A kingdom whose kings were pagans and Christians, Danes and Irish, that submitted to the English twice and twice broke away again, that struck coins bearing the name of Saint Peter and a sword – and whose archbishop more than once stood on the side of the Norsemen. That was York between 866 and 954. Anglo-Saxon Eoforwic became Jórvík. What is left of it lies in layers up to nine metres deep in the damp ground, in silver hoards and in a few chronicles written down late. We go through the sources in order and keep evidence, tradition and interpretation apart.
York was already an old city when the Norsemen came. The Romans had founded Eboracum here, a legionary fortress where the Ouse meets the Foss, and made it a provincial capital. The Anglo-Saxons turned it into Eoforwic, seat of the kings of Northumbria and of an archbishop, with a cathedral school known far beyond England. Its most famous teacher, Alcuin, left from here for the court of Charlemagne. When the Scandinavians stood before the walls in 866, they found no trading post on the fringe but a spiritual and political centre.
They heard the name and made their own sense of it: Jórvík, as though it contained the Norse word for a bay, vík. That is folk etymology, but it fits the ear of the newcomers. From this Jórvík, by a roundabout route, came today's York. Many street names in the old town still carry the Norse ending -gate (from gata, "street"), such as Coppergate, Petergate and Micklegate.
How the Great Heathen Army took the city we have told elsewhere. According to Northumbrian tradition, written down by Symeon of Durham in the twelfth century, it happened on All Saints' Day, 1 November 866, when many nobles had gathered in the minster. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle gives neither day nor month. The date therefore rests on a single text some 250 years younger; the year is secure.
Northumbria was divided at the time. The chronicle reports that the Northumbrians had driven out their king Osberht and made Ælla king, who had no claim by royal descent. When the army approached York, the two rivals came to terms and attacked the city. On 21 March 867, by the usual dating, both fell in the fighting. The survivors made peace, probably through the mediation of Archbishop Wulfhere.
"The same year the army went from East Anglia over the mouth of the Humber to York in Northumbria. There was great dissension among the people; they had deposed their king Osberht and taken Ælla, who had no royal blood. Late in the year they returned to unity and fought against the common army."Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, entry for 867 (own rendering, close paraphrase of the manuscripts)
Later saga tradition turns Ælla into the killer of Ragnar Lodbrok, whom Ragnar's sons avenge. The chronicle knows nothing of that. The capture of York is an attested event; the revenge story is a twelfth- and thirteenth-century tale. More on Ivar, regarded as a leader of the army, is in our article on Ivar the Boneless.
At first the army did not rule directly. It set up an Englishman called Ecgberht as king, who ruled north of the Tyne for as long as it suited the conquerors. In 872 the Northumbrians drove him out, and Archbishop Wulfhere with him; the following year the archbishop was back, and another Englishman, Ricsige, took the lead. The church of York, as would become clear, had come to terms with the new masters.
The decisive break came in 876. Halfdan, one of the army's leaders, shared out the land of the Northumbrians among his men:
"And Healfdene shared out the land of the Northumbrians, and they proceeded to plough and to support themselves."Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, entry for 876 (own rendering)
Warriors became landholders; a camp became a kingdom. The Scandinavian settlement of Northumbria thus belongs to the world of the Danelaw but remained politically separate. York was not one of the Five Boroughs; it was a royal seat. Halfdan himself did not enjoy his landholding for long: in 877 he fell while pursuing a claim to Dublin. Place names in -by and -thorpe between Humber and Tees preserve the settlement to this day. How large the influx was cannot be put in numbers; the sources give none.
The first Christian king of Jórvík we know of is Guthfrith, in Old English Guthred, who reigned from about 883 until his death in 895. The chronicler Æthelweard notes that he was buried in York Minster – a Scandinavian king in the bishop's church. 24 August 895 is given as his death day; 894 also appears in the sources.
How he became king is told by a source from the circle of the monks of Saint Cuthbert, the Historia de Sancto Cuthberto. According to it, Abbot Eadred of Carlisle crossed the Tyne to the Danes and got them to elect Guthred, a man who had served as a widow's slave. He was raised on a hill called Oswigesdune, and the army swore peace on the body of Cuthbert, which Bishop Eardulf had brought there for the purpose. The dream vision in which the saint commands the abbot is found in Symeon of Durham's version, who tells it at greater length in his history of the church of Durham. His history of the kings puts it briefly: Guthred "from a slave was made king".
The Historia itself is anonymous and was completed after 1031, the year of the latest event it records, a grant by King Cnut. Its core may be older. So this is a legend, written down by those who profited from it: Cuthbert's community received land in gratitude, including estates at the mouth of the Tees. But it shows something real: in Northumbria the new kings negotiated with the church, and the church with them. Each needed the other.
