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Documentary, Vikings: The Trading Empire Part 2
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00:00Here in Ireland, evidence is being unearthed of a Viking fortress.
00:14The Viking site is re-emerging.
00:17You can see it back again for the first time in a thousand years.
00:23This was built to help colonise a land that provided a key commodity.
00:30In a trade network that stretched all the way to the Middle East.
00:36Slaves.
00:43I'm finding out the truth about the Vikings.
00:48Leaving Britain behind to enter their land.
00:53And their own mysterious world.
00:56Even now, this place feels like it's on the edge of everything.
01:03And, as an archaeologist, I'm seeking out some of the most telling evidence of all.
01:09The very remains of the Vikings themselves.
01:14This flamboyant hairstyle just adds to his allure.
01:19Last time, I searched out the ancient, prehistoric routes of the Vikings.
01:28It's such a Baltic thing to do.
01:30You don't get ship settings in France or in Britain.
01:35Now, I'm travelling out from Scandinavia.
01:37To explore how the Vikings extended their reach into new lands.
01:49Building a vast trading network from Ireland to the Middle East.
01:54I'm starting off in the heart of Scandinavia.
02:16Heading to the coast of the Baltic Sea.
02:19The capital of Sweden.
02:22Stockholm.
02:22Stockholm.
02:24Here in Stockholm, life is very much about the Baltic.
02:36Britain feels like a long way away towards the west.
02:39From here, the nearest neighbours are Finland, Latvia and Estonia in the east.
02:43In Britain, the force of the Vikings was Norwegians and Danes sailing westwards.
02:55But here it was a different story of settlement and exploration, starting on the Baltic and then heading east into Russia and beyond.
03:04It was settlement built on trade.
03:05It was settlement built on trade in luxury items, many of them obtained from as far afield as China, but at a dreadful human cost.
03:14Countless slaves rounded up from their homes in Britain and Ireland and shipped eastwards for unimaginable lives in far-off lands.
03:23It's not a story of north and south, but rather of an east-west axis and of a Viking footprint that began in the 8th century and in just a hundred years or so was planted firmly over a vast tract of territory.
03:38Here in Sweden, archaeologists have discovered evidence of one of the extremes of this network, far to the east.
04:01These are Arabic dirhams, minted in places like Tashkent and Baghdad and Samarkand, those exotic names.
04:17Yet these pieces found their way back to Scandinavia in truly vast quantities, tens of thousands of coins like this.
04:26These were found in rich Viking hordes, two and a half thousand miles from where they were minted.
04:36Also, Middle Eastern in origin are these necklaces made of rock crystal beads.
04:44They're so colourful, they're almost gaudy.
04:48Perhaps best of all, this unprepossessing sliver here is a piece of Chinese silk.
05:01To me, gold and silver are statements of wealth.
05:06But with silk, you're talking about luxury.
05:10The way it looks, but more importantly, the way that it feels.
05:13All of this kind of material that makes the people of Sweden different from their neighbours.
05:21Because although they live on an outcrop of North Western Europe, out on the edge of the world,
05:28they have connections that reach all the way to the Orient and China.
05:32To track down those Viking traders, I'm crossing the Baltic.
05:47Heading for Russia and its cultural capital, St. Petersburg.
05:52This place is such a symbol of Russia.
06:08From the time of the Tsars, and then its reincarnation as Leningrad during communist rule,
06:14and now reinventing itself again.
06:16But incredibly, this part of Russia, as late as the 17th century, wasn't under Russian rule.
06:23It was Swedish.
06:24Because the deepest heritage here is Viking.
06:31We're so obsessed with what the Vikings got up to in Britain and Ireland,
06:35that the folk who came here tend to be completely overlooked.
06:39But the fact is, more Viking artefacts have been found here, in Russia and Eastern Europe,
06:45than in the whole of Western Europe put together.
06:55Some of the relics preserved here, in Russia's most famous museum, the Hermitage,
07:01paint a completely new picture of the Vikings for me.
07:04Not one of bands of bearded men out on warlike raids,
07:13but ordinary people, living settled lives.
07:20This wonder is a magnificent, well-preserved leather shoe or ankle boot.
07:30Look at the workmanship in this.
07:32Here's where the lace would have gone to hold it in place,
07:36around the foot and around the ankle.
07:40This has been worn to make someone look good.
07:43Somebody who cared about her appearance,
07:47and presumably wanted to appear fashionable.
07:51And then this, it's a distaff,
07:53it's part of the quite simple equipment needed to spin wool into thread.
07:58What makes this one especially memorable?
08:02It's this carefully prepared, smooth face,
08:08into which have been etched Viking runes.
