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00:01So far, on Blood of the Vikings,
00:03I've traced the first 200 years of the Viking Age in Britain and Ireland,
00:07from raids and invasions to peaceful settlement.
00:14This time, I discover how a new generation of Danes conquered the whole of England
00:22and put a Viking on the throne.
00:26But why was rule in England short-lived,
00:29while on the Isle of Man today, they still have a Viking Parliament?
00:59It's 991.
01:0893 Viking longships are advancing up the Blackwater estuary on the Essex coast.
01:13This is the biggest raid England has seen for almost 40 years.
01:17But these Vikings are no motley collection of pirates.
01:20They've raised a powerful, organised fleet to threaten the shores of England once again.
01:29The terror has returned.
01:31In the previous years of peace, England has become rich.
01:39But now it's ruled by Æthelred the Unready, a young and militarily inexperienced king.
01:45And the Vikings can sense an opportunity.
01:47They sail towards Maldon and land on Northe Island to prepare their attack.
01:59But on the mainland, the English are waiting for them,
02:02under the command of Birknot, a veteran military leader.
02:06This much is accepted as fact.
02:09But what followed became the subject of an epic Old English poem.
02:14The Battle of Maldon.
02:18The Viking Herald steps forward and makes demands.
02:22Not for land, but for tribute.
02:25Money to go away and leave the English in peace.
02:28The Vikings have turned to extortion.
02:30The poem has been studied closely by historian Dr. Sam Newton.
02:36He takes up the story as Birknot responds to the Vikings' demands.
02:41You hear a stool sailitha, what this folk saith.
02:46He willeth eal to gavala gara sullun.
02:50At truna ord ad ealda swarith.
02:53Which, loosely translated, he says,
02:55Do you hear, sailor, what this folk says?
02:59We will give you tribute.
03:00We will give you spears as tribute.
03:03Deadly points and time-tested swords.
03:06War gear from which you in battle will not profit.
03:10It is the most immortal note of English defiance,
03:13which has echoed in various ways right down to the 20th century.
03:18But the high tide means that, so far, it's just a war of words.
03:21The two armies have to wait until low water to fight it out.
03:29Then, Birknot makes a tactical error.
03:32He and his men stand back
03:34and allow the Vikings to cross the causeway.
03:37He wanted to bring this lot to battle.
03:40If not, they could sail away up the estuary
03:43and strike at will up and down the coast
03:45and it could be weeks or months
03:47before the English army had a chance to get at them again.
03:50And so, the Battle of Maldon begins in earnest.
03:54The poem becomes very dramatic,
03:56centring on the heroism of the English
03:58and their loyalty to their leader, Birknot.
04:01At one point, he is struck by a spear.
04:05His shield companion beside him draws out the spear from Birknot's body
04:09and throws it back at the Vikings who have hurled it
04:12and kills that Viking with the same spear.
04:13But after all this heroism, who were the eventual winners?
04:17Well, in, of course, military terms, the Vikings were the winners.
04:23But the poem makes the resistance and defence of the English
04:28such a heroic deed in itself that it becomes a kind of moral victory
04:33and a great rallying call for further resistance.
04:35It's a bit like the Dunkirk spirit in that sense.
04:39But there was no denying the English had lost.
04:45In the end, King Æthelred had no choice but to give the victorious Vikings
04:50exactly what they wanted.
04:52He handed over £10,000 in silver, a huge amount of money in those days
04:56in the hope that they'd go away and stay away.
05:03It was a vain hope because once the English paid up,
05:07it was inevitable that the Vikings would be back again.
05:13With each fresh attack, the Vikings demanded more and more
05:17and the English meekly paid up.
05:19The payments became known as Danegeld, money for the Danes,
05:29and in today's prices would eventually total hundreds of millions of pounds.
05:36The Anglo-Saxon chronicles tell of a rocketing extortion racket
05:40which lasted for 20 years.
05:42994, and all the raiding army came to Southampton, and they were paid £16,000.
05:52997, the raiding army brought indescribable war booty.
05:561002, here in this year they were paid £24,000.
