Retracing The REAL Great Viking Army | With Dan Snow and Dr Cat Jarman

Vikings the very name conjures up images of Hit and Run raids from across the water but an 865ad the Vikings came not just a raid but to conquer so exciting this might be the first evidence of a Viking winter camp in Britain this was an Army and it would change Britain forever laying Siege to towns and killing Kings Edmond at that point is still alive he's unchanged from the tree and he is beheaded in this program I joined bio archaeologists to catch German as we go in search of the traces left behind by this conquering Viking Army it's one of the Epic stories of British history the attempt in the 9th century by the Vikings to conquer the kingdoms of England culminating in the battle between Alfred the Great's Wessex and the viking armor undergo on a journey across the country with the Viking expert Dr Cat German and together we're going to be in the footsteps of what contemporaries called a great either [Music] hey Cat German hi Dan how are you I'm very well thank you it's exciting hey the Viking World we're looking at here I mean is that a useful way to think about people Vikings I mean are are we just basically talking about people from what we now call Scandinavia basically yes but unfortunately we don't really have a much better word to use at the moment Vikings is really the best that we've got so we're talking about the people who come from Scandinavia starting these raids movements out to well really this whole region going as far west as Iceland green and North America obviously attacking England and the rest of Northwestern Europe but also all the way down here so all the way down the rivers of Eastern Europe down to the Black Sea and possibly even further east so we've got people from here raiding up and down the coast a definite nuisance but when does that change into something more threatening like Conquest so around about the 850s we start finding out that they are actually not just doing quick raids and going back again but we have records to suggest that they're actually staying over winter okay with the Vikings it's hard to separate out myth from reality Icelandic sagas talk of an army led by the sons of Ragnar Lothbrok now made famous by the Vikings TV series these songs had wonderful names like either the Boneless and Bjorn Ironside but the sagas are written centuries after the events they describe they're more like Legends and history fortunately there is a more reliable document so the key Source in all of this really is the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and that Chronicles year by year the activities and the raids of the Vikings so we first here in the 850s that they're overwinter and then something changes in 865 we hear there's something called a great Army appearing in East Anglia so we're now very much focused here in the east of England so the geography's changed so much since then but you know someone like King's Lynn or Great Yarmouth they land okay and then they they're here to stay yeah so the only thing really we know is that they're somewhere here in East Anglia we don't know what we have from the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle is the record for that year it says and the same year a great reading Army came to the land of the English and took winter quarters in East Anglia and were provided with horses there and they made peace with them so actually they get they get supplies they get horses and then somehow they managed to convince essentially the locals that that they're allowed to stay I think I can imagine how that convincing process went England at this time was divided into four main kingdoms East Anglia ruled by King Edmond the Vikings had already encountered him and managed to negotiate a piece for now ship ruled by King burgrid Wessex where Alfred the Great would soon become king and northumbria which was in the midst of a civil war these this United Kingdoms were ill-prepared for what they were about to face in case we've got some Vikings in East Anglia worryingly they've now got horses what do they do with them so according to English Saxon Chronicle they now start moving around and they've got the seasonal Warfare so they go a new place and then they overwinter and camp out so one of the first places they go to is York up the A1 up the Roman Road to York yeah so they are probably using a lot of these Roman roads and a lot of other sort of really quite useful access places and they're also really good at taking advantage of some of the internal Warfare going on so there's a lot happening in northumbria and in New York at the time that's a really good point because Britain is divided like at no other time it's 2 000 year history you've got various things going up in what is now Scotland lots of little prince parties in Wales northumbria here Cumbria Mercy it's all divided up absolutely so you've got these separate Kingdoms the first Kingdom to face the full Wrath of the Vikings is northumbria the Army probably consisting of several thousand Warriors heads North and in the year 866 they reach York one of the major cities of England probably one of the top five most important cities England is now in the hands of the Vikings exactly the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles give us a dramatic account raking open the town some of them entered in then there was an immense Slaughter of the northumbrians some within and some without both the kings were slain on the spot but although the history tells us that the great Heathen Army was here no traces of that Army have ever been found but in 870 the Vikings leave York and returned to East Anglia and here we can finally pick up the trail of the great Heathen Army so I love this place we're in Thetford little nondescript Market town in Norfolk but look at this place unbelievable that's a gigantic Iron Age and Norman fortification yeah and what's so exciting here is that this may well be that first place where we've got the documentary evidence for a viking camp and possibly also some archeology no way we can see why I mean you've got the giant Iron Age fortifications ramparts you've got a later Norman Mart in the middle so the Iron Age drives lot of space is important the Norman's certainly so Vikings May well have done as well yeah I think that's part of the key is finding those places that made sense for a lot of people and they would have made a lot of sense for the Vikings as well so we're quite close to the North Sea here when do you reckon the Vikings head in land and set up camp here well we definitely know that they came to setford in the 869 to 870 overwintering but we know in 865 that they were in East Anglia as well and it's quite possible that this was the same location that they came to that first year we just don't have the evidence for it yet but quite often it would make sense to come back to the same location later on this could be the place where we met King Edmond they asked those horses and they set off into the heart of Britain quite possibly let's head up to the old Norman mot take a look until they often used Iron Age Hill thoughts so-called as defensive structures quite possibly so all we really know is from the records that they they certainly had fortifications and it would