In winter the mists sometimes hang like a veil across a mile of flooded fields from the old bridge of the Trent at Willington to the soft emerald green folds of the hills above Repton. The Old English Hrypadun, ‘the hill of the Hrype tribe’, Repton was a famous royal monastery, the burial place of the Mercian kings. The church, the mausoleum of Kings Aethelbald and Wiglaf and the murdered saint Wistan, stood on a plateau of land a steep twenty feet above the old course of the river which once flowed right under the churchyard. Here in the winter of 873–4 an extraordinary event took place. A Viking army had made its winter camp here and laid out a fortified base inside the precinct of the royal monastery. The place had been chosen not only for its symbolic value but for practical reasons: it was a naturally protected position bounded by river marshes to the west, and to the east by a stream bed coming down from the ‘dun’. Inside the monastic grounds the Vikings had thrown up an inner defence work, a ditch and bank with a timber palisade, a curving semi-circle 100 metres across, anchored at both ends on the Trent and centred on the stone nave of the church, now desecrated and perhaps serving as the headquarters of the Viking leaders. Here on that winter’s day a sombre ritual took place which would trigger a defining phase in early-medieval English history.
In the old monastic cemetery to the west of the church stood an eighth-century mausoleum, a now roofless, subterranean structure, with a stone floor and walls fifteen feet square. Around it that day was gathered a crowd of perhaps two or three thousand Viking warriors, with their servants and camp followers, including many Anglo-Saxon women and children. Then a group of warriors moved through them bearing a body on a catafalque, down the steps of the mausoleum and through the doorway into the inner tomb chamber, now stripped of its Christian furnishings, its floor laid with a thick layer of marl. In the centre of the chamber was an empty stone coffin, the bones of its former royal occupant summarily thrown out to make it ready for the dead man to receive his final honours.
We can recover more details of this extraordinary scene from the excavators’ report. The dead man had been well-built, six feet tall, and about forty years old. By his left side was an iron sword in a fleece-lined wooden scabbard covered with leather, attached to a belt with a decorated copper buckle. By the sword hilt was a folding iron knife and a dagger with a wooden handle, by the scabbard an iron key. Around the man’s neck a thong held two glass beads and a silver hammer of Thor. On his legs, mysteriously, was a bag containing the humerus of a jackdaw, and between his thighs the tusk of a wild boar. Perhaps he had been disembowelled and his genitals cut off by those who killed him? His death wound had been a heavy blow to the skull but whilst on the ground he had been finished off with a sword slash that had severed the femoral artery in his upper thigh. As for his identity, it seems that this was none other than the most famous Viking of his era, the son of Ragnar Lothbrok, ‘that most cruel pagan king’, ‘king of all the Norsemen of Ireland and Britain’ and founder of the greatest and most long-lasting dynasty of the Viking Age: Ivar, nicknamed ‘the Boneless’.
While the dead chief’s women began to lament, a young man was brought down to the graveside, aged around twenty, wearing an iron knife at his waist. Perhaps he was the squire or armour bearer to the dead man. Unsteady on his feet from a draught of opiates, he was supported to the edge of the coffin and then killed with a single blow to the right side of his head. Buried in an adjacent grave inside the mortuary chamber he would accompany his lord to the halls of the dead.
Still more extraordinary scenes were to follow. The bones of over 200 men and the remains of forty-nine women – who were believed by the excavators to have been Anglo-Saxons – had been gathered inside the cemetery, the remains of warriors and camp followers who had died of wounds or disease that winter. These were now buried in rows fanning out from the central chamber and neatly stacked around the central coffin. Heavy timber joists were laid on the tops of the cut-down walls to form a roof which was covered with flat slabs and earth. The whole sunken structure was then sealed by a low stone cairn, topped by a mound of pebbles and edged by a kerb of upright stones. All the ritual proprieties of pagan Viking religion seem to have been followed: even the leftovers of the funeral feast were carefully buried in four sunken pits filled with stones.
