In Our Time - The Danelaw

Episode Date: March 28, 2019

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the effective partition of England in the 880s after a century of Viking raids, invasions and settlements. Alfred of Wessex, the surviving Anglo-Saxon king and Guthrum, a Danish ruler, had fought each other to a stalemate and came to terms, with Guthrum controlling the land to the east (once he had agreed to convert to Christianity). The key strategic advantage the invaders had was the Viking ships which were far superior and enabled them to raid from the sea and up rivers very rapidly. Their Great Army had arrived in the 870s, conquering the kingdom of Northumbria and occupying York. They defeated the king of Mercia and seized part of his land. They killed the Anglo-Saxon king of East Anglia and gained control of his territory. It was only when a smaller force failed to defeat Wessex that the Danelaw came into being, leaving a lasting impact on the people and customs of that area.With Judith Jesch Professor of Viking Studies at the University of NottinghamJohn Hines Professor of Archaeology at Cardiff UniversityAndJane Kershaw ERC Principal Investigator in Archaeology at the University of OxfordProducer: Simon Tillotson

BBC Sounds, music, radio, podcasts. Thanks for downloading this episode of In Our Time. There's a reading list to go with it on our website, and you can get news about our programmes if you follow us on Twitter at BBC In Our Time. I hope you enjoyed the programmes. Hello, in the late 9th century, Alfred the Great of Wessex and Guthrum, leader of the Danish forces, after Alfred's victory at the Battle of Eddington in 878,

divided England between them, along a line roughly from London to Chester. And the land on Guthrum's side was to become known as the Dane Law. That held for about 50 years before the Anglo-Saxons began to take the land back, but the period of Scandinavian influence, custom or rule in England, straddled those decades and then went on for another couple of centuries. The Scandinavian's invigorated trade and developed market towns and expanded cities from York to Lincoln, Derby, Nottingham and Leicester, and people who speak English use their words to this day. With me to discuss the Dan law

are Judith Yesh, Professor of Viking Studies at the University of Nottingham. Jane Kershaw, E.RC principal investigator in archaeology at the University of Oxford, and John Hines, Professor of Archaeology at Cardiff University. John Hines, why was England partitioned and how did there become a stalemate? Actually, how was it partitioned? What happened with the events that led up to the Battle of Eddington was that this really was the end point of a considerable series of political and military events in terms of the relationship

between Scandinavia's, Scandinavian invaders who were coming in attempting to conquer territory within England and indeed more widely within Britain and Ireland and in Western Europe. And the last

area that managed to hold out within England was the large, powerful and wealthy kingdom of Wessex. Over a period of around about 20 to 25 years, leading up to the attack on Chippenham very, very early in the year of 878 and then Alfred's resistance

in the Battle of Eddington. We have recorded for us, in outline, of course, in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, the way in which invading Scandinavian armies are increasingly occupying land. They start staying over winter. We hear of them making peace with different areas, kingdoms, within England, which essentially mean those kingdoms more or less surrender to them. They gradually drive out or assassinate the kings. And so they've got most of the rest of England under control. They're trying to go to Wessex as well at this point. But Alfred defeats them and he makes conditions.

One is that Guthrum would be a Christian and other conditions about how they operate the Dane law. Alfred wins a battle. He doesn't win the war, I think. is quite an important point to bear in mind. Neither side is really strong enough to decisively knock out the others. They have to come to terms. That condition that the leader of the Danish ruling group

should become Christian is the one thing that is really essential for Alfred in order to be able to come to terms. He is a Christian king. That is territory that has been. been part of Christian kingdoms. There are Christians there. Once that concession, as it were, is made by Guthram as a leader, it is relatively easy for Alfred to recognise his power there. And what's the line? What's the division? They divide in England to two.

Well, we have a source that gives us a very clear description of at least the lower half of the boundary line. That is, it goes along the Thames, from the mouth of the Thames towards London, then up the river Lee, which is heading up towards Bedford. It goes to Bedford, then follows the river Ouse. And what we're actually told is it goes as far as Watling Street. It doesn't actually say that it then follows the line of Watling Street, but that is the reasonable inference to come from it. So it's a sort of diagonal line going up from the southeast towards the northwest.

