The first famous Viking raid has a date: Lindisfarne, 793. The last one does not. Depending on what you mean by a Viking, the series ends at York in 1075, at Whitby around 1151, at Dublin around 1171 or on Iona in 1209/10. This article sets the candidates side by side, names the source for each, and shows which definition yields which year.
A beginning can be dated because a shock leaves traces: monks write down what has happened to them. An ending leaves nothing of the kind. No chronicler records that ships from the north came for the last time, because he cannot know it. That no more followed is something only we can see, and only as far as the record reaches.
There is a second problem. The events in question look very different from one another. A Danish royal fleet hoping to take a country. A Norwegian king who sets fire to a town along his route. An Orkney landowner who goes raiding between sowing and harvest. A band of Norwegians plundering an island monastery. The end of the era as a whole is not the subject here. The question is sharper: which expedition can claim the title, and on what condition?
The language of the sources offers little help at first, and that is revealing. In his essay “The Viking Paradigm in Early Medieval History” (online in 2024), the historian Alex Woolf points out that in Old English and Old Norse the word denoted pirates, whatever their origin. The idea of “the Vikings” as a people with children, farms and towns is, on his account, a recent habit, traceable to the late nineteenth century and dominant only since the 1970s. More in our glossary.
Four workable yardsticks follow, and each leads somewhere else:
The conventional end date of 1066 meets none of these well. Woolf notes that the usual span of 793 to 1066 mirrors English history: Lindisfarne at one end, the Norman Conquest at the other. Harald Hardrada, who fell at Stamford Bridge in 1066, wanted the English crown, not loot. Some writers, Woolf adds, therefore put the end at Svein Estridsson's English expedition of 1069/70. That is where the list begins.
In late summer 1069 a Danish fleet appeared off the English east coast. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle speaks of 240 ships and three sons of King Svein. Modern accounts, according to the English Wikipedia article citing David Bates, name two sons, Harald and Cnut, plus Svein's brother Asbjørn, and give a range of 240 to 300 ships. So the figures differ. After failed landings further south, the fleet entered the Humber, joined English rebels and marched on York.
According to the Chronicle, it was not the Danes who burned the city but the Normans themselves, before the shipmen arrived, plundering and burning St Peter's minster as they did so. The allies then demolished the castle and found great treasure. William the Conqueror answered with the devastation known as the Harrying of the North and, according to Bates, paid the Danes to stop.
In 1070 King Svein came to the Humber in person. The Chronicle reports that the Danish bishop Christian and Earl Osbern came to Ely. The Englishman Hereward and his men attacked Peterborough by ship, burned the monks' houses and most of the town, stripped the church of its treasure and took it to Ely. The Danes, believing they would overcome the French, drove out all the monks but one sick man; the context points to Peterborough. In the end Svein came to terms with William, probably for money again, and sailed home.
A Viking raid? The aim was political: the Danes came as allies of an uprising. The outcome, though, looked like old times: loot, protection money, departure. That blend makes 1069/70 a favourite end point for writers with an English perspective.
In 1075 the earls Ralph de Gael, Roger de Breteuil and Waltheof planned a rising against William and asked Denmark for help. The revolt quickly collapsed. The help came anyway, only too late. The Chronicle sums up the result in a few words:
“Soon after that came east from Denmark two hundred ships; wherein were two captains, Cnute Swainson, and Earl Hacco; but they durst not maintain a fight with King William. They went rather to York, and broke into St. Peter's minster, and took therein much treasure, and so went away.”Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, entry for 1075; public-domain nineteenth-century English translation, as reproduced online without the translator's name
That is strikingly close to the textbook image: a fleet from Scandinavia avoids battle, breaks into a church and vanishes with the treasure. Bates, according to Wikipedia, sees the reason in numbers: without English help the fleet was too small to attempt more. This is the last large-scale Danish plundering expedition against England. Afterwards the ships sailed on towards Flanders.