Finally the tumulus was closed and the last sacrifice took place. Four young captives, perhaps English hostages, were killed and buried in a large pit with a sheep’s head at their feet. Then the army raised their shout to Odin the leader of souls, the incarnation of fury and exaltation, the god of battle, death and prophecy. To the army chaplain, the shaman, perhaps fell the duty of speaking the acclamation prayer: ‘Gakk i haoll horskr’ – ‘Welcome to Valhalla, brave one.’ Then the whole elaborate funeral monument (surely the most extraordinary royal burial ever found in Britain) was sealed and at its edge a tall marker post was erected, carved and painted with pagan symbols, a mnemonic of the tree of Odin in this graveyard of a revered Christian monastery. Such was the funeral of Ivar the Boneless. As a later saga writer said approvingly, ‘He was buried in the true fashion of the old days.’
The Viking army present at Repton that day had already cut a swathe of terror through England, with its allies crushing the kingdoms of the East Angles and the Northumbrians. When it left Repton that spring the army split up, its sights set on new fields of conquest. But these were no longer mere plundering raids. For like the Anglo-Saxons four centuries before, the Danes had come to stay. In the late ninth century their permanent settlement of large tracts of the Midlands north and east of Watling Street, and in East Anglia and Northumbria, would change the culture of England for ever. The people of Kibworth and its neighbouring villages soon found themselves in the border zone between the English and Anglo-Scandinavian worlds in a partitioned country. Like hundreds of similar villages across the Midlands, East Anglia and the north they now owed their allegiance to Viking overlords of the Danelaw. And there a new Anglo-Scandinavian society is about to emerge in which the old aristocracy of the Mercians, those who have survived, are joined as neighbours and landowners by the leaders and rank and file of the army of Repton and the many Danes who came into the country in their wake in secondary migrations.
Remarkably, in the countryside around Kibworth the names of some of the men in the Viking Great Army of the 870s may still survive in today’s village names: men like Slagr ‘the Sly’, Hrolfr, Iolfr, Gauti, Aki and Bladr, ‘the Blade’. These men take us into the next phase of the story of England, and of the village, and the next layer in English identity: the Vikings.
The terror of war
On the eve of the Viking Age the people on the ridge where the village of Kibworth lies today had lived under the rule of the Mercian kings for two and a half centuries. The villagers as we have seen were of mixed ancestry, British, Roman, Anglian and Frisian, but by the ninth century they belonged to the estate named after a nobleman called Cybba in the kingdom of Mercia. Occasionally great events had swirled round their lives, as in 849, in the troubled dog days of the kingdom, when rival claimants in the royal clan came to a meeting on the River Glen by Kibworth, and a young prince of the Mercians, Wistan, was assassinated at Wistow in the water meadows below Kibworth. Locals subsequently told of miracles – a pillar of light had been seen for thirty days in the sky above the murder spot – and though Wistan was carried to Repton for burial, Wistow remained a local pilgrimage place until the Reformation. But of the events of their lives we still have no detail. Then in a few years between the 860s and 870s the old world they had grown up with was swept away as the Vikings changed the English political landscape for all time.
War was endemic in the West in the Dark Ages. Given the prevalence of disorder, violence and raiding in the northern world, whether there really is a moment when the Viking Age can be said to have begun is a moot point. The perceived difference perhaps was the size and frequency of the attacks, and their coordination. Contemporaries certainly thought that something new and deeply threatening had begun to unfold towards the end of the eighth century, and related these events with a growing sense of shock and foreboding. In Kent the first sign was thought to be a sacking of Thanet recorded in 753. West Saxon annals first describe a landing at Portland in 787, an attack by three ships – at most, say, 120 heavily armed men, but enough to overpower the royal coastguard and to strike terror. Believing them to be traders the port reeve, the customs officer, came down to question them, but they drew their swords and killed him and his companions. Then in 794 in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle comes this:
In this year dire portents appeared over Northumbria and deeply terrified the people. They consisted of huge whirlwinds and flashes of lightning and fiery dragons were seen flying in the sky. A great famine immediately followed those signs and a little after that in the same year on 8 June the ravages of the heathen men miserably destroyed God’s church on Lindisfarne with plunder and slaughter.
Northumbrian annals tell the tale with more brutal immediacy, perhaps from an eyewitness account of the atrocities:
in the church of Lindisfarne they plundered and trampled the holy places with polluted steps, they dug up the altars and seized all the treasures of the holy shrine. Some of the monks they killed, some they took away in chains; many they drove out naked and loaded with insults; some they drowned in the sea.
