been to digs in Estonia. And so we're talking about a vast area. But let's talk about Britain. What have you seen that tells us how they live? And would it have been so different to how their Anglo-Saxon and Scottish neighbours were living?

Yeah. So that last bit of the question, no, not hugely different. And there's a lot of overlap, increasingly so, you know, and there's only so many ways you can use the materials around you to make a dwelling that's going to work with what you need. And, you know, we're talking kind of predominantly agricultural societies so you have that basic setup of you know fairly small long houses for the most part predominantly rural dwellings so you've got like single rooms maybe with some other rooms off central hearth in the middle sleeping platforms along the walls possibly what's interesting though is that that is the sort of evidence particularly in Britain, that doesn't survive so well.

And there's various reasons for that. Not least that Britain has good farming land and good building land. And so people you're looking for those kind of everyday rural farmstead type buildings from the Viking Age, sure, they do survive in various forms occasionally, but not in the way that, for example, if you go out to Greenland, they have those two settlements, the Eastern Settlement, Western Settlement on the west coast of Greenland. No one really built on that land afterwards. And so and that's where I do do i've done a lot of my research and it's absolutely extraordinary you know you these houses are still standing in a way that you really wouldn't expect and you certainly don't get in britain what you do get and coming into england particularly is a much more unusual sort of settlement surviving and that's at York that's Jorvik which is the famous site you can go and visit you can go to the Jorvik centre go and see

how the Viking age inhabitants of York lived and there it's this sense of narrow densely populated houses they've got plot boundaries and buildings of wattle walls and thatched roofs and then you know workshops out back kitchen gardens you've got pigs and chickens and bees and all sorts but what's important about that is that those more famous settlements are not necessarily representative of what's going on in most of the Norse world. So, you know, we have sites like that, yeah, Dublin and York and then, you know, Hedebyen, Riber and Cayupang. We have places like that, certainly, across the Norse world. But that's not where most people are living. But it's almost because there's more concentration of human life there, that's often if we're going to find it, where we find it. So it's not representative, but it's absolutely fascinating.

If you look at York, York was a Roman town and then becomes a real centre of Viking power. What changes in York under the Vikings? Well, it's tricky because most of the evidence comes from them, the real concentration, but it's about craftspersonship. It's about trade. It's about that intensity of activity and connections. And politically, it becomes dominant. It becomes a really, really important force and a place of political tensions. So, you know, you have Eric Bladax famously gets kicked out of York. I think it's the 950s or something. He gets killed. There's lots of political factions, both sort of Northumbrian

and Norse who are sort of vying for authority there at various points. But then you also just have an awful lot of culture. You have a lot of very skilled people and very interesting things going on there. One of my favourite bits of the Jorvik cultural kind of complexion of that is the musical instruments, which are just incredible. The things like, you know, there's a set of pan pipes made from boxwood that survive that bits being broken off at the end, but you could basically play them now. There's stringed instruments, there's, you know, woodwind, all sorts of things. And we have to remember in these places just how much human life is there that, again, you know, if we come down from the macro, there's a lot of micro and there's a lot, I think, more that we would kind of recognise as part of that shared human tradition that's going on there, which we might not recognise in this kind of like really brutal, nasty stuff that's also going on. Because it is a brutal period.

I've been lucky enough to handle the Lloyds Bank coprolite, the Lloyds Bank turd. I'm so jealous. Oh my goodness. Tell everyone listening about this fossilised human poo. So, well, you did better than, what was it, back in 2003? There was a teacher who got to hold it in front of their class and they dropped it and it broke into three pieces. Yeah, so, I mean, I think I would be genuinely too scared to touch it,

but I am incredibly jealous. So it's huge, isn't it? It's like 20 centimetres long, like five centimetres wide, something like that. Ninth century. Also known as the Lloyd's Bank coprolite because it was found when the bank was sorting out their building there. But part of the reason it's so fascinating is because usually

when you've got preserved human faeces, it's a big communal mush in a latrine or something. It can't tell you very much. But a lone turd is really exciting because that comes from one individual and so we can see something about the diet and the health of a single human that we know lived in the viking age and was there in york in the ninth century but it's not great is it it's like mostly this poo is is comprised it's like meats breads intestinal worms that's that's the headline here too isn't it i don't think this person was very healthy and they probably hadn't pooed in several

days but i love the fact that you know you could live over a thousand years ago and that is the one part of you that that survives a prodigious turd that you probably had quite some trouble passing at the time yeah so what does it tell us? They had worms, did they? Yeah, yeah, yeah. They had a lot of worms, an awful lot of worms. And do we have a lot of worms? No. Worms are bad, right?

