12. Medieval England’s Most Unpleasant Surprise
In the late eighth century, the Vikings erupted from Scandinavia to terrorize Europe and the Mediterranean world. They 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, massacred the monks, and seized its riches. After generations of peace, the destruction of Lindisfarne was a shock probably equivalent to Pearl Harbor and 9/11 rolled into one. 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 unprepared for the Vikings. 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.
The Vikings 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, and 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.