Even so, 1075 cannot claim “last raid on England”, as candidate 5 will show. Cnut himself wanted one more try. In 1085, now King Cnut IV, he gathered a fleet in the Limfjord. William of Malmesbury, according to Wikipedia, gives 1,000 Danish, 600 Flemish and 60 Norwegian ships, a chronicler's round figure. William the Conqueror hired mercenaries, and the Chronicle for 1085 reports the rumour that Cnut was coming. He never came. In July 1086 rebels killed him in the church at Odense. Frank Stenton, according to Wikipedia, called this probably the last such threat England was ever to face. A threat, however, is not a raid.
One footnote belongs here. A Flemish continuator of the chronicle of Sigebert of Gembloux claims that King Eric III attacked England's borders in 1138 and was defeated by King Stephen. No English or Danish source knows the episode. Older scholars such as Freeman and Poole took it for a confusion with the Scottish invasion of the same year, and Peter Sawyer denied it. In 2015 Thomas Heebøll-Holm argued in an article that there may be something to it. I know all this only from the Wikipedia summary. It cannot be clearly proven, and a single foreign note does not make a candidate.
Between 1098 and 1103 the Norwegian king Magnus Barefoot sailed west twice. His route across Orkney, the Hebrides and Man, the fight off Anglesey and his death in Ulster are told at length in our article on Magnus Barefoot and need no repeating. One detail matters for this question: the Annals of Ulster note under 1103 that Magnus was killed on a raid in the territory of the Ulaid. Magnus wanted to rule the islands, set his son over Orkney and made an alliance with an Irish high king.
A king pursuing royal policy by ship is no robber by the second yardstick, though by the first he is certainly a Scandinavian in foreign parts. He fails as an end point in any case, because half a century later another Norwegian king sets English towns alight.
Lisbon turns up on such lists because Norwegians really did fight there, only not in the year usually given. Snorri Sturluson tells in Heimskringla how King Sigurd Jorsalfar, Magnus's son, sailed along the Iberian coast on his way to the Holy Land. He took a castle he calls Sintre and killed all who refused baptism. Then came Lisbon: in the English version, Sigurd “had his third battle with the heathens, and gained the victory, and with it a great booty.” From there he went on to Alkasse and the Balearics. Modern accounts, according to English Wikipedia, put the fighting at Lisbon in 1109 and the fleet at 60 ships.
Loot and a foreign coast: the craft is familiar. The frame is new. The victims are Muslims, the justification is baptism, and the saga calls the enemy heathens. Sigurd travels as a crusader, and the city was in Muslim hands.
The case of 1147 is different. The conquest of Lisbon that year is described in the Latin account “De expugnatione Lyxbonensi”. The fleet left Dartmouth in May 1147 (the excerpt at Fordham says the 19th, other accounts the 23rd); the excerpt names Anglo-Normans, Flemings and men of Cologne. The siege lasted nearly seventeen weeks and ended in October, after which mainly the Cologne and Flemish men looted the city. The excerpt names no Scandinavians. I have not read the full text, and I know of no source that places Vikings there. So this case comes off.
This candidate is underrated. King Eystein Haraldsson of Norway, a son of Harald Gille, crossed the North Sea in the early 1150s. The surviving sagas tell the sequence soberly. In Caithness he captured Earl Harald Maddadsson, who ransomed himself for three marks of gold. At Aberdeen, in the English saga version, he “slew there many men, and plundered the town.” At Hartlepool he fought horsemen and cleared some ships. At Whitby he “got the victory, but burnt the town.” After that, it is said, he harried widely in England.
Woolf, who has devoted a conference paper to the expedition, sets out the evidence: Morkinskinna, the earliest saga witness, and Reginald of Durham place it under King Stephen, while the Icelandic royal annals, the Konungsannáll, put it in 1151. Modern scholars, Woolf says, have often been tempted to push it a year or two later to suit their readings. Reginald is the only writer from Britain to mention the expedition at all, and, according to Jo Shortt Butler, only for an attack on the Farne Islands. For Whitby and Hartlepool we therefore depend on kings' sagas transmitted in Iceland. Not every detail can be proven.