Was it deign law an idea or an area? I think we can say in a very real sense it is both of those and it's both of those depending on what perspective you come at it from. It's very important with any situation like this to realise that we cannot but think in terms that the sources we have from the period actually impose on us and it's very clear there that for instance the first reference to the Dane Law which is from the beginning of the 11th century, these are sources that are looking at it

from the point of view of administration, of government, of practicalities from those points of view. They do, I think I would say, probably hugely oversimplify what the situation was. In fact, the very, very first reference that we've got to the Dane Law, which is a source of the year 1008,

puts it in a phrase, inner on de Onola Lager, and that inner adverb there actually says, it's within the Dane law. It's very clearly referring to it as an area. Now, within that area, we're going to have a very, very diverse state of affairs, culturally, linguistically, even in terms of identity. Thank you. Jane Kershaw.

When did the Scandinavians started to arrive in some sort of force in England, let's stick to England for this purpose? They had been raiding from the late 780s and 790s, coming over in small boats from Scandinavia, hit and run raids on the coastline. There's then a lull inactivity, but raiding escalates in the 830s, and by 850 Scandinavian armies are overwintering in England for the first time. They now penetrate beyond the coasts. They go inland, and they're now a year-long presence.

that has to be dealt with. And by 865, we have what's described as a Mikkel Herr, a great army, probably comprising a number in the low thousands of warriors. And this is the army that succeeds in taking over East Anglia, Northumbria, and Mercia, leaving all but Alfred's Wessex. One of the earliest descriptions we have is the Vikings, Let's keep calling them Vikings, but he's Denmark, Norway. Attacking Lindisfarne, Holy Island, Lindisfan, Gospels, monks, cuthbert, so on.

And the description is terrible. It's the apocalypse has happened. These are savage, ruthless, brutal people. How far was that typical? I think that, I think actually the attack on Lindisfarne is not that typical in itself, in that the brunt of activity would actually have been towards the south of England. England. It's the South Coast that's hit first. It's the Kentish coast that's fortified. The attack on Lindisfand would have been terrifying for the monks who were there at the time.

We know that they took away riches as well as people. The Vikings captured slaves from Lindisfan. No doubt the people there thought it was the end of the world. These are monastic chroniclers and they saw the Vikings principally as heathens. And that is a view that's reflected throughout the sources from this period. Was there reaction to people in the south of England were they attacked perhaps before, around about the same time? Was it any different?

Did they attack more gently in the south of England? It's not that they attacked more gently. We have the evidence from Lindisfarne, because we have these lesser surviving that describe the attack in detail. We don't have the same evidence from other areas of England, so we don't get that intimate detail

that we do for the Lindisfarne attacks. We could assume it's not entirely different, couldn't we, can't we? I think it would have felt like you were in a desperate situation if you saw them coming over the horizon. I hate to ask historians to assume when there's no evidence. So if you forgive that. What was their motivation? Why did they come across? Initially, they want portable wealth that they can capture and take back to Scandinavia.

And in particular, they love silver. Silver allows people who don't have access to land and to livestock, the ability to acquire wealth and also to pass it on. It's a durable form of wealth that can be passed over generations. Because there's no active silver mining within Scandinavia in this period, it all has to be brought in from overseas. There's a very interesting point about timing here because it's the 790s, around 800,

that the first Islamic silver coins, known as dirhams, start to arrive in Scandinavian. and it may well be that this push westwards, the Vikings that we're seeing in England, are after silver sources that are much closer to home. So it's a drive for silver via Russia, wasn't it? They were coming via Russia to the eastern Scandinavia, you might say, and the raids are mostly from western Scandinavia and Denmark. Can I get away with that?

The raids are initially westwards, but the Vikings have been active across the Baltic in Russia before these raids take place. and yes, they're trading, they're exchanging slaves and furs along the Russian rivers in exchange for high-quality Islamic dirhams. Judith Fier, what would the Anglo-Saxons have known about these Scandinavians? Well, I think they would have known quite a lot, actually, because the original Anglo-Saxons, when they came in the 5th and 6th centuries, at least some of them, as far as we can tell, probably came from southern Scandinavia

or the area where you have the border between Denmark and Germany today. We also know that something like Beowulf, that quintessentially Anglo-Saxon poem, people don't always mention the fact that it's actually set in Scandinavia. The locations are Scandinavian, the people are Scandinavian. Of course, scholars don't entirely agree how old that poem is. If you think it's quite an old poem from before the Viking Age, and then it shows that even before the Viking Age, the Anglo-Saxons were thinking about their Scandinavian origins,

their Scandinavian contacts. And the other thing is something like the Sutton Hu burial in Suffolk, pre-viking age, has very close parallels in Sweden in that period. And we seem to think that the elites around the North Sea had very similar cultures. We haven't mentioned how they were so successful. Can you tell us about the way they attacked? I mean, the boats and everything, why they were so successful? They're pirates, really.

