Episode 2 Vikings

'Here in Ireland

'evidence is being unearthed of a Viking fortress.'

The Viking site is re-emerging.

You can see it back again

for the first time in a thousand years.

This was built to help colonise a land that provided a key commodity

in a trade network that stretched all the way to the Middle East...

slaves.

I'm finding out the truth about the Vikings.

Leaving Britain behind to enter their land

and their own mysterious world.

Even now,

this place feels like it's on the edge of everything.

And as an archaeologist,

I'm seeking out some of the most telling evidence of all...

..the very remains of the Vikings themselves.

This flamboyant hairstyle

just adds to his allure.

Last time, I searched out the ancient, prehistoric roots

of the Vikings.

It's such a Baltic thing to do.

You don't get ship settings in France or in Britain.

Now, I'm travelling out from Scandinavia...

THEY HEAVE THE BOAT

..to explore how the Vikings extended their reach

into new lands...

HE SPEAKS ARABIC

..building a vast trading network,

from Ireland to the Middle East.

I'm starting off in the heart of Scandinavia,

heading to the coast of the Baltic Sea -

the capital of Sweden - Stockholm.

Here in Stockholm, life is very much about the Baltic.

Britain feels like a long way away towards the west.

From here the nearest neighbours are Finland, Latvia and Estonia

in the east.

In Britain, the force of the Vikings

was Norwegians and Danes sailing westwards.

But here it was a different story of settlement and exploration,

starting on the Baltic and heading east into Russia and beyond.

It was settlement built on trade in luxury items,

many of them obtained from as far afield as China

but at a dreadful human cost -

countless slaves rounded up from their homes in Britain and Ireland

and shipped eastwards for unimaginable lives in far-off lands.

It's not a story of north and south but rather of an east-west axis

and of a Viking footprint that began in the eighth century and in just

100 years or so was planted firmly over a vast tract of territory.

It was the beginning of a Viking trading empire.

Here in Sweden archaeologists have discovered evidence

of one of the extremes of this network far to the east.

These are Arabic dirhams...

..minted in places like Tashkent and Baghdad and Samarkand.

Those exotic names,

and yet these pieces found their way back to Scandinavia

in truly vast quantities, tens of thousands of coins like this.

These were found in rich Viking hordes,

2,500 miles from where they were minted.

Also Middle Eastern in origin are these necklaces

made of rock crystal beads.

They're so colourful, they're almost gaudy.

Perhaps best of all, this unprepossessing sliver here

is a piece of Chinese silk.

To me, gold and silver are statements of wealth,

but with silk, you're talking about luxury.

The way it looks, but more importantly the way it feels.

All this kind of material makes the people of Sweden

different from their neighbours,

because although they live on an outcrop of north-western Europe,

out on the edge of the world,

they have connections that reach all the way to the Orient and China.

To track down those Viking traders I'm crossing the Baltic,

heading for Russia and its cultural capital - St Petersburg.

This place is such a symbol of Russia from the time of the tsars

and then its reincarnation as Leningrad during Communist rule,

and now reinventing itself again, but incredibly,

this part of Russia as late as the 17th century

wasn't under Russian rule. It was Swedish

because the deepest heritage here is Viking.

We're so obsessed

with what the Vikings got up to in Britain and Ireland

that the folk who came here tend to be completely overlooked.

The fact is more Viking artefacts have been found here in Russia

and Eastern Europe than in the whole of Western Europe put together.

Some of the relics preserved here in Russia's most famous museum -

The Hermitage - paint a completely new picture of the Vikings for me.

Not one of bands of bearded men out on warlike raids,

but ordinary people, living settled lives.

This wonder

is a magnificent, well-preserved leather shoe or ankle boot.

Look at the workmanship in this.

Here's where the lace would have gone to hold it in place

around the foot and ankle.

This has been worn to make someone look good,

somebody who cared about her appearance

and presumably wanted to appear fashionable.

And this, it's a distaff,

part of the quite simple equipment needed to spin wool into thread.