The story was greeted with horror across Britain and soon reached friends abroad: ‘The news of your tragic sufferings daily brings me sorrow,’ wrote the Northumbrian Alcuin in a letter back home. An alumnus of the school of York, now one of Charlemagne’s think tank, Alcuin was part of the great chain of scholarly transmission in the West down from Theodore and Bede, and immediately saw the disaster in terms of Christian history: ‘The pagans have destroyed God’s sanctuary,’ he wrote from Aachen; ‘But don’t be dismayed by this disaster … you survive and must stand like men and fight bravely. Is this the beginning of greater sufferings?’ Alcuin’s long consolatory letter to the monks of Jarrow is a little too sententious to our modern taste, but behind its religious certainties lay a genuine and deep-felt fear of the fragility of civilization experienced by all early-medieval thinkers:
The pagans have appeared on your coasts; carefully hold on to the rule. Put your faith in God, not weapons. Who is not scared by the terrible fate that befell the church at Lindisfarne? You live by the sea where the danger first appeared … so remember the words of the prophet, ‘from the North evil breaks forth … a terrible glory will come from the Lord.’
Look, the pirate raids have penetrated the north of our island. Let us grieve for the suffering of our brothers and beware the same does not happen to us … Remember the nobility of your predecessors. Look at the treasures of your library, the beauty of your churches … the order of your religious life …
All well and good perhaps to write such words from an ivory tower in Europe; the security of Aachen was a long way from the exposed Northumbrian coast. Alcuin saw the moral in terms of God’s will and the nation’s sins, as sermon writers did throughout the whole period. And the attacks, as Alcuin foresaw, continued. Irish annals pick up the tale next with stories of raids on Skye, Iona and Alba and the routine plundering of Irish houses. Through the middle of the ninth century the threat grew to the whole Christian social order which had been created out of the chaos at the end of Rome and the wanderings of the barbarians. The achievements of kingship and the growth of Western economies, the stored-up merchants’ goods and coins in the nascent towns, the jewelled manuscripts and portable treasures in the monasteries – all were easy prey. Soon the Viking armies were growing in size and beginning to act in combination with groups of kings operating together. A mere three ships in 787 became 140 in Ireland in 849; 120 were wrecked off Swanage in 877; fleets of over 200 were soon reported in Ireland; then 700 in a vast combined operation at the siege of Paris in 885. And as they grew in size the armies began to contemplate permanent settlement. In the winter of 855 a Viking army wintered in Sheppey; in 860 they sacked Winchester and compelled the people of Kent and the East Angles to make peace and pay tribute. Then in 866 a large combined force wintered in the territory of the East Angles and received tribute, supplies and horses. This was what Old English called the ‘micel here’: the ‘great heathen army’.
The wanderings of the Great Army during the next few years by land and sea through the islands and archipelagos of northern Britain and through all the regions of England need not be followed in detail here, though to read the year by year account of their movements in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle is to gain a strong sense of the malign threat they represented, their power and the inability of individual English kingdoms to fight against them. All over England the Great Army’s depredations were well-known to the peasantry, who suffered most from its ravaging and plundering. A professional army heavily armed and mobile, with large numbers of horses, it was led by three kings: Ivar (Ingwer), Halfdan and Hubba, sons of Ragnar Lothbrok, who had ruled in Denmark and who seems to have been killed in Northumbria in 865. In 867 they crossed from East Anglia into Northumbria across the Humber estuary. There, taking advantage of a local civil war, they killed both the rival kings and installed a puppet who made peace and paid tribute. In 868 they moved into Mercia, to Nottingham, and made winter quarters there. The Mercians now asked for help from their erstwhile enemies the West Saxons and after ‘severe fighting’ their joint forces made a negotiated peace with the Danes. The mobility of the Great Army, however, made it impossible to restrict them to one theatre of war, or to one peace agreement. They wintered back in Northumbria then rode back into East Anglia. There in November 870 they defeated and killed King Edmund of the East Angles, who according to an early tradition was captured and put to death with particular cruelty, possibly in some kind of pagan sacrifice. Now in their turn the conquered East Angles installed a puppet king and furnished the Danes with tribute and supplies. Then in 871 the Army moved south and fought a costly series of eight battles and skirmishes against tenacious opposition in Wessex, but unable to overcome the West Saxons under their young king, Alfred, they moved back north.
