Introduction

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       the lands that their viking ancestors took at the end of the ninth century, and so to this day they remain, proud and uncorrupted communities that witness to the ancient greatness of the viking world.
      
       As buccaneers, thieves, and murderers, the Northmen horrified all western Christendom, startled even the Greek Empire, and more than once shocked the Muslim people of the Caliphate. In this respect they were no worse than other robbers and pillagers of history, either before their day or long after it, yet it is an idle and dishonest task to attempt to defend them against the charge of plundering and massacre. 'Merry, clean-limbed, stout-hearted gentlemen of the Northlands' one of their Scottish historians (1) has called them, and such indeed upon occasions they may have been, but history also knows them as bloodthirsty and abominable barbarians, enemies of society capable of infamous, indefensible outrages of arson and slaughter.
       The Christian world of the ninth and tenth centuries did not perhaps deem them to be the most terrible of the enemies of civilization, for the Saracens and the Hungarians, striking at the heart of the Christian world, were worse and more dangerous foes, and it must have seemed a small matter that in 846 the Frisian town of Dorstad should be sacked by Northmen and the little Noirmoutier monastery plundered, when in this same year a Muhammedan force lying before the gates of Rome pillaged the church of St. Peter and profaned the Apostle's hallowed tomb. Nevertheless the towns and religious houses of Francia and Frisia, the monasteries of England and Ireland, and the tiny outpost of Christianity on Iona, lived for many dark years in urgent terror of the vikings, and in the churches was heard that piteous invocation, A furore Normannorum libera nos, Domine. After the pillaging of the monastery of Abingdon in Berkshire (2) a monk wrote, 'O what misery and what grief! And who is there of so dull a head, so brazen a breast, and so hard a heart that he can hear of these things and not dissolve into tears!' In Ireland a Celtic chronicler said, 'In a word, although there were an hundred hard steeled iron heads on one neck, and an hundred sharp, ready, cool, never-rusting, brazen tongues in each head, and an hundred garrulous, loud, unceasing voices from each tongue, they could not recount or narrate or

1. R. L. Bremner, The Norsemen in Alban, Glasgow, 1923, p. 26.
2. Probably during the Danish invasion of Wessex in 871. There is a tradition that the charters and treasures had previously been removed to safety.
      
      
      
      
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       enumerate or tell what all the Gaedhil (the Irish) suffered in common, both men and women, laity and clergy, old and young, noble and ignoble, of hardship and of injuring and of oppression, in every house, from those valiant, wrathful, purely-pagan people.' In Frisia and Francia the terror was still worse, for here there were towns for plundering, and so again and again the monks tell the wretched tale of massacre and smoking ruins. Such appalling outrages as the sack of Nantes in 843 that saw the murder of the bishop at the cathedral altar and the butchering of the congregation and the firing of the great church, or the razing of Quentovic two years before to a desert of smoking ruins, or the awful ravages of the grim years between 853 and 858 when Nantes, Poitiers (twice), Angers, Tours (twice), Blois, Orleans (twice), Paris, Bayeux, Chartres, and Évreux were all sacked by vikings, can neither be condoned nor excused; they were the work of savages angered against a civilization that they were too few to overpower and too ignorant to understand.
       The worst atrocities were those committed in the west. For the Russian-Swedes found themselves established in an environment where it was more profitable to develop rather than to extinguish the little towns of their subject Slavs, and, moreover, they were too much occupied in protecting their small world from the Patzinaks and the Khazars to devote themselves to an orgy of plundering and massacre such as delighted the vikings in western Christendom. But they did contemplate greedily the taking of one rich prize, and that was Constantinople. Six times they turned their presumptuous arms against the lovely 'Queen of Cities'; yet though this may seem to reflect the age-old barbarian longing to damage a higher and a nobler civilization, there was nevertheless in this instance a worthier motive animating them than that of mere greed, because it was necessary for them to protect either by force or by treaty the Russian-Byzantine trade upon which the prosperity of the Kievan state depended. It is only much farther to the east, on the shores of the Caspian Sea, that the Russians (and no doubt the Volga-Russians more than their Dnieper brethren) appear as sea-rovers intent merely upon plunder and the ruthless slaughter of all those whom they encountered.
       But even in the west the reign of terror that was the result of the ravages of the Norsemen and the Danes (most of all the Danes) was not of long duration, and therefore the horrified lamentations of the monks and all the noisy outcry of alarm and hatred that sounds shrilly through the pages of the ninth-century chronicles must be read as a verdict only upon a short
      
