Viking Camps Case Studies and Comparisons

Viking Camps Case Studies and Comparisons

Chapter Fourteen Pirate utopias? Viking camps and aspirational polities

Fourteen Pirate utopias? Viking camps and aspirational polities

Introduction: the new archaeologies of the Great Army and its analogues

The discovery of the Repton winter camp brought a new, material dimension to the debates on Viking army and fleet sizes that had hitherto been largely confined to textual analyses. Prior to the excavations, discussions of these forces tended to focus on scale-did they number in the thousands, or mere hundreds?- and definition, often played out in competing interpretations of the seventh-century Laws of Ine. Into the twenty-first century, the picture was both sharpened and complicated by the excavations at Torksey, Aldwark, and other sites, as Repton too was re-evaluated and seen in the possible context of an expanded landscape of occupation. Beyond mainland Britain, work at the longphuirt sites such as Woodstown, and other Irish camps discussed in this volume, showed establishments of comparable size and complexity. Similar but locally distinctive material was also published from the Continent.

Alongside excavations in the winter camps and temporary fortifications, a broader research agenda addressed the regional socio-politics and demographics of the landscapes through which the armies moved, and in so doing began to consider what they actually were. Some scholars examined the internal structure of these mobile fighting forces, looking at ingroup identification and the conglomerate nature of the army composition, built up around 'brotherhoods' of varying size. Others built on decades of work on the Danelaw, Northumbria, and other areas of Scandinavian settlement, and new studies appeared utilising a varied set of data sources. Old excavation records were examined afresh, combined with the latest information from metal detector finds registered with the Portable Antiquities Scheme, technological investigations of 'Anglo-Scandinavian' dress accessories and portable material culture, and isotopic and genomic analyses of human remains from mass graves and cemeteries. The result was a suite of new interpretations of the successive phases of migration in landscape context, sometimes with startling results.

Over time, what had once been a discussion of local logistics became a radical re-imagining of the ninth-century Viking armies that devastated the English kingdoms and the Frankish Empire. Although debate continues on points of detail and matters of perspective, it is nonetheless possible to draw several key conclusions from this mass of research since the late nineteen seventies:

· by the eight hundreds, the armies clearly numbered in the thousands of individuals

· the population of the camps included not only men, as had long been assumed, but clearly also women, and presumably children

· the majority of the army's members were of pan-Scandinavian origin, from all over the North, but a minority had other ethnic backgrounds

· the camps were not purely military installations, but also provided clear evidence of manufacturing, craftwork, and trade, implying extensive and not exclusively violent interaction with the populations of their hinterlands. At least one-Torksey-and perhaps others, seem to have left a longer-term legacy of settlement in or near the same location.

The 'armies' thus emerged as modular and flexible entities, generally very large though their numbers would have shifted as members came and went. Although clearly Scandinavian in essence, they also attracted people from other regions-in other words, these were organisations that at least some thought worth joining. Although there is no doubt that armed force and peripatetic violence was their core motor, the armies' composite form also encompassed what seem to have been family units as part of the lid.

This new image of the armies fitted well with the adjusted view of the camps that they built, in that there was clearly no single model for their design and size. While sites such as Torksey and Aldwark seem to have housed an entire force, it is by no means clear whether fortifications such as the Repton D-shaped enclosure were intended for smaller groups or perhaps formed fortified 'citadels' around which a larger, dispersed occupation camped. The armies adapted their construction projects to local topography, political conditions, and also to their circumstantial needs at the time.

Given this revisionist understanding of the armies' logistics and composition, one must inevitably reconsider what such forces actually represented: where did they come from, how did they work, what were their agendas? An especially acute problem, or challenge, is that in mid-late ninth-century Scandinavia there seem to have been no political or ethnic groupings of sufficient size to launch expeditions on this scale. This is in turn calls the identification of the armies into question-if they were not the 'Danes' or

'Norwegians', or the armed forces of a more regional power, then who were they?