Dan Snow's History Hit - Hunting the Viking Great Heathen Army

Episode Date: June 25, 2021

In 865 AD Britain was invaded by the Great Heathen Army an alliance of Scandanavian warriors determined to conquer the kingdoms of East Anglia, Northumbria, Merica and Wessex. Over the next few years, all of those kingdoms would fall to the Viking forces with the exception of Wessex. In May 878 Alfred the Great defeated the Vikings at the Battle of Edington. However, despite this defeat, the Vikings did not leave, but rather reached an agreement with Alfred allowing them to retain control of much of the north and east of England in what would become known as the Danelaw. Professor Cat Jarman joins Dan as they travel across the country exploring the key sites of the Viking conquest and looking to discover what may still be to discover about the Great Heathen Army.

Hi everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History. How are you all doing? Good to have you listen to this episode because it's a very special episode. I get back on the road. I'm getting out there today. I'm breaking my curfew. I'm heading out with Kat Jarman, Dr. Kat Jarman. We're going looking for some Vikings. And I mean literally looking for some Vikings. We're visiting sites across England where the Great Heathen Army, Vikings, Northmen, arrived in the mid to late 860s, toppled one English kingdom after another. East Anglia, Mercia, Northumbria, and then pushed into Wessex, where they met Alfred in battle. In this episode, you'll hear us travelling to a number of

sites that Kat has identified as potential sites linked to that great heathen army. She knows more about the archaeology of the great heathen army than nearly anyone else on planet Earth. So I had the best possible guide as I crisscrossed early English kingdoms looking for traces of this huge conquering army. We began in East Anglia looking at some new sites that have yet been identified. We visited the site where King of East Anglia may now be buried under a public park. More of that coming later. And we also went to the spot in Wessex where Alfred may, may we think, have defeated the Northmen, bringing to an end their campaign of conquest. This is a podcast, but you also film this journey.

We have a TV version of this show, which is available at historyhit.tv. It's the world's best history channel. People have asked for more Viking material. Well, here is some Viking material with Dr. Kat Jum, the best best in the business so you can listen to this pod and if you like what you've heard there's plenty more content where that came from go and watch our new show hunting the great heathen army over at history.tv sign up you will not regret it unlike various rulers in ninth century england who thought they could maybe harness the vikings and use them to their own ends which they couldn't't. I should say, and it's my fault, when you're recording on location, it's a bit rough out there. You're at the coalface. You're not sitting in the nice

soundproof studio like I am now. And you'll hear there's a few clicks. There's a bit of interference. We were getting some interference. I think it was from the radio mics from the programs we were also filming for History TV whilst we were doing it. We were multitasking. So you will hear a few little bits of audio interference on this pod. I'm very sorry for that, but I didn't want you to think it was your headphones. Your headphones are fine. They're good headphones. It was wise to spend all that money on them. The clicks are Dan's fault. But in the meantime, here's the podcast with me and Dr. Kat Jarman. Enjoy. But in the meantime, here's the podcast with me and Dr. Cat Jarman. Enjoy. Okay, Cat Jarman, the adventure begins here. We're in the east of England, East Anglia,

Thetford in particular, which by the way, may be where Boudicca and the Iceni tribe came from. So that's exciting. Why does the journey in pursuit of the Great Heathen Army start here? This is really one of the earliest places where we've got the documentary evidence. We know that the Great Army was here. And there might possibly also be some archaeology. We know that the Great Army was overwintering in Thetford between 869 and 870. And it's very possible that this is also where they came that winter in 865 when they first arrived in england they must have landed in kingsland surely just up here it's got a big sign like a neon sign to scandinavian saying please land here anyway so thetford is really significant we are now sitting

in amongst these vast ramparts of an iron age fortification some of the most magnificent i've seen in the uk actually in the middle is a giant norman mot so various other generations of defense builders thought that this place was important makes sense the vikings might choose this place as well absolutely and i think we need to think about what would the vikings do basically what would a great army do and they would be looking for sites that have some suitable fortifications already so they don't have to make them themselves so something like this would make a lot of sense you've got the river running down the middle and you've already got these huge big mounds all around us here other places you might not need physical defences and we know from the records that they actually made peace with the East Anglians so perhaps they didn't