What makes this one especially memorable

is this carefully prepared smooth face,

into which have been etched Viking runes.

This is Viking writing.

This, it's thought, says something poetic like,

"clad from above

"the spindle is spinning.

"Starry-eyed maiden will have a long thin thread.

"Navluk owns this distaff."

So often when you find archaeological artefacts,

you're left to wonder helplessly about who made it

and who owned it and who left it behind, but here, we know.

Navluk, a starry-eyed Viking maiden.

So much attention is given to Viking men, it's striking that the

pioneers of this eastern frontier also included women.

The objects come from one of the very earliest Viking communities

outside of Scandinavia,

one of the first steps in the creation of a vast trading empire.

To discover the source of those artefacts, I have to head

90 miles east of St Petersburg to a tiny riverside village.

It's called Staraya Ladoga

and it's here in the rural backwaters of western Russia

that the story of Viking expansion begins.

SNOW CRUNCHES

Even now this place feels like it's on the edge of everything.

It feels remote,

it feels surrounded by wilderness, nothingness really,

so what on earth must it have been like for the first Vikings,

who found this place beside the river

and furthermore decided to stay, actually to set up home and shop?

It would have been wild in the extreme.

The very earliest Viking finds from here date back to 753AD -

a generation before the first recorded raids on Britain.

So this Russian outpost marks some of the very earliest evidence

of the Vikings outside their Scandinavian homelands.

And this soon became the gateway to a route that would

stretch as far as Constantinople and even Baghdad.

A route that could only be tackled by river.

Morning, Vikings. Where can I be? Up here?

Using a replica Viking boat, these Russian enthusiasts

are figuring out how the Vikings made extraordinary journeys east.

Today there's too much ice on the river to launch our own boat so just

like the eighth century Vikings, we've got to shift it ourselves.

This is just the way the boat has to be moved on dry land.

If it got to an obstacle - rapids, waterfall or ice -

they have to take the boat out of the river and either go round

the obstacle or find another river. This is the only way to do it

so it's just rolled over land on these logs.

Hopefully over the shortest possible distance.

It's literally yard by yard, foot by foot.

ENCOURAGEMENT IN RUSSIAN

Oh, God!

Imagine how long it would take to get anywhere.

You leave home in Sweden,

cross the Baltic in ships

and then get everything into boats like this and every now and again

you've got to take the boat out of the water and move it over land.

These guys must have been away for years at a time.

By navigating the Russian rivers and lugging their boats

when necessary, the Vikings could transport themselves all the way

from the Baltic to the Caspian and Black Seas.

It's time consuming and it's laborious but there's enough men

here to move a boat this size so the system does work, as history shows!

ENCOURAGEMENT IN RUSSIAN

The journeys east along the Russian rivers demanded incredible

feats of organisation,

boatmanship and endurance.

And as well as overcoming the physical hardships,

the Vikings had to find ways of dealing with the very strange

and often very violent locals they encountered along the way.

For the people from the East, the Vikings also seemed strange.

Preserved in contemporary accounts written by Islamic scholars

are vivid descriptions

of how they saw those strange people from the North.

Arabic scholar James Montgomery

has studied the remarkable written records

of a Middle Eastern traveller called Ibn Fadlan.

HE SPEAKS ARABIC

"I've never seen more perfect bodies than theirs.

"They were like palm trees."

And then there's this absolutely fantastic phrase which I just love.

ARABIC PHRASE

They're red, bright red, light haired, they're like a burst of fire.

He says, "From the tip of their fingers right up to their necks,

"every one of them is covered in dark green trees and shapes

-"and other things."

-Tattoos.

-Tattoos.

He then goes on and describes what the women look like,

and this is really interesting, because they are accompanied by their wives.

It says that, "Each woman has some form of a box

"made of iron or silver or bronze or gold,

"depending on how much money her husband has.

"And every box has a ring

"and from the ring there is a dagger suspended."

Are they settling and colonising in the East or are they just moving through?

Well, if we turn to another one of the texts that we have with us today,

we can see a sense that they are both settling,

but they are not setting down any particular roots.

