Chapter 8
A Viking Kingdom in the Irish Sea
“The overpraised are the worst deceivers.”
- The Saga of Grettir the Strong
Perhaps the greatest tribute to Alfred’s success was that the Danelaw never became a kingdom of its own. At the time of his death it accounted for roughly half the land area of the modern kingdom of England. Its main city was York, a city which owes its location and much of its existence to the Vikings. In AD 71, the Ninth Legion of the Roman army had built a wooden fort at the confluence of the rivers Ouse and Foss which they named Eboracum.69 The Anglo-Saxons, however, had moved the settlement inland and renamed it Eoforwīc, or ‘wild boar town’. It remained a smaller royal center until the Viking conquest, when its new masters moved it back to the bank of the rivers, transforming it into a major port city. Their name of Jorvīc or York stuck, and by the eleventh century it had grown to around ten thousand people, representing perhaps a sixth of the existing population of the Danelaw.
Under the Vikings, York flourished. It was at the western end of the great northern trade arc that they had been developing, and was a major center for the export of food and metals to markets from Ireland to Russia. In the other direction came aromatics, glassware, silks, and silver, along with other refined products from eastern markets.
The lure of English wealth glittering just over the Irish Sea was irresistible to the Vikings of Ireland, and they kept returning to it, like moths to a flame. But the repeated attempts to seize its riches – especially the great invasion of England – nearly proved the undoing of Viking settlements in Ireland. The Gaelic Vikings had been facing a serious manpower shortage since 870 when the discovery of Iceland had diverted immigrants to the north, and they could ill afford to lose men in fruitless adventures in England. The drain of available forces left them exposed, and in 902 a High King had managed to drive them out of Dublin itself. The Irish victory proved fleeting, however. In 914 a grandson of Ivar the Boneless named Sitric One-Eyed, sailed into Dublin’s harbor and crushed the High King’s army. With that triumph, the Irish fell back, allowing the Vikings to reoccupy their old settlements.
Sitric One-Eyed, who was pragmatic to the point of ruthlessness, made the strategic decision not to spend his efforts conquering Ireland.70 Instead he wanted to capture the lucrative northern trading routes, by linking Dublin with York. His ambition was to rule a kingdom made up of bits of the coasts of Ireland, England, Scotland, and Wales. This dream was born of a typically Viking outlook. They saw the world in terms of the sea, not land masses, and it made perfect sense to connect the major crossing points. Dublin was cut off from the interior of Ireland by bogs and forests, while northern Britain was divided by the Pennine mountains. By sea, however, which the Vikings could cross easily and quickly, these areas could be knit together into a single kingdom straddling the Irish Sea.
The only serious resistance he faced was from the Irish. In 918 a coalition of petty kings tried to drive him out of Dublin, but were heavily beaten. The next year they tried again with even worse results. In what was probably the most catastrophic defeat ever inflicted on the Irish by the Vikings, Sitric One-Eyed crushed the army, killing several kings.
The victory ensured that Dublin would remain Viking, and reinforced the dominant Viking position in Ireland. With his flank secured, Sitric One-Eyed left Dublin in the hands of his cousin, and sailed across the Irish Sea to claim York as well. The family of Ivar the Boneless had always thought of York as their patrimony, and the feeling seems to have been reciprocated. He was accepted as king, and spent the next six years methodically expanding the size and influence of Viking Northumbria.
By 926 it looked as if Sitric’s dream had become a reality. Dublin and York were the twin centers of an unlikely realm spanning the Irish Sea. He had even made enough of a nuisance of himself that the English king, Athelstan, had bought him off by giving him a royal bride – the king’s own sister. The following year, however, Sitric One-Eyed died, and his Hiberno-English realm collapsed.
The next two decades saw York ruled by a succession of Viking kings, each trying to fend off Athelstan and put Sitric’s possessions back together. His son, Olaf Sitricsson, came the closest, conquering York in 941, and leading an ambitious invasion to bring the entire Danelaw under his control. If he could convince the Danish population of the north to make common cause with him, England would be divided between rival kingdoms.
It appeared at first as if the English nightmare would become a reality. When confronted with the Hiberno-Norse army, the people of Northumbria pledged their loyalty to Olaf. When Edmund arrived, however, they switched their loyalties again, and Olaf was forced to withdraw. The English pursued them all the way to York where Olaf admitted defeat and came to terms. He accepted the English as his overlords, and was baptized with king Edmund standing in as his godfather.