need them at all but we just don't know and what's exciting about Thetford is it's not just the source of the Vikings came here but there's archaeological evidence as well yeah so while we don't have any certain evidence of the great army there are various bits and pieces of Viking archaeology so during development work and building work in some of these housing estates around here archaeologists have found things like a skeleton buried with a weapon so a Viking age weapon that dates probably to the 9th century which is perfect for what we want and other pieces of weaponry as well even an arrowhead that actually matches a scandinavian type perfectly so the archaeological evidence and the evidence from the sources both suggest that this is the kind of starting point i guess this is over winter camp where the great heathen army began that kind of conquest of central and into southern england

yeah absolutely and i think if that 865 that first known evidence of vikings in east anglia if that's also here at thatford then this is definitely the first time we've got proof of it very exciting from here they make this kind of peace with king edmund of east anglia and they head into this kind of pieced with King Edmund of East Anglia, and they head into the heart of England. And how does that go? Yeah, so for the next few years, we know that going north, they'd go to places like York, for example.

They essentially just work their way through the country, going back to Mercia, and then eventually coming back here, back south again in 869. Poor old King Edmund. He's probably hoping they wouldn't be back. I think so. I think he, I think

he was thinking, good riddance, let's drive them north. Right, where are we going next? So one of the things that's quite interesting here is that we've got these Viking camps, but we know that the Great Army, this is a new step up, this is a new phase of the Viking development really, because this is when it starts to lead to settlement. And actually, interestingly, around here there is some evidence that suggests that perhaps these weren't just temporary viking camps perhaps this is a starting point of people actually leaving something much more permanent behind in the landscape let's go and check it out right you brought me into the mighty forest of thetford what are we looking for here so now we're having a little look at some mounds I've been really interested in discovering.

So we're going mound hunting. And you see these mounds tumuli marked on Ordnance Survey maps. I've always thought Bronze Age, Iron Age, but you suspect lots of them are actually much, much more recent. They're Viking. Well, that's the big question because most of them have never been investigated. And just by looking at them, we can't tell. So they could date to any of those periods. But actually, what we do know is that the Scandinavians back home,

in their Viking homeland, the burial mound was one of the most common burial forms. And there are a few in this country as well. It's very near to here, a site called Santon Downham. A grave, or possibly a double grave, Scandinavian grave, was actually found that dates to the late 9th or early 10th century so knowing that we've got these viking graves nearby and then we also have lots of mounds i think we need to look at that again and maybe we've actually got those

early viking settlers so there's a lot of bracken here but there's a sort of clearing there with different kind of vegetation that could definitely be a man it's not like a towering mound but there's definitely something there isn't it yeah definitely and this is one of the places where it's marked with several tumuli on the map as well and those have not been investigated so we have no idea what they are but i think that one and maybe if you look over here there's a sort of select raced area but obviously being in a forest and trees planted all around it's almost impossible to spot them but if they are ninth century mounds this could be evidence for well either the great heathen army or their descendants who came here as settlers

absolutely and i think that's what we need to try to understand because we really want to find that link between those early raiders that we know from the historical records and those early scandinavian settlers because over time tens of thousands possibly even more, Scandinavians came to settle in this country but actually we've got so little physical evidence of those people we don't really know who or where they settled. I love the fact that you think they might be hiding in plain sight, all these mounds and tumuli that we see every day on our hikes, they could have Viking remains in them.

I think we just need to go back and look at them, we need to just reassess and not just assume because that's what people assumed 50 years ago. Maybe they are. Maybe we have got Scandinavians buried all the way around us. Right Kat, we've come to Bury St Edmunds. Beautiful ruined monastery in Suffolk. It is a freezing cold frosty morning here. The blossoms are out. It's an April morning and it should be a lot warmer than it is. Why have you brought me here? I've brought you here because this is a really important part of the Great Army story and it relates to that king we heard about at the beginning, Edmund. So Edmund, he's the guy we learned about in Thetford. He makes the deal with the Great

Heathen Army, sends them off. Good luck lads, have fun storming the castle, as they say in Princess Pride. Go and raid the Northumbrians and the Mercians. Annoyingly, they come back victorious. You can't have been expecting that. Yeah, so they come back in 869 and we don't really know what the terms of the agreement were. We just know that they made peace. But then they come back and all goes terribly wrong for Edmund so Edmund sort of abandons his treaty with them and opts for trying to eject them violently does he it seems to be something along those lines so it ends up with a battle and Edmund loses and very soon after he loses his life as well it's the old being chained to the tree and then

everyone shooting arrows into him isn't it? That's right so he's actually he's become far more famous for his death than his life and that's especially because allegedly he refused to essentially submit to these pagans he was a good Christian king and he refused to submit to them and that was not taken nicely by the Viking army. Presumably there are a few miracles that were found, that occurred, obviously, and then he goes from being dead King Edmund to Saint Edmund. Yeah, so he becomes the martyr king, the martyr saint, and very soon this whole big cult grows up around him