make an awful lot of sense to use something that was already there something that was already made essentially rather than making your own [Music] so lots of Viking objects found just over there God that's so exciting this might be the first evidence of a a viking winter camp in in Britain possibly yeah so it'd be great if we could actually associate these with them so this for example is a sword that was found with a burial in in that housing estate over here and then a bit further down other excavations uncovered lots of fragments and weapons including these arrowheads and one of these is of a type that was not really used in England at the time but it was used in Scandinavia okay that's good enough for me yeah what's going on what's the point of a winter camp why are they staying there for ages and dropping things want to get attacking yeah this seems to be a very deliberate strategy and what the reason for that really is that you you have some time to to catch up to repair your weapons to repair your ships if you've got a ship Army as well get any resources that you need and as we well know winter is not the nicest time to to drag a force of thousands through the through the muddy English landscape yeah the roads the tracks turn into exactly so it makes sense for an awful lot of reasons and you sort of regroup maybe you get new people joining the force reinforcements could come in from scandinav in the North Sea the North Sea Coast is really pretty close to here yeah absolutely and we know from those records in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle that there are several points when the Great Army gets reinforcements of several forces join it and so they get strengthened and you know for whatever purpose this is so different to the Vikings that have just come to raid and go home again this feels like the beginnings of well occupation do you think this is temporary or is this something more permanent we we know that some of it is temporary so they have these camps they move around the country but actually there's quite a lot of evidence that this is the first stage of a settlement process so some of them clearly do stay and they intend to leave something permanent behind and have essentially a new life here this is the beginning of the Viking Conquest absolutely and in the forest not far away cat thinks there might be evidence of that more permanent Viking presence [Music] so you haven't been here before no this is the first time but I've wanted to come up for a very long time why do you think there's Viking activity in this terrain here we're not very far from Thetford here but in 1857 some workmen found a viking grave a possibly a viking double grave really close to here sandton Downham so that's just around the corner we know we've got the camps and then what's really interesting is if you look at the maps there's actually an awful lot of Mounds in this area and nobody's really looked at those there is a chance that some of those could be Vikings so we're looking for Mouse in here see that there's a huge we're trying to should we go off-road here should we yeah yeah the map siros must show that definitely in this area trouble is it's difficult to see isn't it yes this forest was planted very recently and it it kind of hides pretty much everything [Music] yeah I think this might be it [Music] yeah it definitely feels like this could be a man the big one actually a really big one so is this typical of how the Vikings bury their dead you know right across the Viking world yeah so especially in Scandinavia we do see burial mounds as one of the most common forms of burial we also do have them at a very sort of Select number of places in England and in particular right next to one of the most significant working camps so what's it mean that all these little mouse that we've always seen on the map and notice that we've strolled past might actually be Viking burial mounts one of the big questions and one of the things we haven't quite worked out is how these Raiders really turn to settlers we know that we've got you know really huge numbers tens of thousands of Scandinavians settling in this country but that sort of transition as those early phases especially we don't really know very much about them so if we can start to understand start to find those Graves start to find out who those people were and what they what they did where they lived then perhaps we can find that sort of missing link between reading and settlement yeah I guess in the great Ethan Army didn't leave behind a huge footprint but what if it was hiding in plain sight and we'd just all been walking past their graves all along absolutely and I think it's really worth going back and reinvestigating some of those sites get your trowel out but before we leave there's another mystery I want to investigate Edmund king of East Angier to find out we've come to the beautiful cathedral town of berries and Edmonds so I've always wanted Barry Edmonds and now you mentioned who gave the horses to the great Heathen Army yeah that's the one so he was the one who struck a deal with the great Army when they first arrived at 865 they then went to the north they went to York into northumbria went to suit Mercier and then we get to 869 and they come back here they come back to usangi again so he must have been disappointed to see them back surely his calculation was the northumbrians the mercies would deal with these marauding heathens yeah I imagine so and we don't know what the terms of the agreement was either so we don't know what that was and what went wrong but when they do come back something breaks down quite quickly it goes terribly wrong and it doesn't end world for Edmund at all so he ends up fighting the Vikings yeah so we end up with a battle between the Vikings and Edmund Edmund looses and very soon after he also loses his life we're actually buried uh well he was lost for a very long time but we now think we might know where he is n't it embarrassing Edmonds it might be Francis young is a historian author who spent years trying to find out what really happened since Edmond by studying the historical documents we have the anglo-facts in chronicle of our earliest Source written about 30 years after the event and the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle says that the Danes won the battle and killed the king in that order what you would normally have in a source like that is you'd say that they killed the king and therefore won the battle so the fact that the king is killed after the battle suggests that it may well be a separate event we then have a much later Source from over a century later that's the passion of Saint Edmund by a monk called Abba Fleury and that's the story that gives us for the first time details about how Edmund supposedly died that the Danes actually capture him not at the battle but fleeing away from the battle at a place called hegel's Dune we don't know where that was but somewhere in his kingdom at a Royal Estate and at hegelston a debate takes place in which Edmund decides that he's not going to rule as a puppet King under these heathens unless they convert to Christianity when they then refuse to convert to Christianity when they capture him he then says well I would rather die for Christ and