I don't know. I don't think I have any worms. I can't speak for anyone else. Don't be tricky, because, you know, I'm not the biology guy. And so you should not have worms in your poo. No. No, you really shouldn't have worms in your poo. It happens. It certainly happens.

But no, it's not good for you. It doesn't do good things. I just want to check that. I'm asking for a friend. And so the fact that he has worms in the poo, what's that mean? So, I mean, well, what does it mean? So not a huge amount in the sense that many many people had worms it's like many many people had lice at that time and your bodies do adapt you know if it's a common thing your body does adapt to the fact that you have all these sort of intestinal parasites but

it tells us something i think about the low level of hygiene and health in that period compared to modern standards certainly you know and again you see it in the lice there are just every part of the reason that viking age archaeological sites have so many combs in them is well partly because they really are concerned about their that their appearance and that's a really good thing we can talk more about that but it's also because there are lots of lice about and you've got to do something about all these lice. And so it's that low level discomfort. It's in the same way that many, many, many bodies, if they live long enough, you see the skeletons have a lot of osteoarthritic signs on them and again it's just the wear and tear that grind of a hard

physical life without a lot of medical advancements and without a huge amount of downtime and so what is the cliche about life being you know nasty brutish and short whatever it is that yeah yeah you know it's well it's funny whenever i am have conversations with uh you know i mean i'm married to another historian whenever we talk about what period would we wanted to have lived in rather than research or you know go around and have fun exploring it's like okay i'll no now now basically you know it's a no-brainer no, exactly. I briefly considered the Stone Age as a nice alternative. And I was, again, I was corrected on that front. But certainly, yeah, you know what it is.

You know too much about these periods to have a lot of illusions about what it was like to actually live there for the most part. You listened to Dan Snow's history hit. Stick with us. I'm Matt Lewis. And I'm Dr. Alan Orjanaga. And in Gone Medieval, we get into the greatest mysteries. The gobsmacking details and latest groundbreaking research.

From the greatest millennium in human history. We're talking Vikings. Normans. Kings and Popes. Who were rarely the best of friends, murder, rebellions, and crusades. Find out who we really were by subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts. so life is pretty tough hygiene food is guess that it's today of course certainly yeah hygiene is poor what about can i finish by asking about because i got in trouble the other day i put on the internet something about you people, pre the invention of railways, the vast majority of people were born, lived and died within a small radius, without leaving a certain radius. Yeah.

And medievalists got in touch. So I think we really do think there's a lot more movement than is previously thought now. Is that true in the Viking world? Because of these links that have been forged between what is now Russia, Ukraine, all the way to North America? Do you get the sense that people are really moving around? And this is normal people, not just the elite. Yeah, yeah. That's a really good question. I've got to think about this because I think both can be true.

So the Viking Age, part of what's fascinating about it is, as you say, it's just so culturally widespread and diverse. And they end up at the edge of the North American continent, Kievan Rus, down to lived in, you know, pretty, pretty small geographical areas, certainly compared to what we would think of now. You know, it's like, it's like, you know, when they, it's a much later period, obviously, but luck rise to candle for this idea that actually what's out there over there is a lot closer than we would possibly think of that these days. And one thing that I talk about quite a lot in the book is travel. But when we think of Vikings and travel, we think of ships. Of course we do. And that's true. But we're not just talking about those elite, as you say, Viking ships that can take people over the oceans and, you know,

into different lands. Yes, they exist. And yes, we are talking about cultures that sort of create that sense of a diaspora. They're spreading out across the North Atlantic. And that isn't just an elite thing. But we also have to think about land travel. And I don't know if you've come across, there's an amazing archaeological investigation that's going on at Lendbrien in Norway at the moment, and it's glacial archaeologists. And it's an awful reason they're having to do it, which of course is because of climate change. The glaciers are melting. But because they're melting, they're uncovering all these incredible historical artefacts that have been frozen in the ice. historical artifacts that have been frozen in the ice and Lendbrien is this mountain pass in Norway and it goes down from the the fjords where people had their farms up into the mountains