these early pirate attacks. Yes, I think as Jane was saying, that's what they came to do to smash and grab. Their boats were very efficient. They could land. They had shallow keels. They could land anywhere. They could sail up rivers. They were shallow bottom. Yes. And they were very good

at navigating, I think, because Scandinavia is a part of the world where you got around by ship in those days very much. Would the English and Scandinavians have been able to understand each other? I think so. I think it's complicated. There were people with better linguistic skills

than others, just as now. There were different dialects, but I think there's quite a lot of evidence. For example, there's a North Norwegian called Okturah who came out to visit the court of King Alfred at the time when King Alfred was apparently fighting off Vikings elsewhere. He welcomed a North Norwegian reindeer farmer to his court and was very interested in his lifestyle.

and Octora told Alfred about his life herding reindeer and trading, and this was written down by an Anglo-Saxon scribe, and unless there was an interpreter, it doesn't say there was an interpreter, we have to assume they could understand each other. And there's a wonderful example in my view in that text of how they negotiated the linguistic difference because English people didn't have reindeer.

The Old Norse word for reindeer is crane. The scribe knew that the word for stone in Old Norse is Stain and in Old English it's Stann. So on that basis he constructed a word, an English word, gran for reindeer. And, well, that's amazing. I didn't realize if they were so cognate, Old Norse and Old English? They are very closely related,

and I think probably with a certain amount of goodwill people could understand each other. So they came, John. A number significant here. John Hines. They came in enough numbers to conquer most of the places we went to. I think they are. It's a question on which opinions have fluctuated quite dramatically over the last... Amused if they hadn't, really? Yes, over the last 50 to 60 years from a minimalist position that was strongly argued for by the late Peter Sawyer

from the very end of the 1950s onwards, which has been characterized by some people, slightly unkindly, but not unjustly as a sort of magnificent seven scenario where a tiny, tiny handful could come in and somehow conquer huge areas of territory. The pendulum is very definitely swinging back the other way at present and a lot of people are talking in terms of many thousands, tens of thousands of settlers ultimately coming into the conquered areas of England. And I think with good reason, there was something substantial here.

Even emphasizing that we're talking about a political and military takeover, there was settlement with that that followed on from that. I'd just like to jump in there and say, I think a lot depends on what time frame you're looking at. I think if you're talking about large numbers, then you're looking at a slightly longer time frame than just that late 9th century settlement. Without question, yes, I agree. John, can you outline just bullet points before we move on about the areas of life on which they had greatest impact?

We've already mentioned the language. The English language, there are many, many absolute day-to-day words. We'll come back to that. You just know a few bullet points. Okay, absolutely in terms of bullet points. Economic transformation in terms of bringing in training in stimulating the growth of towns and towns that are involved. involved in long distance trade, a political transformation insofar as by taking out the most of the small petty Anglo-Saxon kingdoms the way is laid open for the unification of an English kingdom. Probably a social transformation too insofar as this probably was a less hierarchical

society that came in than that had developed in England. So across the range that things are going to be very, very different. Jane Gershaw, can you tell us, therefore, to follow that, how a major settlement, such as York, which was perhaps the major settlement, how that was transformed? Yes, indeed, there is this urban growth that we see in the Dane law that isn't matched in areas of English, England. And York is our primary example.

It's the best excavated. and it's where the material remains are the best preserved as well. York, before the Vikings, is an ecclesiastical centre. It has its Roman walls. There's a small trading and craft settlement at Fishergate. Maybe it has a population of one, one and a half thousand people. As a Dane law town, it undergoes a huge economic expansion. The excavations at Coppergate have revealed high levels of manufacturing.

There's ironworking, non-ferrous metal working. People are making wooden cups. They're producing leather. They're working bone and antler and amber. People are producing textiles in their own homes. It's also a centre of imports, and it's clear that York is plugged into

the international Scandinavian trade network. So they're receiving honestones from Norway, amber from the Baltic, soapstone that could be coming from Shetland or from Norway, even silk headdresses coming from the Byzantine Empire. So the economy of York is incredibly vibrant. And this year in the population? The population is about 10 to 15,000 people.

Up from one and a half. So it's a huge growth. And because we have lots of environmental remains at York, so plant and animal remains, we can get a really intimate picture of daily life and somewhat cramped and unsanitary conditions of what life was like in York. So we know that people had wooden houses, lived in wooden houses which thatched roofs and earthen floors.