HE SPEAKS ARABIC

So he says, "They don't have any fields that they sow,

"they don't have any villages,

"they don't have any agriculture.

"The only thing they do is trade

"and that is trade in martens and squirrels and other pelts."

So I think the picture that we have at this point

is of a set of trading emporia.

You get off your boat, you do your trade,

build a couple of huts or whatever

and then get back on the boat.

The Islamic writers even had a special name

for the intrepid merchants from the North.

They called them "the Rus,"

which means something like "the men who row".

And it shows how influential they became,

because, after all, this land is now called Russia.

It's remarkable to think that one of the biggest nations in the world

gets its name from the Vikings,

who navigated its waterways

setting up trading posts and colonies as they went.

Their target was the greatest city on Earth - Constantinople.

When I started looking into the Vikings,

I didn't think I'd have to go 1,500 miles south of Scandinavia

to find out about them.

But here I am, in a city that's the gateway to Asia -

Istanbul.

Once known as Constantinople.

For the Vikings, this glorious city

was the culmination of their journeys.

Because, within its walls,

were some of the greatest markets in the world.

For a Viking, this would have been all but overwhelming,

because this is on a completely different scale

from anything he would have witnessed before.

Instead of hundreds of people,

here there would have been thousands or even tens of thousands

and from all over the world.

And then, there were all the exotic sights and sounds and smells.

It's all but an assault on the senses.

The trouble was that Constantinople was tightly controlled

with strict trade quotas, taxes and even immigration rules.

But, by the early 900s, the Vikings had been granted access.

-Hey!

-Yes?

-Do you speak English?

-I speak English, my friend.

-Can I have 100 grams of the red spice?

-100 grams.

-OK.

-Something else?

No, that's all. How much?

Once here, they could buy finely woven silk

worth its weight in gold in exchange for their own exotic wares.

Baltic amber, Arctic furs,

and the Vikings' most important commodity of all -

slaves.

Any Viking who spent three months or more in the city

was entitled to buy silk up to the value of two slaves.

And that silk was so valuable,

it made the perilous river journeys to get here more than worthwhile.

A merchant could earn, in just a year or two,

more wealth than a prosperous farmer back home in Scandinavia

could acquire in an entire lifetime.

Some Vikings made Constantinople their home.

And one of them even left his mark on the city,

in one of the most historic and holy places on the planet.

This is the Hagia Sophia.

Most of what you're looking at was built in the sixth century,

which means that, by the time the Vikings turned up,

that building was already old.

Hagia Sophia was built as a Christian church.

'And it later became a Muslim mosque.

'All around me are remnants

'of over 1,000 years of Christian and Muslim worship.

'But one tiny corner is Viking.'

These dark lines etched into the marble are Vikings runes,

ancient Viking writing.

They're almost indecipherable.

The only bit that's in any way clear is part of someone's name, a man's name -

Halfdan.

And the rest of it is assumed to read "was here".

So you've got, "Halfdan was here" or made these runes.

We'll never know for sure who Halfdan was,

but it's possible that he was a member

of the near-legendary elite bodyguard of the Byzantine emperor,

the so-called Varangian Guard,

who escorted the Emperor on special occasions

and for special ceremonies.

So we can allow ourselves to imagine

that, one day, Halfdan was up here on duty

during a long, boring religious ceremony.

And to pass the time, he carved his name

and some words into the stonework.

These few lines are such a moving, visceral reminder of just how far

the Swedish Vikings had come

since they first set out across the glassy Baltic Sea.

'But what's left in Constantinople is only part of the story,

'because everything the Vikings achieved on their journeys east

'also had a huge impact back home.'

From Istanbul, I'm heading back to Sweden.

My destination - a tiny island,

just a stone's throw from Stockholm, called Birka.

-Hello.

-Hello. Welcome.

-Thank you! Can we head off?

-Yes.

Today, it's a remote rural place.

And its isolation from the modern world

has meant that Birka has been remarkably undisturbed

for over 1,000 years.

