Gone Medieval - Raiding & Trading in Viking Britain

Episode Date: March 29, 2022

Several large kingdoms were formed in the Viking-Age period, the best known settlements being in Ireland and York. Dublin became a thriving hub for western Viking expansion and trade. New discoveries of silver and other items show that traded commodities traveled vast distances, but how interconnected were these towns? And how much were they a part of a greater Viking network? In this episode, Dr. Cat Jarman is joined by Dr. Tom Horne, author of 'A Viking Market Kingdom in Ireland and Britain'.For more Gone Medieval content, subscribe to our Gone Medieval newsletter here. If you'd like to learn even more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad free podcasts and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe today!To download, go to Android or Apple store. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. Hello and welcome to Gone Medieval. I'm Dr. Kat Jarman. Trading, trading and settlement are all key parts of the Viking phenomenon. And it's not a coincidence that several large kingdoms were formed in precisely this period. We also are starting to know more about how silver and other traded commodities make journey vast distances from east to north to west. How interconnected were these different phenomena? And what about big towns turning into cities later on, like Dublin and York?

How much were these part of that big Viking network? A new book is now investigating exactly this. And today I'm talking to the author of that book, Dr. Tom Horn. Tom got his PhD in Viking Age archaeology from the University of Glasgow and his book is called A Viking Market Kingdom in Ireland and Britain, trade networks and the importation of a southern Scandinavian silver bullion economy. So Tom, thanks so much for joining us on Gone Medieval Today. Thank you so much for having me, yeah.

Hopefully we're going to have some good fun talking about Vikings and trade and money and vast distances and all the really cool things. Exactly. And I just think for full disclosure here, we should probably say that you have been part of my teams working with me at lots of different Viking Age sites, including the Viking Camp in Repetin and also our Roos sites in Ukraine. So we've worked on a lot of these sites together over the past few years. So, yeah, basically what Kat is saying that she knows, I talk a lot of rubbish and can talk for a long time. So she thought you'll be perfect for a podcast. No, this is going to be brilliant because I think what you've done and what your book does, it fills in a really crucial part of the picture, as we'll see later on, because it deals with trade, especially, and the significance that trade had, and especially the sort of sophisticated interconnectionness that we see across the Viking world, which is something I think we quite easily tend to ignore. And one thing I wanted to ask you, first of all, was actually in the sort of general public's perceptions of the Vikings, so not for the sort of specialists, but in terms of the general perspective, do you think that people understand, how much of an integral part those trading networks really were in the Viking Age. Or do you think it's seen much more as a sort of simple,

we'll do a bit of trading along the side. What's sort of your sense of that? I think people are getting a much better idea, you know, over the last generation or so when they've been these big urban excavations, we'll be talking about Dublin and York, Yorvik people probably remember from maybe their youth, these major excavations of what we now know is major trade. For that past generation, I think there's been an understanding that trades and market sites were important.

But the problem I think we have is certainly in Ireland and Bristol is that very heavily built up cities, and you only rarely get a chance to do large amounts of new archaeology. So I think if you'd ask me this question in the sort of 70s, 80s, 90s, I think people probably would have gone, oh yeah, I remember the major excavations in Dublin and York or Yorvik as it was to the Vikings. Kings, that maybe over recent years we've been thinking more about the amazing fines that we've been getting with the Great Army sites, the Viking Army we'll be talking about later, and the hordes of silver in the main and single fines. So I think maybe in the public perception, it's probably actually gone back a little bit, and we are thinking again more about treasure hordes,

and we're thinking about raiding, and we're thinking less about the trading aspect of it. But hopefully what you're working in my work, we're both of us standing on the shoulders of giants here. There's many great archaeologists working around us and before us that we're learning from. But hopefully we're able to do, and I always say, actually, you know, what is really driving these events and driving these armies is a desire to keep open trade routes and start new trade routes. Because that's really the aim of the game. You want the most efficient way to get as much money as possible. And if that means owning a couple of large markets, then you'd rather do that than risk dying in battle. So to recap, I think people have been aware.