08:12This is Viking writing.
08:15This, it's thought, says something poetic, like,
08:18clad from above.
08:20The spindle is spinning.
08:23Starry-eyed maiden will have a long, thin thread.
08:27Navlug owns this distaff.
08:31So often when you find archaeological artefacts,
08:35you're left to wonder, helplessly,
08:37about who made it, and who owned it, and who left it behind.
08:41But here, we know Navlug, a starry-eyed Viking maiden.
08:51So much attention is given to Viking men.
08:55It's striking that the pioneers of this eastern frontier
08:58also included women.
09:02The objects come from one of the very earliest Viking communities
09:06outside of Scandinavia.
09:07One of the first steps in the creation of a vast, trading empire.
09:18To discover the source of those artefacts,
09:22I have to head 90 miles east of St. Petersburg
09:24to a tiny riverside village.
09:33It's called Starrya Ladga,
09:36and it's here, in the rural backwaters of western Russia,
09:41that the story of Viking expansion begins.
09:48Even now, this place feels like it's on the edge of everything.
09:54It feels remote.
09:57It feels surrounded by wilderness, nothingness, really.
10:00So, what on earth must it have been like for the first Vikings
10:06who found this place beside the river
10:10and furthermore decided to stay,
10:13actually to set up home and shop?
10:17It would have been wild in the extreme.
10:21The very earliest Viking finds from here date back to 753 AD,
10:29a generation before the first recorded raids on Britain.
10:36So this Russian outpost marks some of the very earliest evidence of the Vikings
10:41outside their Scandinavian homelands.
10:44And this soon became the gateway to a route
10:49that would stretch as far as Constantinople
10:52and even Baghdad.
10:57A route that could only be tackled by river.
11:00Using a replica Viking boat,
11:20these Russian enthusiasts are figuring out
11:23how the Vikings made their extraordinary journeys east.
11:27Today, there's too much ice on the river
11:32to launch our own boat.
11:34So, just like the 8th century Vikings,
11:37we've got to shift it ourselves.
11:39And...
11:40One...
11:40Stop!
11:44One, two, why did you take it?
11:47Why did you take it away?
11:48Why did you take it away?
11:49Well, let's get ready.
11:52And...
11:53This is just the way that the boat
11:55has to be moved on dry land.
11:57If they got to an obstacle,
11:59rapids or a waterfall or ice,
12:01they have to take the boat out of the river
12:02and either go around the obstacle
12:03or find another river.
12:05This is the only way to do it.
12:06So, it's just rolled over land on these logs,
12:10hopefully over the shortest possible distance.
12:13It's literally yard by yard, foot by foot.
12:20Stop!
12:22Stop! Stop! Stop!
12:23Stop!
12:23And...
12:24One...
12:25One...
12:26One...
12:27Oh, God.
12:28And...
12:29One...
12:30One...
12:31Imagine how long it would take to get anywhere.
12:33You know, from you leave home in Sweden,
12:37cross the Baltic in ships
12:39and then get everything out of boats like this,
12:41and every now and again you've got to take the boat
12:43out of the water and move it over land.
12:45This guy's must have been away for years at a time.
12:49Years!
12:54By navigating the Russian rivers
12:56and lugging their boats when necessary,
12:58the Vikings could transport themselves
13:00all the way from the Baltic
13:02to the Caspian and the Black Seas.
13:08It's time-consuming and it is laborious,
13:10but, you know, there's enough men here
13:13to move a boat this size,
13:15so the system does work, as history shows.
13:19The journeys east along the Russian rivers
13:30demanded incredible feats of organisation,
13:34boatmanship and endurance.
13:36And as well as overcoming the physical hardships,
13:39the Vikings had to find ways
13:41of dealing with the very strange
13:43and often very violent locals
13:45that they encountered along the way.
13:49For the people from the east,
13:50the Vikings also seemed strange.
13:53Preserved in contemporary accounts written by Islamic scholars
14:06are vivid descriptions of how they saw those strange people
14:10from the north.
14:13Arabic scholar James Montgomery
14:15has studied the remarkable written records
14:18of a Middle Eastern traveller called Ibn Thadlan.
14:21I've never seen more perfect bodies than theirs.
14:32They were like palm trees.
14:33And then there's this absolutely fantastic little phrase,
14:36which I just love.
14:37So they're red, they're bright red, they're light-haired,
14:42they're like a burst of fire.
14:45He says, from the tip of their fingers
14:48right up to their necks,
14:50every one of them is covered in dark green trees
14:56and shapes and other things.
14:57Tattoos.
14:58Tattoos.
15:00He then goes into, he describes what the women look like,
15:02and this is really interesting
15:03because they're accompanied by their wives.