They introduced a lot of insects because of this. So we have lots of different beetles species from the Coppergate excavations. We know that people suffered because there are lots of human feces remains in York, that they suffered from intestinal parasites, that they were covered with lice and fleas because they were working wool in their home.

They introduced a lot of sheep ticks to their houses, so rather unsanitary conditions that you only get in densely populated urban environments. Do you have any idea of an average life of man and woman in Yorker about that time? For men it's about 50 The human remains aren't very extensive But it's about 50 Women would have been lucky to make it to 35

Judith Which means John spoke earlier about the settlement And you spoke about the settlement growing The number growing We think of it Viking warriors coming over Throwing a few axes and going back with a lot of loot

But then the whole families came over Can you develop that please? Yes I think if even if even if If we go back to the great army of the 860s, recent research suggests that actually they weren't just made up of warriors. This was a mobile community. An army would need cooks, doctors, religious specialists to help them through to the next world. And there is evidence that women came with them and where you have women, then inevitably you have children as well. And we know that in the later armies in the 890s, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle actually says they had women and children with them.

But then there's this extra immigration, I would say. Once the Vikings are in control of the towns and some of the villages of the Dane law, then there is evidence particularly from the kind of work Jane's been doing with female dress accessories found by metal detectors that there are quite large numbers of women who want to look like Scandinavian women and in many cases almost certainly were Scandinavian women. What's the difference in the look between Scandinavian men and women and English, let's call them. Different dress styles, basically.

Nothing to do with shoes and hair? I don't think so. I think they had the usual range of hair that Northern European people have. There is this interesting source. It's a later source, but it's a letter, and a man berates his brother Edward for having his hair cut in a Scandinavian fashion. He criticises him for having a bared neck

and blinded eyes, a suggestion that Scandinavian haircuts were short at the back and long at the front. This is the kind of thing that wouldn't survive archaeologically, but it's a hint that things like hairstyles could have been a way of signalling identities. If I may, there's a particularly interesting point about that particular hairstyle, because that's exactly the way the Normans are represented on the Bayer tapestry of Scandinavian origins, but that's how you can tell straight off a Norman from an Anglo-Saxon. Actually, hairstyles probably distinguished classes in society more than they distinguished different ethnic groups,

just as a woman of the rank of a married woman would have her hair covered, whereas an unmarried virgin would have her hair long and open. Likewise, long hair was for the male elite. Can I go back to you for a moment, Judith? This more information, is this partly to do with the needs, intensive increase in archaeology over the last 20 or 30 years? It depends what you mean by archaeology.

Well, you tell me and then we'll go on. What I was referring to earlier are metal detectorist finds, which are not archaeologists basically, but are studied by archaeologists like Jane. There hasn't been that much intensive archaeology, unfortunately. And what we don't have is very much knowledge about the rural settlements

because although we've been talking about York and Lincoln and places like that, we know very little about people out in the countryside. And some towns like Nottingham, where I live in work, was one of the five boroughs of the Dane Law, and we can't, short of tearing Nottingham down, we can't really find any evidence. There have been some excavations which haven't been published, so we know very little still.

We have this line down the country. What interactions were there between the Dane Law and the and the English side? I personally think they were actually quite limited. And this comes partly from the study of the distribution of distinctive finds that we can say where they come from and where they particularly belong, such as pottery and metal work, which is very durable, so we will find it and see it.

And it can also be, argued, I think, on historical grounds too, because I do think that treaty between Alfred and Guthram that we mentioned before, my own reading of that particular text is that although it does deal with cross-border relationships, it expects them to be exceptional. Jane has mapped large numbers of broaches that have come up. It's very clear to me, at least. I hope Jane will agree on this but you'll come in and tell as if not, that there seems to be a strip along what we think of as the Dane Law

border in which these are really quite thin on the ground, and relatively few of them are actually crossing that boundary. I just wanted to jump in there and mention something we haven't mentioned yet, which is the distribution of place names given in the Scandinavian, we're coming to that,

okay, but they do match that distribution pattern, and you were asking earlier about new evidence, and I would say that there's categories of evidence like place names and sculpture which have been known about but which haven't been studied in as much detail until very recently so we're getting the publications of those can i add one more important point here which is that actually the situation either side of the dane law boundary in terms of distribution is not a perfect mirror image by any means so that for instance if we look at the

