When Vikings Went From Raiders to Conquerors
Anglo-Saxon England was wholly unprepared for the Viking onslaught. Ironically, it was quite similar to the Anglo-Saxon onslaught upon Roman Britain centuries earlier. In the decades after they destroyed Lindisfarne, the Vikings continued to raid England. Their assaults were marked by a wanton savagery, and gratuitous destructiveness that terrorized all and sundry. For decades, the raiders retreated after they struck, wintered in their homeland, and returned 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 repeated that in subsequent years until, in 865, they switched from raids 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 – modern York. It was the first Viking settlement in England. The Anglo-Saxons couldn’t stop the invaders. By 867, the Vikings had conquered what came to be known as the Danelaw – a territory that eventually stretched 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.