But I think more recently with the amazing finds, such as things like the Galloway Horde in southwest Scotland that people are thinking about treasure. But now the important thing with the Galloway Horde is the way it's been risten up very recently by Goldberg and Davis gives you a brilliant idea of the massive trade networks that are involved in getting these shiny amazing things. to what is a rural part of southwest Scotland. So, yeah, I think we're on the cusp of a second sort of great age and a sort of general popular understanding of what these trade networks are. Yeah, and that's the key, isn't it? It's the fact that these are networks and they are quite complex. This isn't just random you turn up with things to trade.

But it's much more than that, as we'll get into the dynamics of that a bit later on. But it's also relating really to kingdom formation because we're talking about a time where all these countries, are being shaped, they're being formed, they're being developed. And that trade really is a really, really key part of that, you know, how that is controlled and so on. So how did you get into this? How did you realise that there was a bit of a gap here that needed to be studied?

Well, initially it goes back to working with great people like Colleen Beatty and when asking what I'd interested in just think dirums. And dirhams are these amazing silver coins, very high-quality silver, the beautiful inscriptions of Quranic Kufiq script on them. And they were being produced in what we think of as Central Asia, so we call parts of the Middle East, places like Baghdad, Samarkand up into places like Uzbekistan. And they were being recovered over the last century or so,

in huge numbers in the Baltic and associated with Scandinavian sites in the Baltic. And this at the very start of the Viking Age. And I just thought that was very cool. I initially was interested in what the Vikings might be doing in Al-Andalus, you know, the Islamic part of Spain in the 8th and 9th century. But we're at early stages of the research there. So, you know, people like Killeenbitt were saying to me, well, maybe concentrate more on what's

happening in the Baltics. I was looking at the Baltic. And then, of course, you start to read around it. And then you realize that these silver coins are also being found in Britain and Ireland. And that was just utterly fascinating to me. It was just distances involved, you know, something coming from Baghdad and ending up on an island of Scotland, for example, Sky, where we have these dirham coins. And you get them also in England associated often with the Great Army, which we'll talk about later. So I was just trying to think, what were the mechanisms behind this?

You know, these silver coins, they're in huge numbers in the Baltic. They're being traded for something, which we'll probably discuss later. But then they're also ending up in Bristol and Ireland. And I was thinking, what are those connections that are connecting essentially Central Asia, via the Baltic, via Scandinavia, and into Bristol and Ireland? Because I thought there must be something really big happening for these coins to be finding their way through into Bristol, Ireland from the mid-9th century. So that was really what got me interesting.

It was basically the how and the why of these beautiful silver coins where we were ending up in Britain and Ireland. Yeah, because there needs to be a point. There needs to be a reason really, then sort of a market for them, which is exactly what you've been looking at. So I wanted to get back in the moment to Scotland and Ireland especially. But I think this, for those of our listeners who are maybe not quite so familiar with it, maybe a sort of quick recap once happening. So we're in the 9th century here. So we are sort of well into the Viking Age, who's been going for almost, well, a century really, by now.

And we'll also do a little plug for some of our other episodes. We've got quite a few on these. There are some on the Great Army afterwards. If you want to hear more, you can go back and look. look over the previous Conradieval episodes to fill in some of the gaps here. But can you just give a sort of brief summary to 9th century, this great army that we talk about all the time, and England, the Vikings, what's going on in England and also wider than that in sort of Scotland and Ireland at the time?

I know there's a bit of an unfair question to ask you to summarise briefly, but if you could do that. So what everyone will know is the raids, the classic raids that are starting in the 70s, 780s, but you seem to have a second phase that starts in a. about 840s in Ireland and the mid-860s in England and also up into Scotland. And that is when you get a different breed of Vikings. And these Vikings seem more intent on staying and they seem more intent on setting up what will become major markets.

So what's happening there, if we were to Dublin in 840s, we think it's probably what we'd consider Norwegians that set this up in. around about 840, but then something happens in the early 850s. And there's a lot of debate about this. And if you want to read growing people on it, Claire Downham is amazing on this sort of thing. And Dirk Steinforth is also excellent in for recent summaries of it. What we think is happening there is there's just a regime change. And what the argument is whether that's Norwegians or Southern Scandinavians for Danes come up on top. I'll talk about it later, but I think it's Southern Scandinavians.