and he eventually becomes one of the earliest patron saints of England, actually. And East Anglia, you should say say therefore conquered formally at that point by the Great Heathen Army. Yeah so at this point then this comes under Viking rule under Scandinavian rule. The cult goes from strength to strength and then the Normans build this gigantic abbey that we're sitting in the skeletal ruins of now. The abbey is dissolved in the 16th century by Henry VIII. What happened to King Edmund the saint so his bones were probably here his relics probably here until that time we don't actually know for certain what happened to them but they were certainly lost and nobody knew where they

were until quite recently quite a few theories around one of them had him in France actually but then quite recently a new theory arose because there's a document that suggests that he was actually taken in the 16th century. His bones were put in an iron coffin and buried in the monks' cemetery just at the end of the abbey here. I did not know that. So we've got a new king in the car park situation. Pretty much, because there was actually a tennis court until last year right on top of that cemetery. Wow. That's exciting exciting are there any plans i'm asking for a friend with a history uh audio and tv business there is i hope that we might be able to to find out because now the tennis court's gone there's a nice clean flat lawn there something like a big iron coffin would show up really nicely on geophysics so maybe we could do radar or magnetometry or something like that

to give us an idea if there's actually something there. I mean, obviously, the dream would be to try and excavate and try to discover if that really was the case. Oh my goodness, that would be so cool. Imagine discovering a body from the 9th century with loads of arrow wounds in him. That would be amazing, wouldn't it? It would.

I'm not entirely sure we'd be quite that lucky, but we could hope. You scholars. Well, I'm glad St Edmund is still buried in Bury St Edmunds. So, OK, so we've done Norfolk, we've done Suffolk, we've done East Anglia. Where did the Great Heathen Army head next and where are we heading next? So now we're going to go north

because now we are especially interested in what happens in Mercia and that's where we've got some really amazing archaeological site and probably some of the best evidence for the Great Army's presence. OK, Kat, you've taken me down to the crypt of this... How do we pronounce it? St Wiston's? St Wiston's Church, yes. OK, St Wiston's Church.

People don't know about this place, but this is one of the most important sites of architectural history in the whole of the UK, because this crypt that we're now in is high Anglo-Saxon. Absolutely. So this bit underneath the church dates back probably 7th or early 8th century. That's extremely rare. It's really rare, and you can still see some of the paintwork on these pillars. What are these twisty... I remember coming in before and being told the twisty bits around the columns are very important.

That's like classic Mercian 8th century or something, right? Possibly, yeah. And it may well have been inspired by, I think it's St Peter's Church as one of the theories. How big is this crypt? It's about four or five metres squared. And it is a very complete crypt of 15th, 14th century church above us, which you referred to earlier as modern. Yeah, I think pretty much everything after the 11th

century is modern though isn't it no i don't think that cat i don't think that at all i think that you're the only person in the world who thinks that and i think you need to seek help um but talk to me about this crypt what would have been down here what would you have seen if we'd been down here before the great heathen army arrived in the 9th century this i mean it feels special when we're here today but i think if you were here in the 8th century, it would have been absolutely magical. We can see the traces of the paint, the red colour. It would have been really, really vivid, bright colours. It would be full of glittering jewels.

There'd be gold, there'd be garnets in red, and they would all be lit up by candles, and you would see that blinking. And in these little alcoves, you'd have the bodies, probably some kind of a coffin the remains of some of the most important kings of the merchant kingdom and mercy at various times during the early medieval period the dominant anglo-saxon kingdom in britain and this was one of their main royal and religious sites i mean this couldn't have been more important in the anglo-saxon

world absolutely this was kind of to jewel in the crown, as it were, of that Mercian kingdom. So when the Vikings arrived, they knew exactly what they're doing and they came here for some very, very good reasons. Yeah, unfortunately the Mercians should not have put this essential royal and political religious site on the banks of a gigantic river, the Trent, which joins neatly to the North Sea. Yeah, that made it a little bit easier, I think, for an invading army that was used to moving by boat. And there's no more surviving architecture that links us to that Mercian monastic establishment, but there's a lot underground, right? Absolutely. So if you walk around the village now today, you can't really see any of it.