15:05He says that each woman has some form of a box
15:10made of iron or silver or bronze or gold,
15:15depending on how much money her husband has.
15:17And every box has a ring,
15:19and from the ring there is a dagger suspended.
15:22Are they settling and colonising in the east,
15:24or are they just moving through?
15:26Well, if we turn to another one of the texts
15:28that we have with us today,
15:30we can see a sense that they are both settling,
15:33but they're not setting down any particular roots.
15:36So he says, they don't have any fields that they sow,
15:53they don't have any villages,
15:55they don't have any agriculture.
15:57The only thing they do is trade,
15:58and that is trade in martins and squirrels and other pelts.
16:02So I think the picture that we have at this point
16:05is of a set of trading emporia.
16:08You get off the boat, you do your trade,
16:10build a couple of huts or whatever,
16:12then get back on the boat and move on.
16:16The Islamic writers even had a special name
16:18for the intrepid merchants from the north.
16:23They called them the Rus,
16:25which means something like the men who row.
16:28And it shows how influential they became,
16:30because after all, this land is now called Russia.
16:42It's remarkable to think that one of the biggest nations
16:45in the world gets its name from the Vikings,
16:49who navigated its waterways,
16:51setting up trading posts and colonies as they went.
16:55The target was the greatest city on earth,
17:00Constantinople.
17:04When I started looking into the Vikings,
17:05I didn't think I'd have to go one and a half thousand miles south of Scandinavia
17:09to find out about them.
17:10But here I am, in a city that's the gateway to Asia.
17:15Istanbul.
17:16Istanbul.
17:17Once known as Constantinople.
17:18Istanbul.
17:19Once known as Constantinople.
17:20Istanbul.
17:21Istanbul.
17:22Istanbul.
17:23Once known as Constantinople.
17:24Istanbul.
17:25Istanbul.
17:26For the Vikings.
17:27For the Vikings.
17:28this glorious city.
17:29the Commonwealth of the Bolivar as the region.
17:31Men and the Voluntary of Slovenia and I flew to Burn of India,
17:32of Civil War.
17:33And I went to South Carolina to find out about them.
17:34I did not go right away.
17:35And I went to South Carolina to find out about them.
17:36But here I am, in a city that's the gateway to Asia.
17:40Istanbul, once known as Constantinople.
17:54For the Vikings, this glorious city was the culmination of their journeys.
18:02Because within its walls were some of the greatest markets in the world.
18:10For a Viking, this would have been all but overwhelming.
18:25Because this is on a completely different scale from anything he would have witnessed before.
18:33Instead of hundreds of people, here it would have been thousands or even tens of thousands.
18:37And from all over the world.
18:41And then there are all the exotic sights and sounds and smells.
18:46It's all but an assault on the senses.
18:49The trouble was that Constantinople was tightly controlled.
18:56With strict trade quotas, taxes and even immigration rules.
19:02But by the early 900s, the Vikings had been granted access.
19:09Hey, you speak English?
19:11I speak English, my friend.
19:12Can I help you?
19:13Can I have 100 grams of the red spice?
19:15That's right, 100 grams.
19:17Something else?
19:18No, that's all. How much?
19:21Once here, they could buy finely woven silk, worth its weight in gold,
19:26in exchange for their own exotic wares.
19:31Baltic amber, arctic furs, and the Vikings' most important commodity of all.
19:39Slaves.
19:41Any Viking who had spent three months or more in the city was entitled to buy silk up to the value of two slaves.
19:50And that silk was so valuable, it made the perilous river journeys to get here more than worthwhile.
19:56A 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.
20:13Some Vikings made Constantinople their home.
20:17And one of them even left his mark on the city, in one of the most historic and holy places on the planet.
20:24This is the Hagia Sophia.
20:28Most of what you're looking at was built in the sixth century,
20:31which means that by the time the Vikings turned up, that building was already old.
20:41Hagia Sophia was built as a Christian church.
20:46And it later became a Muslim mosque.
20:48All around me are remnants of over a thousand years of Christian and Muslim worship.
20:56But one tiny corner is Viking.
20:58These dark lines etched into the marble are Viking runes.
21:10Ancient Viking writing.
21:12They're almost indecipherable.
21:15The only bit that's in any way clear is part of someone's name, a man's name, Halfdan.
21:19And the rest of it is assumed to read, was here.
21:23So you've got, Halfdan was here, or made these runes.
21:26We'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.
21:37The so-called Varengian Guard, who escorted the Emperor on special occasions and for special ceremonies.
21:44So we can allow ourselves to imagine that one day Halfdan was up here on duty during a long, boring religious ceremony.