06:011007, the tax to the hostile raiding army was £30,000.
06:061,012, £48,000.
06:08Only a few were brave enough to defy the Danes.
06:18This London church of St Alphage commemorates one,
06:22a bishop who refused to pay and who suffered the consequences.
06:28Then, on the Saturday, the raiding army became much stirred up against the bishop
06:33because he did not want to offer them any money.
06:35Also, they were very drunk because there was wine brought from the south.
06:40Then they seized the bishop and then pelted him there with bones.
06:44And one of them struck him on the head with the butt of an axe,
06:48so that with the blow he sank down and his holy blood fell on the earth.
06:54But such resistance was rare, and the Danes grew richer and richer.
06:59So where did all that money go? Back here to the Viking homeland?
07:09More Anglo-Saxon coins have been found in Scandinavia than in England,
07:14and I'd like to know if they were earned through legitimate trading
07:16or are the proceeds of a highly successful extortion racket.
07:28In 1997, a hoard of 120 English coins was discovered in a remote part of Denmark.
07:34Is this Danegeld?
07:39All these coins are 990s.
07:42It's a coin type that was struck from about 91 to 97 in all over England.
07:49So whose reign is that?
07:51That's Edelred II.
07:52So that's Edelred the Unready.
07:53Yes, it is. It is.
07:55And this is a coin with Edelred's portrait, his name,
08:01and the inscription Edelred Rex Unglorum.
08:04Edelred, king of the English.
08:06And it might be a Danegeld payment
08:10because a usual hoard in Scandinavia would be all mixed up.
08:15English coins, German coins, a few Arabic coins.
08:19They'll be of all kinds of dates.
08:22But this is a very, very pure hoard.
08:27It seems unlikely that these coins have been in general circulation.
08:30So surely this points to them being Danegeld.
08:34Perhaps the share given to an individual Viking.
08:40Yes, a lot of them look like perfect coins, don't they?
08:43But some of them are bent. Why is that?
08:45Yes, yes.
08:46The gains at that period were interested in the quality of the metal.
08:50And one way of checking the quality is to take the coin and bend it.
08:54If it's soft and you can bend it easily, it's good silver.
08:59If it cracks, it's bad silver.
09:00But how, in just 40 years, have the Vikings become so powerful?
09:12What had changed here in Denmark to turn the Vikings into such an organised fighting force?
09:17One clue lies here, in Jelling, in the west of Denmark.
09:35Today, it's a small, quiet town.
09:36But in the 900s, it was the capital of a royal dynasty.
09:40And would become the birthplace of the modern Danish state.
09:52The first king of a united Denmark was Harold Bluetooth.
09:55Who was probably given his colourful name on account of his rotten teeth.
09:58But despite his dental afflictions, he was a ruler who changed the course of Danish history.
10:04And here, carved on this massive boulder, is the record of his greatest achievements.
10:09One side is completely covered in runes.
10:13An early form of writing used by the Vikings.
10:16On another side is a strange carving of a mythical monster.
10:27But this third side is the most astonishing, because there's what appears to be the figure of Christ.
10:33You can make out the face, outstretched arms and hands, right down to the feet.
10:39Now, surely, at this time, the Vikings in Scandinavia were pagans.
10:42So what are they doing carving images of Christ?
10:46The runic inscription ought to provide the answer.
10:49Professor Elsa Rosedahl, a leading Viking archaeologist, has come to translate it for me.
10:55So what does this say?
10:57It starts with the name of the king, Harald Bluetooth, who raised the stone.
11:03Harald King ordered these monuments to be made for Gorm, his father.
11:12And in memory of Tyre, his mother.
11:16That Harald, who won for himself Denmark and Norway.
11:26And then the last deed, and made the Danes Christian.
11:31So his third great deed was to make the Danes Christian, to Christianise the Danes.
11:35So that explains why you've got the figure of Christ on this side.
11:40Yes.
11:41And it's the oldest great picture of Christ in Scandinavia.
11:47So what made Harald become a Christian and convert an entire nation?