This was the background to the dramatic events at Repton. In 872–3 a combined army moved into Mercia under four kings, who are named in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle as Halfdan, Guthrum, Anand and Oscytel. A fifth mentioned by Irish sources and later Scandinavian tradition is the legendary Ingwaer, ‘Ivar beinluss’, the paramount king who was remembered by the chronicler Adam of Bremen as ‘the most cruel pagan king who everywhere tortured Christians to death’. In November 872 they wintered on the Trent in Lindsey and to buy time the Mercian king Burgred made peace, in the now usual pattern by providing money and supplies.
The following year, 873, however, they moved across country into the heart of Mercia and made their base at the Mercian royal church of Repton. At this point Burgred seems to have fought them but was defeated and after a reign of twenty-two years resigned his kingship and fled overseas, ending his days in Rome. The whole kingdom of the Mercians now fell under Viking power. In Burgred’s place the Mercians elected a nobleman called Ceolwulf – ‘a foolish king’s thegn’ it was said contemptuously in the south, though in fact he was of the royal kin and would issue charters and coins in his own name as king. But Ceolwulf was to be the last king of the Mercians. In what one contemporary called a ‘wretched deal’ he agreed to cooperate with the invaders and provided them with hostages and supplies. This took place in a formal ceremony of submission in which ‘He swore oaths to them that what they desired should be ready for them on whatever day they wanted it and he would be ready himself and with all those who remained with him, at the service of the army.’ To us Ceolwulf sounds like a quisling, but in the face of military defeat and remorseless pressure from a hostile and ruthless army composed of heavily armed professionals, it was perhaps the only sensible course for the moment. Against them the surviving Mercian thegns, the lords of estates like Kibworth, were outnumbered and outfought, and the local peasant levies too poorly armed and organized to offer serious resistance.
The fighting which led to Burgred’s defeat may have been near to Repton. It is hard to imagine the Mercian king would not have made an attempt to save this royal cult centre and mausoleum. In 1855 a Viking Age cemetery was found with fifty-nine male burials only two miles away on a rise above the Trent valley. These were cremations burned on boat planking but traces of clothes, possessions and weapons were found with coins datable to the mid-870s. It was perhaps in this warfare that Ingwaer, Ivar, died, whose death is recorded that year in Irish annals as ‘the king of the Norsemen of Britain and Ireland’. Hence it is tempting to associate him with the incredible discovery made at Repton described at the head of this chapter, one of the most dramatic archaeological finds in British history and indeed a find without parallel anywhere in Viking Age Europe.
With the burial of Ivar, the long and eventful stay of the Vikings at Repton was over. In spring 874 the Great Army left Repton and split up, part heading down into East Anglia, part up into Northumbria to the Tyne valley. Then comes the first sign of a momentous change in their tactics. In 876, says the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, ‘the army in Northumbria under King Halfdan shared out the land of the Northumbrians and proceeded to plough and support themselves.’ In the following year, 877, the southern army rode back into Mercia, and in August, around harvest-time, began to share it out, allotting some to Ceolwulf and some to their own rank and file. So less than a century after the great Offa had dominated England, the old lands of Mercia were partitioned. The East Midlands, between Trent and Welland, the Lincolnshire Wolds and the Leicester uplands, were divided up, and members of a Viking army settled and took land alongside the English landowners and their peasantry and ‘began to plough and to provide for themselves’.
Only in Wessex was King Alfred able to hold his own and defeat Guthrum’s army at the battle of Edington in 878. But such was the Vikings’ military power that in 886 Alfred was forced to acknowledge the true state of affairs by agreeing to a treaty dividing England from the River Lea above London all the way up Watling Street to Tamworth: a partition of England right through what had been the kingdom of Mercia. The age of Scandinavian England had begun. Exactly what this meant for the people in villages like Kibworth – what happened, what were the numbers, whether it was a small elite or a mass migration – has been hotly disputed. Inevitably chroniclers writing in Winchester or Northumbria saw only part of the picture. The full story is only now being slowly recovered from archaeology, place names and even DNA.