21:52And to pass the time, he carved his name and some words into the stonework.
21:56These 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.
22:12But what's left in Constantinople is only part of the story.
22:26Because everything the Vikings achieved on their journeys east, also had a huge impact back home.
22:42From Istanbul, I'm heading back to Sweden.
22:48My destination? A tiny island just a stone's throw from Stockholm.
22:54Called Birka.
22:59Hello. Hello. Welcome.
23:01Thank you. Can we head off? Yes.
23:08Today, it's a remote, rural place.
23:12And it's isolation from the modern world has meant that Birka has been remarkably undisturbed for over a thousand years.
23:23In Birka, we should glimpse traces of everyday life.
23:28Not the lives of the warrior class, but ordinary working people.
23:32Because what's preserved in Birka is more than just a town.
23:37It's an entire culture.
23:42Swedish archaeologist, Charlotte Hidensterna Johnson, has been excavating Viking Birka for a decade.
23:52In the league of Viking towns, where does Birka rank?
23:59If you ask me, very top.
24:01Number one.
24:02Yeah.
24:03Okay.
24:04Birka was one of the very first urban centres in Scandinavia, and it thrived on international trade.
24:14So Birka's like a department store where you can get clothes, you can get jewellery, you can get furnishings for your home.
24:21Weaponry, food, or imported food, I should say. Spices, textiles.
24:30What kind of things do you find? You know, is it rich pickings out where the people left?
24:36Yeah. It's very rich pickings.
24:39Gold and silver?
24:41No. Not today.
24:47Now this is a very good example of what they actually did here. The trade is at the heart of everything.
24:53This is an iron weight.
24:54So this isn't for weighing the goods themselves.
24:57No.
24:58This is how you make sure someone's paid the right price.
25:00Exactly.
25:01So by the time they've got these weights, they've moved from, you know, simple barter to objects having an established value in silver.
25:11Yeah. Much more advanced. It's coming close to a monetary system.
25:18But Birka was far more than just a market.
25:21This was a whole society, with a garrison and an industrial area, as well as markets and residences.
25:33For Vikings, places like Birka were a new world.
25:38It was about urban living. It was about life in an international trading centre.
25:44And it was about having connections, contacts, with people living as far afield as Ireland and Constantinople.
25:52And the Vikings who once lived here clearly wanted to be remembered.
26:01These humps and bumps are the unmistakable outlines of Viking burial mounds.
26:12They're all around me here. They stretch off in every direction.
26:16It's reckoned that there are at least 3,000 visible graves in and around Birka.
26:23Within these graves, archaeologists have found the remains of wealthy merchants with eastern goods.
26:33And even their Viking children, who lived over a thousand years ago.
26:37It's an unusually well-preserved skeleton, especially given that it's the skeleton of a child.
26:54There's nothing on the skeleton to reveal how she died.
26:58That would remain a mystery.
27:01But we know from analysis that she was no more than maybe six years old when she died.
27:07And I can confidently say she, because of the things that went into her coffin with her.
27:17She was wearing a necklace of brightly coloured glass beads.
27:21There's silver and gold and blue in there.
27:23Also, her clothing was fastened across her chest with a very heavily decorated gilded brooch.
27:36And on the back of the brooch, there's the impression of some of the fabric that it was holding in place.
27:44And it's a very finely made expensive fabric.
27:46We don't know quite what it was, but it would have cost a lot of money.
27:49And it may well have been an exotic import.
27:56Because she was expensively dressed, she was obviously the daughter of a wealthy family.
28:03The wealth here tells us that she was part of Birka's trading elite.
28:09In places like Birka, all those luxury eastern goods could be found.
28:22But they also had to be paid for.
28:25Furs could be traded and trapped.
28:28Amber could be found in the ground itself.
28:30But much of the Vikings' wealth depended on slaves.
28:36And they had to be taken.
28:39By force.
28:40By force.
28:56Having travelled east, I'm now heading west.
28:59To the other extreme of the Vikings' trading network.
29:02Dublin, Ireland's capital, was founded by Norwegian Vikings in 841 AD.
29:17Dublin was one of the Vikings' most important bases.
29:21And Ireland's very first town.
29:22It's often thought that the Vikings came here to raid gold and silver treasures from Irish monasteries.
29:39But it turns out that the engine behind the Vikings' expansion into Ireland
29:44was that oh so important human commodity.
29:51Slaves.
29:55In here is evidence of what the Vikings came here for.
30:00Part of what Dublin was all about.
30:03These are slave collars and chains.
30:07Made of iron.
30:09You can imagine the discomfort.
30:11Never mind the humiliation of having something like this placed around your neck.
30:17With a chain attached.