Around 895 something began in York that no other Viking realm in the British Isles did on this scale: the kings had coins struck. The earliest bear the names Siefred and Cnut, two rulers we know almost only from these coins. By the coin finds Siefred reigns about 895 to 900 and Cnut about 900 to 905; who exactly these men were is disputed among historians. The name Siefred, Norse Sigfrøðr, was common. A Sigfred led, together with Godfrid, the army that burned the palace at Aachen in 881; that they are the same person is not supported by anything and, given the gap in time, unlikely. Then there are pennies with the puzzling legend CVNNETTI, whose meaning is still disputed.
How much silver was in circulation is shown by the Cuerdale hoard. Workmen found it on 15 May 1840 while repairing the embankment of the Ribble in Lancashire. It comprises more than 8,600 pieces: around 31 kilograms of silver in ingots and hacksilver, plus over 7,000 coins. The coins come from three sources: the Viking kingdoms of eastern England, Alfred's Wessex and foreign mints, including Byzantine, papal, north Italian, Frankish and Islamic pieces. About 3,000 pennies alone bear Cnut's name, around 1,800 commemorate Saint Edmund of East Anglia. The hoard was probably buried between 903 and 910. Who owned it is unclear: people have thought of the war chest of Dublin Norsemen planning to retake their city, of a Viking chieftain's fortune, or of material for a foundry. Most of it lies in the British Museum today; how such hacksilver hoards worked is explained in our piece on hacksilver.
At about the same time the St Peter pennies appear. Instead of a king's name they carry the legend SCI PETRI MO, Sancti Petri moneta, money of Saint Peter – the patron of York's cathedral. In the 920s some of these coins add a sword, others a hammer that is often read as Thor's hammer; for context see our article on the Thor's hammer. A Christian saint, a sword and perhaps a pagan sign on the same money: that is Jórvík in a single coin. Many numismatists suspect that the archbishop had a hand in the minting. That is not proven, but the saint's name on the money points that way.
Under Olaf Guthfrithsson around 940 the royal title even appears on the coin in Norse form: ANLAF CVNVNC, King Olaf, above a bird usually interpreted as a raven. One mint calls itself EBRAICE, the Latin form of the city's name; Æthelstan's coins from York bear the Old English form Eforwic. By 2009 as many as 31 York coins in Eric's name had been found, two types, struck by the same moneyers who also worked for Olaf Cuaran. For a realm that lasted only ninety years, the coin series is remarkably dense.
Between the first coins and the Dublin kings lies a phase about which we know little. Around 901 the Norsemen of York accepted Æthelwold, a nephew of Alfred the Great, who claimed the throne of Wessex and set out against his cousin Edward the Elder. He fell in a battle around 902 to 905, which the chronicle dates differently depending on the manuscript. In 910 the English defeated a Northumbrian army at Tettenhall; the kings Eowils and Halfdan II died there. After that, for years, it is unclear who ruled York. A continuous royal list for these years is missing.
In the tenth century the kings of Jórvík came from a different direction: from Dublin. The grandsons of Ivar, the Uí Ímair of the Irish annals, ruled the Ostmen in Ireland and now reached across the Irish Sea for York.
Ragnall, a grandson of Ivar, fought the Scottish king Constantine II at Corbridge in 918. The sources disagree about the outcome: the Historia de Sancto Cuthberto lets the Norsemen win, the Scottish royal chronicle does not. Ragnall then established himself in York, around 918 to 919, and gave followers land between the Wear and the Tees, as the Historia records. After his death in 921 came Sihtric, whom the Irish called Cáech, the one-eyed or squinting. Sihtric sought an understanding with the south: on 30 January 926 he married a sister of King Æthelstan at Tamworth. A year later he was dead, and Æthelstan took York himself in 927.
A find made near Harrogate in 2007 belongs to these years. David Whelan and his son Andrew found it with metal detectors on 6 January 2007 in an unploughed field; it was announced in July. The hoard holds 617 silver coins and 65 other objects, among them ingots, hacksilver, jewellery and a rare gold arm ring. The coins date from the late ninth and early tenth century, and the treasure was buried around 927/28.
The centrepiece is a gilded silver vessel lined with gold, buried in a lead chest. It is decorated with vines, leaves and six running animals and resembles the Halton Moor cup; it is placed in a Carolingian workshop setting of the mid-ninth century, probably a church vessel from northern France that was looted or paid as tribute. In it lie coins of Æthelstan beside Arab dirhams and hacksilver – the moment of the takeover, sealed in a vessel. The find was declared treasure under the Treasure Act 1996 and valued at £1,082,000; the Yorkshire Museum and the British Museum acquired it jointly.