But essentially from the 840s, you've got strong, permanent Scandinavian presence in Dublin. Now, 15 years later, you get the Great Army. And the Great Army seem to be a collection of mainly Southern Scandinavian. When I talk about Southern Scandinavia, I'll be talking about essentially Denmark,

but also large parts of Southern Norway and Southern Sweden as well. But the groups that eventually form the Great Army are probably operating in the local. countries, Belgium, Netherlands, northern what is now France, and they're operating there in the decades before that. There are some excellent books on that as well, Christian Cummins' book on that particularly. But what happens in 8465-66, they come over en masse into England, and this is known in the Anglo-Saxon

written sources as the Great Heathen Army. and after that point they spend about 10, 15 years campaigning all over England, famously against Alfred and his heirs, and then also into southern and central Scotland. And they take York in about 866-867, and they've got a second, I think a second, because I think their relations, or actually people in that group have taken over Dublin in the 850s. And by the end of the 860s, these Southern Scandinavian elements are also in charge at Yorvik. So what you've got by, let's say, 870, I think you've got these essentially southern Scandinavian elements. Actually, I think you've got probably same family members that are in charge in Dublin and in charge in Yorvik. And by the end of the 870s, 880s, that's when this is active comparing sort of more stops. And we get more established what we'll talk about, this potential list market.

kingdom, this kingdom that seems to connect Dublin and Yorvik and then connects on into Scandinavia and the Baltic and the dirums and all the trade networks that we were discussing earlier. Okay, so we're seeing markets, we're seeing market towns, we're seeing these networks and things that you refer to as nodal points, these trading settlements and things that are sort of where you can tap into that whole network. Can you say a bit more about that idea, this sort of network theory and how that's come about and how we're we sort of have understood have those work, sort of more mechanically speaking? The great advantage that I had, and we all have in a research, if you're based in Bristol and

Ireland, is the work that's been done in Scandinavia and the Baltic countries over very many generations because they had such huge quantities of dirums and obviously amber and other things like silks and these particular other types of silver jewellery that's hacked up into hack silver, but we know comes from some Bruce areas in Eastern Europe. So they've had this collection of objects that seem to be connected to this very expansive Eastern trade, and they've been looking at them for generations now. And when you've got data, it allows you to come up with theory, allows you to essentially hypothesize and speculate based on these massive data sets, this big collection of evidence that you have. And essentially, what I had to do was,

When I got interested in DERMs, I had to think how it was coming in in terms of networks. And the Scandinavians had answers for this in archaeology, really brilliant work. You've got the work of Niels Blonquist, who talks about network kingdoms. So he talks about really fascinating things about how Sweden, we don't think of it as the Swedish territories. We think of it now as a country, but back in the 8th, 9th century, it's more a collection of trading towns. And the interest of the rulers is how you connect these towns and bring in resources so you can get all the lovely silver that's coming eastward from the east across the Baltic. Then you've also got the amazing work that's been done at what we now know to be trading sites. So you've got the work of Surin Sinbach, who comes to this idea of nodal points.

So he looks at on a network, you get things called nodes. And these are essentially just hubs. These are places that have more connections, more frequently with other places. They're generally bigger. You find richer archaeological deposits there, and you have a particular concentration of very high status finds, very expensive objects and lots of currency, or what we find related currency, the weights and the scales. So you had that. So you had this idea of network kingdoms connecting up, and then you had this idea of the nodal markets, so the larger markets within the kingdoms. And you've also got even things like the classic one is Norway.

It comes from the North Way. It comes from essentially from a trading, also migration route as well. And where was that North Way coming down to? It was coming to places like Kaupang near what is modern Oslo. And this site has been brilliantly published. Dagfin Scrae led the project, amazing books on this. And what they can begin to look at is really go into this granular detail of what is coming down these trade routes, this north way, and what is coming in probably to pay for it.