30:23The going rate for a male slave at the time was 12 ounces of silver.
30:27And a woman could be had for 8 ounces of silver.
30:33There are even different kinds of chains and collars for different classes of captives.
30:38Look at this.
30:42It's hard to use terms like luxury item in relation to a slave collar and chain.
30:48But everything about it seems to speak to the status of the person whose neck it was once around.
30:55It's nothing less than ornate.
30:58Quite a lot of work has gone into making this look like the kind of collar you would put round an expensive neck.
31:04So perhaps this was briefly worn around the neck of an Irish king before his ransom was paid.
31:13Or he agreed to some specific set of terms.
31:16And it's harrowing to think a city owes its foundation, its existence, at least in part, to one civilization's appetite for buying and selling human beings.
31:29Dublin quickly grew into one of the largest slave markets in Europe, attracting merchants from all across the continent.
31:40In 871, it was reported that 200 ships arrived packed with Angles, Britons and Pits.
31:50This was organised human trafficking on a scale that even bears comparison with the early years of the slave trade to the Americas, almost a thousand years later.
32:02Incredibly, the remains of some of the very early pioneers who came to seek their fortune in the slave trade have been found.
32:18Archaeologist Lindsay Simpson has recently examined four skeletons on the site of the original Dublin settlement.
32:30How can you tell that this is a Viking and not a local?
32:37Yes, very good question. Well, we knew, by the way, that he was buried, is a short answer.
32:41He wasn't buried in a Christian burial, as an Irish person would be.
32:45He's a pagan, he was buried with grave goods, which is not something that happens with Irish people who are Christian.
32:50Based on his skeleton, what do you think he looked like in life?
32:54He was probably five foot nine, which is very big for that time.
32:57You can see that his bones are really quite enormous. And when you look down at his legs, his legs are incredibly powerful.
33:04The upper shoulder here, and you can see the strong lines where the ligaments have actually worn a groove in the bones.
33:13Is that happening during hard physical work?
33:16This is happening through rotation movement.
33:18So a big part of his daily life involved some kind of rotational, repetitive movement?
33:24So this could be either sword fighting, or it could be from rowing, because they would have been doing an awful lot of rowing.
33:32It's always amazing to me that all of that hard work, rowing, swinging a sword, it's all written into the bones.
33:41Everything you do with your skeleton is reflected at the end of the day.
33:45And he was a very bulky, stocky, scary guy. He would not want to meet this individual, especially not when he had all his paraphernalia with him.
33:54It'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.
34:06With 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.
34:25Dublin was the centre of this vast and expanding sea kingdom.
34:32It commanded the Irish Sea, as well as the sea routes headed north to Scotland, south to Wales and east to England.
34:40From this frontier town, the Norsemen commanded it all.
34:43But the Vikings weren't content with just controlling the sea routes and settling barren land.
34:51They had much greater ambitions.
34:53A vast Viking trade network from Russia to Ireland had led to increasingly widespread Viking settlement.
35:11But there was one more prize that lay right on their doorstep. England.
35:21The 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.
35:33The Anglo-Saxons.
35:39Leaving Dublin behind, I've come to Oxford, once part of Wessex, the most powerful of all England's kingdoms.
35:52And it's here that one of the greatest treasures of the age can be seen.
35:55An Anglo-Saxon masterpiece.
36:12This is the Alfred Jewel.
36:14It's so irreplaceably valuable that I'm not even allowed to touch it.
36:22Which, frankly, given the price on it, is a relief.
36:29This once belonged to Alfred the Great.
36:32King of 9th century Wessex.
36:35The most powerful man in all of Britain.
36:38It's made of gold and enamel and crystal.
36:45But more impressive than the raw materials, by far.
36:50It's the artistry that's gone into making it.
36:53So finely worked.
36:55And it terminates in this weird and wonderful head of a beast.
36:59There's been a lot of theory over the years about what it was for.
37:10Could it be a centrepiece for a headdress making it a crown jewel?
37:16Could it have been worn as a pendant on a chain around someone's neck?
37:21The abiding theory now is that it's the handle of a pointer.
37:26There would have been a little piece of maybe worked ivory.
37:29Something suitably glamorous in the mouth of the beast.
37:32And then it could be used to point out lines and words
37:36on an illuminated manuscript that was itself too valuable to be touched.
37:42This was made for King Alfred.
37:45The letters around it say Alfred ordered me to be made.
37:48And right here in this tiny object is a powerful statement
37:54of wealth and authority and commitment to learning.
38:00And you can only imagine what it did in the hearts and minds of Vikings
38:05when they knew that objects like this were here
38:08and that they could get their hands on them.