so that's when he is beaten he is chained up he's tied to a tree the Danes then use him as target practice for their archers Edmund at that point is still alive he's unchanged from the tree and he is beheaded and his head as a final Act of ignominy is thrown into the bushes so that his followers can't find it again Edmond's body is simply left by the Vikings the local people come and they take his headless body and they bury it nearby but what then happens is according to the hagiography the miracle account is we have this extraordinary story about how his followers sometime afterward are searching in the undergrowth trying to find that head and they hear a voice shouting very clearly here here here and they don't know who who it is he's shouting and they follow the voice and they find in a clearing in the wood a gigantic wolf holding between its paws the severed head of the king which is undecayed and as it was when it was beheaded and it's the head itself that according to this account God has given miraculous power to shout and find its location they then take the head back to the body the wolf following which has become tame by another miracle and then the body is exhumed the head is attached to the body both parts of the body are incorrupt if not decayed and the head and body miraculously reunite leaving only a A Thin Red Line to Mark where the Martyr had been uh killed and yeah one of the one of the miracle accounts that comes back again and again with some Edmund is the idea that his body does not Decay it is an incorrupt corpse [Music] soon the martyrd king became the focus of a religious community posing place of worship was built in his honor and Edwin's Abbey [Music] astonishing isn't it some dramatic ruins this is the Norman transect of the giant Monastery they built her I guess he must have been a big deal he was he was for a very long time and he was one of the patrons at least patron saints of England and he was venerated for his martyrdom against the Danes for centuries and a bigger deal is after death than he was during his life yeah definitely we actually didn't really know that much about his life the most interesting part of Edmond's life is what happens after his death is what several Scholars observed and yes Edmund continues according to the hagiographical accounts to perform these Miracles so we have extraordinary Miracles at Berry particularly where he begins to become a rather scary Saint a very vengeful figure who does not take kindly to anybody meddling with his Shrine or his church in any way his body has moved to the church of Saint Mary in Barrison Edmonds which is at that time a wooden church and his Shrine soon becomes a magnet for pilgrims to donate gold and other Rich offerings to that shrine and so it becomes very attractive to thieves and we have early examples of uh people attempting to rob it at night and Edmund simply freezes them in their place so that they are unable to move we have other examples of Miracles where his hair and his fingernails continue to grow after death and are cut by a holy woman called Oswin who looks after the body so another sign of the body being completely incorrupt we have examples of people being punished when they try to touch the body of Saint Edmund one of the early abbots of Paris and Edmonds attempts to find out whether Edmund's head is properly attached to his body having looked at that Miracle account about how the two of miraculously joined and so he asked another Monk called thirst and halt the feet while the Abbott lie of Stan holds the head but it's such an impious act that gordonson Edmund punishes Liston by striking him down with a palsy that affects him for the rest of his life and so no one ever tries that one again with these reported Miracles Edmund's Fame grows stronger his importance for the whole country or for the whole sort of England really is part of the reason why this this whole site grew to the size it did yeah no it's a massive Monastery isn't it what about Edmund himself what he was at the heart of it what happened to him so his bones his his body was moved here quite soon after his death and his relics remained here and they become a site of pilgrimage for a very very long time and in fact they probably stayed here until about the 16th century at which point they were lost so a classic case Henry VII dissolves the monastery 16th century they're all stripped the roofs are taken off the stones all ripped out to be used around the rest of the town and um the Old Kings of England like in Winchester they're all sort of scattered scattered to the winds yeah so we don't know exactly what's happened but clearly they disappear so for a very very long time the bones of Edmonds were completely lost but now we think that we might know where he might be it's very unlikely that the body of Edmund was destroyed the bodies of saints were not generally destroyed there's one possible exception to that which was Thomas Beckett but in the case of Edmund as a royal king his body would have been treated with some degree of decency and respect and in fact it's very likely it would have been left up to the monks we have a later Source from the 17th century which claims to be an account of how a grandfather of a 17th century monk in France had been a monk of bearson Edmonds and that that grandfather Monk who had children after he ceased to be a monk after dissolution that he was responsible with a number of other monks for taking the body of Saint Edmund placing it in a great iron chest and putting it somewhere in the Abbey precincts and that's the only account that we have it doesn't go into any more detail than that so all we can say is that this account may be reliable it's the oldest account that we have but it gives us a hint of what may possibly have occurred so there's a chance that actually at the point that he was reburied in the 16th century uh right here we're now in the in the Crypt of the Old Abbey and on the other side here is the old monk cemetery and there is a source that suggests he was actually taken put into an iron coffin and buried somewhere right here oh my gosh that's so exciting so we've got another king in the car park situation here pretty much because this actually used to be a tennis court until last year so we had a king under the tennis court yeah if you walk round to the end of the ruined Crypt which is at the very east end of that huge Norman abbey church you'll find a raised area of grass until very recently it was the site of some tennis court however today those tennis courts have been cleared away and we hope that at some point in The Fairly near future there will be some sort of archaeological investigation into that area not only to potentially look for some Edmund but also to look at those monastic burials which have never been investigated because there was a tennis court on this from quite an early date the earlier excavations of the Abbey never looked at this area and so now it's it's available for potential investigation I'm getting a bit of excited here but we are now within meters of the hapless King Edmond a man killed by the great Heathen Army Saint Edmund still buried in burying Edmonds Maybe such a Dharma [Music] at last we're on the trail of the Heathen Army but the archeology is still