Introduction

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       were casual and difficult trade, though the great protected convoys of merchant-vikings such as made the Constantinople journey were unknown in the west, yet the bartering overseas was precious and necessary to the Northmen and they well knew the worth to them of such a market as Dublin where vikings from Norway and from the Scottish Isles and Man and even from Iceland could pile their goods upon the wharves and obtain in exchange Irish slaves, grain or cattle, or rarer stuffs come up from the land of the Franks or from the east. So it came about that when the safety of Dublin was threatened by Brian Boru there hurried from all over the viking world boatloads of warriors to Dublin Bay to do battle with the Irish at Clontarf and to defend this main market of the west.
       The western trade did not, of course, benefit the vikings only. For their daring on the seas and the frequency of their visits gave to trans-mean traffic an altogether new stability and a vastly wider scope, so that for the first time in history there was a regular and stimulating circulation of commodities down the western fringe of Britain and across the Irish Sea, and in this improved commerce, which led ultimately to the foundation by the vikings of the sea-port towns of Ireland and the Welsh towns along the north coast of the Bristol Channel, the Celt co-operated with enthusiasm, soon realizing the economic advantages of a viking settlement upon his shores. Indeed it may have happened more than once that the continued tenure of these settlements often depended less on the might of the Norse arms than on the prospect of the regular arrival of viking boats to take native wheat or honey or malt or slaves, and to pay in return for them warm furs and hides, whale oil, walrus tusks, butter, cheese, dried fish, and coarse woollen cloth.
      
       It has been said that the vikings abroad take their place in history as conquerors of foreign lands and as colonists, but it is easy in the modern mood of romantic affection for all ancient barbarians to err in the direction of over-praising their achievements in these capacities. To take first of all the matter of their land-winning: Frisia, the natural prey of the Danes, was never adequately defended against them by the Carolingian emperors, always preoccupied with dangers greater than the menace of the vikings. Northern and eastern England, easily overrun, was nothing but a pitiful turmoil of warring little princes, and against Wessex, so long as it was stoutly defended, the vikings failed. Ireland may have been rich in learning and monasteries, but the invading Northmen found her a heptarchy
      
      
      
      
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       of jealous states incapable at first of organized resistance, and even so they could only hold on with difficulty to their harbour-strongholds on the west and southern coasts. Wales the vikings never conquered. France, sorely harassed in the north and west, was betrayed, like Frisia, by her rulers; even the cession of Normandy to Rollo was an unexpected weakness on the part of Charles the Simple that a sterner and less embarrassed monarch would have scorned, nothing but a chance consequence of European politics of the hour and in no sense the logical result of a long and brilliant campaign on the part of Rollo. The East Baltic provinces were sparsely populated by a folk no better equipped than the Swedes who subjugated them, and it was only by invitation of the Slavs that the Swedish city-states in Russia were founded. The few inhabitants of the Scottish islands were defenceless, and as for the Faroes, Iceland, and Greenland, these were empty and unwanted wildernesses of the north. For the taking of these the vikings deserve only the credit of the fine seamanship that brought them thither.
       It is understood, of course, that mere feebleness of the opposition does not necessarily rob the viking military achievements of all merit, and, setting aside their many audacious and successful raids, there were several occasions in the long story of their operations in enemy countries when beyond all doubt they possessed an effective and dangerous army. Such forces were Halfdan's Danish mounted infantry in England, the armies of Turgeis and Olaf of Dublin in Ireland, Ragnar Lodbrok's army in France in 845, and the huge army of 40,000 men in 700 boats that laid siege to Paris forty years later, the Swedish force that conquered Kurland, the Russian armies of Svyatoslav, Vladimir, and Yaroslav, and the redoubtable hosts of Svein Forkbeard and Cnut the Great. But except when they were under the leadership of such men of military genius as these, it is doubtful whether they would ever have obtained any notable successes against a resolute and united opposition. As it is, whenever a real show of force was mustered against them, whenever they were pitted against a skilfully led army, such as that of Brian's Irishmen, or the English forces of Edward and Æthelstan, or the host of the Emperor John Zimiskes, the vikings crumbled and were scattered. Even the little Spanish kingdom of the Asturias proved that unity of purpose and a brave front could avert the viking menace, and of the west it may be said that whatever the fate of poor Britain might have been, if the Frankish empire had possessed so brave a defender as did the
      