coins that are being produced within the dane law area very few of those are going to the south and west If we look at coins of King Alfred of Wessex, there's actually quite a wide distribution of those up into the Dane Law, at least up to the Trent and to the Humber. So the relations are not entirely equal, nor are the circumstances whereby we would find these things the same either side. Can I turn to Jane? Can you tell us to say more about the interaction between these two, let's call them two groups, Dain Law and the English, Anglo-Saxon? Yes, we do see signs of interaction between people of Scandinavian heritage and Anglo-Saxon heritage who would have been living in the Dane Law. And I think it's important to point out that just because the Scandinavian settle in the Dane-Lore region, it doesn't mean that the people living there before were killed or expelled.

They're living together side by side. And indeed, where we find lots of this metalwork, Scandinavian metalwork, it does seem to be that we also have Anglo-Saxon messwork of a similar date suggesting that these are communities living in close proximity to each other. And there are occasions when we see different amalgamations, different styles coming together on certain objects. So we have distinctly Scandinavian brooches, but we also have styles of jewellery that suggest a blending of Anglo-Saxon fashions

and Scandinavian fashions. And are these coming from people of second generation, or is it reflecting a desire of Anglo-Saxon women to look Scandinavian, to adopt a Scandinavian style? We're not really sure, but definitely here is a culture, two different cultures coming together. We could say the same for stone sculpture. The practice of stone sculpture is not a Scandinavian practice.

Indeed, they do not have carved stone in Scandinavia apart from on Gotland in this period. So it's an Anglo-Saxon tradition. but it's really embraced by the Scandinavians and it takes off. There's five times as many sculptures under Danish rule than there is in the preceding two centuries. Cross was cross and things like that. Yes, in Cumbria and other kind of less prominent cross sculptures

and they're decorated with Scandinavian style. So you might see twisting snakes and cat-like creatures in the borough and yelling styles. You might see armed warrior figures. You might see scenes from Norse mythology and legend. So it's a tradition that the Scandinavians have adopted and they've made it their own. And remarkably durable, really.

Judith, can I bring something up that we might not have, might not be, can I bring something about the church? Alfred was a Christian, he wouldn't let things, set in motion. until it was agreed that it would be Christian. Heavily churched. What happened to the church culture in the north, in the lane law? Well, the map that we were talking about earlier,

the map of place names of fines, metalwork fines, also corresponds quite closely to the map of where the church seems to have been interrupted, so the diocese ceased to operate for a while. But we also know that in places like York, the Vikings cooperated with the church, or the church cooperated with the Vikings. They had to find a way of living together, and they did.

And already by 9.58, we have an Archbishop of Canterbury, whose father was a Viking, basically. But the question of how quickly the Vikings became Christian is a very interesting one, which I don't think we know the full answer to. I think it varied enormously. I think there's quite a lot of evidence that they did become Christian but in their own way

and that's where the sculpture comes in that they kind of wanted a Christian cross like the Gosforth cross with bits of Norse mythology on it not just I think to say that they've given up the old religion for the Christian I think some people have argued I think it's probably going a bit

too far but some people have even argued that some of the sculpture represents a kind of hybrid religion but they did destroy some of the churches and the libraries and so on There was a degree of destruction, wasn't that? Yes.

We were talking about Linda's Fine earlier. That's a good example. Hexham. Hexham. But at the same time, we also have a lot of villages in England called Kirby or Kirkby, which mean church village, which suggests that the incomers just renamed these villages but recognised the right of the church to exist. John, let's talk about the people.

pervasiveness of this influence. They're there. They're across that line. They're dug in. We've been told that they come in great numbers by you and by Judith and so on. Have they completely taken over? The Anglo-Saxon in that area feels subdued. Can you give us an idea of what it's like? What's going on? Well, in a real sense, they certainly have completely taken over so that... They have their law? Yes. And what that law really...