elusive it's time to go back to our HQ to plan our next move so we realize it is hard to find the archaeological the physical Footprints and this this great Heathen Army it's so tantalizing isn't it because we've got little fragments of information yeah so especially in that early phase we've got so little evidence so it is really really difficult and it gets even worse because we have all these battles referred to so when they move on from East Anglia they actually go to to readings and that year there's an awful lot of battles there's sort of 789 different battles happening but we haven't found any of them so we we don't know where they were even though the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle actually explains that thousands die we still don't know [Applause] battlefields I can imagine they're really difficult to find that sometimes the action might only be well minutes long possibly a couple of hours but the camps where they spend the winter they're dropping more stuff they're surely they're doing more Earth moving it must be a bit easier yeah so quite early on a lot of the hunt for these camps was in looking for fortifications the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles often mentions that they have fortifications it's a great big Earthworks you should be able to see right so that was a lot of the early search but then more recently new methods have shown that actually there are different risks they didn't always build Earthworks and in fact exactly what you say that the objects that are being dropped the sort of random rubbish that they leave behind is one of the key ways that we've been able to find them so a really important site is where they go next after reading so that's torxy in Lincolnshire because if we try and try and find it uh just about here it's a very distinctive Bend in the river there yeah so you can see it's really wide here it's really easy to get down from the Humber by boats and what happened here was that quite recently a lot of metal detecting fines were discovered in exactly these fields so right by the sort of Bend in the river and actually later archaeological work showed that at the time this was an island so the Trent was really you know much more water much higher so it was as a proper sort of isolated location so they probably didn't need the fortifications they didn't need the Earthworks it was naturally defended the ideal place to spend the winter absolutely and the key really there was realizing the sort of finds that were essentially a kind of signature or a fingerprint of the great Army the sort of things they left behind something that's proven invaluable in the hunt for Vikings is the portable Antiquity scheme through this scheme metal detectors can report objects they've found with over one and a half million fines recorded archaeologists can search for patterns that would otherwise be missed so one of the key types of objects are these little things here so these are from a different sites these are what are these little gaming pieces this is a viking gaming piece like a chess piece or something like that yeah like a sort of checkers or something like that and they found them in really really huge numbers at Tulsi along with various other types of artifacts that we know are very specific to the Vikings so things like weights from Trading and Weighing Systems as well and later archaeological work has even shown things like ship Nails coming up there so all of this now essentially has become our sort of fingerprint as it were for searching for the great Army so this this site and the work done here really revolutionized as such and we've been able to use that now to look at the rest of the country so when metal detectorists elsewhere in the country are turning up these kind of objects you're like great he's an army yeah pretty much seems that we don't know how long they have been used for but it seems like talksuit is the first place that they definitely start using these so looking at the distribution we can then start to look at the patterns and I'll drop that Priceless Viking artifact um it makes me very nervous right where are we going after talksuit then where does the Great Heathen Army go now does it follow the the Trent Into the Heart of England absolutely so now at this year apparently they make peace with immersion so now we're looking at the immersion the kingdom of Mercia and it seems that after this point they are looking for the jewel in the crown of the mountain Kingdom which is the site of Repton The Jewel In The Crowd that sounds like a must visit it's back on the road to Repton in Derbyshire [Music] foreign but when I visit places that were at the center of kind of bloody dramatic events in our history even though it's one thousand years ago I still feel like it's been like that today but of course now it just feels like a lovely beautiful Country Church yeah this sort of feels like as I do like as you can get in England doesn't it really but it definitely was not like that in a late 9th century it was an important place not the Vikings obviously a huge Empire but it was an important Place well before they arrived I thought that's what they were doing here I guess yeah absolutely so even before the Viking age this was one of the most significant sites really in the Kingdom of Mercia this was of Royal ecclesiastical religious importance there was a very wealthy monster here dating back probably as early as the 7th Century does any of that fabric still remain or was it all smashed up by the Vikings so we know definitely some of it was destroyed by the Vikings but there is a part that still remains that the Crypt I mean this most of the churches is very modern but there are still you're the only person I know who refers to very modern as the 14th century yeah well you know anything after the turn of the Millennium was pretty much modern to me which millennium so we're heading down to the Crypt yeah this is the Anglers that is incredible this is Anglo-Saxon now these rocks here I think whoa so this here I'd definitely warming out in the Crypt this is all part of the merchant monastery amazing time travel yeah absolutely this I mean this is what so if you're wondering this is what was here when the Vikings arrived they would be touching the same pillars that we're touching today and that's pretty unusual in Britain isn't it there's not much Stone architecture left from what the well the ninth Century this got older yes this is this is eighth Century certainly possibly even before that so there's not much of that at all so we it's very rare in the whole country to have uh evidence of that remaining this is one of the most special early medieval bits of architecture in in the UK yeah definitely and what's really nice as well is you can see things like traces of paint so if you if you imagine it's been colored yeah imagine it really vividly colored full of jewels glittering gold candles it must have been such an atmospheric space I mean it's special today but more than a thousand years ago even more so and and so This Is Where Mercy which had been one of the most powerful Anglo-Saxon Kingdom from periods buried its Kings I mean this was the holiest the holy yeah so several we know that several of the emotion uh Dynasty the Royal