Æthelstan took York in 927 and received the submission of the Danes of the city. On 12 July that year, at Eamont Bridge near Penrith, Constantine II of Scotland, Hywel Dda of Wales, Ealdred of Bamburgh and Owain of Strathclyde accepted his overlordship. After that he struck coins reading Rex Totius Britanniae, king of all Britain, in York as well. In 934 he marched against Scotland; a year later Constantine appeared in his charters as a sub-king.
In 937 at Brunanburh he defeated an alliance of Scots, men of Strathclyde and the Dublin king Olaf Guthfrithsson. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle devotes a whole victory poem to the battle, describing a slaughter greater than any "since the Angles and Saxons" came to Britain. Where it took place is unknown: more than forty sites have been proposed, and Bromborough on the Wirral is named most often. Egil's saga (c. 1220–1240) describes a battle at "Vínheiðr" usually read as Brunanburh; it may be partly true but is no reliable source. Alfred Smyth called it the greatest battle in Anglo-Saxon history before Hastings; Alex Woolf spoke of a pyrrhic victory because Æthelstan's power afterwards rather declined.
The reckoning came quickly. When Æthelstan died at Gloucester in October 939, Olaf came back, was accepted as king in York and even reached for the Five Boroughs in northern Mercia. Symeon of Durham reports a meeting with King Edmund at Leicester at which England was divided; when the boroughs fell is uncertain, with Symeon saying 940 and the Chronicle silent or dating after his death. Olaf died in 941, probably during a raid on Tyninghame.
After that, rule changed hands in quick succession. Olaf Sihtricsson (the Irish Amlaíb Cuarán), son of Sihtric Cáech, ruled from 941, for a time alongside Ragnall Guthfrithsson; in 944 King Edmund drove both out. Then the Northumbrians took a king of quite different origin: Erik, whom posterity calls Bloodaxe. Between his two reigns Olaf Sihtricsson returned once more in 949. In 954 the Northumbrians drove Erik out, and King Eadred took over the land. The kingdom of Jórvík was at an end. From then on earls governed on behalf of the English kings. Olaf Cuaran later ruled in Dublin again; after the defeat of his sons at Tara in 980 he retired to the monastery on Iona and died there.
Hardly any figure shows so clearly how thin the tradition is. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle names Eric, one manuscript "Haroldes sunu", Harald's son, under 952; another says the Northumbrians took him as king in 948. Then there are the coins in his name. Everything else comes from later texts: Heimskringla and Fagrskinna, Egil's saga with Gunnhild as queen and the poet Egill who saves his life with a praise poem, and the anonymous poem Eiríksmál, which describes Eric's welcome into Valhalla.
How he died, the sources tell differently. Roger of Wendover, who wrote only in the thirteenth century, has him fall at Stainmore with a son and a brother through the treachery of Earl Osulf; the killer is Maccus, son of Anlaf. Fagrskinna and Heimskringla report a battle in England, while Ágrip and the Historia Norwegiæ place his death on a raid in Spain. Modern scholars mostly consider an assassination in exile likely.
One figure runs through these years: Wulfstan I, archbishop of York from 931 until his death at Oundle in 956, interrupted by his imprisonment in 952. He stood with Olaf Guthfrithsson when Olaf invaded Mercia (the Chronicle enters it under 943, historians usually date it to 940), and negotiated with Archbishop Wulfhelm of Canterbury a peace that ceded the land between Watling Street and the Northumbrian border to Olaf. In 944, according to Æthelweard, he and the Mercian ealdormen drove out Olaf Sihtricsson and Ragnall. In 947 the Northumbrians swore loyalty to King Eadred at Tanshelf and soon broke the oath; Wulfstan is said to have invited Eric. In 952 Eadred had the archbishop detained, "because accusations had often been made to the king against him", as the Chronicle says; he was taken to Iudanbyrig, whose location is unknown. By 953 he was witnessing charters again but governed from distant Dorchester.
You can call Wulfstan a traitor, as the Chronicle's southern English viewpoint suggests. You can also see him as a man defending the independence of Northumbria and its church – against a distant king in the south, and together with whichever ruler happened to sit in York. Since Wulfhere the same pattern shows: the archbishops of York were not the Norsemen's victims but their most important negotiating partners. Current research (Rabin 2024, for instance) asks how many "kings" Wulfstan actually made in these years.
We know about the kings from chronicles and coins. Almost everything we know about the people comes from the ground. In 1972 archaeologists found well-preserved Viking Age timber beneath a bank branch in York. Then, from 1976 to 1981, the York Archaeological Trust, founded by Peter Addyman in 1972, excavated on Coppergate: on the site of the demolished Cravens confectionery factory, before the shopping centre was built. Addyman and Richard Hall directed the work.