Slagr ‘the Sly’ and Blath ‘the Blade’
The popular image of the Viking invasions from medieval chronicles to Victorian paintings and Hollywood epics is of blood and thunder, rape and pillage. But as with the ‘coming of the English’ the reality was far more complex and interesting. What did the ‘sharing out’ of Mercia mean? How was the settlement negotiated between the leaders of the Great Army and the Mercian king and his council? Did the Vikings actually buy land and property? Did they simply seize choice estates, or were they allotted uninhabited or marginal land away from the local English? Answers to some of these questions have started to emerge recently from fascinating new place name evidence from the East Midlands.
The people of Kibworth were in the main region of Danish settlement, which later became known as the Danelaw. Here, the Middle Anglian lords of Leicester were replaced by Viking rulers, kings or chiefs, whose warriors settled across the Leicester uplands to Rutland. At a local level many estates remained under their English lords – around Kibworth in the Gartree Hundred, several places today still retain the name of an Anglo-Saxon lord, Osulf at Owston, Glor at Glooston, or Cybba at Kibworth. But today’s villages also preserve the names of Viking newcomers who, out in the landscape, attached Scandinavian words to villages, hamlets and farms, fields, watercourses and many smaller natural features. Even in Kibworth itself where the field names remained predominantly Old English, nearly a fifth of place names are from the Scandinavian language, and the pattern of these names shows us what might have happened after the share-out of land by the Great Army after 877.
The chronology of these settlements is also revealed by the place names. From the first phase after 877 are hybrid names like Grimston which combine a Viking personal name with the English word tun (village). Close to Kibworth there are a number of these hybrids, which suggests the appropriation of already existing English estates and settlements by warriors of the Danish Army. Illston on the Hill just north of Kibworth for example is named after a Dane, Iolfr. Nearby Rolleston preserves the name of another Viking, Hrolfr. Others in the vicinity include Slagr, ‘the Sly’, who took over the English tun which is now Slawston; and the tough-sounding Blath, ‘the Blade’, who was a close neighbour at Blaston. Iolfr, Hrolfr, Slafr and Blath may have been original members of the army disbanded in 877, veterans who settled in the Kibworth area, ‘shared the land and began to plough’, backed by the armed force of their friends and retinues – a heavily armed elite who carved out a kingdom in England and farmed land in exchange for military service to their paramount lord, presumably in Leicester, who was now Danish.
Second-stage settlements – those of immigrants who perhaps came into England in the next two or three decades – are indicated by another layer of place names. To the north-east of Kibworth a cluster of names on poorer land contain the Viking word for farm,by, as in Galby, Goadby and Frisby (‘farmstead of Frisians’). These can be connected with a later phase of settlement, one in which more immigrants, family members and women, had come from Denmark and Frisia. But these were not on as good land as the tuns. Little Galby, for example, was never a great success – it was finally virtually deserted in the decades after the Black Death; its name means ‘poor soil’ in Old Norse, and the land is stiff clay and loam. But Galby is surrounded by villages which kept their English names, King’s Norton, Stretton, Burton and Houghton, where evidently the local native farmers had not been dislodged. The Vikings in Galby then had to be satisfied with poor marginal land. Around Kibworth there are a number of these names: Bushby as its name says was a ‘farm in the scrubland’; Thurnby, ‘the farm on thorny land’; Rainby in Goadby parish was ‘a borderland farm’. A further group around Kibworth reveals further outlying Viking farmsteads (thorpe), in Thorpe Langton, Hothorpe and Othorpe – where a field name commemorates another Viking settler called Aki. Thorpes, like tofts, seem to have been from a still later phase of Viking settlement when the squeeze on land for new immigrants had become quite tight. Most picturesquely named is Scraptoft – in Old Norse a thin, poor or even miserable covering of grass: a further hint that some settlers moved round the existing English population to open up new poorer land on the margins, even perhaps buying plots from locals. As regards the settlers, some names may indicate their places of origin. Gauti of Goadby may be as his name implies a man from Gautland. Next door to Kibworth in Great Glen parish the Viking who built himself a small farm at ‘Northman’s toft’ may have been a Norwegian.