And from that, people like Diphon Scrae, Ingrid Guston sort of began to look at things and go, you know, this is happening early. It looks very planned. It's happening elsewhere. It's connecting places like Kaupang to Denmark and the rest of what we think of the southern Scandinavia. And then they begin to come up with these amazing theories of like, well, it's called post-subsensitism, but you don't need to worry about that. what you need to worry about is that a couple of generations ago, people were generally

doubting that Scandinavans were tickly interested in commerce and trade. And that was fair enough with the data sets at the time. But now with the excavation of sites like a cowpang or a beerka in Sweden or a head of it, you've finally got evidence for very long-term, sophisticated, planned sites that look like they're essentially designed to get all the best trade items of the region or coming down these trade routes. So they developed this theory called Postal Science Division, essentially basically prior to that, Vikings were maybe not thought of as a very sort of commercial group, certainly not primarily. After this point, you come up with this theory saying, well, you know, the evidence really is pointing towards a long-term,

sophisticated planning of what looks like a market economy. And if you now go back and look at studies from the last century or so, when they've looked at what people would call primitive groups, if you begin to actually drill down into that data, the ethnographic research, you begin to see that people do trade and they've always traded. So essentially, this is what happened in Scandinavia. They came up with this idea of networks, essentially the kingdoms essentially being a collection of trade routes because that was an efficient way to bring in money that would pay for the resources that you could bring into these sites. And then from that, you look at these nodal points in them, which are these larger markets,

which is where maybe the royals were associated with, the royal family would be next to the trading site, just keeping an eye on it and they would get their tolls and taxes. And then from that, you got this theory that actually this is really sophisticated commerce that's happening here. So you get this sort of scientist-a-bist theory about, you know, essentially they're very sort of market-savvy people. So when I talk about standing on shoulders of giants in my work, I was able to transpose all that theory and then bring it to the data that we had for Ireland and Britain and for Dublin and for York. And then also the Great Army sites, which look very much like mini markets when they're overwintering. So it just looks like a very

commercially savvy people who, if they're not setting up permanent large markets, in between they're setting up smaller temporary markets, but they're markets and they're connected to trade routes, long distance and local trade routes. But that's the idea. We're getting this from Scandinavian archaeology and that's what's able for us to interpret the data that we're getting now and before in Bristol and Ireland. We've got those amazing work that came before. Did Edison really take credit for things he didn't invent? Were treadmills originally a form of corporal punishment? And would man have ever got to the moon without the bra?

You can expect answers to all these questions and more in the brand new podcast from history hit, patented history of inventions. Join me, Dallas Campbell, as I uncover what really sparked history's most impactful ideas. Each episode, I'll be recruiting the help of experts, scientists, historians, and even a few real-life inventors. Subscribe to patented history of inventions wherever you listen to your podcasts. Okay, so we know some of this, don't me, from written sources, but they're actually pretty limited. We have some of the names, we have some of the events, we have some dates and so on. Of course, for Scandinavia, we don't have direct written sources. So what sort of evidence do we have really to understand those connections then?

if it's not they're written down. For what is happening in Ireland and Britain to take a step back, yeah, we're initially looking at the written sources. We've got the Irish animals and we've got potentially the English animals and they will mention the Great Army. That's where we get the name from and they'll mention certain figures. And there's an Evar who becomes very prominent and who seems to be operating both, I think, in Ireland, particularly in Dublin and with the Great Army in England and Southern Scotland as well.

after that point we are looking at the archaeology and what we are looking at is particular signs in material culture, the archaeological evidence that seem to connect these two sides of this kingdom and it is initially looking at things like dirums and dirms are used as currency we think in what they called a billion economy so a metalweight economy so that's when the currency that you have it's not like a modern economy where the coin has a figure of state on it and it's a particular value. It doesn't have any precious metal in it, but it's taken as guarantor of value. In a billion economy that's operating in Bristol, Ireland this time in the Viking economies, what is happening is you are valuing the silver

based on its weight and its purity and you will assess its weight in a small portable balance with some weights on the other side and you maybe test it by bending it or scratching it, taking pick marks out of it, and that's to assess the purity, whether it's soft or hard, of it's most commonly silver, but it could also be gold. And you're also then seeing if it's been plated with silver over a base metal. So that's another connection you've got. You've got this similar sort of use of silver, things like the dirms, and also cut up bits of silver, because it doesn't matter what it looks like as long as the silver's good. It can be a cut-up armoring, and that also goes into the scale pan, and you measure that with the same way.