11:52Could it have been more than just his religious belief?
11:56Very practical political reason may have been that the great country to the south, Germany.
12:05The German emperor, he liked to convert pagan peoples.
12:10He went on crusades and it's much better to do it yourself than to be conquered by a foreign power.
12:18Harold Bluetooth's conversion to Christianity not only ensured that the Danes were left in peace.
12:31It also helped to enhance his own status.
12:33As a Christian king, he was acknowledged to be Christ's representative on earth.
12:42A position which brought almost universal loyalty and allegiance.
12:47For the Danes, becoming Christian wasn't just a matter of exchanging a collection of Norse gods for one Christian god.
12:54It also brought them into the European fold, into a culture that was centred on books and learning, laws and taxes.
13:02But perhaps more significantly, a Christian king had divine authority, which gave him huge power and the means of showing it.
13:11Like this, the massive fort at Trelleborg.
13:15When it was excavated in the 1930s, archaeologists found that its interior was laid out with perfect symmetry.
13:26Divided by roads, each quadrant contained identical boat-shaped barracks, 16 in all.
13:33This regimented design is very similar to that of Roman military forts built nearly a thousand years earlier.
13:53Archaeologist Dr Lars Jørgensen has made a detailed study of Viking military architecture.
13:58I mean, this is a huge amount of effort to put into constructing something like this, isn't it?
14:03An enormous amount of resources.
14:05Were all these built of timber, the buildings?
14:08Yes. In the Viking period, Denmark, all houses were timber built.
14:12And actually, archaeologists have tried to calculate how many timbers have been used, or how much timbers have been used here.
14:18And they have calculated 8,000 trees was cut down in order to build this military installation.
14:25So how many soldiers would a fort like this contain?
14:27Well, I would say around 1,000 would have been possible.
14:36So, if you've got a fort like this, with 1,000 professional soldiers and all the effort that's gone into this,
14:42I mean, why is the king building it?
14:45There are different theories about that.
14:48One is that they were constructed in order to control internal troubles in his kingdom.
14:53The second one says that they were defence against the German Empire.
14:58And the third one says that they were for training soldiers who were going to participate in the attacks on England.
15:06Which of those theories do you like best?
15:12I like the last one best, actually.
15:15Because we have three of these fortresses like this size, and we have a fourth in northern Jutland, which is much, much larger.
15:23And it's quite clear that a large fortress in northern Jutland are facing the English area.
15:29So I think actually that, at that time, they were planning to attack England.
15:32Harold Bluetooth seems to have had a large, well-trained and disciplined army.
15:39And England, made rich through trade and with a wealthy church, must have been a tempting target.
15:44Although it wouldn't be until Harold was succeeded by his son that the attacks on England would start.
15:49Not only did the Danes have a new military machine, but they developed new military technology.
16:06Warships capable of delivering more troops and faster than ever before.
16:10In 1956, amateur divers in the Rosgildefjord at Skuldelev discovered the frame of a Viking ship.
16:22Of a type that hadn't been seen before.
16:25And as more ships emerged, this became one of the most important marine excavations of the 20th century.
16:30Under the stinking sludge, they found the remains of five Viking ships, broken into hundreds of thousands of soggy fragments.
16:51Reassembling this archaeological treasure was a painstaking process and took 20 years to complete.
16:57But the results present a catalogue of Viking ship design.
17:09Of the five ships, three were short and wide, designed for carrying large cargoes.
17:21The other two were warships.
17:23They were long and narrow, designed specifically for battle.
17:40This is the biggest.
17:42A warship 30 metres long.
17:43This ship may well have played a key role in Viking attacks.
17:48Transporting a hundred warriors at a time to battles in Norway, France or England.
17:56That ship, Skuldelev II, is now being reconstructed at the Viking Ship Museum at Rosgilde.
18:01It's being built in exactly the same way as the original, even using replicas of Viking tools.
18:15And this has revealed why these ships were so well adapted to sea voyages.
18:20The secret lies in their flexibility.
18:22Here you can see one of the planks which are nearly finished and you can feel how smooth the surface is, how very delicate it is.