Even so, Eystein's voyage is the cleanest answer to one version of the question. If a Viking raid means a Scandinavian plundering expedition against the English coast, then on the evidence this is the last. Butler, looking at the Cleveland coast, calls it the next recorded attack after Harald Hardrada's of 1066; her piece does not touch the Danish expeditions of 1069/70 and 1075. I know of no comparable expedition against the English mainland after it. No intent to rule is visible in the saga narrative: Eystein takes, burns and sails back. I saw only the opening of Woolf's paper, so it may read this more politically.
If one individual is linked to the title “last Viking”, it is this landowner from the Orkney island of Gairsay, usually Sveinn Ásleifarson in recent literature and Swein or Sweyn in older books. Our survey of the Orkney earls tells their story; Sveinn is no earl but an awkward big farmer in their orbit, which is exactly what makes him interesting.
Orkneyinga saga, by a common dating written down around 1200, describes his year so memorably that it has become his trademark: sow in spring and go raiding until after midsummer, then harvest and go out again in autumn. An English translation, seen only in an online extract without the translator's name, reads: “This he called autumn-viking.” Its counterpart “spring-viking” I know only from retellings such as David Mackay's. The picture is plausible but literary.
Where does the title come from, then? Not from the saga. In its closing chapter (numbered 108 or 112, depending on the edition) it says something else: that he was held to be the greatest man in the western lands. The title belongs to the nineteenth century. The introduction to the edition of Anderson, Hjaltalín and Goudie (1873) calls Swein “the last and greatest of the Orkney vikings”. The introduction to Dasent's English version (volume 3 of “Icelandic Sagas”) says this was “one who may be called the last of the Vikings”, and the “may” is worth noting. It is an editors' formula. The historian Ian Beuermann remarks that scholars like to treat Sveinn as “the ultimate (Orcadian) Viking” and asks in his essay what message the saga is pursuing with this figure. I have read only the opening of that piece.
His end came in Dublin. In Mackay's retelling of the saga, he fell on returning to the city into pits the citizens had dug overnight, and died fighting. The year 1171 is a modern assignment: it arises from linking the episode to the short-lived attempt by the last Norse ruler of Dublin, Ascall mac Ragnaill, to win the city back from the Anglo-Normans. According to Wikipedia there are many discrepancies between the saga and the Anglo-Norman accounts, and the idea that Sveinn was the “John the Furious” of Gerald of Wales remains a conjecture. More on the city's background is in our article on Viking Dublin.
For this question it means: under the third yardstick, raiding as a way of life, Sveinn is the strongest contender. He was one man, not a realm, and his plunder was a private affair. The catch lies in the “last”. We do not know that nobody lived like this after him. We know only that no saga describes anyone so after him.
Here the textbook image nearly returns to its starting point. The island monastery of Iona had been attacked, according to the Irish annals, in 795, 802, 806 and 825, and again in 986. Now the Bǫglunga sǫgur, the sagas of the “Crozier men” from the Norwegian civil wars, report that in 1209/10 Norwegians sailed west with twelve ships, raided the Hebrides and pillaged the holy island, which Norwegians had always held sacred. They then quarrelled among themselves and suffered defeats. Back home the bishops rebuked them.
This expedition is usually treated as the last raid of its kind in the region. Ian Beuermann put the question explicitly at an Iona conference in 2012: “The Last Viking Raid?” His finding is that, on closer inspection, a merely classic raid is “rather unlikely”. According to Wikipedia he sees a political setting, with the plundering perhaps as unsanctioned violence. I saw only his opening. Sagas are not the only witnesses: Icelandic annals (per Wikipedia) name Iona under 1210, and the Welsh chronicle “O Oes Gwrtheyrn” records the death of the Norwegian Erlendr Pikr at Llanfaes on Anglesey in 1209. Its editor, the historian Owain Jones, calls this the last Viking raid on Wales and thinks the band probably belonged to the same fleet.