38:10Around 50 years after the foundation of Staria Ladga and 50 years before the birth of Alfred,
38:24the British had their first taste of the Vikings.
38:28On the 8th of June 793, the peace of the Northumbrian coast was shattered.
38:32A band of Vikings launched a surprise attack on the monastery at Lindisfarne.
38:43They hacked most of the monks to death and stole the unguarded religious treasures.
38:50It was the 9-11 moment for Anglo-Saxon Britain.
38:56Things could never be the same again.
38:58From that moment, monks and nuns living in monasteries all around the coastline
39:03had to accept the threat of terror attacks.
39:06Murder, enslavement, all of it could come at them from just beyond the horizon.
39:10The unprecedented violence of this raid seared itself into the nation's psyche.
39:21For all their other endeavours, it's raids like this for which they've been remembered.
39:29But the brutal attack on Lindisfarne was just the beginning.
39:33In 865 AD, a combined alliance of around 3,000 Vikings, mostly Danes, arrived on English soil.
39:52Their aim wasn't trade or another attack.
39:57It was conquest of the whole of England.
40:00At a time when a band of 30 men was routinely described as an army,
40:06this was truly a force to be reckoned with.
40:09The Anglo-Saxons called it the Great Heathen Army.
40:12And it wasn't just a rearing party intent on slaves and gold.
40:16The Great Heathen Army wanted everything.
40:19And to get it, they would have to take on the Anglo-Saxons.
40:22The conquest of England would be a task far greater than anything the Vikings had ever attempted before.
40:33England was divided into four powerful, well-organised kingdoms.
40:38Northumbria, East Anglia, Mercia and Wessex.
40:43To succeed, the Vikings would have to defeat them all.
40:54After a few brutal years of fighting, and the deaths of the Northumbrian and East Anglian kings,
40:59in 873, the Vikings turned to the very heart of England.
41:05When the Great Heathen Army arrived here in Repton, they'd come to take Mercia.
41:11Now, Repton's small and out of the way today.
41:15But a thousand years ago, it was the most important town in Mercia.
41:19And Mercia was the second most powerful kingdom in all of England.
41:22When the Vikings descended on Repton, they transformed the sacred Church of St. Wisdom into a centre of operations.
41:40The tower doesn't look very tall from the ground, but it is, I can assure you.
41:46It was a huge step along the way to controlling the whole of England.
41:57Well, there you go.
41:59The whole of the Trent Valley laid out before us, stretching right off into the haze on the horizon.
42:06If you look down just beyond the graveyard, you can see a stretch of water,
42:10and that's a relic of a much older course of the River Trent.
42:13And it's right there that the Vikings would have pulled up in their ships,
42:19come out onto the bank to set about their business of takeover.
42:23And you can see why Repton mattered to them.
42:27From up here on the tower, you feel like the master of all you survey.
42:31And the Vikings, great strategists that they were,
42:35they realised that Repton was the key that would unlock Mercia for them.
42:43In the churchyard, archaeologists have found remnants of the Vikings' fortress.
42:51This is a map of the excavations that were done around the church in the 1980s.
42:57Look at the genius of what's going on here.
43:02We've got a D-shaped enclosure with a fourth side created by a river.
43:08And great tacticians that they were.
43:12The Vikings here have even employed the Christian church
43:16and turned it into a defensive gateway into their fortress.
43:20Genius.
43:21The Vikings even used the Christian graveyard to bury their own pagan dead.
43:28This is where archaeological evidence brings us face to face with the men of the great heathen army.
43:37Just here is grave number eight.
43:44That's one of the most important Viking graves ever found in Britain.
43:49I must be just about standing on the spot, just about here.
43:53Imagine that.
43:54Right here, archaeologists discovered the remains of a six-foot-tall skeleton.
44:02A quintessential Viking warrior.
44:11He was buried in the pagan style with his most precious possessions,
44:16preserved today at the Derby Museum.
44:18These are some of the most important things that the Repton warrior was buried with.
44:33The Viking belief dictated that whatever you needed and wanted in the next life
44:38had to go into the ground with you.
44:40First of all, you've got the perfect weapon,
44:44which is not just giving him the ability to fight,
44:47but it says something about who he is in life.
44:50Now, it's no ordinary warrior that's armed like this.
44:55The vast majority are armed with something that's quite simple and cheap to make, like axes.
45:02A sword is of a different order of magnitude.
45:05You feel as if you're looking at the iron blade, but you're not.
45:09The brown colour is deceiving.
45:11This is actually an iron sword in a scabbard.
45:16It's a wooden scabbard with a fleece lining to protect the blade,
45:20and then on the outside there's a leather casing.