18:30And since we have made this plank in the way we have, where we have kind of followed the grain in the wood from top to end, we get this very strong and very flexible plank.
18:41I think you, please try and step on it.
18:44It won't break?
18:45No, please.
18:49See how flexible it is?
18:52So it's really a strong plank.
18:54Yes.
18:55I'll try to stand up.
18:58That's fantastic.
18:59You can see it comes to the ground.
19:01So you can imagine when planks like this are built into ships, how these ships will move and bend in the heavy seas in a stormy weather.
19:09After that, we'll pass the planks and put them in the back.
19:18I want to find out what it's really like to be part of the crew of a Viking warship.
19:23But Skulderlef II is going to take another three years to build.
19:26So I'm joining the crew of number five, the replica of the smaller warship.
19:31Go ahead.
19:39God, it gets up at an incredible speed very quickly, doesn't it?
19:50I feel a bit of a fraud actually, you know, an Englishman rowing a Viking boat. Is this allowed?
19:54Yeah, it is allowed.
19:55Is it?
19:56Yeah.
19:57Even on a calm sea, I could feel the ship flexing as we pulled on the oars. But it was exhausting. The Vikings must have been incredibly fit.
20:17Personally, I was quite relieved when the sail was hoisted.
20:24Hey, look.
20:25Harold Bluetooth's son, Sven Forkbeard, could command a fleet of warships capable of transporting thousands of soldiers across the North Sea.
20:45And following the battle at Moldham, he led the Vikings in a series of attacks on towns along the English coast and up rivers.
21:00But one place in particular was considered to be the greatest prize.
21:05The city of London.
21:08Here, a quarter of all English coins were minted.
21:11The city was repeatedly attacked, but again and again the Vikings were beaten off.
21:28To get to their prize, the Vikings would have to take London Bridge, which stood on the same site as the present one.
21:34Today, the Thames is crossed by many bridges, but a thousand years ago there was only one.
21:41Connecting the walled city of London with the trading centre of Southwark, it was made entirely of wood and was said to be so wide that two wagons could cross at the same time.
21:50The bridge was fought over many times, and lying in the Thames mud is the evidence of these battles.
22:04John, what exactly are these? I know they're axes, but what were they used for?
22:08They're battle axes. They're battle axes of a Viking type, and they were found very close to where we're standing now.
22:14Just behind us here, the building there was built in the 1920s, and the workmen on the site found six of these, plus six spears.
22:23How do you know that these are Vikings?
22:25It's the shape. It's this very elegant, broad blade, beautifully curved, and they're a very handy weapon.
22:31There's this old story that a skilled axeman could shave somebody's moustache off in the middle of a battle simply by using his axe.
22:40Now, these are weapons, but what's that? That's surely not a weapon, is it?
22:45It's a grappling hook found with the axes and the spears in the 1920s.
22:50It's the sort of thing you use on shipboard, perhaps for just pulling the ship into the side, but also to link two vessels together for battle.
23:01Hooks like this are mentioned in one of the Norse sagas, which tells of a daring attack on London Bridge.
23:10It describes how the Vikings attached grappling hooks to its supports and rode off hard downstream, pulling the bridge and all those on it down behind them.
23:22Long the bridge is falling down, falling down, falling down. Long the bridge is falling down, my baby.
23:39Long the bridge is falling down, my baby.
23:42At this time, the English were burdened with crippling taxes to pay the Danegeld, and lived under the constant threat of Viking attack.
23:49They grew to loathe their tormentors, and there are stories of how they fought back and took revenge.
23:54Here in the village of Hadstock in Essex, there's a grisly tale of the punishment inflicted on a captured Viking.
24:03Local legend has it that for centuries, nailed to the door of the church was a piece of human skin.
24:12It's said that it came from a marauding Dane who was caught by the locals and flayed alive.
24:22Surprisingly, some of that skin still survives in the museum at nearby Saffron Walden.
24:29But is it really what it's claimed to be?
24:33This is it. A little tiny fragment that was preserved underneath one of the door hinges.