But over the past 40 years, we've uncovered some really quite remarkable evidence, both for the Merton Kingdom and also for the Viking attack. So let's go out in the graveyard. You can talk me through what you found. Let's do that. You're listening to Dan's Notes History. I'm talking about the Great Heathen Army. More after this. Land a Viking longship on island shores. scramble over the dunes of ancient egypt and avoid the poisoner's cup in renaissance florence each week on echoes of history we uncover the epic stories that inspire assassin's creed we're stepping into feudal japan in our special series chasing shadows

where samurai warlords and shinobi spies teach us the tactics and skills needed not only to survive, but to conquer. Whether you're preparing for Assassin's Creed Shadows or fascinated by history and great stories, listen to Echoes of History, a Ubisoft podcast brought to you by History Hits. There are new episodes every week. Okay, we've come outside now. We're standing right up against the wall of the Anglo-Saxon crypt, the Mercian crypt, church built much later, as we've discussed,

and this little 10-metre square patch of grass we're now standing on, this is really significant. It is. This held some of, I think, the most important Viking graves in the whole country, right where we're standing now. So the Vikings came here, captured this kind of essential mercy and sight, and then started burying their own dead right into the ground. Yeah, so at some point, possibly during that time of the winter camp, 873 to 874, or just after,

several individuals clearly died in battle, and they were buried right here. So the Vikings are making a very significant statement by putting their dead, possibly their high-status dead, right in this location. One of the dead has appeared on this podcast before. He's that famous. For those who haven't heard about him, tell me about the Viking warrior, the Repton warrior.

Yes, so Grave 511 was a sort of archetypal Viking warrior, really. He's sort of what you're looking for if you want to find one. He was found buried with lots of objects around him he had a Thor's hammer around his neck he was in a grave that had a stone setting with smashed up Anglo-Saxon crosses and he had a viking sword along his side but what's even more remarkable is that we can't always know if somebody was a real warrior just because they were buried with weapons, but this man had several very, very severe injuries to his body.

And I remember you told me before, I mean, his body was virtually dismembered. Yes, pretty much literally dismembered. He actually had a very severe cut. The most famous of them all is a severe cut through his left femur, through his left thigh bone, going down diagonally at an an angle and if you look at how that cut is made it's almost certain that he would have lost probably his penis and part of his testicles and what's even more striking is that those who buried him seem to have want to counteract that fact by placing a boar's tusk in between his legs tusk of a mighty wild boar put it as a kind of prosthetic and he can enjoy the afterlife well that's the interpretation that we've got yes i mean it's hard to imagine why else you would do that so the viking army overwintering here they've smashed up this

vitally important mercy in sight they're burying their high status warriors right next to the monastery walls what are they trying to tell the world? This is very much a political statement. This isn't a sort of smash and grab and get away quickly. This is a conquest of the merchant territory. This is a message saying, this is ours now. This is no longer the merchants. This is now in Scandinavian power. Okay, we've headed east from the church, or so meters we're in the vicarage

garden and this is the one of the most exciting places in the whole of britain tell me what happened in here in the 1980s cat in the 1980s this was excavated for the first time and right where we're standing now there was a mound that mound housed what's probably the most extraordinary viking site outside of scandinavia i think i mean that's a big statement what was in the mound yeah it probably is but then i have been spending the last decade studying it i thought you're about to say i've been spending the last two hours with you and you speak in hyperbole all the time so thank you it's okay so you've been studying it so you are obsessed by it i am yeah completely it's taken over my life, unfortunately. But what they found, because it was slightly before my time,

was a mass grave or a mass burial with the remains of almost 300 individuals all cramped into one single room of the ruins of an 8th century building. So one of these monastic buildings, the Vikings turned it into an ossuary? Basically, yeah. So this was part of the monastery originally. It was probably a lovely mausoleum or some other church perhaps or chapel and at some point during the viking attack it was converted so one room was completely swept clean they put a layer of red sand down the bottom and then they carried bones from presumably other sites these were body skeletons that had already been buried

somewhere else, taken up out of the ground and moved and packed into this space. And do we have any evidence from other sites like why the Vikings did that? No, this is really unique. We don't have it anywhere else across Scandinavia or anywhere else in the Viking world. But we do know from other sites that we have evidence of bones being curated bones being moved around buried sometimes we have bones of people we think have died elsewhere they're christian burials so they needed a proper christian burial ground so they're moved into churches but nothing like this anywhere else we're staying in this garden there are other humps and bumps around i'm looking at them now are you just itching to get all this grass up and get under the soil here i would love to

