Viking Raid on London (842)
Who Fought
History & Significance
The Viking Age (about 800–1050 CE) was the period during the Middle Ages when Norsemen known as Vikings undertook large-scale raiding, colonising, conquest, and trading throughout Europe and reached North America. The Viking Age applies not only to their homeland of Scandinavia but also to any place significantly settled by Scandinavians during the period. Although few of the Scandinavians of the Viking Age were Vikings in the sense of being engaged in piracy, they are often referred to as Vikings as well as Norsemen.
Voyaging by sea from their homelands in Denmark, Norway, and Sweden, the Norse people settled in the British Isles, Ireland, the Faroe Islands, Iceland, Greenland, Normandy, and the Baltic coast and along the Dnieper and Volga trade routes in eastern Europe, where they were also known as Varangians. They also briefly settled in Newfoundland, becoming the first Europeans to reach North America. The Norse-Gaels, Normans, Rus' people, Faroese, and Icelanders emerged from these Norse colonies. The Vikings founded several kingdoms and earldoms in Europe: the Kingdom of the Isles (Suðreyjar), Orkney (Norðreyjar), York (Jórvík) and the Danelaw (Danalǫg), Dublin (Dyflin), Normandy, and Kievan Rus' (Garðaríki). The Norse homelands were also unified into larger kingdoms during the Viking Age, and the short-lived North Sea Empire included large swathes of Scandinavia and Britain. In 1021, the Vikings achieved the feat of reaching North America—the date of which was not determined until a millennium later.
Several factors drove this expansion. The Vikings were drawn by the growth of wealthy towns and monasteries overseas and weak kingdoms. They may also have been pushed to leave their homeland by overpopulation, lack of good farmland, and political strife arising from the unification of Norway. The aggressive expansion of the Carolingian Empire and forced conversion of the neighbouring Saxons to Christianity may also have been a factor. Sailing innovations had allowed the Vikings to sail farther and longer to begin with.
Information about the Viking Age is drawn largely from primary sources written by those the Vikings encountered, as well as archaeology, supplemented with secondary sources such as the Icelandic Sagas.
In England, the Viking attack of 8 June 793 that destroyed the abbey on Lindisfarne, a centre of learning on an island off the north-east coast of England in Northumberland, is regarded as the beginning of the Viking Age. Judith Jesch has argued that the start of the Viking Age can be pushed back to 700–750, as it was unlikely that the Lindisfarne attack was the first attack, and given archeological evidence that suggests contacts between Scandinavia and the British isles earlier in the century. The earliest raids were most likely small in scale, but expanded in scale during the 9th century.
The ground they fought on
The site of Viking Raid on London (842) lies on Thames Group, bedrock that formed in the Eocene. The rock here is clay, silt, sand and gravel.
The sole detail that survives from the 842 raid in the contemporary record is a chronicler's stark description of it as "the great slaughter". In an age when raids were frequent and often passed without comment, this phrase stands out as an indication that the violence inflicted on Lundenwic that year was remarkable even by the brutal standards of ninth-century Viking attacks on England.
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