History Forum / General / British History / September 2006

I'm reading about the peoples who migrated to Britain in the early Middle
Ages. I used to think of the Brits as one people but later learned the Brits
were invaded and conqured by quite a number of people: the Romans, the
Saxons, Normans, and various Vikings.  (The French Normans were actually
Vikings that had settled in Normandy.) It seems native Brits had a devil of
a time protecting their borders for at least a thousand years or so. All th
knights and castles came after the Vikings but would have offered scant
protection against the fearsome longboats, which could navigate ocean or
river with ease. We are really not sure why the Viking raids suddenly
stopped sometime around the 10th century or so. They had invaded at will
nearly every city and monestary of England and the continent. In some places
Vikings had drained cities of all currency. Use of money had to be
abandoned, or maybe that was done on purpose so the Vikings wouldn't have
anything to carry away. Vikings left a mark on the English language,
particularly in the way of nautical terms, and their alphabet was somehow
related to the Greek or Roman I believe. The Vikings even traded with Islam,
sometimes selling war captives to Bagdad as slaves. I have to wonder how
brutal these raids were, whether there was any semblance of civility. It
seems however that the Vikings knew there was more to be plundered by not
destroying their victims too completely because then they could return later
and plunder again and again.

Of course, the plundering was going on everywhere except places like Papua
New Guinea. Ironically, countries that got plundered a lot tended to advance
faster in later years, at least in many cases. New Guinea suffered from a
lack of cross polination.  Another irony is that the Viking conquests help
unite Britain into a country.

Cheers for the USA,
John

ps. I could sure use a Guiness stout right now.