Now, what else we're looking at is very interesting. I think the thing that made me really think about the connections between Dublin and York. People have been talking about those connections, you know, essentially since the 9th century. And Alfred Smith had talked about the connections between Dublin and York before. What is really interesting now in the evidence that he didn't have is that we've got these urban excavations since the 70s and 80s. So we started to find things, for example, Neualtic Amber. is particularly popular in Southern Scandinavian. And the places that we find it in the biggest concentrations in Britain, Ireland, are, you guessed it, Dublin and Yorvik. So it's little things like that that, you know, particularly sort of culturally associated with a particular group of Scandinavians, in this case of Southern Scandinavians, and then you start to find them in bulk.

Essentially, these things have been imported. You get raw amber there. So it's not just imported, say, beads. jewelry or rings, you're actually getting raw amber. So you're actually getting a trade in the commodity. And again, that fitted in with what was happening with this silver dirms, but also other particular pieces of types of silver jewelry. They're coming from the Baltic and the Ruslanz in Eastern Europe. And it all starts to be found together. You were getting these silver jewelry. You were getting amber. And you're also getting things like silk. And again, these things are

coming through these same trade routes that are coming from Central Asia. They're coming from the Middle East and Central Asia and maybe even further afield than that. You've got silk in the Galloway Horde that's from about 900. So you started to get all these types of artifacts that are particularly associated with the Baltic and Southern Scandinavia and the markets connected to them. We can talk about them later. But now you're also finding them in places like York and Dublin. And Dublin is interesting because you get a lot of information of the hordes buried by Irish people, non-Scanonavians, outside, and you get them in hordes and single finds. And John Sheehan is particularly brilliant for that sort of thing.

So we assume from the distribution patterns that these particular, very distinctive pieces of silver that are connected to the east are coming in through the nearest trading port. They said to fan out from Dublin. So that's kind of what made sense of two markets set up to connect to the wealth that's coming through the Baltic from Eastern Europe and Central Asia. And what is popular are things like the Amber in particular. You're getting things that were particularly popular in Southern Scandinavia. And I thought that that actually made the most sense of the historical evidence that we have as well.

So that's how the evidence we have that begins to marry up the historical evidence. the archaeological evidence. Okay, so we've got these connections then. We've got Dublin and you're clearly having a connection between them. That connections goes really far east, so these materials are coming in. And of course, then the bit in the middle there is Scandinavia, and you've already sort of talked about that little bit of southern Scandinavia. Can you say something about how it connects there?

How does that go across the North Sea? And how do those sort of westernmost networks connect to what's going on in Scandinavia at the time? I think the best way to think of it is you've got southern Scandinavia where you've got these older trading towns, places like Kaukang and Hedibbe, which is now in northern Germany, but was then essentially southern Danish lands. And so that is where you're getting development of economies based on this influx of silver wealth again, mainly these silver dirham coins. So what you have there, and also in Sweden, as well as you have rulers that are beginning to understand the best way to get the local natural wealth produce and also the results of raiding and warfare,

particularly slaves in Norway and Sweden. You'll also have furs as well. And what you are getting after that point is you're finding ways of being more efficient at this. So you set up these market sites. And what you then want to do is continue to bring all the silver in, which is probably being exchanged for furs and slaves and the like. And you're setting up these markets and you're trying to link them up as well. So we think Kaupang and Neuros of Oslo,

Neoslav, Neosovr, connecting to Hedby, which is basically in southern Denmark, northern Germany. And that we think of that actually is a kingdom. Niels Blancis would call it a network kingdom. And you also get network kingdoms connecting Scandinavian. territories in the Eastern Baltic with Scandinavia proper. So Birka, which is to the major trading site to the west of Stockholm, is connecting across the Baltic into places like probably Estonia and then into the river systems of Eastern Europe, then heading down to where the silver's