In Birka, we should glimpse traces of everyday life,

not the lives of the warrior class, but ordinary working people.

Because what's preserved in Birka is more than just a town,

it's an entire culture.

Swedish archaeologist Charlotte Hedenstierna-Johnson

has been excavating Viking Birka for a decade.

In the league of Viking towns, where does Birka rank?

If you ask me, very top.

-Number one?

-Yeah.

-OK.

Birka was one of the very first urban centres in Scandinavia

and it thrived on international trade.

So Birka is like a department store where you can get clothes,

you can get jewellery, you can get furnishings for your home...

Weaponry, food...

Imported food, I should say.

Um... Spices, textiles.

What kind of things do you find?

You know, is it rich pickings out where the people lived?

Yeah, it's very rich pickings.

-Gold and silver?

-No, not today.

Now, this is a very good example of what they actually did here.

Their trade is at the heart of everything.

This is an iron weight.

-So this isn't for weighing the goods themselves.

-No.

-This is how you make sure someone's paid the right price.

-Exactly.

So, by the time they got these weights,

they've moved from, you know,

simple barter to objects having an established value in silver?

Yeah, yeah, much more advanced.

It's coming close to a monetary system.

But Birka was far more than just a market.

This was a whole society

with a garrison and an industrial area

as well as markets and residences.

For Vikings, places like Birka were a new world.

It was about urban living,

it was about life in an international trading centre

and it was about having connections, contacts,

with people living as far afield as Ireland and Constantinople.

And the Vikings who once lived here clearly wanted to be remembered.

These humps and bumps are the unmistakable outlines

of Viking burial mounds.

They're all around me here, they stretch off in every direction.

It's reckoned that there are at least 3,000 visible graves

in and around Birka.

Within these graves, archaeologists have found the remains

of wealthy merchants with Eastern goods.

And even their Viking children who lived over 1,000 years ago.

It's an unusually well-preserved skeleton,

especially given that it's the skeleton of a child.

There's nothing on the skeleton to reveal how she died.

That will remain a mystery.

But we know from analysis that she was no more

than maybe six years old when she died.

And I can confidently say SHE

because of the things that went into her coffin with her.

She was wearing a necklace of brightly coloured glass beads,

silver and gold and blue in there.

Also, her clothing was fastened across her chest

with a very heavily decorated gilded brooch.

And on the back of the brooch, there's the impression

of some of the fabric that it was holding in place,

and it's a very finely made, expensive fabric.

We don't know quite what it was,

but it would have cost a lot of money

and it may well have been an exotic import.

Because she was expensively dressed,

she was obviously the daughter of a wealthy family.

The wealth here tells us that she was part of Birka's trading elite.

In places like Birka, all those luxury Eastern goods could be found,

but they also had to be paid for.

Furs could be traded and trapped.

Amber could be found in the ground itself.

But much of the Vikings' wealth depended on slaves.

And THEY had to be taken by force.

Having travelled east, I'm now heading west,

to the other extreme of the Vikings' trading network.

Dublin, Ireland's capital, was founded by Norwegian Vikings in 841AD.

Dublin was one of the Vikings' most important bases

and Ireland's very first town.

It's often thought that the Vikings came here

to raid gold and silver treasures from Irish monasteries.

But it turns out that the engine behind the Vikings expansion into Ireland

was that oh, so important human commodity -

slaves.

In here is evidence of what the Vikings came here for.

Part of what Dublin was all about.

These are slave collars and chains made of iron.

You can imagine the discomfort, never mind the humiliation,

of having something like this placed around your neck

with a chain attached.

The going rate for a male slave at the time was 12 ounces of silver.

And a woman could be had for eight ounces of silver.

There were even different kinds of chains and collars

for different classes of captives.

Look at this.

It's hard to use terms like "luxury item" in relation to a slave collar and chain,

but everything about it seems to speak to the status

of the person whose neck it was once around.

It's nothing less than ornate,

quite a lot of work has gone into making this look

like the kind of collar you would put round an expensive neck.

