KS2 / KS3 History: Viking invaders and settlers

Over 1,000 years ago, on June 8th 793 AD, a small band of Vikings sailed down the eastern coast of England. Their target was a monastery, called Lindisfarne, and they decided to launch a surprise attack. It's likely that the first thing the monks saw was the outline of two or three ships on the horizon, but that would hardly have been unusual. Living here, they would have been accustomed to the arrival of ships from all sorts of places. Maybe a few of the monks came down onto the beach to welcome the newcomers with open arms. But the monks weren't prepared for visitors like these. Because these were Viking warriors. And they had come to kill the monks and steal the monastery's treasure. Life in England was about to change forever, because the savage attack on Lindisfarne was just the beginning.

Fifty years after the attack on the Lindisfarne monastery, a huge force of around 3,000 Vikings arrived on our shores, and they wanted to conquer the whole of England. This was truly a force to be reckoned with. The Anglo-Saxons called it the Great Heathen Army, and it wasn't just a raiding party intent on slaves and gold. The Great Heathen Army wanted everything, and to get it, they would have to take on the Anglo-Saxons. The conquest of England was a task far greater than anything the Vikings had ever attempted before. England was divided into four powerful, well-organised kingdoms: Northumbria, East Anglia, Mercia, and Wessex. So to succeed, the Vikings would have to defeat them all.

The Viking army didn't stay on the English coast, but struck at the very heart of England, a town in Derbyshire called Repton. When the Great Heathen Army arrived here in Repton, they'd come to take Mercia. Now, Repton's small and out of the way today, but 1,000 years ago, it was the most important town in Mercia, and Mercia was the second most powerful kingdom in all of England. When the Vikings came to Repton in the winter of 873 AD, they transformed the sacred church of St Wystan into a fortress. It was an important step in their bold attempt to take the whole of England.

If you look down just beyond the graveyard, you can see a stretch of water, and that's a relic of a much older course of the River Trent. That's how the Vikings would have approached, along the river, and then they would have moored the ships just down there and come out onto the bank to set about the business of takeover. In the churchyard, archaeologists have dug up the remains of the Vikings' impressive fortress. We've got a D-shaped enclosure with a fourth side created by a river. And, great tacticians that they were, the Vikings here have even employed the Christian church and turned it into a defensive gateway into their fortress. Genius!

There's not only a fortress, but the remains of the warriors themselves. Just here is grave number eight. That's one of the most important Viking graves ever found in Britain. I must be just about standing on the spot. Just about here. Imagine that! Right here, archaeologists discovered the remains of a six-foot-tall skeleton. A typical Viking warrior. He was not a Christian. He was a pagan, believing in many gods. He was buried with his most precious possessions. The Viking belief dictated that whatever you needed and wanted in the next life had to go into the ground with you.

First of all, you've got the perfect weapon. Which is not just giving him the ability to fight, but it says something about who he is in life. This is actually an iron sword in a scabbard. It's a wooden scabbard with a fleece lining to protect the blade, and then on the outside, there's a leather casing. So a man on the battlefield with a sword is already someone you would notice. But a man with a sword and a scabbard is another step up again. So this man was clearly a leader amongst his own kind. This is a little silver hammer. The Repton Warrior was wearing this around his neck in the same way that a Christian would wear a cross. It's connecting him physically to the god Thor.

For a man like the Repton Warrior, everything about him was building to one ideal conclusion. He wanted a heroic death on the battlefield that would guarantee him access to the next world, which for him was Valhalla, a place where he would fight all day with other heroes and then feast all night. It was the perfect Viking heaven. For the Anglo-Saxons, this is the worst-case scenario, because it's in the Viking mindset to fight to the death. And it's a horde of men who think like this that the Anglo-Saxons here had to face.

The English kingdom fell into the hands of Vikings like the Repton Warrior. Only Wessex, led by its king, Alfred, withstood the brutal attack, and even he wasn't quite strong enough to drive them out completely. Eventually, Alfred and the Vikings agreed to make peace, the terms of which basically gave the Vikings control of a territory north of a line stretching between Chester and the Thames. The territory became known as the Danelaw. It was basically a Danish Viking colony. All of this land that I'm travelling through now was under Danish Viking control. The most important city in the Danelaw was called Jorvik, or York as we know it today. Over 10,000 people, men, women and children, lived here, and it became an important place to buy, sell and make goods.

The things Vikings used in their everyday lives. There's a comb for personal grooming and taking care of head lice. You've got amber jewellery, possibly from the Baltic. This is a gaming piece, and it's walrus ivory, maybe from as far away as Greenland. Along with these fascinating objects the Vikings left in the ground, there's something else that remains from the Viking age, something that we all use every day, and that's our language. How many of the words we use every day actually have their roots in Viking words?

Lots and lots of really basic everyday words. Things like eggs, skirts, I see some bags over there. The sky, windows, other things that I can see include skin, leg, skull…

So very simple words?

Very simple, basic words for things, yeah. Also words which describe how we feel and how we react to stuff. So if you're angry, if you're happy, if you're ill…

Those words as well?

All these words come from Norse.

Does language reveal anything about the extent of Viking colonisation?

There are lots of Old Norse place names. Words which are wholly or partly from Old Norse. So anything involving '-by'. B-Y. Places like Grimsby…

Or Whitby.

Whitby, yes. Selby.

And what does the '-by' mean?

"-By" seems to mean a settlement, village.

It's amazing, isn't it? We're talking about people who arrived, you know, 1,300, 1,200 years ago, and yet the words they brought with them are still echoing around us today.

They're all around, yes. That's right. That's right.

When you come to a place like this, is easy to see the impact the Vikings have had on us. And it's not just the place names or the words in our everyday language. The Vikings are part of who we are. By setting up their own towns, and by marrying the locals, their blood mixed with our blood. And they're still here with us today.