and then eventually if you carry on it will take you all the way to the sea and so what you have is all these little artifacts that show how people are moving it's kind of that transhumance they're moving from their farms down in the valleys up into their shielings their summer shielings with their animals you have all these little bits and pieces like you have a walking stick and it says on it in runes Ivar owns this well you know at some point Ivar lost this you have a mitten made from like all different textiles. You have little bits to put in the mouth of baby animals to stop them suckling too much milk from their mothers. You have tons of horse poo all frozen in the ice. You have bodies of horses. And so what you have there is a sense

of local travel. Travel that is not an inconsiderable distance, but certainly isn't national or international. And it's about that everyday travel. And so I think it's tricky, isn't it? I think we have to be able to hold those ideas, both those ideas in our heads, this idea that, yes, for the most part, people are living, you know, on farmsteads and are travelling locally, and they might be travelling for things like national assemblies, if they're in Iceland, for example, or local assemblies, that do take them distances, absolutely do. But I suppose it kind of comes back neatly to what we were talking about

at the beginning, what is a Viking, what is the Viking Age? When you think of that stereotype of the Viking, it's someone, let someone let's not kid ourselves male on their boat setting out across the sea to distant lands yes there is truth in that whether they're doing that for raiding or for settlement or for trading whatever purposes but it's also true that most of the people living in the viking age were not doing that all the time. And even those who would have considered themselves, you know, explorers and traders, they still weren't doing it all the time. Most of them had farmsteads to go back to. So it's complicated. It sure is. But thank you for trying to make it clear for us. And I want to finish off by asking, if you'd been visiting 11th century Britain, and you'd moved from a Viking occupied area to an English occupied

area, a Scottish occupied area, would you have noticed a difference? Looking at the people, looking at how they were farming? I mean, given the enormous differences, for example, if you popped across and gone to look at the Algonquin and the Mohawk living in what is now Canada at the same time, would you have said to yourself, these are actually very similar cultures that have adapted to try and make the best of this shared environment? Yeah, that's a good question. I think, certainly compared to the examples you give,

yes, I think they were similar. I'm just thinking about the different ways that people signify difference and then pick up on other people's differences. There's been some really interesting work looking at female jewellery from Scandinavian or Nordic cultural areas of Britain and this this idea that women were wearing jewellery that they had either brought over from Scandinavia or their you know relatives a couple of generations earlier had brought over or they had made that still signify that sort of Scandinavian heritage. And so there's a difference there. There's also, if we're thinking of physical differences, oh my goodness, the Anglo-Saxons do not seem to

have liked the fact that the Norse settlers were so clean and sexy. There's like, my favourite is, there's an anglicist like alfred of ancient he's writing to someone he calls brother alfred and he's so cross at brother alfred he's saying you you really should not be cutting your hair like a dane you know that's that's it's it's just terrible behavior why are you why you know he called he says with them bare neck and blinded eyes this idea that it's like short at the back and shaggy at the front you know a bit like you see on the Bay of Tapestry as well you know the Normans have that and again there's Norse heritage there to draw on there's also this oh my goodness there's people complaining that essentially the the Norse bathed too frequently and there's later accounts

describing how it's like oh they bathed every single week and as a result the anglo-saxon women were all over them it was just so rude and you're like yeah no no kidding huh and even and saturday is actually was in old norse and is in modern scandinavian languages like variations on like bath day essentially so i think yes there there absolutely will have been visual differences um sort of what's the word olfactory differences perhaps but there's also then picking up on the idea of of Saturday being bath day in the language there's you know linguistic differences and yes it's true that old norse and old english are very similar but i really love actually a york like amazing academic called matt townend and he wrote a book about the linguistic differences you know how much would basically people speaking old

english have understood people speaking old norse and it's an obviously it's an extremely academic and wonderfully researched book, but I once asked him, well, what's your take home message of that? He said, well, basically, they'd have been able to point and grunt and thumbs up and smile and communicate in that way. There's enough similarities,

but also differences. So I don't think it's the same as, you know, when the North Sagas describe sort of people like Leif Erikson kind of heading over from Greenland to the edge of North America and the cultural groups they meet there. There are huge differences and it doesn't, you know, it doesn't always go badly, but it certainly doesn't always go well. And there's a sense of almost sort of supernatural otherness at times because you're dealing with people who are very culturally different and have no shared linguistic tradition. But that's not true of the difference between