So perhaps this was briefly worn around the neck of an Irish king

before his ransom was paid

or he agreed to some specific set of terms.

And it's harrowing to think a city owes its foundation,

its existence, at least in part,

to one civilisation's appetite for buying and selling human beings.

Dublin quickly grew into one of the largest slave markets in Europe,

attracting merchants from all across the continent.

In 871, it was reported that 200 ships arrived

packed with Angles, Britons and Picts.

This was organised human trafficking

on a scale that even bears comparison

with the early years of the slave trade to the Americas,

almost 1,000 years later.

Incredibly, the remains of some of the very early pioneers

who came to seek their fortune in the slave trade have been found.

Archaeologist Lindsay Simpson has recently examined four skeletons

on the site of the original Dublin settlement.

How can you tell that this is a Viking and not a local?

Yes, very good question.

Well, we knew by the way that he was buried, is the short answer.

He wasn't buried in a Christian burial, as an Irish person would be.

He's a pagan, he was buried with grave goods, which is not something

that happens with Irish people who are Christian.

Based on his skeleton, what do you think he looked like in life?

He was probably five foot nine,

which is very big for that time.

You can see that his bones are really quite enormous.

And when you look down at his legs,

his legs are incredibly powerful.

The upper shoulder here, you can see the strong lines

where the ligaments have actually worn a groove in the bones.

-Is that happening during hard physical work?

-This has happened through rotation movement.

So a big part of his daily life involved some kind of

rotational, repetitive movement.

So this could be either sword fighting or it could be from rowing.

Cos they would have been doing an awful lot of rowing.

It's always amazing to me that all of that hard work -

rowing, swinging a sword, it's all written into the bones.

Everything you do with your skeleton is reflected at the end of the day.

And he was a very bulky, stocky, scary guy.

You would not want to meet this individual,

especially not when he had all his paraphernalia with him.

It's clear that, just like the Swedish Vikings in Russia,

many of the Norwegian Vikings who came here didn't go home again,

but decided to settle.

With Dublin established as a thriving base,

the Vikings of Norway began to settle more widely,

over large parts of Ireland, much of Scotland,

the Isle of Man and coastal Wales.

Dublin was the centre of this vast and expanding sea kingdom.

It commanded the Irish Sea

as well as the sea routes headed north to Scotland,

south to Wales and east to England.

From this frontier town, the Norsemen commanded it all.

But the Vikings weren't content with just controlling the sea routes

and settling barren land.

They had much greater ambitions.

A vast Viking trade network

from Russia to Ireland

had led to increasingly widespread Viking settlement.

But there was one more prize that lay right on their doorstep.

England.

The trouble was, though, that unlike the great wilderness of Russia

or the tribal lands of Ireland,

the valuable, golden land of England

already had some well-organised sitting tenants.

The Anglo-Saxons.

Leaving Dublin behind, I've come to Oxford,

once part of Wessex, the most powerful of all England's kingdoms.

And it's here that

one of the greatest treasures of the age can be seen.

An Anglo-Saxon masterpiece.

This is the Alfred Jewel.

It's so irreplaceably valuable that I'm not even allowed to touch it.

Which, frankly, given the price on it, is a relief!

This once belonged to Alfred the Great, King of 9th-century Wessex.

The most powerful man in all of Britain.

It's made of gold and enamel and crystal.

But, more impressive than the raw materials, by far,

is the artistry that's gone into making it.

So finely worked, and it terminates

in this weird and wonderful head of a beast.

There's been a lot of theory over the years about what it was for.

Could it be a centrepiece for a headdress, making it a crown jewel?

Could it have been worn as a pendant on a chain around someone's neck?

The abiding theory now is it's the handle of a pointer.

It would have been a little piece

of maybe worked ivory, something suitably glamorous,

in the mouth of the beast.

And then it could be used to point out lines and words

on an illuminated manuscript

that was itself too valuable to be touched.

This was made for King Alfred.

The letters around it say,

"Alfred ordered me to be made."

And right here, in this tiny object,

is a powerful statement of wealth

and authority and commitment to learning.