Dynasty were buried here and this Crypt itself would have been that Mausoleum so this would have been where those possibly in these alcoves here would have had uh essentially the remains of those kings and people would come here as a pilgrimage somewhere to visit and this was all part of of the bigger Monastery site which was very wealthy there's a double house Monastery for men and women so it might have been a small town around it as well so this is you can't really talk about things as a capital city I guess but this would have been one of the most important religious political Royal sites in Mercia absolutely and this would have been known far and wide so a very deliberate place for the Vikings to attack [Music] so this would have been filled with all sorts of riches so there'd be lots that they could take away a lot of wealth here but it was much more than that it was a very much a political statement knowing that it was such an important religious site if you come and take that then you're making a really big statement but it's like the Soviets sticking their kind of hammer and sickle flag on the reichstag in 1945. what an amazing moment we know about the Viking presence here thanks to the extraordinary investigations done here by Professor Martin Biddle and his late wife beata Shelby Biddle from 1974 we started to dig beside the Crypt and very early on we got dating evidence and then we found an enormous ditch I mean a Whopper beside right beside the church and if you can imagine the church was there the sort of angle of the of the church the ditch was there they were corner to corner and this was I mean this is four meters deep goodness knows how wide we only got part of it and we started to think and we looked at the kind of pottery not much that was coming out of it and it came to us that there was only one thing this could be it would be part of the Viking Winter Camp of eight seven three to four which of course we know about from the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and Martin biddlin's team didn't only find the ditch around the church they found other evidence that proved the Vikings were here [Music] so what else have you found at this site so in addition to to the ditch and all of that the archaeologists executing here in the 1970s and 80s found a lot of burials and some of them were definitely Scandinavian or Viking burials and actually they are right here and some of the most important things yeah so we're just going to try and work out exactly where we are so looking at the the map and the plan so this is the church that's the correct seven and eight this is right in here yeah this spot that we're standing on now yeah uh it's probably the most well the best known and most significant Viking grave in all of England right this was where we had the so-called Repton Warrior uh buried and a younger man next to him he was buried with a lot of objects which was a typical Scandinavian burial writers being buried with objects around you that included a sword alongside a Viking sword he had a sore thumb around his neck yes Thor's hammer on his neck the guys are Viking precisely so so that's that's the sort of most obvious part of it he had lots of the smaller objects but he also had some really really severe injuries on his body so we could be pretty confident I mean it's difficult to say there's this idea of whether somebody's a warrior is really hard even if you bird with weapons doesn't necessarily mean that but the severity of his injuries he must have died in battle so he was terrible terribly wounded or killed in battle and brought back here to this sacred Royal space to be buried absolutely so he was here there was a younger man next to him and we actually now know through DNA analysis that they were related so they were father and son they were essentially buried side by side and on top of them were lots of sort of rectangular Stone setting which included smashed up pieces of beautiful carved Anglo-Saxon crosses so here you have what seems to be a pagan burial with weapons with Thor's hammer and with essentially the evidence of that smash-up Monastery right on top anything else in the body you want to tell me about well there is a very I know exactly what you're asking about uh he had some quite severe injuries as I said one of them was a very uh big wound to his left female his left thigh bone almost certainly made by an ax because it was a properly big v-shaped cut but he went so uh closely down diagonal from his left hip that is almost certain that it would have cut off part of his penis as well more evidence for for the likelihood of that is that those who buried him actually placed a Boar's Tusk in between his legs right so he could still Enjoy Life the full in the afterlife presumably that was the reason and why I mean it's that Maps fascinating there's just a cluster of burials right here just outside the Royal Crypt what statement the Vikings trying to make there yeah I think that's the really key Point here in Rapton this isn't there this isn't just something that they do and then move away and forget all about they are using burial those funery rights as a very political statement saying this is where you used to have your Royals your most important people but now we're in control we're in charge and these are our important dead so now we have that link that we can show even the next Generations that that this is now essentially a Scandinavian territory and an even more dramatic burial is to be found next door so we come to the vicarage Garden just next the church now more evidence here is that yeah so this is another one of those locations in fact if we go over here where one of those discoveries was made in the 1980s back in the 80s there was a mound here okay and that mound had been known about for a very long time in fact they'd been dug into by antiquarius pesky antiquarians yeah absolutely they're dug holes into it and in fact there's a record that dates to the 70 early 1700s of somebody who had been asked by the lady of the manor the manohar that used to be behind us here to investigate Helix in the garden and this Workman had dug into it and found this huge deposit of Bones there was a central uh skeleton nine foot tall surrounded by the bodies of 100 Humane skeletons apparently but the lady of the manor was so horrified by this that she just ordered them to cover it all up again but back in the 1980s this was excavated again this mound and and they actually found that bone deposit but it was inside a building so it was inside a two-celled stone building which again was part of that same Monastery same period that the Crypt was from just basically right where we're standing now and it was just full of Bones it was one compartment was full of Bones they identified almost 300 individuals all crammed into that single space and do we know that that's Viking era so there's quite a few Clues within those bones we know that they were all what we call secondary deposits so they were bones that were buried somewhere else originally and then they were moved when they turned to skeletons and put in place but among the bones were also lots of artifacts so there were Viking weapons also coin stating to the 870s so precisely that winter we know the Viking great Army was here