24:41Now, I've never seen preserved thousand-year-old human skin before, so I'm not really qualified to say that that's what it is.
24:49But it's a horrible thought that this might really be something that's been ripped from the back of a living Viking.
24:54But according to the museum records, there's absolutely no doubt about what it is.
25:00When it first came to the museum in 1847, it's described as a piece of human skin from the church door at Hadstock.
25:09And a year later, in 1848, it was examined by Mr. Quicket of the Royal College of Surgeons, who states,
25:17I've been fortunate in making out the specimen of skin you last sent me to be human.
25:21I found on it three hairs which I preserved.
25:25And he goes on further to say, I should state that the skin was in all probability removed from the back of the Dane,
25:31and that he was a fair-haired person.
25:33And in 1974, another test at Leeds University concluded that the grain pattern corresponds closely to human skin,
25:41and it was from a person with fair or greying hair.
25:46So, there doesn't seem to be any doubt.
25:49But now, for the first time, we can take it a stage further, and we can use modern genetic science to answer the question,
25:56is this really a relic of some terrible grisly event, or is it just simply another legend?
26:07We asked a team from the Ancient Biomolecules Centre in Oxford to find out.
26:11They were given permission to slice off a tiny piece and analyse its DNA.
26:16The team leader is Dr. Alan Cooper.
26:21Alan, did you actually manage to get any DNA out of that bit of skin?
26:26Well, we did. We were very pleased because we thought that the amount of degradation that the skin was showing
26:32would mean that there was no DNA left.
26:34But we were able to get quite a bit of DNA from the material inside the specimen
26:39once we'd taken off that outer, withered layer.
26:42So, what was it?
26:44Well, we tried a variety of human primers to see if we could pick up human DNA from the material
26:50and got a complete blank in several combinations.
26:53Then we thought we should try cow, and that came back for roaringly strong signal.
27:01So, we're pretty sure it's cow, unfortunately.
27:04So, how come all these scientists in the past, then, have been so wrong about it?
27:09Well, I think it was a very difficult bit of diagnosis, because it had been sitting on the door
27:15exposed to the elements for some considerable period of time, so it was quite weathered.
27:18I think, also, we might be underestimating some of the powers of forgery of some of these early
27:23artisans, because what we did notice was the skin was very thin, much thinner than you normally expect for a cow skin.
27:29So, I suspect it was taken from the underbelly or some other area.
27:33And it looked, therefore, a lot more like human skin.
27:36So, they might have been disguising it, perhaps, a little bit.
27:39So, perhaps it's just an ancient forgery, but it's one that obviously hit the mark.
27:48Take a piece of cowhide, add imagination, and by the 18th century, you've got a gruesome legend.
27:54Although the skin has turned out not to be human, this small story still seems to illustrate a bigger picture of the fear and hatred
28:06that must have existed between the English and the Danes.
28:09And this hatred finally boiled over into what can only be described as state-sponsored ethnic cleansing.
28:14Not all the Vikings in England were marauders bent on extortion.
28:25Danish settlers have been living peacefully here for over a hundred years.
28:33But in 1002, on St Brice's Day, the 13th of November,
28:38King Æthelred commanded that all Danes living in the country should be killed.
28:42This day was Saturday, on which the Danes are in the habit of bathing.
28:49And accordingly, at the set time, they were destroyed most ruthlessly.
28:58From the least even to the greatest, they spared neither age nor sex.
29:03The massacre on St Brice's Day provoked the wrath of the Vikings, especially as one of the victims was said to be the sister of Sven Forkbeard, the Danish king.
29:22Over the coming years, bitter hatred between the English and the Vikings would continue to intensify.
29:31Soon, it was a new generation at the top.
29:35In a tangle of invasion, exile and death, the English and Danish kings Æthelred and Sven Forkbeard passed on the fighting to their sons.
29:42Edmund Ironside and his young Viking adversary, Canute were head to head. Canute was still a teenager, but he was about to trigger the most dramatic shift in power in the history of Viking influence in these islands.