And you can only imagine what it did

in the hearts and minds of Vikings,

when they knew that objects like this

were here and that they could get their hands on them.

Around 50 years after the foundation of Staraya Ladoga,

and 50 years before the birth of Alfred,

the British had their first taste of the Vikings.

On the 8th of June 793,

the peace of the Northumbrian coast was shattered.

A band of Vikings launched a surprise attack

on the monastery at Lindisfarne.

They hacked most of the monks to death

and stole the unguarded religious treasures.

It was the 9/11 moment for Anglo-Saxon Britain.

Things could never be the same again.

From that moment, monks and nuns living in monasteries

all around the coastline had to accept the threat of terror attacks.

Murder, enslavement, all of it,

could come at them from just beyond the horizon.

The unprecedented violence of this raid

seared itself into the nation's psyche.

For all their other endeavours,

it's raids like this for which they've been remembered.

But the brutal attack on Lindisfarne

was just the beginning.

In 865AD, a combined alliance of around 3,000 Vikings,

mostly Danes, arrived on English soil.

Their aim wasn't trade, or another attack.

It was conquest of the whole of England.

At a time when a band of 30 men was routinely described as an army,

this was truly a force to be reckoned with.

The Anglo-Saxons called it The Great Heathen Army,

and it wasn't just a raiding party, intent on slaves and gold.

The Great Heathen Army wanted everything.

And to get it, they would have to take on the Anglo-Saxons.

The conquest of England would be a task far greater

than anything the Vikings had ever attempted before.

England was divided into four powerful, well-organised kingdoms.

Northumbria, East Anglia,

Mercia and Wessex.

To succeed, the Vikings would have to defeat them all.

After a few brutal years of fighting,

and the deaths of the Northumbrian and East Anglian kings,

in 873, the Vikings turned to the very heart of England.

When The Great Heathen Army arrived here in Repton,

they'd come to take Mercia.

Now Repton's small and out of the way today,

but 1,000 years ago, it was the most important town in Mercia.

And Mercia was the second most powerful kingdom in all of England.

When the Vikings descended on Repton,

they transformed the sacred church of St Wystan

into a centre of operations.

HE PANTS

The tower doesn't look very tall from the ground.

But it is. I can assure you!

It was a huge step along the way to controlling the whole of England.

Well, there you go.

The whole of the Trent Valley laid out before us.

Stretching right off into the haze on the horizon.

If you look down just beyond the graveyard,

you can see a stretch of water.

And that's a relic of a much older course of the River Trent.

And it's right there that the Vikings would have pulled up

in their ships, come out onto the bank,

to set about the business of takeover.

And you can see why Repton mattered to them.

From up here on the tower, you feel like the master of all you survey.

And the Vikings, great strategists that they were,

they realised that Repton was the key

that would unlock Mercia for them.

In the churchyard,

archaeologists have found remnants of the Vikings' fortress.

This is a map of the excavations

that were done around the church in the 1980s.

Look at the genius of what's going on here.

We've got a D-shaped enclosure

with a fourth side created by a river.

And, great tacticians that they were,

the Vikings here have even employed the Christian church

and turned it into a defensive gateway into their fortress.

Genius!

The Vikings even used the Christian graveyard

to bury their own, pagan dead.

This is where archaeological evidence

brings us face-to-face with the men of The Great Heathen Army.

Just here is grave number eight.

That's one of the most important Viking graves ever found in Britain.

I must be just about standing on the spot.

Just about here. Imagine that!

Right here, archaeologists discovered the remains

of a six-foot-tall skeleton.

A quintessential Viking warrior.

He was buried in the pagan style,

with his most precious possessions,

preserved today at the Derby Museum.

These are some of the most important things

that the Repton Warrior was buried with.

The Viking belief dictated that

whatever you needed and wanted in the next life

had to go into the ground with you.

First of all, you've got the perfect weapon.

Which is not just giving him the ability to fight,

but it says something about who he is in life.

Now, it's no ordinary warrior that's armed like this.