means first and foremost are the customs by which you organise your practical life. And if those were different, it would be very evident, you know, as you tried to function within these areas. So I am quite sure that if we could take an imaginary journey completely across this line, you would see things very differently when you move from Wessex, as with the remains. area was and a rump of Mercia into the Anglo-Scanadian area. But the point I would emphasise there, it's an Anglo-Scanadian area. If you had moved, shall we say, right the way up to the Orkneys and the Shetlands to the Western Isles or something like that, you would effectively go into territory that had become

part of Scandinavia. You might just as well be on islands off the West Coast. of Norway. Jane Kersh, Alfred's family, his son, grandson, then eventually set about trying to reclaim, recapture these lands. How did they get on? Yes, his son and his daughter, Ethel fled, very important. They have an offensive military campaign, which involves building forts known as Burrs, these are essentially fortified strongholds, taking control of the surrounding area and then getting the local population to submit to them. There's a battle that takes place in 909, or was it 910, Teton Hall, when Edward himself goes into Northumbria, raids there

and the Scandinavians retaliate. On their way back to the Dane law, they get intercepted by English troops and a battle is fought there and the Scandinavians are defeated. and this seems to open the gates for a really aggressive military campaign taking Dainlaw territory, which they do by this strategy of birds, and also going into Dainaw territory, taking back birds that the Scandinavians themselves had built. So how long did I go on for? It's from 909, 910 to, we could say it's over by 920, by which time all the birds south of, of the Humber have been taken back. Northumbria remains in Scandinavian hands. York has never taken.

It's almost taken by Ethel fled, but she dies before it happens. Lincoln isn't mentioned, so we're not sure. So it's about 10 years. So does it cease to be thought of as the Dane law then, or is it still half and half? What's going on? It's the end of independent Scandinavian rule, but that's not to say that it's the end of Scandinavian influence. Indeed, we might question whether there's any actual change on the ground at all. We know, for instance, from the coinage of the period that nothing really changes. Dane law coins have the same, the names of the money is the same after this capture of the Dainlaw as they are before. So there's no change in local administration.

We see Scandinavians appearing in positions of authority within Edwards and later government. So they appear as witnesses on charters, for instance. So they're not losing authority. And part of this submission process is that Edward confirms the lands of the Scandinavian. So it's a two-way process. They submit to him. Edward confirms their land. But there's quite a comeback, Judith,

when we get King Canute, who rule as king of three countries, Norway and Denmark, ending from 1016 to 1035. So that's a big wedge of Scandinavia come back with the Wallop, isn't it? Definitely, and it started in the late 10th century, and then, as you say, Knoot became king of England, and you could say that's the kind of culmination of the Viking Age in England. So apart from being defeated, they came back and were triumphant. They've never been a king before.

It's very interesting. And Scandinavian king? Yeah, Knut is often presented as, you know, he wanted to be a very English king, and the English sources certainly present him in that way. But at the same time, he's the king who had a whole posse of Scandinavian poets at his court, composing poetry in the Schauldic meter, which hardly anyone who speaks Old Norse can understand, let alone the English people.

Yeah, I think the points I would make is that it's getting on for a century between the reconquest of the Dane law and Cunute taking on rule in England. And a lot happens in between those times. And it may be true that Cunute was the first king of all of England, but it was actually only the reconquest of the Dane law and the defeat of the Viking rulers up there that created a unified kingdom of England for there to be possible for a Scandinavian...

He was the man who inherited it. Well, you didn't exactly inherit it. He won it by force. I'm not using inherit it literally. He took it over. He took it over. Yes, yes, yes, he took it over. But we see through the course of the 10th century, we see various kings who are part of the West Saxon dynasty, struggling to maintain or consolidate their rule over the whole of England, but actually, interestingly also, over the whole of, over a very large part. part of Britain as well, getting kings who they recognise as ruling in Wales, in the north,

in Scotland and so on, to accept them as the overlord. Let's talk about what you've been straining at the least to talk about for quite a while. We've seen influence on the language and the place names. You talked about the B-Y at the end, meaning B-Y? Yes, it's a word for a farm instead, essentially. Well, they're everywhere, right? Just around the town that I lived in, there's Wigandby, Crosby, Laysenby, Thurbsby, on and on it goes. that area. It's everywhere in the north, isn't it?

Yes, they're very, very widespread and indeed down through the Midlands and a certain number in the east of where. We even have a couple in the Cardiff area as well. And they undoubtedly go back to this Scandinavian influence. And the names of people with Sun at the end? That is in itself not necessarily Scandinavian. That was an English practice as well at the time. What is particularly interesting, Judith will certainly be able to say a great deal more in detail about this is what actually goes with those bee names. Are they Scandinavian words and Scandinavian names that come before them? Are they English names? I'm fascinated by names like Frisbee, Frisbee, where we have a word that is saying, here is a Frisian, somebody from the north of the Netherlands,

who is somehow settled within this mixed Scandinavian, Anglo-Scanadian. circumstance. There are others that go the other way around where you have a Scandinavian personal name and then an English specific like tune at the end of it. Grimston hybrids they're called. But the Frisian is ironic that that's

the part of the world where the Germanic language came to this country from most prevalently from that area, as I understand it. There are alternative views on that as well as you would not be surprised to hear at the moment. A lot came from Physians because if you hear the Frisian weather podcast

I think we think rather more that Frisian came from England now. Really? Yes. Very well, I'm not up to date. Who is on this paper chase? You were going to, let's talk about the influence on place names. You were going to develop that. Yes.