29:56And in 1016, after a summer of skirmishes, a confrontation in Essex proved decisive.
30:07At the Battle of Assenden, heavy losses were recorded on the English side, especially amongst the nobles.
30:12There was then killed Bishop Eyadnoth, Abbott Wulfseer, Ialdeman Elfrick, Ialdeman Gudwina, Ulf Kettle and Æthelweird.
30:28The flower of all England was cut down.
30:33With such an outcome, the English king was forced to give Canute northern and central England.
30:38And then, only a few months later, Edmund died, maybe from the wounds he'd suffered on the battlefield.
30:45The rest of the country had little choice but to turn to Canute.
30:53In an ancient ceremony, Canute was crowned king.
31:00The unthinkable had happened. The invaders had become rulers, and there was a Viking on the throne of England.
31:08The unthinkable had happened.
31:09The unthinkable had happened.
31:10But today, people only remember one story about Canute.
31:26King Canute tried to stop the tide coming in.
31:29The tide? Trying to send it back?
31:32Everyone thought he could do everything, but then he got his throne, he sat beside the sea, and he commanded it not to come in, and it did.
31:39So that thought he couldn't do everything.
31:41And got his feet rather wet, as I remember.
31:44We all know the story, but where did it come from?
31:46It's first mentioned in the Historia Anglorum, a 12th century mixture of history and moral fables.
31:57This tells us that Canute gave orders for his throne to be placed on the seashore as the tide was coming in,
32:03and that the king commanded the water not to rise and wet his clothes or feet.
32:07The tide obviously ignored the king's commands, but what came next in the story isn't often mentioned.
32:28Canute is actually making a point that no matter what his courtiers may think, he's just a man.
32:36Let all men know how empty and worthless is the power of kings.
32:40For there is none worthy of the name but God, whom heaven and earth and sea obey.
32:45The full story, then, puts rather a different slant on it.
32:54Perhaps we've had it wrong all these years, and it was really written to show how pious a Christian Canute was.
33:01We've no way of knowing whether this happened.
33:04It may simply be a moral tale, but it's interesting to note how we'd sooner believe in the arrogance of our kings than in their piety.
33:15But having seized the English crown by force, would Canute be able to hang on to it?
33:31Very little is known about his reign, but there's one priceless manuscript that contains a drawing of Canute that shows how he himself wanted to be seen.
33:38It was made at the time he donated a gold cross to the new minister at Winchester.
33:46As a Christian king, his power ultimately comes from Christ, seated well above him.
33:52But the hand on the hilt of his sword suggests a strong ruler who should not be challenged.
33:57And the monks are firmly in their place.
33:59Dr Ken Lawson is a leading authority on Canute.
34:05In a sense, it's political propaganda.
34:08And this is important to Canute, because he has no real claim to the English throne.
34:14When the church crowns and anoints him, this gives him a legitimacy, which he doesn't otherwise have.
34:20Okay, so if this is Canute Rex, the king, I presume this is the queen?
34:26That is Canute's queen, Emma.
34:29She'd previously, of course, been the queen of King Æthelred.
34:32She came second hand.
34:34So is this quite an astute move on Canute's part, then, to marry the widow of the previous king?
34:40It almost certainly is.
34:41I mean, she was probably quite a bit older than he was.
34:44I don't think it was a love match of any kind.
34:47Because Emma knows the English political system, she can give Canute advice on personalities,
34:54and in particular, on how to treat the church.
34:59The giving of the great gold cross is meant to show his piety and generosity to the church.
35:04But although Canute could be generous to those who were important to him, there was also a ruthless side to his character.
35:16The shady side of him is partly, probably, very heavy taxation.
35:21Taxation which is enforced by people unable to pay taxes forfeiting the land.
35:27And the coercive power behind all that are the professional soldiers known as housecarls,
35:34who Canute may have employed in considerable numbers.
35:37It's possible there were garrisons of housecarls in certain cities.
35:41And they are the people who, in the last analysis, will come and persuade you to do what the king wants.
35:47So these are Canute's heavy mob, are they?
