The Vikings Nearly Brought the Anglo-Saxon Era to a Premature End
Anglo-Saxon England breathed a collective sigh of relief upon Penda’s death in 655. The era of widespread warfare ushered in by the Mercian king, was followed by one of relative peace, that came to be seen as an Anglo-Saxon golden age. It was a period of economic expansion, which produced a surplus that helped fund a growing number of monasteries – centers of learning in the early Medieval period.
In 669, the Archbishop of Canterbury founded a school in his city – the first school in England. The Venerable Bede would describe it about 60 years later as having “attracted a crowd of students into whose minds they daily poured the streams of wholesome knowledge“. Some of them, who survived into Bede’s own day, were as fluent in Greek and Latin as they were in their native English.
That and other learning institutions produced scholars and poets who wrote in Latin, and one of them, Aldhelm, pioneered a grandiloquent style that became the dominant Latin style for centuries to come. Anglo-Saxon scholars were the most highly respected throughout Europe during this period, and Bede himself was one of the foremost scholars and men of letters in Christendom.
The peoples of Anglo-Saxon kingdoms had initially spoke distinctive dialects. However, those different strains melded into each other over time, and evolved to form a common language, known as Old English, which lent itself to an exceptionally rich vernacular literature. Examples include the epic poem Beowulf, and a collection of manuscripts covering the early history of England, known as the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles.
Unfortunately for the Anglo-Saxons, the very prosperity and plenty that fueled their golden age would result in its sudden ending. Anglo-Saxon England’s wealth, and especially the wealth of its monasteries, would attract the covetous attention of Viking raiders. Erupting from Scandinavia in the late 8th century to terrorize Europe and the Mediterranean world, those seaborne raiders nearly brought the Anglo-Saxon era to a premature end.
What came to be known as the Viking Age began in 793, when raiders struck the great monastery at Lindisfarne, massacring the monks and seizing the riches. After generations of peace, the destruction of Lindisfarne was a shock probably equivalent to Pearl Harbor and 9/11 rolled into one. And unlike the US, the Anglo-Saxons lacked the means to strike back, and were unable to even defend their shores from further raids.
Anglo-Saxon England was wholly unprepared for the Viking onslaught, which, ironicallyy, was quite similar to the Anglo-Saxon onslaught upon Roman Britain centuries earlier. In the decades after destroying Lindisfarne, the Vikings continued raiding England, in assaults marked by a wanton savagery, and gratuitous destructiveness that terrorized all and sundry.
For decades, the raiders had always retreated after striking, wintering in their homeland before returning the following spring. By 850, however, they had had grown sufficiently disdainful of Anglo-Saxon resistance to overwinter in England for the first time, in the island of Thanet off Kent. They would repeat that in subsequent years until, in 865, they switched from raiding to outright conquest.
That year, Vikings gathered into what came to be known as “The Great Heathen Army”, landed in East Anglia, then marched northward into Northumbria. There, they established the Viking community of Jorvik – the first Viking settlement in England. The Anglo-Saxons were unable to invaders, and by 867, the Vikings had conquered what came to be known as the Danelaw – a territory eventually stretching from London and the Thames to north of York, into Northumberland. In 871, the Great Heathen Army, reinforced by a newly arrived Viking army known as the “Great Summer Army”, invaded Wessex, the last independent Anglo-Saxon kingdom.
