Guthrum sat in Chippenham like a West Saxon king, Alfred would become the viking marauder, waging guerilla war against the entrenched invaders and their native allies. Alfred’s flight into the Somerset marshes was a strategic withdrawal that revealed his keen appreciation of the military situation. Rather than retreat into Devon to join Ealdorman Odda, Alfred chose instead to contest Guthrum’s control over the West Saxon heartland by maintaining a military presence in Somerset and Wiltshire. With the Danes in possession of his estates and food-rents, Alfred raided in order to feed his men. But by harrying the lands of his foreign enemies and the traitors who supported them, Alfred also reminded his subjects that their king had not abdicated and still had power to punish the disloyal. Guthrum, on the other hand, lacked the manpower to protect the lands and people he now claimed to rule. In a sense, Alfred and Guthrum were waging a war for hearts and minds; the former knew that he could not regain his kingdom, and the latter that he could not maintain even the pretence of rule, without the active support of the local elites.
Raiding
Viking Slave Raid on woman
At least part of the Viking slave trade explicitly depended on sex trafficking, especially in the East. Settlements were specifically targeted for the enslavement of women, while their menfolk were often killed on the spot. Young women were transported long distances to be sold as sex slaves and were routinely assaulted by their captors along the way.
Raidler Öncesi Vikingler Britanyayı Biliyordu
The notion that, before the raids, the Scandinavians were ignorant of what lay ‘west over the sea’ is nonsense. They probably had a good idea of life at least along the east coast, in particular around the markets and monasteries—but this is not the same as complete familiarity with England, its people and landscapes, its politics and culture. It may be that much of this early period was essentially one of tentative exploration, mapping out vulnerabilities while ensuring relatively safe lines of supply and retreat.
İlk Viking Raidi Salme
However, the earliest actual evidence for a Viking raid is not textual at all, but archaeological. Crucially, considering that it predates the Lindisfarne attack by more than forty years, it does not come from the West and the British Isles, but from the East, and the Baltic. Around the middle of the eighth century, c. 750, a Swedish maritime expedition came to violent grief on or near the island of Saaremaa off the coast of Estonia. We know this because of the chance discoveries from 2008 to 2012 of two boats full of dead warriors, buried by the seashore in what is now the village of Salme. They had been set up parallel to the water some forty metres apart on an isthmus, at a strategic point where ships would pass. The graves would have been a visible landmark—they were intended to be seen, and remembered. Before the excavation of the Salme find, the largest number of bodies previously known from a Viking boat burial was four, arguably five. The first of the Salme vessels, the smaller of the two, contained the corpses of seven men; astonishingly, the second Salme ship contained no fewer than thirty-four bodies.
Viking Yağma Taktiği Örneği
In practice, the vikings’ success depended on intimate knowledge of the area on which they preyed, and careful calculation. It was not simply a matter of smash and grab. One manuscript demonstrates very well just how canny ninth-century viking raiders could be. It is a grand Gospel-book, made to the highest of standards in England in the eighth century. An inscription added to it in Old English about a hundred years later tells how it was taken as loot by ‘the heathen army’ and then bought back by an English aristocrat and his family, who in turn gifted it to Canterbury Cathedral. Where the vikings had got the book from is not clear – but despite being pagans, they evidently knew its value, and had kept it safe and undamaged so that they could profit from selling the book back to a devout Anglo-Saxon.