45:23So, a man on the battlefield with a sword is already someone you would notice,
45:28but a man with a sword and a scabbard is another step up again.
45:31So, this man was clearly a leader amongst his own kind.
45:38A sword is always an impressive thing to see,
45:41but for me it's just as affecting and moving to see the other items that he wanted with him.
45:49This is a little silver hammer.
45:54The Repton warrior was wearing this around his neck in the same way that a Christian would wear a cross.
46:01It's connecting him physically to the god Thor.
46:05Thor is one of the big three Old Norse gods,
46:09and he was definitely the soldiers, the warrior's friend.
46:12They felt that Thor understood them.
46:15Thor was armed with a legendary hammer called Mjolnir,
46:18and with it Thor could level mountains.
46:24For a man like the Repton warrior,
46:26everything about him was building to one ideal conclusion.
46:32He wanted a heroic death on the battlefield that would guarantee him access to the next world,
46:38which for him was Valhalla,
46:39which was a place where he would fight all day with other heroes,
46:43and then feast all night.
46:44It was the perfect Viking heaven.
46:48For the Anglo-Saxons,
46:50this is the worst-case scenario,
46:52because it's in the Viking mindset to fight to the death,
46:56and it's a horde of men who think like this
47:01that the Anglo-Saxons here had to face.
47:05East Anglia, Northumbria, and finally Mercia all fell into the hands of the Danes.
47:19Only King Alfred's kingdom, Wessex, withstood the onslaught.
47:25But even he wasn't quite strong enough to drive them out completely.
47:29So eventually, a peace treaty was agreed.
47:34In terms of which basically gave the Vikings control of a territory north of a line,
47:41stretching between Chester and the Thames.
47:44The territory became known as the Danelaw.
47:49It was basically a Danish Viking colony.
47:52All of this land that I'm travelling through now
47:54was under Danish Viking control.
47:59What the Vikings did here in England was unprecedented.
48:03The taking of England wasn't settlement or expansion.
48:07It was conquest.
48:09By war.
48:12It was different from anything they were to do anywhere else.
48:16And the result was unique.
48:17A fusion of Viking and Anglo-Saxon culture in the North.
48:22That even today gives Northern England so much of its distinctive character.
48:28The establishment of the Danelaw essentially created our North-South divide.
48:33The city that became the capital of the Danelaw was York.
48:48And Viking settlers started flooding into what was already one of the most important Anglo-Saxon centres in England.
48:55All of these items here shows that there were Vikings in York.
49:08They're classically Viking material.
49:10The comb for personal grooming and taking care of head lice.
49:14You've got amber jewellery, possibly from the Baltic.
49:17This is a gaming piece and it's walrus ivory.
49:21Maybe from as far away as Greenland.
49:22So it's precisely the sort of stuff you expect from Vikings and from people who are trading.
49:28At a time when York has become a centre with material coming in from all over.
49:35On the back of Viking trade, York boomed and became a thriving city.
49:41Second only to Anglo-Saxon London.
49:44Its population exploded from two to ten thousand.
49:48But for the Vikings who settled here, it was a very strange experience.
49:55York was quite unlike Birka or even Dublin.
50:00Let alone the farmstead settlements of most of Scandinavia.
50:06And the new city life had some very serious downsides.
50:09I'm quite glad to be putting on gloves because these contain Viking excrement.
50:18Fragments thereof.
50:20It's all been collected from cesspits.
50:22Examination of this though, glamorous though it certainly isn't.
50:26It's very informative because this contains the traces of what the people were eating.
50:31You get traces of things like bran, cereals, fruit stones.
50:37So we can tell that in some ways their diet was quite healthy.
50:41However, most tellingly of all, the excrement is full of eggs left behind by intestinal parasites.
50:50Worms.
50:51It was unavoidable.
50:52And it was caused by the sanitation, or frankly the lack of it.
50:56There wasn't the infrastructure for running water.
50:59So by and large people had cesspits in their yards.
51:03They were living close to, surrounded by their own waste, their own infections.
51:08That took its toll.
51:10Something like 50% of Viking women were dead at 35.
51:14Viking men were lucky to make it to 50.
51:17Despite its drawbacks, York became a place of manufacture, craft and design, as well as trade and settlement.
51:28And as the second and third generation Vikings grew up here, there was inevitable integration of people and language.
51:41How many of the words that we use every day actually have their roots in Viking words?
51:46Lots and lots are really basic everyday words.
51:49So the word you've just used, root, itself probably comes from Old Norse.
51:53Probably comes through the Viking side of English as ancestry.
51:56What about things around us in this market?
51:58Well, things like eggs, skirts, you can see some bags over there, the sky, windows.