The ground there is damp and starved of oxygen. Wood, leather, textiles and even plant remains have survived, in clay where otherwise everything organic rots. The excavators uncovered house plots, narrow tenements running back from the street, with buildings of wattle and later of timber planks, whose walls in places still stood up to two metres high, plus workshops, fences, animal pens, privies, pits and wells. Depending on how one counts, there are some twenty thousand individual finds or more than forty thousand objects, along with over a quarter of a million pottery sherds and tonnes of animal bone.
What these finds show is a town of workshops: turners making wooden bowls and cups on the lathe – the street name Coppergate probably goes back to the cup-makers, Norse koppari, and gata, street –, comb-makers, shoemakers, metalworkers, amber-workers, glassmakers and jewellers. For leatherwork see the article on leather craft. There are also things from far away, among them a cap of silk whose cloth came from a long way off, and materials said to reach back to the Persian Gulf. Jórvík was a market place in the network of the North Sea and beyond.
How many people lived in the town we do not know. Occasionally you read of "over 10,000" inhabitants and the second-largest town in Britain after London. That is an estimate resting on no count; there are no reliable figures.
Contemporary written sources are the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, which writes from a southern English standpoint, the chronicle of Æthelweard, the Irish annals for the Dublin kings, and charters. Much about Northumbria we know only from texts of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, such as Symeon of Durham. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle is no Northumbrian chronicle; it notices the north only when Wessex has dealings with it.
Archaeologically and numismatically attested are the coinage from Siefred and Cnut to Olaf, the St Peter pennies, the hoards of Cuerdale and the Vale of York, and the houses and workshops of Coppergate.
Later tradition includes Guthred's rise from slave to king by Cuthbert's dream command and the sagas about Eric, with the conquest story of Ragnar Lodbrok's death in the snake pit as a prelude.
Modern interpretation includes the archbishops' role in the minting, the meaning of CVNNETTI, the Thor's hammer on the St Peter pennies, and the population figure.
A documented link between Jórvík and the Rhineland is slim. The Frankish coins in the hoards of Cuerdale and Harrogate show that Frankish silver and Frankish church vessels ended up in Yorkshire. And the army that burned the palace at Aachen in 881 grew out of the force that had fought in England and crossed to the Continent in 879; the continental campaigns are described in the piece on the Great Army on the Continent, the Aachen sources in Vikings in Aachen. That the same men stood in York and in Aachen would be a claim without evidence. We stay with what the finds carry: silver that travelled across the Channel and the North Sea, and jewellery known on both sides. How such wealth shaped imagery is shown in the article on Viking art styles.
We know the names of many kings but not their faces, not the number of their followers, not their everyday speech. We do not know who Siefred and Cnut were, what CVNNETTI means, who owned the Cuerdale treasure, or who buried the vessel near Harrogate. We do not know how many people lived in Jórvík or where most of them came from. Archaeology shows craft and trade, but it says nothing of faith and allegiance, except that Christian saints and Norse signs stood on the same silver.
Ninety years are short for a kingdom. But they have marked York to this day: in the street names ending in -gate, in what lies beneath the city, and in a story in which pagans, Christians, Danes and Irish fought over the same town.
When did the Vikings take York? In 866 the Great Heathen Army captured the city. According to Symeon of Durham it happened on 1 November; the Chronicle gives no day. On 21 March 867 the two Northumbrian kings Osberht and Ælla fell.
Who was the first Viking king of York? The first king of the Norsemen is usually taken to be Halfdan, who shared out the land in 876. The first Christian king was Guthfrith (Guthred), who reigned from about 883 to 895. Before that the army set up Englishmen as puppets.
Why do York coins show Saint Peter? Peter is patron of York Minster. The pennies reading SCI PETRI MO were struck in the early tenth century; some types of the 920s add a sword or hammer. Whether the archbishop supervised the minting is likely but not proven.
When did the kingdom of Jórvík end? In 954, when the Northumbrians drove out Eric and King Eadred took over the land. After that earls ruled in the name of the English kings.
What was found at Coppergate? Houses and workshops of the tenth century with preserved wood, leather and textile, excavated 1976 to 1981. The Jorvik Viking Centre (1984) came out of the dig, and the Anglo-Saxon Coppergate helmet (1982) was found a year after the main excavation ended.
Was Eric Bloodaxe really king of York? A King Eric is attested by chronicle and coins. Whether he is identical with the Norwegian king's son of the sagas is disputed by recent research; the sagas are about two centuries younger.
For courage. For remembrance. For legends that live on.
The Great Heathen Army · The Danelaw · Erik Bloodaxe · The Ostmen · The England Voyagers · The Norse on the Isle of Man.
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