Most runestones tell of death. One in Uppland tells of a career. Ulf of Borresta, it says, took payment in England three times – and then it lists the payers one by one, all the way up to King Cnut. Ulf is not alone. Some thirty stones in Scandinavia commemorate men who went to England. Together with the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle they give us a rare view: the same years seen once from the side of those who paid and once from the side of those who took. We go through the stones one by one, set the English figures beside them, and say where both sides fall silent.
Runestone U 344 originally stood at Yttergärde in Uppland and now stands by the church of Orkesta in Vallentuna, north of Stockholm. It belongs to a group of stones raised by Ulf and his family. The decisive part reads:
En Ulfʀ hafiʀ a Ænglandi þry giald takit. Þet vas fyrsta þet's Tosti ga[l]t. Þa [galt] Þorkætill. Þa galt Knutr.
"And Ulf has taken three payments in England. The first was the one Tosti paid. Then Thorketil paid. Then Cnut paid."Runestone U 344, Yttergärde, now Orkesta; normalised reading after the Samnordisk runtextdatabas, English rendering our own
The Old Norse word is gjald, payment, levy: money England paid so that an army would leave or stay in its service – and of which Ulf brought his share home. One reads the sentence twice because it is so unusual. Here a man boasts not of a victory but of an account.
Two of the three names can be placed. Thorketil is very probably Thorkell the Tall, who was in England with a large army from 1009 to 1012. Cnut is Cnut the Great, king of England from 1016. Who Tosti was remains open. Skoglar Toste has been suggested, a leader from Västergötland who appears in Snorri's Heimskringla as the father of Sigrid the Haughty. The equation is proposed, not proven. The date of the first payment also stays uncertain; some accounts think of the payment of 991 after the battle of Maldon, others of a later one.
If the order on the stone follows the order of events, Ulf took part in payments over more than two decades. That presupposes that he came home each time, brought his share and later set out again. For a man from Uppland this was not emigration but a series of ventures with returns between. It fits that Ulf is regarded as a wealthy landowner whose kin could afford to raise stones.
Research knows about thirty runestones that mention England. The great majority, around twenty-seven, stand in present-day Sweden, seventeen of them in the provinces around Lake Mälaren alone. Uppland counts eight, Södermanland six, Småland five or six and Västmanland three, with single stones in Gästrikland, Östergötland and Västergötland. Outside Sweden there are only a few: stone Dr 337 from Valleberga in Scania, now in Lund, the only one of the Danish group to name London; the Schleswig stone Dr 6; and a stone in Aust-Agder in Norway, N 184 from Galteland, which remembers a son who fell in Cnut's retinue.
That Sweden has so many does not mean Swedes went to England more often than Danes. It reflects a custom: eleventh-century Uppland raised runestones in numbers seen nowhere else. The England stones are one slice of that wave (more in our piece on runic scholarship). Denmark had raised its stones earlier, in the time of Harald Bluetooth and Gorm, and about other things: royal glory, the making of a realm, family memory.
Most of these stones say little more than "X died in England". That is what stands on Ög 104 from Gillberga in Östergötland, which Rauðr raised for his brother Tóki, and on Sm 29 from Ingelstad in Småland. Stone U 539 from Husby-Sjuhundra, by contrast, tells of a man, Sveinn, who died in Jutland because he wanted to go to England; scholars place his death around 1015. And stone Sm 101 from Nävelsjö reports that Gunnarr was buried by his brother in a stone coffin in Bath. That is unusually exact information, naming place, manner of burial and the person who carried it out.
The journey becomes especially tangible in a find from London itself. In 1852 a grave slab in the Scandinavian animal-ornament style of the eleventh century, with a runic inscription, was found at St Paul's; it says that someone had the stone laid together with a man called Tóki. For research it is a sign that Scandinavian warriors in Cnut's following were also buried in London; whose grave it was, we do not know.