Under the fourth yardstick, the picture from Lindisfarne, Iona is the answer: a monastery opens the series and a monastery closes it. Beuermann's question mark belongs in any citation.
In 1263 King Hákon IV sailed to Scotland with a large fleet; the events are told in our article on Largs 1263. While talks over the Clyde islands stalled, Hákon, according to Hákonar saga, sent 60 ships into Loch Long under King Magnus of Man, Hebridean leaders and Norwegian retainers. They hauled boats across the isthmus into Loch Lomond, now usually placed at Tarbet, and ravaged the inhabited islands and shores of the loch in the earldom of Lennox. It sounds like a Viking cliché, but it was a means of pressure in a war over island possessions, carried out mainly by vassals. Three years later, on 2 July 1266, the Treaty of Perth ended Norwegian rule over the Hebrides and Man.
Bergen contributes two cases that show where the label tears. In 1193 men from Orkney and Shetland, the “Island Beards” (Eyjarskeggjar), rallied behind a young claimant against King Sverre. They wintered in Bergen and held the town but failed to take the castle, and were defeated on 3 April 1194 at Florvåg across the water. So Sverris saga tells it, which I know only through summaries. These were islanders attacking by ship, but in a war for the throne, not for plunder.
The second case is plainer still. In 1393 the Victual Brothers, pirates serving the cause of King Albert, fell on Bergen with 18 ships from Wismar and Rostock, plundered the town and partly burned it. According to Store norske leksikon they came back in 1428 and 1429. Take the old meaning of the word seriously and these are “vikings”, pirates regardless of origin. Yet they came from the German Baltic coast and attacked Scandinavia.
The question can now be answered by dividing it:
None of these answers is wrong as long as the yardstick is stated. The error begins when one of them is offered as the end without one. The later the candidate, the more caution it demands. 1075 stands in a near-contemporary chronicle. Whitby, Dublin and largely Iona rest on sagas written decades or more later, with purposes of their own.
When was the last Viking raid? There is no generally accepted date. The strongest candidates are York 1075, Whitby around 1151, the voyages of Sveinn Ásleifarson up to around 1171, and Iona 1209/10. Which applies depends on the definition.
Who was the last Viking? The name usually given is Sveinn Ásleifarson, in the older editors' formula “the last of the Vikings”. That is a modern label, not a medieval one, and it reflects his image in the saga more than any verifiable end point.
Did Vikings still attack England after 1066? Yes, according to the sources, several times. The Danes came in 1069/70 and 1075, and Eystein Haraldsson plundered the east coast in the early 1150s. Whether a further attack took place in 1138 is disputed.
Does Magnus Barefoot count as the last Viking on a throne? His main goal was rule over the islands, and King Eystein was still plundering after him. So he does not work as an end point.
Why can it not be said more precisely? Because nobody records an ending as it happens, and because “viking” once simply meant pirate. Later cases also often rest on a single saga.
Magnus Barefoot · The Orkney earls · Largs 1263 and the Treaty of Perth · Stamford Bridge 1066 · Harald Hardrada · Viking Dublin · Lindisfarne 793 · Vikings in Scotland · Glossary
Magnus Barefoot · The Earls of Orkney · Largs 1263.
No grave, no house plan, no saga: there is still no direct evidence of Norse seafarers on Madeira or the Azores. Even …
Read more →Few characters have made the thunder god as famous as Marvel's Thor – and few have spread as many misunderstandings …
Read more →Two spells on the blank leaf of a missal, entered in Old High German in the tenth century, discovered in 1841 by Georg …
Read more →Since 1961 Minnesota has fielded a football team with a Viking name, a horn on its helmet and a rallying cry that began …
Read more →