in retin that's pretty good evidence isn't it yeah that's pretty good as you go for evidence is that bodies that people who died on the campaign they kept them all and buried them in one place this is one of the big questions and I think that that's what's most likely because we would have had hundreds maybe thousands of people dying on those campaigns in battle or for other reasons it's likely they may have been given a temporary burial somewhere at the site but when they came here to repson we know that they took over the whole territory so this was this is a long-term thing so I think it's quite likely that they could have gone back found some of those remains and taking them giving them essentially a communal burial somewhere like this somewhere where they can say well this is this is where we've settled now this is where we are to stay to try and understand more about the Viking army cat has been investigating what modern science can tell from the skeletons so these are some of the skulls from the Charnel the maths burial in Rapton these are some of the individuals that were exploited and since these were found in the 1980s so many different scientific techniques have been developed what can you now tell about these skeletons so we can doubt quite a lot more initially really all they could do was look at things like the skull shape to determine whether we're male or female what sort of age category so they discovered that they were largely male although we do also have some women in this grave most of them were very very young so up to about between 18 and 45 for most of them not really any old people and not children but that was kind of it and there's also confusion about the dates because they seem to date do much before the Viking age actually when they really carbon dated them so that seemed to be a bit of a kind of anomaly and for a while these were thought not to be related to Great Army at all because those dates were too early but but you put that right yeah so some of the work I've been doing is looking at those dates because now we've got some really brilliant techniques for looking at things like diets and also where people came from and it turned out that dating was all about actually the sort of diets that these people had by looking at whether they were eating fish or not so I was able to to correct essentially those early radio carbon days because what happens when you have a high Marine diet you incorporate some carbon that's much older into your body because otherwise we've all got carbon so we can radio carbon dates um skeletons we can you know wood or anything like that but that assumes that the carbon comes from the atmosphere and that's why we sort of normally do if you've eaten a lot of fish then actually the carbon in your body and your bones and your skin and hair and everything has been around for much much longer because carbon emotions this is actually older than terrestrial carbon so by correcting for that finding out if these people ate fish you can then correct the dates as well so we know they eat fish what else can we tell about them doing anything where they were from yep so the other thing I've been able to do is look at something called strontium and oxygen isotope analysis because we are like walking Diaries of Our Lives of what the sort of food we eat and also the places where we are growing up we sort of take up those chemical signals in our teeth especially as children so when your teeth are forming in childhood you take up oxygen and strontium that's very specific to that Geographic environment in your teeth and that remains there even a thousand years after you're you're dead so looking at these ones here it showed that very few of them were local so one of the early theories was that some of these could be local people who were killed by the Vikings but actually very few of them would fit the local pattern what was really striking was that they were they were really mixed they're really varied so they were not all from the same place some of them fit really really well with Inland Scandinavia and colder climates and in fact I mean pretty much all of them could fit Scandinavia we can't quite rule out and make a sort of absolutely certain conclusion but they definitely fit with what we would expect from a mixed Viking Army so these are young military-aged men it looks like they very possibly come from Scandinavia they eat lots of fish feels like Viking Army yeah it's it's really quite likely and it does fit with that but the one issue that a lot of people have had is the fact that we actually do also have some women among these bodies so some of these scars we know belong to women this one here that's a female skull all right so the question has always been why who were they and what were they doing there and one of the early theories was that these were the essentially the local wives or the incoming Scandinavian men and that was based on partially some of the sort of physical characteristics of the skulls but also the idea that actually Viking armies didn't really have any women in them it used to be thought that the women all sail at home and only the men really took part in their migrations we've now changed that completely in terms of what we understand about these Viking migrations and actually a lot of women were also part of it even probably some of these early armies and we think women were there during ancillary jobs or do you think they might have been there as worries themselves that's one of the big questions that we can't quite answer um I think if they were there if they're part of the group it would be silly to think that they weren't able to defend themselves and they weren't able to take part in their fighting to some degree I don't think they necessarily had to be sort of specialized Warriors we do have some cases across the Viking world of women buried with weapons in quite High status Graves so that is a big debate what they were doing there if they were essentially professional fighters or if they were actually just sort of Hangers On I think the reality is probably somewhere in between some of them would be able to fight if they needed to I don't think we can have them as just completely passive textile workers or whatever fixing fixing clothes and whatnot but maybe somewhere in between there aren't only boats the site of Repton has yielded a rich selection of artifacts these are one of the some of the most special ones actually I think these are actually pieces of anglo-saxon window glass so these are from the buildings and if you if you look if you pick them up and have a look they are really really beautiful they also cut so you can see they're really sharp corners on them here which is where they would be cut and actually Anglo-Saxon colored glass is really quite unusual at the time so you would only get that in really high status buildings and we're finding these in the fragmented parts of the camp so it's quite nice to think of that as possibly evidence of the actual attack itself so the window's been smashed out and just bits of glass have been you know used around the camp for whatever yeah or just you know um ending up and then literally so there's things like that we've also got some coins that date back to the 8th Century they're