On the other side stand the figures of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. After the defeat at Maldon in 991 England paid ten thousand pounds of silver. In 994 it was sixteen thousand, in 1002 twenty-four thousand, in 1007 thirty-six thousand – thirty thousand in one manuscript – and in 1012 forty-eight thousand. In 1018, after his accession, Cnut raised seventy-two thousand pounds, plus ten and a half thousand from London alone, to pay off his army.
"In this year the tribute was paid over all England, seventy-two thousand pounds in all, besides what the townsmen of London paid, which was ten thousand five hundred pounds."Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, entry for 1018, in sense after the public-domain nineteenth-century English translations
The chroniclers call it gafol, tribute. In a few places gyld appears too, and once heregyld. From 1012 a regular tax was added, the heregeld, which paid mercenary fleets in the king's service. The word "Danegeld", by which the whole business is known today, appears only after the Norman Conquest, as the name of a land tax.
How much of it actually reached Scandinavia no one knows. But the hoards speak clearly: Scandinavian treasure finds contain tens of thousands of Anglo-Saxon silver pennies, most of them from the reigns of Æthelred and Cnut. Even the currency followed the money. The Swedish king Olof Skötkonung had coins struck at Sigtuna from about 995 that imitated English pennies, specifically the types of Æthelred. For more on coin circulation see our pieces on hack-silver and the coins of Ribe.
On 10 or 11 August 991 – the sources differ by a day – an English levy under Ealdorman Byrhtnoth met a Viking army at Maldon in Essex. Byrhtnoth let the attackers cross a causeway onto the mainland, whether out of courage or out of pride scholars argue, and lost both battle and life. The Chronicle names the leader Anlaf; he is often identified with Olaf Tryggvason, but that is not certain. On the advice of Archbishop Sigeric and the south-western ealdormen King Æthelred paid ten thousand pounds. That is the start of the series that ends on the stone of Orkesta.
Of the battle we possess a poem, The Battle of Maldon, which survives only as a fragment of 325 lines. Its manuscript burned in 1731 in the fire of the Cotton library; it had been transcribed before. The poem ends with the words of the old retainer Byrhtwold, who tells his men that mind must be harder, heart bolder, courage greater as strength dwindles.
"Hige sceal þe heardra, heorte þe cenre, mod sceal þe mare, þe ure mægen lytlað." – Mind must be the harder, heart the bolder, courage the greater, as our strength grows less.The Battle of Maldon, lines 312 f. (Old English, public domain; rendering our own)
It is worth holding this poem beside the runestones. It is the English counterpart: the same reality, told by those who stood and fell rather than by those who paid or took. More on the background in Danegeld and Maldon.
In 994 Sweyn Forkbeard and Olaf Tryggvason failed to take London. They ravaged the south-east instead until the English paid sixteen thousand pounds. In 1002 came twenty-four thousand. In the same year, on 13 November, Æthelred according to the Chronicle and later testimony ordered Danes in England to be killed; the event is called the St Brice's Day massacre. How many died and whether the order was carried out everywhere is unclear. During building work at St John's College, Oxford, a mass grave was found in 2008 with the skeletons of about thirty-five young men who died violently; the radiocarbon dates fit the period around 1000. Whether they were victims of 1002 remains a hypothesis.
From 1009 to 1012 a large army under Thorkell the Tall ravaged the south. In 1011 it took Canterbury, and Archbishop Ælfheah, held for ransom, was killed at Greenwich in 1012. In the same year the English paid forty-eight thousand pounds. Thorkell then changed sides: with about forty-five ships he entered Æthelred's service, later Cnut's, and became the latter's earl in East Anglia. On the stone of Orkesta it is, if the identification holds, this very man who made the second payment.
That also explains how the voyages worked. A leader like Thorkell gathered followers, many of whom came from Denmark and Sweden. He led them on a raid, collected tribute, and after the peace the force became partly paid service, partly his own property. Anyone interested in how such retinues were organised will find more in Lið, hird and leidang.
Ulf is the accountant among the England voyagers, but not the only one to speak of payment.