These faint footprints of real individuals in the Viking Age are intriguing hints of the treaties and negotiations that happened from day to day as the Viking armies attempted to take some of the rich farmland of the Middle Angles for themselves. The indigenous population though was too large to remove or drive out: things had to be negotiated, and in the end they would have to rub along.
The village reeve and everyone in Kibworth and Smeeton would have warily watched these changes happening around them. On the wrong side of the Watling Street frontier, their overlord after 877 was no longer the King of the Mercians, but the Viking lord, the jarl, of the ‘Army of Leicester’. To see precisely how these things might have worked out in practice in Kibworth we only need to walk downhill out of Smeeton Westerby on the Gumley Road. Here sherds of St Neots ware and Stamford ware pottery were found in the 2009 village dig, attesting to the growth of a wealthy and populous community in the Viking Age from the late ninth century onwards. At the bottom in the valley is a little stream which snakes through a field undulating with medieval ridge and furrow. Standing in the field and looking back to the ridge on which the village sits, Smeeton to the right was already a tun by the ninth century, and its name is English. But only a few yards along the ridge to the left are the farms and weavers’ cottages of Westerby: in Old Norse Vesterbyr, the ‘West farm’ – founded just to the west of Smeeton by Viking settlers at some point perhaps a few years after the disbanding of the army of 877.
In the farmland below the village the field names are a mix of English and Scandinavian. The little stream at the foot of the hill occurs in tithe maps as the Fleet: fliotr in Viking; by its banks there’s a carr, in Old Norse kjarr – a boggy flat covered with brush – and out in the fields there are wongs, slangs, flats, tofts, holms and siks. In some parts of the East Midlands and north these words are all still used in farming speech. Holme, a familiar northern place name, occurs across the parish of Kibworth, as do gates (in northern speech meaning not an opening gate but a street or track) and siks (in Scandinavian speech a watercourse or ditch between fields which in time becomes a grassy division between field strips). These words still exist in farming speech in the surviving open-field village at Laxton in the East Midlands. The survival of such field names is a strong indication that over the generations Scandinavian dialect spread quite widely among English as well as Viking farmers, and probably that Viking speech was spoken for some generations among a minority of the population even in Kibworth. Perhaps the most notable minor field name in Smeeton, last recorded in the 1960s, but found in documents from the Victorian age back to 1636, is Crackley, whose earlier forms in the seventeenth century reveal the Scandinavian word craca = kraka, the Old Norse ‘raven’, with the Old English leah – a suitably Viking name in an English field, ‘Raven’s Wood’.
Numbers: elites or mass migration?
The Viking settlement depicted in such lurid terms by monastic chroniclers was not an act of ethnic cleansing; nor did it involve the driving out of the native population. The population of England was still low after its peak in the late-Roman world, kept in check by plague, disease, war and natural catastrophe. The countryside was far less crowded, and there was plenty of land available for newcomers, especially in the margins which now began to be cleared for cultivation. Anglian-speaking areas, not Saxon, were favoured for settlement – even Essex was not, despite its proximity to Jutland and Frisia – perhaps because of the linguistic closeness of Anglian and Danish. On the numbers of the settlers modern opinion is divided. Recent historiography has argued for a very small elite. But place names and documents are evidence of transformation by sizeable immigration. In terms of the whole population DNA experts have suggested an addition to the English gene pool of 1 per cent Norwegian and 4–5 per cent Danish; a total of over 5.5 per cent of the total population for the newcomers nationally, though in this part of the East Midlands the figure was probably higher, around 10 per cent. In a national population of one million 5.5 per cent would represent over 50,000 immigrants, twice that if the population was 2 million.
So following the Britons, Romans, Angles and Saxons, the Vikings were added to the racial and cultural mix. Again they were a minority, a few tens of thousands in one to two million. But they will bring important changes in the law, language and customs of northern and eastern England. By the eleventh century the countryside will have been opened up to near its full potential so that in late-Saxon Kibworth there was almost as much arable land as there was in the nineteenth century. All this was to meet the demands of population growth after the Viking Age.