The vast majority are armed with something that's quite simple

and cheap to make, like axes.

A sword is of a different order of magnitude.

You feel as if you're looking at the iron blade, but you're not.

The brown colour is deceiving.

This is actually an iron sword in a scabbard.

It's a wooden scabbard

with a fleece lining to protect the blade,

and then on the outside, there's a leather casing.

So a man on the battlefield with a sword

is already someone you would notice.

But a man with a sword and a scabbard is another step up again.

So this man was clearly a leader amongst his own kind.

A sword is always an impressive thing to see,

but for me, it's just as affecting

and moving to see the other items that he wanted with him.

This is a little silver hammer.

The Repton Warrior was wearing this around his neck

in the same way that a Christian would wear a cross.

It's connecting him physically to the god Thor.

Thor is one of the big three Old Norse gods,

and he was definitely the soldier's, the warrior's, friend.

They felt that Thor understood them.

Thor was armed with a legendary hammer called Mjolnir,

and with it, Thor could level mountains.

For a man like the Repton Warrior,

everything about him was building to one ideal conclusion.

He wanted a heroic death on the battlefield

that would guarantee him access to the next world,

which for him was Valhalla,

which was a place where he would fight all day with other heroes

and then feast all night.

It was the perfect Viking heaven.

For the Anglo-Saxons, this is the worst-case scenario,

because it's in the Viking mindset to fight to the death.

And it's a horde of men who think like this

that the Anglo-Saxons here had to face.

East Anglia, Northumbria, and finally, Mercia,

all fell into the hands of the Danes.

Only King Alfred's kingdom, Wessex, withstood the onslaught.

But even he wasn't quite strong enough to drive them out completely.

So eventually, a peace treaty was agreed,

the terms of which basically gave the Vikings control

of a territory north of a line

stretching between Chester and the Thames.

The territory became known as the Danelaw.

It was basically a Danish Viking colony.

All of this land that I'm travelling through now

was under Danish Viking control.

What the Vikings did here in England was unprecedented.

The taking of England wasn't settlement or expansion.

It was conquest, by war.

It was different from anything they were to do anywhere else,

and the result was unique,

a fusion of Viking and Anglo-Saxon culture in the North

that even today gives Northern England

so much of its distinctive character.

The establishment of the Danelaw

essentially created our North-South divide.

The city that became the capital of the Danelaw was York.

And Viking settlers started flooding in to what was already

one of the most important Anglo-Saxon centres in England.

All of these items here shows that there were Vikings in York.

They're classically Viking material.

The comb for personal grooming and taking care of head lice.

You've got amber jewellery, possibly from the Baltic.

This is a gaming piece, and it's walrus ivory,

maybe from as far away as Greenland.

So it's precisely the sort of stuff you expect from Vikings

and from people who are trading,

at a time when York has become a centre

with material coming in from all over.

On the back of Viking trade, York boomed,

and became a thriving city,

second only to Anglo-Saxon London.

Its population exploded from 2,000 to 10,000.

But for the Vikings who settled here,

it was a very strange experience.

York was quite unlike Birka, or even Dublin,

let alone the farmstead settlements of most of Scandinavia.

And the new city life had some very serious downsides.

I'm quite glad to be putting on gloves,

because these contain Viking excrement.

Fragments thereof. It's all been collected from cesspits.

Examination of this, though,

glamorous though it certainly isn't,

is very informative,

because this contains traces of what the people were eating.

You get traces of things like bran, cereals, fruit stones.

So we can tell that, in some ways, their diet was quite healthy.

However, most tellingly of all,

the excrement is full of eggs

left behind by intestinal parasites. Worms.

It was unavoidable.

And it was caused by the sanitation,

or frankly, the lack of it.

There wasn't the infrastructure for running water.

So, by and large, people had cesspits in their yards.

They were living close to, surrounded by, their own waste,

their own infections.

That took its toll.

Something like 50% of Viking women were dead at 35.

Viking men were lucky to make it to 50.

Despite its drawbacks,

York became a place of manufacture, craft and design,

as well as trade and settlement.