coming in. So what you've got is silver coming out one way, and then you've got these markets which attract things like bring in slaves and bring in things like amber and furs, and then you get that exchange. So what I think is then happening is when the Southern Scandinavians establish themselves in Dublin and then York, what they're doing is, oh, okay, this works. It's an efficient way of getting the local wealth and however you define that and getting it to a market point where by ship in the main, we can transport it long distances quickly and efficiently and we can bring in tolls from that, we can bring in taxes from that, and then obviously the sale as well. They knew from Southern Scandinavia that you could bring in lots of

silver coming in via the Baltic, which would pay for your slaves from Ireland or from Southern Scotland or Northern England as well. So what I think is happening is the Southern Scandinavians that have been raiding and trading in the low countries in Northern France. When they go over to Dublin and Ireland in the 850s particularly and England from the 865 on. What they are doing is basically just this thing of best practice that are going. The best way to make money quickly and efficiently is to have connected markets, or in sending back, we'll call them no dull markets, some major market points that are efficiently placed to get all the resources that are near to them and then be able to exchange them from all this amazing silver that's coming in to the Baltic.

So they've got basically the game plan there. So what you need to do is set up what Niels Blancis calls these network kingdoms. You connect as many major markets as you can and that bring in all the resources. And then you just try and attract traders to them. And you try to attract people that are bringing in their slaves. And then you just skim the profit off that. So I think that is the connection. You've really got to look at Southern Scandinavia.

and maybe even also Sweden, and you see what's been done there, and then they've transposed that. They've just taken that idea, and they've brought it to Bristol and Ireland, and then they just follow what they've been doing for maybe even a century by that stage. And of course, this will also benefit

quite a lot of the local communities in a way, won't it? I mean, far more certainly than if you just have to give in to raiding and violence. But actually, so local communities, local people can benefit from, being part of that trading system as well, can't they? Yeah. Generally, they talk about these trading flights. If they're in, you know, as it were, foreign territory for the Scandinavians, they might be between kingdoms. So they will be able to exploit one kingdom against the other. And when these kingdoms are fighting each other, where do they sell the slaves, which are captured after battles, they'll sell them at this semi sort of mutual ground. So it doesn't benefit

obviously the people are paying sold, but it benefits the people who are the kings of the local area. It gives you a place that you can get ready to access to money, particularly in the silver billion that we're talking about, this currency. And also you can then hire the Vikings who are there, as happens in Dublin. You can hire them out to fight your battles for you. And that brings in more slaves, and that just brings in more money. And we're talking about obviously the elites benefiting here. So yes, it can benefit the elites of the indigenous people as well as the sort of incoming Scandinavians. So we think when Dublin is temporarily out of Viking control between 902 and 1917, that people like Lindsay Simpson will talk about the continuity that seems to happen in Dublin. So what might actually be happening really fascinatingly is the Irish king comes in and takes it as a going concern.

You get rid of the elites because you know, you want to be skimming. off the money, but you keep the merits of it because that's why you want to be in control of it because it's an easy way to make money quickly and efficiently. And if you're not having to do raiding and fighting, it's much safer way of guaranteeing this profit. So yeah, it can work out well for the elites, not just the Scandinavians in a particular area. And so we've talked so far about some of these larger sites and the towns and the trading settlements, but we talked a little bit earlier as well about the Great Army and the Great Army's camps. So what they do is they move around the country and they set up these temporary camps.

And some of our listeners might have heard this in other previous episodes as well. But one of the things that seem to be happening in these winter camps of the Great Army is a lot of trade. And you mentioned this earlier on as well. Can you say something about how that sort of much smaller scale, I suppose, trade, sort of just in the inner winter camp, relates to that whole bigger network? I think it's absolutely key. These Great Army winter camps, so an overwintering camp, so you read up to Scotland in the summer, and then you come back down to a site in Northumbria, and you sit there overwinter because roads are essentially impassable at that time. So if you're campaigning on land, you can't really operate effectively at that point.