      
      
      
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       and temporary phase in viking history. For sustained pillage and arson ceased with the accomplishment of land-winning, and in the tenth century, after a hundred years of contact with Christendom, the fury of the attack upon towns and churches was spent and the vikings took up arms only either to increase or to defend their holding. There was never, of course, a complete abandonment of the ancient sea-roving habit. Long after the Viking Period was over the Norsemen of the Scottish Isles were still accustomed to fare forth on spring or autumnal cruises to harry and plunder as their forefathers had done of old, and all through the tenth and eleventh centuries there were Norse and Danish chieftains, King Olaf Tryggvason, King Olaf the Saint, and King Svein Forkbeard, for example, who went west-oversea on viking cruises in their youth. But after the ninth century had run its course these viking princes were merchant-adventurers rather than looters and there are no glaring examples of sustained and villainous piracy until the dark days of the fourteenth century when the German 'Victual Brothers' of Stockholm terrorized the Baltic world.
       Even in the ninth century not all the Danes nor all the Norsemen who sailed the western seas were robbers of the most violent sort; probably many of the first Norwegian settlers in the Orkneys and Shetlands were peaceful folk, and this in spite of the disadvantage that all the Scottish islands were notorious haunts of Norse pirates who plagued not only the Celtic lands but their own mother-country; certainly some of the early colonists in Ireland were desirous of maintaining themselves in tranquil and orderly settlements, and they were no doubt men of a peaceable mind who first took land in the Faroes and Iceland. The ninth-century vikings were likewise far from being preoccupied in an unremitting assault upon church and monastery; thus in England when Halfdan had finally established his authority by the awful ravaging of Bernicia in 875 those that were left of the religious houses within the Danelaw suffered no harm until 945, in which year an English king came north and sacked Ripon. The truth is that the viking once settled became quickly tolerant of the Christian faith and its institutions, and it was only during forays in wild Ireland or in unconquered Francia that the plundering of monasteries remained a regular practice throughout the greater part of the century. Theft, sacrilege, and massacre, therefore, were not the invariable characteristics of viking operations abroad, and that which was really a typical viking raid in the western seas, a raid such as was repeated again and again throughout the whole of the
      
      
      
      
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       Viking Period, was a mild and almost innocuous progress; a packing-up when the hay was in or the harvest gathered; the loading and the manning of the boat; a hazardous journey over the high seas; then a spell of adventurous trading, a roughand-ready commerce that often included the exchange of hard knocks, for there was always the chance of a fight with rival boats making for the same market or of landing among strangers who were suspicious and unfriendly.
      
       Much will be heard of viking trade in the narrative that follows, for the Northman was at heart always more of a chapman than a robber, and is deemed to have played no small part in the development of European commerce. As far back as the first century of the Christian era the North Germans had sold furs and amber to the Roman world, and the vikings in their turn were no strangers to continental trade; but, as of old, their best-organized and most lucrative commerce was that following the great river-routes of East Germany and Russia whereby the Goths of the Black Sea had traded with their fellow-Germans of the north, teaching them the new and flashy eastern modes and selling to them the precious stuffs and wares of the Orient and of Greece. It was, in fact, a desire to retain and to consolidate this ancient German trade across Russia that led to the Swedish settlements on the Volga, the river-way to the Khazar world and the Arabic east, that occasioned the exploitation of the Dnieper basin and the establishment of the Kievan state, and that was the reason for the foundation of Swedish settlements on the Weichsel mouth in the dangerous borderland between the Slavonic Wends and the East Baltic folk.
       In the west viking trade was irregular and ill-organized, if indeed it can be said to have been controlled at all. The Danes made but poor use of their capture of the Frisian markets and of their temporary supremacy on the famous route along the North Sea coast to the Baltic; the Norwegians depended on an intermittent and wasteful commerce. The little boats plied, as they had done of old, across the North Sea, and along the Channel or round Scotland into the Western Sea and to the Irish coast on their seasonal journeys or on bolder trading-ventures lasting for two or three years; the sea-port settlements in Ireland and South Wales became busy marts; the viking chapman became familiar to Celt, Englishman, and Frank; but his was always a petty commerce of private enterprises and of the laborious exchange of wares in little quantities. Nevertheless though it