52:04All the things that I can see include skin, leg, skull.
52:08So very simple words.
52:09Very simple words.
52:10Very simple basic words for things, yeah.
52:12Okay.
52:13Also words which would describe how we feel and how we react to stuff.
52:17So if you're angry, if you're happy, if you're ill.
52:20Those words as well.
52:21All these words come from Norse.
52:23Basic verbs as well.
52:25So give and take, get, call.
52:27Does language reveal anything about the extent of Viking colonisation?
52:34Well, the easiest way to tell that is by looking at the evidence of the place names.
52:37Really anywhere in a band across the north and the east, from Cheshire right down to Suffolk,
52:43there are lots of Old Norse place names, which are wholly or partly from Old Norse.
52:48So anything involving B, B-Y, places like Grimsby.
52:53Or Whitby.
52:54Whitby.
52:55Yeah, Selby.
52:56And what does the bit mean?
52:57The bit seems to mean a settlement, a village, somewhere around a farmstead.
53:01There are lots more.
53:02It's amazing, isn't it, that we're talking about people who arrived, you know,
53:071300, 1200 years ago, and yet the words they've got with them are still echoing around us today.
53:14Yeah, they're all around, yes, that's right, that's right.
53:18When you come to a place like this, it's easy to see the impact that the Vikings have had on us.
53:24And it's not just the place names or the words in our everyday language.
53:28The Vikings are part of who we are.
53:31By setting up their own towns and by marrying the locals, their blood mixed with our blood.
53:38And they're still here with us today.
53:40What started with attack and war became, as so often with invaders, assimilation.
53:51Bloodshed giving way to a new cultural fusion.
53:55But for the Vikings, this wasn't only something that happened with the Anglo-Saxons of England.
54:05It was global.
54:08To end my journey, I'm returning to Stockholm, one last time.
54:21Because right here, at the geographical hub of east and west, north and south,
54:27at the heart of the Vikings' trading network,
54:31there's something that epitomises the global reach of that trading empire.
54:37And it also graphically illustrates just how many cultures the Vikings were exposed to.
54:51A collection of treasure, discovered on a little Baltic island,
54:55was once the property of a single Viking household.
55:00Look at these three marvels.
55:03They are known collectively as the Helgo treasure.
55:12They were all found together in one house.
55:19First of all, there's a bishop's crozier,
55:22which is the headpiece that would be on top of a staff,
55:26carried by a bishop as a mark of his office and status.
55:29Everything about its decoration is typically Irish.
55:34How did it come to be in an island in Sweden?
55:39Well, we've talked about raids on Irish monasteries,
55:42and it's very believable that this has been plundered during one of those raids.
55:50Next here, we have a ladle.
55:53It would have been used in religious ceremonies, specifically for baptism.
55:57It's to pour water over the head of someone who's being welcomed into the Christian church.
56:04It's made of bronze, and it's probably from North Africa.
56:10The Christian crozier and Coptic ladle are incredible objects.
56:22But there was something found beside them that I find even more extraordinary.
56:27It's a bronze Buddha.
56:32This was probably made in the northern part of the Indian subcontinent,
56:36maybe Pakistan or Afghanistan.
56:39And it has made its way here, likely, along the Silk Road,
56:44passing through many hands, going through Constantinople, through Russia,
56:49and eventually finding its way to Helga.
56:54Within the heart of Scandinavia, in the far north,
56:58you have objects that represent the other three points on the compass.
57:03West, south and east.
57:05The products of Africa, Ireland and India, and in one place, one little Baltic island.
57:18It's almost inconceivable, quite marvellous to behold.
57:24Think how far the Vikings have come.
57:27It's only 100, maybe 150 years since those first raids.
57:32But by now, those Vikings have stretched their hands across the face of the known world.
57:39The Vikings have arrived.
57:44Next time, the Vikings head for unknown lands.
57:49The Vikings were no longer just raiders and traders.
57:53From that moment onwards, they were explorers and adventurers.
57:59Begin to form powerful nation states.
58:03We have Harold himself being baptised.
58:07And finally say goodbye to the ancient pagan gods.
58:13To join the kings of Christian Europe.
58:19Food rationing and the blitz.
58:30Life gets tough on the wartime farm on Thursday at 8.
58:34But next tonight on BBC HD, Ray Winston and Brian Cox, guests on the Rob Brydon Show.
58:39From there, we can gather the girls inайтесь.
58:41gratitude트가.
58:42For those of you all.
58:43Thanks, Brad.
58:45Cheers.
58:46Amen...
59:00My family would probably love that.
59:04You Ry Dyett Marks are the ones that rocked up and they should've done by us.
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