      
      
      
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       eastern empire in Basil II Bulgaroctonos, who freed Byzantium of the Bulgar peril, then the towns and monasteries of Francia would thereafter have had little to fear from the pirates of an impotent and terrified north.
       The chief source of the viking weakness in serious military operations lay in the fact that most of their onslaughts upon foreign countries were not the expression of a national policy, but were merely private enterprises that were also, as often as not, calculated gestures of dissatisfaction with the government of their country. This, of course, is not true of such grand enterprises as the conquest of Svein and Cnut in the fifth phase of viking history and not true of some of the Danish raiders in the time of King Horik, and never true of the Russian wars, but it is true of many of the big viking operations of the ninth and tenth centuries; for in those days the kings of the north were more often embarrassed than gratified by the surprising exploits of their own countrymen abroad, and though they were no doubt willing to take whatever taxes they could succeed in collecting from the newly won possessions of their folk, their own domestic affairs gave them small chance of maintaining discipline abroad, of protecting the would-be settlers, or of reinforcing their armies. Therefore a well-equipped expeditionary force of vikings, once departed from the mother-country, was obliged to feed, pay, and maintain itself with little hope of succour from without, a disadvantage that often converted it in a short space of time into an isolated and precariously situated marauding band. Such a lack of support, moreover, was liable to rob the Norsemen of the advantages that were theirs by virtue of their skill as warriors, their clever preliminary espionage and reconnoitring, their strategical sense, their use of camouflage and ruse, their mobility (for they turned themselves into a mounted force wherever horses were available), their unusual battle-tactics and their memorable bravery. It is, of course, a common thing to read in the chronicles how a viking attack was followed by the advent of new fleets of invaders from the north; but these vikings coming afterwards did not always love those who had first arrived and usually weakened rather than strengthened the position of the Northmen abroad. Thus the various Norse and Danish settlements in Ireland were as likely to war with one another as with the Irish; the Danes and the Norse quarrelled in Northumbria; some vikings were prepared to take English pay and enlist against their own countrymen; in Francia one viking fleet could be bribed to fight against another.
      
      
      
      
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       It is probably not true that the vikings were any worse fighters by land than they were afloat, but it counted against them in the west that they seldom had the opportunity of fighting foreigners on the sea where they were absolutely and incontestably supreme. The Russian-Swedes certainly failed, as indeed they were bound to fail, against Greek warships and 'Greek fire'; but in north-western Europe none of the kingdoms or empires against whom the vikings fought could oppose them with an efficient fleet; thus when King Alfred built a navy to fight the Danes, his hired sailors bungled in their management of the new boats and the English fleet failed; so, much later, did the expensive and pathetic armament collected by Æthelred at Sandwich, this being miserably scattered by storm and incompetence before a blow was struck. There was, moreover, one consequence of the supremacy at sea that was an additional source of weakness to the viking armies, for since the fleets of the Northmen might fare anywhere unmolested, there was no necessity for them to proceed only in huge armaments; therefore the viking strength was perpetually in danger of being frittered away by the desertion of discontented adventurers who could safely traverse the seas by themselves, either homewards or to fresh foreign lands. In an age of unrest, amid the endless flow and ebb of their folk, it was a hard thing to hold steadfastly to one scrap of conquered land, should their tenure be threatened, or to obey the dictates of wisdom in a world where fortune and folly beckoned to them on every side. Only under the few iron rulers of men, the great vikings, did Northmen rise superior to their chaotic environment and prove themselves redoubtable conquerors and diligent colonists.
       The success of their colonial enterprise depended in an even greater measure than that of their wars upon the leaders. Some of these certainly showed a political sense of a high order, such as Rurik of Novgorod or the Kievan princes Oleg, Igor, Vladimir, and Yaroslav, or again Halfdan in England, King Olaf of Dublin, Sigurd and Thorfinn, the Orkney earls, or Rollo in Normandy, or the great Svein and Cnut in Denmark; but these men were exceptions, and of the vikings in general it must be admitted that they failed as colonists. The fault lay in the lack of proper administration and organization, a reluctance to submit to the rule of a single chieftain in a society where most men deemed themselves the equal of one another, and in a lack of zeal for the commonwealth that is common among new settlers who have their own private fortunes to make; thus the grand Danelaw of Halfdan lasted only fifty years before it