U 241 at Lingsberg says of Ulfríkr that he took payment in England twice. U 194 at Väsby says of Alli that he took Cnut's payment in England. And Sö 166 from Grinda in Södermanland joins two directions:
"Guðvér was in the west, shared out payment in England, manfully attacked towns in Saxony."Runestone Sö 166, Grinda; English rendering our own
Sharing out payment means dividing spoils among companions, not plundering on one's own account. The stone shows a man who knew both: the paid voyage to England and the raid on the North Sea coast of the Empire. "Saxony" here means the land of the Saxons, that is, the north of present-day Germany.
Not every England voyager was an attacker. On U 668 at Kålsta two brothers raised a stone for their father Geiri, who "sat in the þingalið in the west". The þingalið was the core troop of England's Danish kings in the decades after 1016 until the reforms of Edward the Confessor, a paid elite drawn largely from Scandinavia. Its roots reach back to 1012, when Thorkell's fleet at Greenwich entered Æthelred's pay and was maintained from the tax that went into history as the heregeld. After Cnut's victory forty ships and their crews stayed in the king's service while the bulk of his army went home.
How many men there were can only be inferred from later testimony. The Danish chronicler Sven Aggesen wrote in the twelfth century that Cnut picked three thousand men; the figure should be treated with caution. Under Harold Harefoot there were still sixteen ships, in Harthacnut's first year sixty-two, in 1041 thirty-two, and Edward the Confessor sent the last ships home in 1051 and abolished the heregeld.
Stone Sm 77 from Komstad near Sävsjö in Småland also shows such service: Vrái raised it for his brother Gunni, who died in England; Vrái himself was marshal to an Earl Hákon. Geiri and Vrái were no robbers but professional soldiers in the service of a king in London. It is the same world as the Varangian Guard in Byzantium, only at the other end of Europe.
Anyone who wanted to go from the Mälaren basin to England sailed across the Baltic, through the Danish waters and over the North Sea, several hundred nautical miles of it on open water. We know the ships for it from finds like the Skuldelev wrecks and from our piece on longships. A voyage of that length was not made alone: one joined an army, which usually gathered in Denmark. Stone U 539 fits. Sveinn died in Jutland on the way to England, so presumably on the way to a rallying point, before he crossed the North Sea.
Along this route lay the trading places of the time, Hedeby and Ribe. Whether crews were recruited and ships fitted out there, the sources do not say expressly; it is likely, but it is an assumption. We have no detailed reports on how individual voyages were organised; we infer it from the Chronicle, which notes the arrival and departure of fleets.
With Cnut's victory over Edmund Ironside at Assandun in October 1016 raids became a realm. Cnut was king of England; in 1018 or 1019 he became king of Denmark, and in 1028 he drove Saint Olaf out of Norway. He died in 1035 at Shaftesbury. In this period the þingalið became the power base of a king who ruled lands on both sides of the North Sea, and the men who had once fought only for pay became part of a court.
For the England voyagers this meant a change. Service in the þingalið demanded discipline and loyalty and brought pay and rank. Whoever, like Geiri, "sat in the þingalið in the west" belonged to the men who carried this order. The raids of 991 to 1012 and the ordered service after 1016 are two faces of one movement, and the runestones record both without explaining the transition.
What it all felt like on the other side was set down by Wulfstan, Archbishop of York from 1002 and one of Æthelred's chief advisers, in his sermon to the English, the Sermo Lupi ad Anglos ("Sermon of the Wolf to the English", Wulfstan called himself Lupus). The sermon was composed between 1010 and 1016 and revised in 1014, the year Æthelred returned from Normandy and a royal council issued new laws. It survives in five manuscripts and three versions; the shortest is thought to be the original.
Wulfstan traces the country's misfortune to the sins of the English: perjury, the slave trade, plunder. He claims that a single Viking can put ten Englishmen to flight, and complains that a slave will leave his master to become a Viking himself. That English bondsmen joined the attackers is thus attested as a contemporary worry, even if we do not know its extent. The sermon is no chronicle but a moral interpretation: the land, says Wulfstan, is being punished as the Britons were punished before it.