As the second and third-generation Vikings grew up here,

there was inevitable integration

of people and language.

How many of the words we use every day

actually have their roots in Viking words?

Lots and lots of really basic everyday words.

So a word you've just used, "root,"

itself probably comes from Old Norse.

Comes through the Viking side of English's ancestry.

What about things around us in this market?

Well, things like eggs, skirts,

I see some bags over there.

The sky, windows,

other things that I can see include skin, leg, skull...

So very simple words?

Very simple, basic words for things, yeah.

Also words which describe how we feel and how we react to stuff.

So if you're angry, if you're happy, if you're ill...

-Those words as well?

-All these words come from Norse.

Basic verbs as well.

So, give and take, get, call.

Does language reveal anything about the extent of Viking colonisation?

Well, the easiest way to tell that

is by looking at the evidence of the place names.

Anywhere in a band across the North and the East,

from Cheshire right down to Suffolk,

there are lots of Old Norse place names.

Words which are wholly or partly from Old Norse.

So anything involving '-by'. B-Y.

Places like Grimsby...

-Or Whitby.

-Whitby, yes. Selby.

And what does the '-by' mean?

"-By" seems to mean a settlement, village.

Somewhere round a farmstead. There are lots more.

It's amazing, isn't it?

We're talking about people who arrived, you know,

1,300, 1,200 years ago,

and yet the words they brought with them

are still echoing around us today.

They're all around, yes. That's right. That's right.

When you come to a place like this,

is easy to see the impact that Vikings have had on us.

And it's not just the place names

or the words in our everyday language.

The Vikings are part of who we are.

By setting up their own towns, and by marrying the locals,

their blood mixed with our blood.

And they're still here with us today.

What started with attack and war became,

as so often with invaders, assimilation.

Bloodshed giving way to a new cultural fusion.

But for the Vikings, this wasn't only something that happened

with the Anglo-Saxons of England.

It was global.

To end my journey, I'm returning to Stockholm one last time.

Because right here, at the geographical hub

of East and West, North and South,

at the heart of the Vikings' trading network,

there's something that epitomises

the global reach of that trading empire.

And it also graphically illustrates

just how many cultures the Vikings were exposed to.

A collection of treasure discovered on a little Baltic island

was once the property of a single Viking household.

Look at these three marvels.

They are known collectively as the Helgo Treasure.

They were all found together in one house.

First of all, there's a bishop's crosier,

which is the headpiece that would be on top of a staff

carried by a bishop as a mark of his office and status.

Everything about its decoration is typically Irish.

How did it come to be in an island in Sweden?

Well, we've talked about raids on Irish monasteries,

and it's very believable

that this has been plundered during one of those raids.

Next here, we have a ladle.

It would've been used in religious ceremonies,

specifically for baptism.

It's to pour water over the head of someone

who's being welcomed into the Christian church.

It's made of bronze,

and it's probably from North Africa.

The Christian crosier and Coptic ladle are incredible objects.

But there was something found beside them

that I find even more extraordinary.

It's a bronze Buddha.

This was probably made

in the northern part of the Indian subcontinent.

Maybe Pakistan or Afghanistan.

And it has made its way here, likely, along the Silk Road.

Passing through many hands,

going through Constantinople, through Russia,

and eventually finding its way to Helgo.

Within the heart of Scandinavia, in the far north,

you have objects that represent

the other three points on the compass.

West, South, and East.

The products of Africa, Ireland, and India,

and in one place.

One little Baltic island.

It's almost inconceivable.

Quite marvellous to behold.

Think how far the Vikings have come.

It's only 100, maybe 150 years,

since those first raids.

But by now, those Vikings

have stretched their hands across the face of the known world.

The Vikings have arrived.

Next time,

the Vikings head for unknown lands.

The Vikings were no longer just raiders and traders.

From that moment onwards, they were explorers and adventurers.

They begin to form powerful nation states.

We have Harold himself being baptised.

And finally, say goodbye

to their ancient pagan gods,

to join the kings of Christian Europe.

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