investigate this entire huge big garden yes absolutely there's lots of different things we know there are more burials we've started doing some geophysics some radar surveys which showing up some quite suspicious blobs that may well hide something quite extraordinary okay so this is a really dynamic viking site next 20 years we can expect really interesting things come out here i think so i think the story of repton has not been fully told yet all right cat you brought me here we're at three four five miles uh east of repton now we're like a high piece of ground and we're looking down at what was once the mighty trench there's the trent valley but now Trent's like a little tiny canal in the middle of it it would have been

huge back then and so what's the point of being up here what we're doing here I've taken you here because this even though it looks like very little is actually a really significant new discovery this is a second Viking camp from that great army dating probably to exactly the same year as Repton. So why were they at Repton and also here? That's one of the questions we haven't quite been able to work out, but for quite a long time people have been questioning whether Repton was really it, if that was the only camp, if it was big enough. It didn't seem to match some of the other sites like Torxie, for example, which is a big open site, huge open site, with lots of artefacts that we didn't have that many of in Repton. But then a few years ago,

I got into contact with a metal detectorist who'd actually found a lot of artefacts around here that we now know are essentially the signature of the Great Army. Things like gaming pieces, Durham coins, even a Thor's hammer, all evidence that pointed to quite a significant Viking army. Metal Tector is listening to this podcast. Guys, report your finds. This person found where the Great Heathen Army camped. I mean, that's a big discovery. It really, really is.

And so we are absolutely reliant on Metal Tectorist reporting these finds to the Portable Antiquities Scheme because it makes a huge difference to our understanding and in fact it's completely revolutionized our understanding of the vikings in england which is quite staggering because it makes sense that you'd want to have a camp here it's a nice bit of downland overlooking the trent valley you got the obviously you're a big highway to the east and into the north sea you're on high ground it's wide open it's great space to camp it makes total sense there would have been a kind of festival vibe up here pretty much yeah if somebody has compared these sites to a festival you'd have tents you'd have people selling goods

you'd have people walking around being quite bored other people making stuff doing interesting things so i think that is a really good analogy it's weird because there is just a random church with no settlement near it, which we're standing in front of now, otherwise surrounded by fields and woods. So did the Vikings start what could have been a more lasting settlement? Yeah, so we actually think that there was a settlement here at the time. And interestingly, the name of the place is Fulmark, which we also know from the Doomsday Book and there's a recorded village here.

So probably a lost medieval village but Fawnmark in itself is really interesting because it comes from a Scandinavian name Fawnmark which means the old fortification. Nice guys you're listening to this so you can't see the smile that Kat has got on her face that's like Sherlock Holmes delivering the old coup de grace at the end of the story. That's amazing isn't it? It really is because that shows that there was a Scandinavian presence here so we actually excavated here a couple of years ago and we found some evidence of an early medieval 9th century building and we think there may well have been an estate, an Anglo-Saxon estate here. So we've got some clues in the name of this site and the fact that there was a settlement here but the other thing that's really extraordinary is that just a few hundred metres away from us is a site called Heath Wood,

which is actually the only known large-scale Scandinavian cremation cemetery. There's a whole barrow cemetery just up the road here with 59 burial mounds that have been excavated and that we know have Scandinavian grave goods and bodies in them. Here we are we're in the heart of the Midlands on the banks of the Trent and actually this is like a major Scandinavian site in England. Absolutely it's probably one of the the most significant areas understanding especially that 9th century present that great army those raiders that turn into settlers, just turning the whole Viking story to the next chapter. This is one corner of England that will be forever Scandinavian.

Absolutely. Okay so Kat, you're dragging me through the undergrowth here. We've come to a hilltop, now covered in trees, a smidgen to the east of that last spot why are we here what we're looking for we are about to go mound hunting in a forest we are looking for the only scandinavian viking age cremation century in the whole country that we know about so that's extraordinary right so there's a okay hang on okay we're coming to the clearing is this it is this it here we go that's extraordinary. Right, so there's a... OK, hang on. OK, we're coming to the clearing. Is this it? Is this it? Here we go. That's amazing. So we're in a clearing. Hold on a second. It looks like a First World War battlefield. You've got these kind of, well, I don't know, metre and a half high mounds.

You've got loads of them. So what's going on here? So each of these mounds that you can see around us here, each of those is a Scandinavian barrow. So this is a burial, each of them, from the Viking Age. So this is an absolutely exceptional place. It's got at least 59 of them. Has this been excavated? Yeah, so this was excavated a while back, actually.

