A few days later the winds finally changed to the south and on 28 September, William the Conqueror landed at Pevensey. Harold hurried south to defeat and death at the Battle of Hastings on 14 October. With Harold dead English resistance quickly crumbled and on Christmas Day 1066, William was crowned king of England in Westminster Abbey. The Norman conquest had much more far-reaching consequences than the Danish conquest fifty years earlier. William and many of his followers may have been of Viking descent, but by 1066, Normandy was linguistically and culturally a French principality. The conquest decisively drew England out of its north European orbit and turned it into a political and cultural satellite of France. It would be the end of the fourteenth century before England again had a king whose first language was English. The native English aristocracy who survived the battles of 1066 were within a few years either executed or exiled, and almost every English landowner was dispossessed. The English peasantry were forced into serfdom. The conquerors expropriated the wealth of the English on such a vast scale that even today, 950 years later, people in England with surnames of Norman-French origin are, on average, 20 per cent richer than the national average.
The Battle of Stamford Bridge is widely seen as marking the end of England’s Viking Age, but the Vikings were not quite finished with England. William was quite the most brutal man ever to rule England and the atrocities he meted out to the defeated English were such that, even in an age inured to violence, they shocked Europe. Two years after William’s accession fierce but unco-ordinated English rebellions erupted across the country and these brought the Danes back to England. After his death at Stamford Bridge, Harald Hardrada’s claim to the English throne had passed to the Danish king Svein Estrithsson (r. 1046 – 74/6), and it was to him that the English rebels turned for support, offering to accept him as king. In 1069, Svein sent his son Cnut to England with a fleet of 240 ships. Cnut landed at Dover in September and then sailed north, meeting with little success until he reached the Humber in October where he joined up with a large English rebel force. The Danes and the English marched on York and wiped out the Norman garrison there. William acted quickly and recaptured York in December. A campaign of savage retaliation, known as the ‘Harrying of North’, followed. William’s forces spread out across the countryside, burning and killing people and livestock, reducing the survivors to beggary. The Domesday Book, compiled in 1086, lists hundreds of villages across the north as still being waste and uninhabited, and worth only a fraction of their value twenty years earlier. William’s brutality served the double purpose of punishing the rebels and depriving the Danes of supplies. William literally made a desert of the north and called it peace.
In the spring of 1070, King Svein joined his son on the Humber and in June sailed to the Wash to join the English rebels under Hereward the Wake in sacking Peterborough. However, Svein was reluctant to face the Normans in open battle. When a force of just 160 Normans arrived at Ely, the Danes took to their ships. With English resistance collapsing, Svein reached an agreement with William and went home with his plunder. Five years later, Cnut returned to England with 200 ships at the invitation of two rebellious Norman earls. By the time he arrived, the rebellion was over and, apart from sacking York, he achieved nothing. In 1080, Cnut became king of Denmark (r. 1080 – 86) and revived his claim to the English throne. In 1085 he allied with Count Baldwin of Flanders, one of William’s French rivals, and raised a large invasion fleet. William prepared for the invasion by bringing over troops from Normandy, taxing the English, and by laying waste England’s coastal districts so that the Danes would find nothing with which to supply their army. ‘And people had much oppression that year,’ lamented the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle: being protected by William was probably considerably worse than being raided by Vikings. The English suffered for nothing: the threat of a German invasion of Denmark prevented Cnut’s fleet from sailing and at the end of the summer it dispersed. Cnut planned to try again but he was murdered in Odense in July 1086 and his successor Olaf had other priorities. With Cnut’s death, England’s Viking Age truly came to an end. True, England continued to suffer Viking raids from Orkney and Norway until the middle of the twelfth century and as late as the 1150s the Norwegian king Eystein II took advantage of a civil war to plunder England’s east coast. However, these were mere pinpricks and the country never again faced the threat of a serious Viking invasion.
Chapter 10: Hedeby, Jelling and Stiklestad. The Scandinavian kingdoms to 1100
Histories of the Vikings tend to concentrate on their impact on Europe and the wider world. The untold story of the Vikings is the impact that Europe had on them. At the beginning of the Viking Age, Scandinavians were still prehistoric, pagan barbarians: by its end, they were fully integrated into the cultural mainstream of Roman Catholic Christian Europe. For all their energy and aggression, the Vikings did not Scandinavianise Europe; Europe Europeanised the Vikings. This process of assimilating Scandinavia into Christian Europe, which mirrors on a much larger scale the assimilation of Scandinavian settlers into their European host communities, was inextricably linked to the culmination of the state formation process, which saw the emergence of stable kingdoms in Denmark, Norway and Sweden. Just as it was the emergence of states in these countries that triggered Viking exploration and raiding, it was the end of the state-building process, not more effective defences by the Vikings’ victims, that led to the decline of their freebooting ways. Once kings had built effective governments, they could prevent their subjects from causing diplomatic problems with neighbouring states, and they could also offer them alternative routes to social advancement through royal service, so reducing the incentive to go on Viking raids. And because they now had other forms of income from taxation and trade, kings did not have the same pressures to lead plundering raids themselves. As was the case in the Viking colonies, conversion to Christianity was the main vehicle of cultural assimilation.
Because it was blessed with the greatest area of good arable land, Denmark was the wealthiest and most populated country of Viking Age Scandinavia. It was also the smallest and most compact, with good internal communications. The two largest regions of Viking Age Denmark were the Jutland peninsula in the west and the two provinces of Skåne and Blekinge in the east (both of which came under Swedish rule in the seventeenth century). In between them lay a scatter of dozens of low-lying islands, linked rather than separated by shallow, sheltered channels of the sea. Because there were no large forests or high mountains as there were in Norway and Sweden, there were few obstacles to travel on land. Because of its land border with Germany in the south, Denmark was also the Scandinavian country in closest contact with Christian Europe. These geographical circumstances alone made it likely that Denmark would be the first of the Scandinavian countries to be welded into a unified kingdom, but there was also an important external factor driving the Danes towards unity: their powerful Christian neighbour, the Frankish empire.