35:49Yes, they are probably very heavy.
35:51Such was Canute's ruthlessness that he was able to build a huge North Sea Empire.
36:00Three years after he seized the English throne, he succeeded his brother as king of Denmark.
36:06Then, using money from English taxes, he conquered Norway, and then part of southern Sweden.
36:12Even the Scots accepted him as their overlord.
36:14Canute's empire stretched from the English Channel to the Baltic.
36:27It was the most dramatic rise to power of any Viking ruler in history.
36:31By 1030, a large proportion of the British Isles were under Scandinavian control.
36:37But not all under the Danes.
36:38Earlier, Norwegian Vikings had captured the islands on the Sea Road from Shetland to the Irish Sea.
36:45And here, the picture of Viking rule was quite different.
36:55On the Isle of Man, it appears to be a story of integration more than domination.
37:00A view that's championed by archaeologist Andrew Johnson from Manx National Heritage.
37:13The Viking involvement with the island is not so much one of invasion and of driving out the local population, seizing the best land, all this kind of thing.
37:24I think, instead, what you've got is a relatively small number of people coming and being absorbed by the existing population.
37:35But making a very, very considerable imprint on that population.
37:43Evidence to support this theory came to light in the 1980s, during the excavation of an ancient graveyard under Peel Castle.
37:49Andrew was on site when the team stumbled on an intriguing grave.
37:56In a Christian cemetery, a woman had been buried with grave goods, in the pagan tradition.
38:05The first thing that was apparent were her leg bones.
38:09And, oddly enough, it looked as if, you know, perhaps she had a third leg.
38:14And, obviously, that couldn't possibly be the case.
38:16And, the closer we looked at this, we realised that this bar-shaped thing down her right side was actually iron.
38:24It was actually a piece of iron.
38:26The object must have been important.
38:29But no-one on the team could tell what it was.
38:32It was like nothing they'd seen before.
38:34Then, there were a few phone calls to various archaeologists, and the suggestion came back.
38:40Well, what if it's a cooking spit?
38:47And that's exactly what it turned out to be.
38:50A symbol of domestic power.
38:52Part of a wealthy female burial.
38:55Along with the spit, there were other domestic objects.
39:01A knife.
39:03A pair of shears into which was rusted a bone comb.
39:07And a necklace of multi-coloured beads, of glass, jet and amber.
39:11These objects suggested that this woman was a Viking.
39:18But, strangely, there was no sign of the brooches that were a characteristic part of everyday Viking dress.
39:25So, who was she?
39:31I think that she was a local Celt.
39:35Someone who was married to one of these new arrivals.
39:41And probably this was an arranged marriage.
39:44And this would be a perfect way for, you know, a Scandinavian who didn't want to get into the whole risky business of fighting to take over land.
39:54But sought to gain land through marriage.
40:01So is there any more evidence for intermarriage elsewhere on the island?
40:07Viking runic inscriptions on Christian crosses give the names of people they commemorated.
40:13And those who had them made.
40:14This one declares that it was raised by Torleif Hnaghi to the memory of his son Fiak.
40:26Now this is fascinating.
40:28Because Torleif Hnaghi is a Viking name.
40:31But his son's name is Celtic.
40:32Now the most likely explanation is that Fiak's mother was a Celt, who despite being married to a Viking, had chosen to name her son in her own language.
40:42This seems like more evidence of intermarriage, of the mingling of two very distinct cultures.
40:47And the result of this integrated society is the extraordinary survival of a remnant of Viking rule.
41:04Tinwold Day.
41:06Each year, the island's parliament meets on this grassy mound to conduct its business.
41:11Open to all.
41:13Almost exactly as they did a thousand years ago.
41:15Learned Deensters, I exhort you to proclaim to the people, in ancient form, such laws as have been enacted during the past year, and which have received Her Gracious Majesty's royal assent.
41:33Electronic Transactions Act, which facilitates electronic transactions.
41:39Our origins of the artisanal ceremony certainly go back well into our Viking period, but they established the form of government here on the island, and promulgated, read out, the laws which they were suggesting that the public of the Isle of Man should live under annually.