You mentioned the question of what's linked with the B element, and very often it's a personal name, and very often it's a Scandinavian personal name, including a few women's names. and the Helper Bee in North Yorkshire is a fascinating example because it contains a female name

Hialp and it also contains Old Norse grammar the ER in the middle of the name is a genitive ending so it's the village of Hialp and so people English people wouldn't be using Old Norse grammar it's a name given in the Old Norse language

but what I would draw from that is that there's a huge variety of personal names including names that are Anglo-Sandinavian names that are made up here but on a Scandinavian model. And in places like Lincolnshire and Yorkshire, you can find a huge variety of Scandinavian names still being given to people in the 12th and 13th century. The documents show that probably by then they're speaking English, but they still have a nomenclature that goes back to their Scandinavian origins.

I'll be any example. There's just hundreds of them. A good example is Sumar Lidvi, which, is a name that means summer traveller and is not found in Scandinavia, but sums up the kind of Viking project, really. I'm common old garden words in the north like Fell and Beck and Bridge. You were going to come in here.

We've been talking about what are called major place names to describe settlements, but also really striking is that minor place names have seemed to have been coined in Old Norse. So names for the local landscape that you could really only give if you were, settled there and you're farming the land. So names for things like little streams and for little paths and, you know, names embedded in the local landscape. And the only way they can

have a Norse name is if there are people there farming the landscape speaking old Norse. So it's just a nice kind of balance to looking at the major place names, looking at the minor place names as well. Although I would just draw a caveat there in that certain words do enter the English language. And you have to look at the distribution of these field names. Sometimes they contain Scandinavian words that have just become normal English words as the examples you gave, but many others. I mean, the other thing I find fascinating is the words that have entered English from Scandinavian, which tell us a lot about their society. The very word law is a Scandinavian word. Husband is a Scandinavian word. Hustings is a Scandinavian word.

And my favorite word is cross, which is not Scandinavian word. It's borrowed from Latin crooks into Irish. The Vikings pick it up from Irish as they become Christian. They bring it to England. And the English people stop saying road for the cross, and they start calling it the cross. How's that for Viking influence? I would actually sum this up by emphasizing the point

that it isn't really quite a matter of saying, oh, these were formed by Scandinavians, were formed by the English, but we are really talking about this Anglo-Scanadian amalgam that comes out of this, so that it effectively, I mean, as a strict linguistic historian, indeed you can often identify that a certain word is of Scandinavian origin rather than English. Well, thank you very much, and that trickles on right into the 12th century and beyond. And definitely beyond, without a question. There are texts of the 14th century

where suddenly a huge number of new Scandinavian words appear, which must have existed within the British context for centuries up to that point. The most interesting example I know is in Lady Chattelie's lover, where Mellers teaches Lady Chattelie to speak in his dialect and he teaches her how to use a Norse loan word. There we are. If we can end with D.H. Lawrence, it's a pretty good morning, isn't it? Thanks very much to Judith Deh. Jane Kirshan, John Hines.

Next week, the Great Irish Famine, 1845 to 1849. Thank you for listening. And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests. Just a little thing. I'm not trying, I mean, you know 10 times as much as I do, but when we did the book in the invention of English, the Frisians were supposed to be very influential in bringing over.

No, no, exactly. Without question, English and Friesin are incredibly closely related. So I wasn't entirely. No, no, no, you're not wrong. But the old idea, it was a sort of European language equivalent of the out of Africa hypothesis, that everything to Britain came from the continent. The most recent arguments are that Frisia remained Celtic speaking after the 4th century. It's then effectively abandoned, it's resettled at the same time as the Anglo-Saxons come into. Britain and in fact in this North Sea amalgam there's probably more influence washing back

from Britain into Frisia than there is coming the other way. And the old idea was that Frisian was always there as a language and indeed inevitably there are still Frisian provincial nationalists who want to believe they've been there absolutely all the time but the scholars in Frisia would go along with this idea. There's a complete population replacement, and you're looking at influence coming in from outside. What did we not have a chance? What did you not have a chance to say?