And those that have been excavated, they found Scandinavian grave goods. They found bodies, cremations with things like weapons, swords, even some female grave goods as well. So we know that this had both men and women in it. Because this is the highest point, looking down over the River Trent. They were cremated up here. This would have been an incredibly, like a dramatic setting. Absolutely. And I think the landscape placement is key here for so many reasons. One of those is that drama that you get around the Viking Age funeral,

but also the fact that you could see these mounds from all around. You can't now because they're hidden by the very recent woodlands, but in the Viking Age, if you were sailing down the River Trent, there was no way you wouldn't see this right on the top of the hill here. By very recent woodlands, you mean it's actually about 200 or 300 years old, these woods? Yes, even recent by your standards, surely, Dan. So is this normal in the Viking world to get these kind of hilltop mound burials? Yeah, so if you look at Scandinavia, burial in the Viking Age varies quite a lot,

but the mound is very, very common as a form of burial. So you get clusters of them outside settlements and towns. So places like Birka or Kaupang in Norway, for example, they all have these mound cemeteries. So this is something that the Vikings or the Scandinavians would be used to back home. This really is just another example of just a classic piece of Scandinavian culture and identity, just in the heart of England. Absolutely. And this is one of the few that have been actually investigated. And the interesting thing is that we do have a lot of other mounds like this

all the way around the country. Most of them are assumed to date to different periods, but actually a lot of them we just don't know. So there could be more Scandinavian or Viking Age burial mounds. I'd never even heard of this place existing, and it's an amazing site i love it okay cat we've climbed to the top of the kind of escarpment overlooking the town of eddington we're on the edge of salisbury plain it's one of the most dramatic landscapes in southern england

why brought me here this is almost the end of that story that we've been trying to tell this is hopefully or probably the site of the battle of eddington the sort of decisive battle between the vikings and alfred the great it's a blustery day up here we don't know exactly what the battle was but this could be the kind of culmination of this story following the great heathen army they attack chippenham don't they kind of chase alfred out of one of his principal towns he then goes and does his famous hiding out in somerset yeah that's right so for several months he hides there until he starts planning his little counter-attack to get his kingdom back. So he gathers all the men, all the people he can, in Somerset and Wiltshire and Hampshire, and then they start moving back up.

And they end up at this site called Ethendun, which we think is Eddington in Wiltshire, and they have this giant battle. And that doesn't end very well for the Vikings, and Alfred defeats them. We could be standing on, it's so tantalising, we could be standing on one of the great decisive battlefields in British history. After this Alfred saves Wessex but there's a kind of formal division of England isn't there? Yeah pretty much

so what happens is that Alfred chases the Vikings back to their fortification probably Chippenham and he essentially besieges them and they are stuck in there for 14 days and eventually they admit defeat. And what happens then is really interesting because they actually agree to leave the kingdom, they agree to leave Wessex, and they agree to swear oath to him, give him hostages, and Guthrum and 30 of his best men agreed to be baptised and become Christian. So that happens a few weeks later and eventually they leave Wessek or they leave Chippenham at least. And then at some point after this we have a surviving treaty which is called the Treaty between Alfred and Guthrum. We don't quite know when it's signed, it's sometime soon after that,

quite know when it's signed it's sometime soon after that but that actually gives different sort of rights to territories under alfred's rule and territories under gusdrum's rule which is probably the eastern part places like east anglia where we were earlier and it even gives a boundary line between them and later on this sort of eastern part under the scandinavian rule becomes known as the dane law so there you go the Danelaw. So there you go the Great Eastern Army has not succeeded in conquering the whole of England but it has tightened its grip now affirmed by treaty on large chunks of the eastern side of the island. Yeah that's right and that's really where we then start to see those settled populations so if you look at things like place names they're really spread,

Scandinavian place numbers spread all the way in that area that becomes the Danelaw. Well Kat you have been the best guide imaginable as we've rampaged across England on the footsteps of the Great Heathen Army. We've ended up here perhaps on the kind of an army we've ended up here perhaps on the kind of titanic battlefield of ethel dune thank you very much indeed let's do another viking road trip soon absolutely there's lots more to find thank you for making this episode the end of this episode of Dan Snow's History. I really appreciate you listening to this podcast. I love doing these podcasts. It's a highlight of my career.

It's the best thing I've ever done. And your support, your listening is obviously crucial for that project. If you did feel like doing me a favour, if you go to wherever you get your podcasts and give it a review, give it a rating, obviously a good one, ideally, then that would be fantastic. And feel free to share it. We obviously depend on listeners, depend on more and more people finding out about it, depend on good reviews to keep the listeners coming in. Really appreciate it. Thank you. you