‘A farmer needs a wife’
In the families of Kibworth and many places like it, the Viking settlers left a long-lasting mark. The stories of the families descended from the Great Army and later waves of migrants can be traced into the period after the Norman Conquest when detailed documents emerge for the first time in the history of the village. Many common Midland names – Tookey, Pauley, Chettle, Gamel, Herrick for example – are Viking in origin, and in estate documents and tax rolls from Kibworth and Smeeton starting in the 1200s some of the most common family names are Scandinavian. One or two, like Thurd or Thored, are only found in this region in Kibworth itself. These people constitute a landowning class of small farmers, freemen or ‘sokemen’, who are prominent at local level in later manorial documents and tenaciously hold their position in the next centuries to become part of the yeoman class in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.
In Smeeton for example there are the Astins and Swans: behind these surnames lie the Danish Haesten and Sweyn – modern Sven. By the thirteenth century these families have several distinct branches of the family tree in separate households, and very likely go back to individual settlers in the Viking Age. These men were perhaps second-generation incomers after the share-out of 877 and it is possible that they were the founders of Westerby, the Scandinavian hamlet west of Smeeton village. There, Sven, Haesten and companions opened up new land, cleared brush and woodland and began to plough. ‘Always a distinct place’ as Nichols wrote of it in the late eighteenth century, though even then Westerby had only eight houses.
Sven and Haesten still owed military service to their Danish overlord and had to join his ‘here’ with their horses and war gear for campaigns into the south against Alfred the Great’s successors. But essentially now they were farmers. When Sven married and had children, it is possible that he sent for a bride from Denmark, but more likely he married a local Englishwoman, as did even the chief man in Leicester in the 930s, Earl Urm, who gave his daughter an English name. And if Sven set out to court a wife, the daughter of a local Kibworth farmer, Oswin or Godwine for example, then perhaps he bought her a cheap imitation Danish brooch manufactured in the Danelaw, one of the women’s fashions from Scandinavia which were now all the rage in England and which are now being picked up by metal detectorists across the East Midlands. If so, Sven’s wife was not the only one: as so often in history, within a short time there was very likely plenty of intermarriage between the indigenous people and the newcomers. It has been suggested that Danish men took more care over their looks. The bone combs with which Viking men combed their long hair, Danish-style, are frequently found in archaeological digs, and it was said (perhaps not entirely in jest) that they washed more often too. The languages of course were similar, especially the Anglian dialect spoken in the Midlands and East Anglia, so they could swiftly learn to make themselves understood. Did Sven’s children learn to speak Danish from their father and English from their mother? On such matters of course our sources are silent, but these are the intimate details we would really wish to know.
Perhaps then some of the new immigrants found a warmer welcome than might be gathered from ecclesiastical writers horrified by the aggression (and of course the paganism) of these ‘uncouth, barbarous, berserk, stubborn, treacherous foreigners …’ Sven of Westerby we must assume took a more relaxed view. He wore the silver hammer of Thor round his neck and he took his children to make offerings to Thunor’s ‘holy oak’ on the edge of Rutland. But he was happy to go to church with his English wife wearing the ring of the English St Edmund, martyred by Sven’s parents a generation back in 870, his severed head miraculously protected by wolves like a figure from the pagan past, but now a model to both communities as a courageous Christian warrior favoured by God. In time Sven will baptize his daughters and granddaughters and give them English names but his first-born son will keep the name of his forefathers. He will be Magnus son of Sven, and in time his descendants will become the Swans of Smeeton and Westerby. By the eleventh century they could have bought silk and wine in the market at Lincoln and with a bit of money perhaps even gone to Rome on pilgrimage.
So the Anglo-Saxon settlement of Kibworth became an Anglo-Scandinavian village in the Danelaw, a parable of the Viking Age. We can now picture the village divided into the four communities that appear in eleventh-century documents and which exist today: the northern village (later Kibworth Harcourt), site of the Iron Age, Roman and Anglian settlements and Cybba’s enclosure; the ‘lower’ Kibworth (today’s Beauchamp), the old Anglo-Saxon service village with its unfree population of villeins and serfs; Smeeton, with its free peasantry, artisans and farmers; and finally little Westerby, the Viking farmstead of the late ninth or early tenth century whose precise boundary is still pointed out at the end of Smeeton’s main street, from where one may look out across the ‘fleet’ to ‘Raven’s Wood’. In the one parish are the roots of the English story from the Romans to the Vikings.