Olaf would probably have tried again, but in 944 he was expelled by the people of York, and forced to flee to Dublin. Bad news continued to plague him, as that year Dublin was sacked by the Irish High King, and Olaf only just managed to maintain control. With Dublin badly weakened, the Viking grip on York waned, and the English seized control of the city.
As the Vikings of Ireland entered a period of relative weakness, other Viking adventurers began to cast interested eyes on York. The most ambitious of these was Erik Bloodaxe of Norway. He was one of at least twenty sons of the first Norwegian king, Harald Fairhair, and according to later accounts, showed tremendous potential as a Viking from an early age. When he turned twelve, he left Norway to go adventuring, and spent the next decade raiding up and down the coasts from France to northern Russia.
These exploits won him the affection of his father, who made it known that he wanted Erik to succeed him. That didn’t sit well with Erik’s older half-brothers, but when two of them protested, Erik resolved the issue by murdering them with an axe. Two other siblings marshaled armies to depose Erik, but he brutally suppressed them as well, and they met the same fate. Erik – now called ‘bloodaxe’ for his method of fratricide – was accepted as king of Norway. Unsurprisingly, he was unable to keep the throne for long. The brutality he had shown in cutting his way to the crown was a prelude to how he would rule, and the increasingly despotic reign lost the support of both commoners and nobles or jarls. After only a brief time on the throne, Erik was run out of Norway by his youngest brother Håkon the Good.
Erik seems to have resorted to what he was best at – raiding – and while pillaging in the north learned that York had expelled its king. Using the dissatisfaction with English rule, which had already alienated the Danish population, he managed to get himself crowned king of York.
He quickly found himself between a rock and a hard place. The new English king, a capable warrior named Eadred, had no intention of letting another Viking establish himself in York, and induced the Scots to raid Northumbria. At the same time the English sovereign moved north, promising the inhabitants of Northumbria severe punishment if they didn’t expel Erik. Once again, the Danish population refused to rally around a Scandinavian monarch, and Erik was run out of England.
That cleared the way for Olaf Sitricsson to return from Dublin, but he quickly squandered any goodwill and was driven back to Ireland by his own subjects after only three years. By that time it was clear that the constant changing of power had eroded whatever support there was in the north for Viking rule, and doomed Sitric’s old dream of a united York and Dublin. The Danes of Yorkshire may have still gone by Viking names and abided by Viking law, but they no longer considered themselves Vikings. For the most part they had accepted Christianity and developed a settled, landed class. They no longer viewed the adventurers from Norway or Ireland as kinsmen, seeing them instead as disruptive forces, if not outright enemies. They preferred the stable, Christian kings of Wessex to the violent sea-kings of the north, and that realization marked the first real assimilation of the Danelaw into the kingdom of England.
This failure of a Scandinavian kingdom to take root was by no means inevitable. The first generation of Vikings may have been too restless to be good administrators, but their successors undoubtedly would have learned. Both Ivar the Boneless and Guthrum had given land to their veterans and styled themselves as Anglo-Saxon kings. Over time, the Viking population adopted the religion, fashions, and even the farming techniques of the English, a process which should have resulted in a strong Viking state in the north, similar to that which developed in Normandy.
It didn’t only because Alfred and his two successors were shrewd enough to allow the Vikings of the Danelaw to maintain their traditions, while building up a strong, centralized English state. In the end, the fading Norse language and cuisine wasn’t enough to maintain a Scandinavian identity. Once the population of the Danelaw realized that they had more in common with their neighbors to the south than with the immigrants from the north, it was only a matter of time before the region was swallowed up by the English king.
Viking York still had one gasp of life left in it. In 952 Erik Bloodaxe stormed back into England at the head of a small Viking army. He smashed a combined Scottish and Welsh army and was accepted as king in York. A man with the nickname ‘bloodaxe’, however, was hardly the one to win over a population that was disillusioned with Viking rule. After two years of Erik’s increasingly harsh reign, he was thrown out by the people of York and assassinated while trying to recruit another army.71 York was absorbed permanently into the English kingdom and never again had a Viking king.