showing really how pre-viking coins yeah so things that like these ones here there was a lot of money about there was quite a lot of money I think because this was a very wealthy site there's a very wealthy Monastery it was one of the reasons why the Vikings attacked in the first place the fact that we've got here these are actually also they're from freesia so they're from across the English Channel so they are probably quite valuable at the time what else have we got these worms you'll recognize gaming pieces yes as you say they are identical yep wow so you get exactly the same thing these are found again you know really close by where the where the Anglo-Saxon glasses so that's that's again how we know that these are Viking objects we even have a quite rare quite unusual arrowheads so that's yeah it's Scandinavian type Arrowhead so completely consistent with the idea of a Viking Camp so we've got uh some really really nice things that relate to what was happening in the camp possibly also telling us something about who was there so there's things like this which is one that was found back in the 80s actually and this is a spindle world for using for textiles oh interesting okay so they're making clothes repairing yeah or sales sales obviously really important and then we have some things like this which is very very special uh which show that these Vikings were part of some really big trading networks so this is the bead that was found in the Musgrave at Repton wow which is made of that's beautiful carnelium and what is carnelian so carnelium is a semi-precious Stone it's not found in England and in fact the most likely source of the speed is Gujarat in India really and yeah and we're finding them across the Working World quite suddenly they start in about the late 9th century and what they sure is is that the Vikings who came to rap soon were actually part of a much much bigger trading Network that goes across Scandinavia all the way down the Eastern river routes and that includes the great Army so it sort of changes a little bit the idea that these were completely separate from uh you know the rest of the Viking world but actually what we're looking at we're looking at something that's part of a much bigger system despite all this evidence a mystery Remains the site of Repton just doesn't seem large enough for the whole Heathen Army so now Kat has taken me to a field a few miles east of Repton where she thinks she might have found the answer there is something that the only Camp which is what was mentioned in the Anglican and the evidence seemed to suggest that but there's been a lot of questions about that so one of them being is it really big enough because that site is quite small we now know from other sites that the great Army probably numbered in the thousands could they all fit in that side and there were certain things that didn't really turn up we didn't have that many gaming pieces no durhams that sort of thing then just a few years ago a metal detectorist dictating around here actually made some discoveries and told me all about them turns out he'd found exactly the sort of thing that we were looking for so gaming pieces lots of uh broken up bits of jewelry and even a Thor's hammer pendant and those Durham coins in the fields all around us here so very much like torxy yeah absolutely just the sort of thing and if you look at the landscape it actually makes a lot of sense so as we were just saying the flood plain is just down at the bottom here and you can't necessarily make it out as you're driving through it but if you look at something like the lidarth is really blindingly obvious and here we go that's the church just behind us and if you zoom out oh yeah that's we're right on the edge of some Much Higher Ground oh there's that's the Valley of the Trent Valley yeah this is the floodplain it's just really really really clear this is a 3D lidar model created by scanning a laser across the ground it allows you to see not only the current landscape but Clues to what the landscape used to be for instance you can see the path of the river that used to run right by the church at Repton explaining why the Viking Camp was there you can see you got the river coming along that's where there ever is today you can just about make it out so you got this really quite steep almost like an escarpment just behind us here and then as you go along it starts to flatten out and so it makes sense that you get if I can come in a place like this because this is where you can pull up boats and have it essentially a bit like a beach this must have been so full of people you've got boats being pulled out of the river you've probably got tents we don't think they've got buildings and structures in these camps so we think they're just very very temporary there's nothing in the geophysics there's no real evidence of building so you'll have tents you'd have animals you'd have horses maybe even cattle at some of these places food basically and it would just be packed a bit like somebody's mainly comparison to a festival like a music festival just turning up and then disappearing again so in 873 this landscape might have resembled a kind of Viking Glastonbury with thousands of Warriors camped out for the winter [Music] and just a few miles away deep in the woods near Repton there's another site that cat can see on the lidar [Music] so yes if you look at this it's the woodlands this is a path we've just come up here there's a little triangle the Woodland is very very recent so that was not only a few hundred years ago yeah something like that um but if you look you can zoom in those mouths are really yeah oh my goodness that little cluster so each Mound is a Scandinavian burial and there's there's a few others dotted around as well 59 have been identified in total in this area it's interesting because if you look at this as well you can see this is the highest ground by far this is red color it's likely that these were actually seen from the river which is just down because they're dipping down oh wow so they're placing their dead right up on the hill here anybody coming along by boat will see them anybody I mean possibly even down towards Repton you might even be able to see up here okay so they're in here somewhere aren't they it should be low down this way it's exciting isn't I can't believe it I keep now of course everywhere I'm seeing Mounds everywhere now I've got to pull myself together I think where are they come on I think we're just probably just around the corner let's try this way the problem is obviously the trees and the vegetation make it much harder that's hellish isn't it yeah this is it this is definitely moundy wow so this is what you could see on that lighter and yeah they're really clear actually so these oh this is a God I can't believe this is a viking burial site in the middle of Derbyshire I love it and so these have excavated are they some of them not all of them so I think most of these have not been executed but those that have been have shown that they were all cremation Mounds so there were cremations most of them on the site itself so you have you actually have the funeral pyre right there some of our grave Goods things like weapons we know that some of them had women in them as well so both men and