sort of the Norse incomers and those who are already living in parts of the British Isles. And my absolute favourite figure who kind of illustrates this is this 9th century trader from Arctic Norway called Oktara, which is the old English version of his name, or Oktar would have been sort of more like the old Norse one. And he comes to Anglo-Saxon England and he visits the court of King Alfred. And of course, King Alfred, we remember, you know, he's King of Wessex, and he's the one that is sort of holding out against the great heathen army, as it were, the invaders led by Norse leaders such as Gudrun, who eventually becomes King of East Anglia and is baptised and takes on an Anglo-Saxon name as he does so. But in that same period, you have people like Octora who are

visiting the court of King Alfred and he's there as a trader. He's not there to fight. And his description of these very far Northern Arctic lands that he comes from and the flora and the fauna and the different peoples who live there and you know there's the social hierarchy and structure this is all recorded it's recorded in old english but what's amazing is that although it's recorded in old english you can almost hear octa's voice coming through and you can hear it coming through and things like the names of some of the animals that don't actually have an old english equivalent. So like, you know, walrus and reindeer. And so they're taking the Old Norse versions of those words, and they're making Old English equivalents that make sense within that text. And so,

again, it's sort of breaking down that there are some really, really horrible things that happen in terms of conflicts between these different cultural groups you know the St. Brice's Day Massacre in the year 1002 is sort of the absolute example of that. That's when King Ithelred orders all his English subjects to just turn on any Dane any Norseman wherever they are and kill them. Yeah and it's we don't act we don't really know what happened we've got we've got his account of basically the church of saint fred swedes in oxford being sort of rebuilt because basically it was it says you know i king athelred you know i i i'm making this rebuilt because the scandinavians fled into it and it was burnt down with them inside. And we have a possible, possible mass burial that was found all male, all mostly young males in St. John's College in Oxford that is of a similar period.

And there's all males and they seem to have been killed when they were running away. There's lots of wounds on their backs and kind of defensive wounds. It's absolutely horrible. And there's a suggestion that that is linked to the St. Brice's Day massacre but we don't really know what happened there how it played out we haven't found other any other archaeological evidence really that there's another mass grave on Ridgeway Hill but we can't pinpoint it accurately enough to say oh yes this also is linked to that period of great sort of ethnic tension, essentially.

But it's worth saying if we're talking just thinking about this kind of cultural mix and thinking of churches as well. One of the most fascinating examples, when we're talking about the end of Viking Age Britain, that's actually a really, really tricky question. We can't see a direct date. One date that's often used is 1066, because it's in 1066 that King Harald Hardrada, who's King of Norway, comes to England to try and take the English throne and is killed by Harold Godwinson in the Battle of Stamford Bridge just outside York. And so that's used as a date, although it should absolutely be said that, you know, Battle of Largs in Scotland, you know, we're talking 1263. If we're talking about the Northern Isles, that doesn't pass from the Norwegian crown to the

Scottish crown until, you know, 1472. There's a form of Old Norse, that language being spoken in the Northern Isles until maybe 1800. So tricky, tricky question. But there's an amazing church in the Vale of Pickering in Yorkshire, and it's an Anglo-Saxon church, but there's a sundial. And this sundial has an inscription on it. And it's put up. It says, I, Orm, son of Gamal. And that's significant already because Orm is an old Norse name. Gamal is an old, it means like snake and Gamal means old. I basically had this church, it's a Christian church,

obviously rebuilt when it was all broken down. And he says, and it was in the days of Oktosti the Earl, who's the brother of Harold Godwinson. And because of that specific reference, we know that's in the last decades before 1066. And so again, there we have someone almost certainly of Norse heritage, but he's writing in Old English and it's an Anglo-Saxon Christian context there but he has rebuilt this church and again there's always nuances and there's always sort of local complications national complexity we have to be very careful not to make big pronouncements on you know what it was like to live in viking age britain because i mean it's

it's not unlike today even right i mean it's a it's a huge geographical area and we're talking about a big chronological period as well so you know you ask what it's like to live in anglo-saxon england or you know viking age britain if you're living as a monk on lindisfarne in 793. Well, that's very, very different if you're living in York in, say, 915 or, do you know what I mean? It's just that there are so many, or you're living on Orkney in, well, quite frankly, 1400 or something. Quite right. Well, thank you for coming and helping us try and make sense of it all. Really appreciate that. What is your wonderful book called? It is called Embers of the Hands, Hidden Histories of the Viking Age. And it's about, you know,

the everyday humans of the Viking world and the little bits and pieces of them that, you know, essentially slipped between the floorboards, between the cracks of history and, you know, survived down to the present day. And yeah, it's out September the 19th. Thank you very much for coming on you