On 8 June 793, raiders from Scandinavia attacked the monastery at Lindisfarne off the Northumbrian coast, killing monks and carrying off treasure. The attack shocked Christian Europe and began nearly three centuries of Viking involvement in Britain.
Raiding, then settling
The early raids targeted monasteries — undefended, coastal, and full of portable wealth. But the popular image of hit-and-run piracy is only the first phase. From the 860s the Great Heathen Army came to conquer and stay, overrunning the kingdoms of Northumbria, East Anglia and Mercia.
Only Wessex survived, under Alfred the Great, who was driven into the Somerset marshes before defeating the Danes at Edington in 878 and negotiating a division of England.
The Danelaw
The agreed Danish-ruled territory covered eastern and northern England, roughly north and east of a line from London to Chester. Within it, Danish law and custom applied, and Scandinavian settlers farmed, traded and intermarried.
Jorvik — York — became a major Viking city and trading centre, and excavations there in the 1970s uncovered whole streets of preserved timber buildings, now the Jorvik Viking Centre.
What they left in the language
Old Norse is embedded in everyday English, including some of its most basic words: sky, skin, skirt, knife, egg, husband, window, leg, ugly, happy, die, take, give, get, they, them, their. The sk- sound at the start of an English word is usually a Norse import.
Place names are even clearer. -by means farmstead (Grimsby, Whitby, Derby), -thorpe an outlying settlement (Scunthorpe), -thwaite a clearing (Bassenthwaite), -toft a plot of land. Map them and you have drawn the Danelaw.
Kings and the end
Renewed attacks under Sweyn Forkbeard and his son Cnut put a Dane on the English throne from 1016 to 1035, ruling a North Sea empire spanning England, Denmark and Norway.
The Viking age in England ended in September 1066 at Stamford Bridge, where Harold Godwinson destroyed a Norwegian invasion under Harald Hardrada. Three weeks later Harold marched south and lost at Hastings to the Normans — who were themselves descended from Vikings settled in France.
Scotland and the isles
Norse settlement in Orkney and Shetland was so complete that the islands were Norwegian territory until 1469, when they were pledged to Scotland as part of a dowry and never redeemed. Norse influence on their dialect, place names and identity remains strong, and Shetland’s Up Helly Aa fire festival, though Victorian in origin, celebrates it.
The horns
Vikings did not wear horned helmets. There is no archaeological evidence for it whatsoever. The image comes from a costume designer for a production of Wagner’s Ring cycle in 1876, and it has proved impossible to shift.