41:55And that is really a tradition which we today, centuries later, have been carrying out.
42:00The Viking rulers have handed down their political traditions, but has their genetic legacy also been handed down?
42:13What proportion of today's manxmen are direct descendants of the Vikings?
42:18The answer may be revealed by the genetic survey of the British Isles, being carried out by the BBC and University College London.
42:25What you have to do is scrape the inside of the mouth ten times, and I'll add this tube of preservative, which just preserves the cells that we're actually collecting when you're doing swabbing.
42:38They're sampling males because it's the Y chromosome, which only males have, that will clearly show Norwegian genetic markers.
42:46Back in the lab, analysis of the samples is just beginning.
42:49When we carry out just the first preliminary analysis, we see that about 15% of the chromosomes in the Isle of Man are only found in Norway, so it looks like those have a Norwegian origin.
43:02So there are indications of a strong Viking presence here, confirming the evidence from archaeology.
43:07The genetics does indicate that there is Viking genetic input, and that could be precisely through the kind of intermarriages that are documented in the archaeological record with Viking men joining the society.
43:24Residents Act, which provides for the registration of residents and for regular...
43:28The enduring nature of Viking rule in the Isle of Man contrasts sharply with the short-lived experience of Viking rule in England, where it would last for only 26 years.
43:39King Canute died in 1035. His sons were unable to hold on to their father's gains for long, and within seven years, the impressive North Sea Empire that he'd built had collapsed.
43:55Canute had been king of all England, and he was buried like one alongside the Saxon kings in Winchester's ancient Minster.
44:03But he wasn't allowed to rest in peace. When this new cathedral was built, his bones were moved, along with those of other kings and bishops, into wooden caskets.
44:15And here, there's an ignominious postscript. Centuries later, they became the target of round-head aggression during the English Civil War.
44:24Cromwell's troops effectively looted the cathedral. They rode up the Isle, some of them on horseback, running more or less amok.
44:38And when they got here, of course, looking up to right and left, what did they see with these boxes with crowns on the top?
44:44Well, you can imagine, a symbol of royal authority. It was precisely the sort of thing that they had it in for.
44:50So they pulled down the boxes from on top, smash, out came the contents, and then they picked up the bones and used the bones as missiles with which to break the windows, which had idolatrous biblical imagery on them.
45:05The surviving bones were later replaced in the chests, but they'd been jumbled up.
45:14So where exactly are Canute's remains?
45:18Is it possible to have a look in the chests?
45:21Well, the current feeling is that one should leave these human remains to lie in peace, so the simple answer to that is no, but I was allowed to check the conservation state of the remains about ten years ago, I suppose it was, and also to take some photographs, which I've got here.
45:40So this is the chest that we've been looking at on the side there.
45:45I mean, what this looks like is just a collection of long bones, few bits of pelvis and some arm bones.
45:50Yes.
45:51There's no complete skeletons in there, are there?
45:53Exactly so, and what seems to have happened is that during one of the re-sortings, they sorted out these bones osteologically and decided they ought to put the long bones into these two new chests.
46:02The result, then, is that some of the other chests, for example, one which only bears the name of one monarch, and yet, as you can see, we've got five skulls in there.
46:12So, a complete jumble.
46:14But Canute is somewhere in amongst one of these chests, you think?
46:19I don't think there's any reason to suppose that Canute's bones aren't somewhere amongst this lot, even jumbled up.
46:24This remarkable episode of Viking rule in England finished when the Anglo-Saxon dynasty was restored almost three decades after it had been overthrown.
46:39In 1042, Edward the Confessor took back the English throne.
46:43It so happened that Denmark was too busy fighting Norway to launch any more contenders for the English throne, and so it looked as if the Viking Age in England had finally come to an end.
47:01But the death of Edward the Confessor meant that the crown was once again up for grabs, and this time the Norwegians were ready.
47:08The extraordinary tale of what really happened in 1066 is in the next and final episode of Blood of the Vikings.
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