Anyone who wants to understand the England voyagers should read both sides. The stone of Orkesta names a sum and three payers; the sermon names guilt and punishment. Both describe the same years, and neither can contradict the other because they do not answer the same question.
The stones give names but hardly any occupations. What can be seen: most of the patrons are brothers, sons or fathers, that is, families that could afford to have a stone raised. That points to farm-owners, not to the landless. The men who died were warriors in a leader's retinue, and their family remembered them at a time when Christianity was just gaining ground in Uppland and Södermanland. Many of the England stones carry a cross.
That is remarkable, for it shows that returning from a raid and the cross on a stone did not exclude each other. Some stones ask expressly that God may help the dead man's soul. The Viking who brought silver from England could therefore be a Christian at the same time, or his family could present him as one. For the picture of the age that matters more than the question of who was heathen and who Christian: the boundaries ran through the families.
Social history also gets something from the stones that sagas and chronicles hardly offer: they name women as patrons and describe kinship where the chronicles see only armies. More about the people behind the numbers is in our pieces on Vikings in England and on the Ingvar voyagers, who set out east from the same villages.
Of the sums the Chronicle names, only a part is archaeologically tangible in Scandinavia. The Anglo-Saxon pennies of Æthelred's and Cnut's time lie in hoards on Gotland, in Scania, on Öland and in Uppland, and many of them were never lifted again. Why silver was buried we do not know for certain; obvious reasons are security in unquiet times and religious gifts. In the piece on silver hoards and the text on the Gotlanders the pattern of finds can be followed.
Part of the silver was melted down, cut up or made into jewellery; other parts were used directly as currency. Swedish and Danish kings afterwards began to strike coins of their own on the English model. We have mentioned the example of Olof Skötkonung. That Scandinavia developed a money economy of its own in the eleventh century has much to do with this stream of silver, even if the share cannot be calculated.
Proven is that men from Uppland and Södermanland went to England in the late tenth and early eleventh centuries, took part in tribute payments and served in Cnut's army, and that their families were proud of it. The scale of the payments is proven too – from the English side.
Not proven is what any one man received, which battles he fought in, how he came home. The stones are memorials, not reports. The identification of individual names such as Tosti also stays uncertain, and the reading of some inscriptions is disputed. The tradition is uneven, too: we have stones from central Sweden but no reports from Denmark, where most of the armies were gathered. And the English figures come from chronicles written in monasteries, from the standpoint of those affected.
The England voyagers are the late heirs of the Great Heathen Army, and they are contemporaries of the men who served in the east under Harald Hardrada. Their stones are a rare chance to hear people of the Viking Age in their own words.
What does runestone U 344 say? That Ulf of Borresta took payment in England three times: first from Tosti, then from Thorketil, then from Cnut. The stone now stands by the church of Orkesta in Uppland.
How many England runestones are there? About thirty, roughly twenty-seven of them in Sweden. Seventeen stand in the provinces around Lake Mälaren.
What is Danegeld? The English term for tribute payments to Viking armies. Contemporaries spoke of gafol; "Danegeld" is attested as the name of a tax only after the Norman Conquest.
How much did England pay in total? The Chronicle gives sums between 10,000 pounds (991) and 72,000 pounds (1018), plus 10,500 pounds from London. A grand total is a reckoning of posterity and depends on the manuscripts.
What was the þingalið? A paid elite force of England's Danish kings, mostly Scandinavians, financed by a tax, the heregeld. Several runestones mention men who served in it.
Who was Thorkell the Tall? A Danish commander who ravaged England from 1009 to 1012, then entered Æthelred's service and later became earl of East Anglia under Cnut.
For courage. For remembrance. For legends that live on.
Cnut the Great · Sweyn Forkbeard · The Great Heathen Army · The Ingvar Expedition · The Danelaw · Lið, Hird & Leiðangr · Miklagard and the Varangians · Danes, Swedes, Norwegians.
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