The Vikings and their enemies : warfare in Northern Europe, 750-1100

370 Pages·2015·4.19 MB·English

by  Philip Line

Copyright © 2014 by Philip Line Originally published by Pen & Sword Military in 2014
First Skyhorse Publishing edition 2015
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.
Cover design by Jon Wilkinson
Print ISBN: 978-1-63220-503-2
Ebook ISBN: 978-1-63220872-9
Printed in the United States of America
Contents
List of Plates
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Maps
1. Viking-Age Warfare and History
2. Equipment
3. Military Organization and Training
4. Campaigning
5. Battle
6. Fortifications and Siegecraft
7. The Way of the Warrior
8. Concluding Words
Notes
Bibliography
Index
List of Plates
Aerial view of Northey Island and the site of the Battle of Maldon, from the east.
Viking-Age spearhead, shield-boss, ring and buckle from Vestre Slidre, Oppland, Norway.
Two Viking Period swords inscribed with names.
Two Viking Period iron axeheads from Norway.
An arrowhead, spearheads, fragment of ring-mail, a bit, a dagger and an axehead.
Replica of the tenth-century helmet found at Gjermundbu, Norway.
Replica of one of two ninth-or tenth-century helmets found at Gnezdovo, Russia.
Replica of the so-called “Wenceslas helmet”: tenth-century, Bohemia.
Replica of a helmet of segmented and riveted construction, probably eleventh century.
Picture stone of the late Vendel or early Viking Period, Lärbro socken, Stora hammars, Gotland.
Another picture stone from Lärbro socken, at Tängelgårda, Fånggården, Gotland, showing a fully manned
Viking ship.
The Gokstad ship, early Viking Period.
The runestone U344, found at Yttergärde, which commemorates Ulf of Borresta’s expeditions to England.
Two examples of late Anglo-Saxon stone sculpture showing armed and mounted men, one with a shield.
Carolingian horsemen of the late ninth century.
A scene from the Bayeux Tapestry, showing Norman cavalry attacking armored English infantry.
Aerial view of Harald Bluetooth’s circular fort at Trelleborg, Jutland, Denmark.
View of the rampart and ditch of the Bullcroft area (north flank) of the burh at Wallingford, Oxfordshire.
The reconstructed inner gateway of the late tenth-or eleventh-century imperial palatine fort at Tilleda,
Saxony-Anhalt.
The reconstructed ninth-century Slavic fortified site of Groß Raden, in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern,
Germany, the land of the Slavic Obodrites in the Viking Period.
Acknowledgements
First of all, I would like to thank my wife, Mervi Mattila, who not only insisted
on helping with the laborious task of indexing, but had to endure a considerable
amount of complaint (most of it about my own inability to live up to the
demands I place on myself) during the process of writing this book. Her brother,
Jari Mattila, has also earned my gratitude by turning my draft maps into very
good maps and making the photographs look as good as possible. Many thanks
are also owed to several friends who research or have an interest in various
aspects of the subject and gave me their comments after reading through parts of
the manuscript: Aleksandr Koptev, Paul Elvidge, and Karolina Kouvola. I am
also grateful to those who have agreed to supply me with the photographs used
in this book: Peter Jan Bomhof of the Photodepartment in the Rijksmuseum van
Oudheden, Leiden; Ingvild Tinglum of the Department of Documentation/Photo
at the Museum of Cultural History, Oslo; Siv Falk of the Historiska Museet in
Stockholm; Derek Craig of the Corpus of Anglo-Saxon Stone Sculpture; Dr. Neil
Christie, one of the project directors of the Wallingford Burh to Borough
Research Project; Terry Joyce; Gabrielle Roeder-Campbell; and Grzegorz Kulig
(aka Thorkil) for the pictures of his excellent replica helmets of the period.
Finally, I have to thank the people at Pen and Sword: Rupert Harding, the
Commissioning Editor, not least for tolerating my shifting deadlines; Sarah
Cook, who did such a meticulous job checking through the text in preparation
for printing; and the typesetter Noel Sadler. This is their work, of course, but
nowadays not all publishers take so much care.
Introduction
There have been many books on the Vikings, and a number on Viking warfare,
and the reader is entitled to ask why there is a need for another. The purpose is
not to give the chronology or history of Viking expeditions, which have been
related in many other works, but to concentrate on some of the aspects of
Viking-Age warfare that have either not been dealt with, or have been dealt with
inadequately, in previous general books. This includes military organization and
contemporary attitudes to war, both among the Vikings and among their
enemies in northern Europe, which obviously affected the way wars were fought
and even why they were fought. To the Christian lands that suffered from their
raids, the Vikings represented a terrifying and alien phenomenon, as they were
non-Christians whose activities caused a dramatic increase in the level of pillage,
destruction, and slave-trading. Yet none of these practices was unfamiliar to any
of Europe’s inhabitants before the Viking Era. Similarly, although the
Scandinavians presented their enemies with some new problems, in many ways
their military methods were similar to those of their opponents.
Many previous books on Viking and Anglo-Saxon warfare have looked at the
subject entirely from a modern perspective, as if Vikings and their
contemporaries were modern soldiers in fancy dress, and have taken the
accounts of medieval writers (and often their numbers) at face value, without
taking much notice of who they were, why they were writing, or even how long
after the events they describe they were writing. As a result, things that are very
uncertain have all too often been presented as facts. We all want to know what
really happened, and it is easy to fall into the trap of accepting the only account
we have of a certain campaign or battle as the truth, but if there is reason to
question it, this should be done.
Since the aim of this book is to look at Viking warfare in the context of warfare
in northern Europe in general, the discussion covers the period 750–1100 and
ranges over the British Isles, the Carolingian Empire and its successor kingdoms
(including East Frankia, generally referred to as Germany after 917), and the
areas north and east of the Balkans occupied by the Slavs. Although they are not
fully covered here, there are also occasional excursions into Italy, Islamic Spain,
the Byzantine Empire, and the steppes to the southeast of Russia (then inhabited
largely by Turkic-speaking nomads).