In 865 an army landed in England that did not want to raid and sail home, but to stay: the „Great Heathen Army". Two excavations make its winter camps astonishingly tangible today.
Until 865 the Anglo-Saxons knew the Northmen as lightning raiders: a few ships appeared, plundered a monastery, and vanished back over the sea. The Great Heathen Army (“micel hæðen here”, as the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle calls it) was something fundamentally new. It did not come to take loot and sail home – it came to stay. For more than a decade it moved back and forth across England, deposed kings, divided up land, and thereby laid the foundation for what would later be called the Danelaw: the Scandinavian-shaped east and north of England.
The Chronicle records the opening soberly: the army took winter quarters in East Anglia, was supplied with horses, and marched on York in 866. What followed was no raid but a conquest with intent – dogged, organised, and carried by a force that understood politics.
The later Norse sagas give the army prominent leaders: the sons of Ragnar Lodbrok, above all Ivar the Boneless and Halfdan. The story goes that they came to England to avenge their father, whom the Northumbrian king Ælla had thrown into a snake-pit. That is great literature – and to be taken with caution. Ragnar himself is a half-legendary figure, and the revenge tale belongs to the realm of saga.
What is secure, by contrast, is that men named Ivar and Halfdan really existed and played a role around the army. But the army becomes historically graspable less through names than through the ground: through two winter camps that archaeologists have investigated in recent decades with spectacular results.
On 1 November 866 the army took York – then the rich religious and economic centre of Northumbria. The timing was shrewd: the kingdom was split by a civil war between two rival claimants, Ælla and Osberht. Only once the city had fallen did the feuding kings unite – too late. In an attempt to retake York on 21 March 867 both were killed, and Northumbria fell under the army’s control.
Anglo-Saxon York became Norse Jórvík, one of the most important trading towns of the North, whose workshops and streets excavations beneath today’s Coppergate have laid bare. From here the army pushed on into Mercia and East Anglia; in 869 King Edmund of East Anglia fell, later venerated as a holy martyr. Within a few years three of the four Anglo-Saxon kingdoms were broken – only Wessex in the south still held.
In the winter of 872/873 the army pitched camp at Torksey on the river Trent (Lincolnshire). What the universities of Sheffield and York have investigated there fundamentally changes our picture of a “Viking army”. The camp covered some 55 hectares – larger than later Repton, protected by marshes and the river. It was no field camp in the military sense, but a temporary town in which several thousand people wintered.
The finds tell of daily life: over 300 coins from three realms, more than 350 lead weights, hacksilver, Arab dirhams, crucibles, tools – and gaming pieces against the boredom of winter. Silver was weighed, gear repaired, loot melted down and trade carried on. Above all, it was not only warriors who lived here: the density of finds points to craftsmen, traders and families. The Great Army was a wandering community that carried its own economy with it.
“Her nam se here winter-setl æt Turcesige.” – “Here the army took winter quarters at Torksey.” — Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, for the year 873 (public domain)
It is one of the most sober sentences in the Chronicle for one of the region’s greatest events – half a sentence for a town of tents that stood a whole winter on the Trent.
A year later, in the winter of 873/874, the army camped at Repton (Derbyshire), a spiritual centre of Mercia, and drove out King Burgred. The excavations of Martin and Birthe Biddle found a D-shaped rampart that tied in the church and opened toward the river – the church itself became the gate-building of the fortification. And they found something that still poses riddles: a mass grave with the jumbled bones of at least 264 people, mostly strong men of fighting age, buried around a single central body.
For a long time scholars argued over the dating, because individual radiocarbon dates seemed too old. A 2018 study resolved the contradiction: the high proportion of fish in these seafarers’ diet had skewed the measurements (the so-called marine reservoir effect). Correcting for it, all the bones fit consistently into a single event of the late 9th century – the Repton winter. Whether the dead fell in battle, succumbed to disease, or were in part even ritually buried alongside, remains open.
In 876 Halfdan began dividing land in Northumbria among his men – warriors became farmers. Another part of the army turned south against Wessex and there met the one Anglo-Saxon king who was its match: Alfred the Great. After years of ups and downs, the treaty of Wedmore (878) sealed a division of England – the east and north became Danish legal territory, the Danelaw.
Its traces we still carry in our mouths: English place-names in -by (Derby, Whitby) and -thorpe go back to the army’s settlers, as do everyday words like sky, knife and they. An army that meant to stay ended up shaping a language. And it left behind the things by which we grasp it today: silver in the ground, a rampart around a church, gaming pieces in the winter mud. From such small, lasting things archaeologists build whole worlds – and in our workshop we see it much the same way: a good piece outlasts those who made and carried it.
The Great Silver Hoards · Longships · Trade · Burial.
Antiquity 92 (2018), Repton charnel; The Antiquaries Journal 96 (2016), Torksey; Anglo-Saxon Chronicle.