We spoke a bit about the metalwork and the female jewellery, but there's also a lot of silver that the Vikings are using. The Vikings mint coins, along as most Christian kings in Europe do at the time, I mean, they want to show that they're part of that club by minting coins, and Guthram mince coins in his baptismal name of Ethelstan. But it's also clear that alongside this coinage, they're using silver as a bullion currency.

So they're getting out ingots, they're putting them on scales, weighing them out, chopping them up, testing to make sure the silver content is good. And this is an economic system that comes over from Scandinavia. And it is preserved in the day and law for a couple of generations. So it's something that they're keeping up. So it's another example of the meta work that we're seeing now recorded in the hundreds of items that we're getting from the plow zone. And there are actually at least...

Through archaeology. Yeah, and there are... It isn't adding anything. At least as many of those ingots going down south into the south-west as there are coins that are being struck in the north. And yet this is not an area that uses... bullion per se as a form of currency. I was wanting actually to, if the conversation had come round to it, to add to the point of the conversion. We have a colleague Leslie Abrams who in a

paper some time ago now made a very, very good distinction between conversion as a process which was making the rulers accept Christianity as their official religion and Christianisation, which is a deeper conversion of the population and its practices and its cultures. And from that point of view, you can argue that conversion takes place really quite early. It isn't just a matter of a pragmatic acceptance of baptism by Guthram, to whom it actually doesn't really mean very much. Amongst those coins, we've got, by the 890s, a coinage in East Anglia, which is celebrating the last Christian king of that area as a saint, as a martyr.

We've got coinage from Lincoln, which is issued in the name of St. Martin, the patron saint of the cathedral there. We've got St. Peter's Pence coming out of York. We've got other York coins that have got clear Christian legends written on them, dominosteus omnipotens, rex, and so on. So I think, in fact, there is quite a real acceptance of Christianity going on in these areas. That's by no means to say simply that Christianity came in. That was it. They were all good Christians. Of course not. I would stress, actually, that there was bound to be quite a lot of diversity.

And I would also, the one thing I would have liked to bring out is the broader context, because although most of the Dane laws in the east of England, and it's called the Dane Law, people just assume that they're all Danes. And what we have quite a lot of evidence for is people coming from the Irish Sea region into the eastern part of England. And once you've got connections with the Irish Sea region, you have connections with the North Atlantic Islands. There's even one of the settlers of Iceland is said to have come from England.

So I think they're plugged into a larger world and not just that kind of North Sea. And there's, sorry, if I may, there's an interesting additional point that comes into that, and it's on this point of, you know, were women and children, or to what degree were women and children involved as well? Because as you hinted Julia, there is evidence that it becomes more later on. The evidence that we've got from Ireland, and particularly it's the indirect evidence of the DNA from Iceland, is that a lot of Scandinavian settlement from the Irish Sea area, the mitochondrial, DNA, which is the female line, looks very Celtic. It looks like it's Irish women who are mated with Scandinavian men. And I think there is a prima facie case that to start with their

very much masculine male dominated raiding armies coming in and more and more women and children follow on later. Yeah, I definitely support that model. I don't see so much evidence for women with the Great Armies. I think that's something that we're going to be looking at in future. You don't think there's much evidence for that. It's not been demonstrated yet.

We look at the evidence that we have from Viking Winter Camps. So we now have evidence of where they actually overwintered in England when they're taking over these different kingdoms. These are huge places, lots of evidence for trade and exchange, there's weaponry.

We don't have the female Scandinavian signature that we do have in the countryside surrounding these places when the settlement actually takes place. So I see a second wave of settlers following in the wake of the army but not actually with them. And this is a model that was initially proposed by place name scholars to explain the huge impact of Scandinavian on place names in England. And I definitely see it from the metal work perspective. Anything else? You're all finished.

Well, thank you all very much indeed. That was terrific. Thank you. Just in time, the producers broken us up. Does anyone want to your coffee? Yes, cup of tea. In our time with Melvin Bragg

is produced by Simon Tillotson. You know the way late at night, in bed, in the dark, your tired mind can wander and strange thoughts, float like balloons escaping into the sky. Well, bun,

Bunk Bed is a podcast where Peter Curran and Patrick Marber find the nearest faraway place from the hurly-burly of daily life, where tired minds can wander. Why don't you come along and eavesdrop and see if you like it? You can subscribe to Bunk Bed on BBC Sounds.