And what we're finding at these sites, and it's repped and you know very well, is you essentially get what you would think of as a southern Scandinavian economy happening. You've got cuts up bits of silver in the billion economy. It's called hack silver when it's literally just hacked up because it's small and they've got so much of it. It gets lost. We're playing out games, you know, they're betting, or they're just exchanging because these sites seem to be essentially mini set of markets. And they make sense that they're on this southern Scandinavian Baltic sort of lines. So people talk about them being essentially movable towns. So probably what happens is when they're overwintering,

again, the local elites or the rich people and local community can go in and trade there. So what you've got really is this key link between these essentially military sites, but they're also very commercial. And they kind of make sense that the people that are in the Great Army have these essentially trading and military sites then are also going to be interested in establishing somewhere like York, a bigger site,

that you can do the same thing, but on a much bigger scale and much more permanently. And obviously, what seems to have happened in Dublin as well, it starts off as a temporary rating base. And then certainly from the 850s, again, the Southern Scandinavian connection that I believe in, you've got it as a more permanent site. And again, it's on this model that you see in Southern Norway and Denmark and Sweden as well. So it's key. If we understand the great army as being essentially a sort of southern Scandinavian group, it will have elements from all over, which we know to be true.

But they perceive the world and they perceive making profit and what they want to do long term as being based on markets. And then it begins to make sense of what previously happened in Ireland, culminating, particularly in the establishment of Dublin. And then what they really want to do is take a major trading centre like York, which becomes Yorvik. So I think if you understand what's happening in Yorvik, you understand what's happening with the Great Army and vice versa. They're really key. These are sort of sites that are army bases to rest up over winter,

but they're not just that. They're not just waiting out winter. Basically part of the core of the Great Army is to establish trade because it's a much easier way, much quicker way, much safer way to make money. And I think they're bringing over those. is essentially from southern Scandinavia. Yeah, so bringing it back then to the beginning then, this idea of trade and the importance

that trade had, I think to me, from your work, especially the important sort of takeaway point is really that interaction with that trade and the fact that we shouldn't see it as separate from the raiding activities and everything else that's going on. The trade is such a key integral part of the expansion from Scandinavia and the sort of success. Would you agree to say that what you've been doing is to sort of show the level of sophistication behind that, that it wasn't just a sort of random chance. But he was actually something much bigger than that, wasn't it, really? So I think what we need to reframe or thinking is that you previously thought of Scandinavians primarily raiding just to get essentially shiny

things in a display economy. So you wear your wealth. You don't really use it as a currency in the way that we use money today. I think, what? What we need to flip in his head is at the very elite level. So people like these Evar that seems to be operating in Ireland and with the Great Army in the 50s, 860s. I think what we need to think of, these guys are really thinking the raiding is a means to an end. And the end is set up permanent trading sites and trading market centers that connect in to wider long distance trade. routes. And I think everything begins to make more sense of if you look what's happening in Dublin, you look at what the Great Army do. And when they stop, they kind of stop when they've established

markets in Dublin as well. They're not massively interest in expanding. They have other postal sites around Ireland. But Dublin is the big one. Once they stop there, they're kind of not that interested and probably not able to expand inland quite so easily. But I don't think, they would have, even if they could, I think, you know, the means to the end was setting up these trading sites because low risk, you guaranteed, as much as you can, you could get guaranteed income, tolls and taxes. So I think that's the way we need to think of things. It's like there's Christian Cummins and John Shee and myself, you know, will argue that what is happening is they've got long-term thinking over what they want to do and what they want to do is set up these markets

on this southern Scandinavian and Baltic model and also model the Russe use in Eastern Europe as well. So wherever they go, I think if you begin to think of it in those terms, the history and what we find in archaeology begins to make a lot more sense. Thanks so much, Tom. That's a really nice way, I think, of looking at the Vikings. And so, yeah, thank you so much for joining me here today.

No problem. It's been an absolute pleasure. I hope people enjoyed it. And it's a fascinating subject. And as the Galloway Horde showed that we're just always potentially around the corner from just another one of these discoveries. It just shows really how vast and interconnected the Scandinavian Viking Age world was. Yeah, and you never know what's going to come up next. Thank you so much.

That was Dr. Tom Horne. And you can read more about this in Tom's book, which is called A Viking Market Kingdom in Ireland and Britain, trade networks and the importation of a southern Scandinavian silver bullion economy. Thank you all so much for listening. This has been an episode of Gone Medieval from History Hit. I'm Dr. Kat Jarman. Don't forget to subscribe to the podcast if you haven't already.

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