women and um and there are some that are really intriguing because they seem to be empty when they were first dug up and then they only found it as a small almost like a little parcel of burnt bone it's possible that those were Graves for people who were cremated elsewhere and then taken and given a burial to the bones were sort of moved into those Mounds so this is on the very top of the highest hill for miles around and they've had these cremation fires everyone will be able to see it just a what a stunning set setting it must have been for that ritual yeah I think it's quite important to think of that whole ritual not just the Mounds afterwards but actually what that meant to those people in society what signals what messages were they sending out and the location is really key and you can just about through the trees over there see that we are dipping down and without the trees you would be able to see the river you everybody would be able to see the Mounds as well so anybody coming down this route this would have been blindingly obvious and really familiar to them from their Scandinavian lives I think so and I think it's Ariel was a way of signaling identity as well who you were religion was and what your beliefs were so I think that was one of the messages that that people probably would have tried to get across we're back at HQ to continue the story [Music] so where does the Great Heathen Army go after making an absolute mess at Repton this was really a key point in the whole story of the great Army because after this year they split up and it's never one complete Army again so we actually what happens here is that one part of it under half done goes north so they goes into are they going to northumbria and keep raiding around this sort of backup area somewhere yeah and we're looking for some new sites and again things like the gaming pieces actually give you some Clues so we may well have one of those sites coming up soon and then the other half which is under the leadership of goose room and two other kings called Anand and oscatel they start going South and they go back towards the Kingdom of Wessex Wessex is now ruled by Alfred the Great one of the best known early Kings the part of the Heathen Army heading south is now led by the Scandinavian guthrum for five years these two men engaged in a game of cat and mouse until 8 7 8 when the future of England would hang in the bounds cat and I have come to this dramatic location in Wiltshire to find out how King Alfred finally took on the might of the invading Vikings he essentially decides to to take their Victory back and take take his kingdom back so he gathers up all the men he can can get and then they move up again and they come to this place called athendon or Eddington so most likely just right here where we are now but we're not certain are we that's not so tantalizing it this this could have been the site of this great this great climactic battle Yeah so it's one of those that because obviously we haven't found it for certain yet there's no evidence of where it is people have been coming with all sorts of suggestions there's quite a lot of places called Eddington as well which doesn't really help and there's nothing in the records to really talk about the geography as such so the question is then where in the landscape where would it make sense to have a battle again we don't have any clues from the documents so you know what about your archaeological eye you know are there any humps and bumps around anything you've picked out that you think might be connected to the battle so there's a lot going on in this landscape it has been doing a long period of time there's quite a lot of prehistoric monuments there's even Mounds out here I would look very much like those burial mounds so if cat is right this is the location of one of the most pivotal moments in British history a battle of Eddington briefly described in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles King Alfred proceeds to headington and their fought with all the Army and put them to flight riding after them as far as the Fortress so he basically chases them back and it seems to be a really really close call because according to one of the records he kills everybody outside people haven't been able to get into safety so men cattle horses everything that was outside the fortification and they then hold up for 14 days until they presumably can't can't make it any longer from from Hunger or thirst or whatever and so that's the Viking surrender pretty much so they agree at that point to essentially give up so they agree to leave his kingdom and they promise to swear Oaths give him hostages and cruise shipy they also promised that the king Goose room along with 30 of his best men are going to be baptized so they agree to go to Alfred a bit later on and be become Christians basically well that's literally the end of the great Heathen Army they're led by a bunch of Christians now Alfred and the Vikings sign a peace treaty that divides England between them the influence of that deal survived to this day that this line here is the one agreed between Alfred and Griffin yeah so that's the boundary in the treaty and then these dots that we see here these are all Scandinavian place names so these are all settlements Villages towns they've got some kind of Scandinavian element to them and it's really quite obvious how they're practically none to the west of this so in what was in Wessex they're just not there so they are settling in those territories and that becomes a really really important point so even though the battles continue there's still a lot of competition over these other territories this really what happens then after Eddington on this treaty onwards becomes such a decisive moment that is remembered for quite a long time afterwards so even when Alfred and his children grandchildren started conquering eastern northern England the Viking the Scandinavian place names jeans the people the Customs they would endure absolutely so the Scandinavians from this point on especially left a really lasting Legacy on the whole of the country [Music] so the remains of the great Heathen Army can be found all around us [Music] not just in the archaeological traces they left behind been names customs and genes that have become part of the fabric of this country the Viking Invaders became settlers [Music] thanks for watching this video on the history Hit YouTube channel you can subscribe right here to make sure you don't miss any of our great films that are coming out or if you are a true history fan check out our special dedicated History Channel historyhit.tv you're gonna love it

Channel: History Hit

Views: 701,578

Keywords: history hit, history hit youtube, viking age britain, viking britain timeline, viking invasion britain, great heathen army, great heathen army vs wessex, great heathen army history, viking battle documentary, vikings documentaries, viking invasion of england, viking invasion of england documentary, dan snow vikings, cat jarman vikings, cat jarman viking documentary, dan snow viking documentary, dan snow documentary, dan snow history hit, dan snow history, vikings, king alfred

Id: wgxEgaRrM7Q

Length: 60min 27sec (3627 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 02 2023