Since the days of the Anglo-Norman historians it has been commonly assumed that the nordhere that Edward’s army ‘ravaged very severely’ in 909 was the Danish army of Northumbria with its base of power centred on York. For the Anglo-Normans who were largely (and often solely) dependent upon the texts of the Chronicle for their knowledge of the Anglo-Saxon period, this was the only interpretation available to them. To this point in ASC, specific reference to Scandinavian settlement in England is limited to regions north and east of Watling Street, the border established by Alfred and Guthrum in the treaty they reached between 878 and 886.
It may now, however, be possible to consider an alternative interpretation. Since the mid-19th century and through the ongoing study of place-names, stone sculpture, silver and/or coin hoards, burials, grave goods, and other archaeological finds in north-west England, acceptance has grown among scholars that by the first decade of 10th century another Scandinavian immigration (ignored by ASC’s chroniclers and quite separate from the earlier one in eastern England), was underway in north-western regions (Wainwright 1975, pp. 182-184; Edwards 1998; Andersen 2006, pp. 9-58; Graham-Campbell and Philpott 2009).
One assumption fundamental to the arguments that follow is that the early years of Edward the Elder’s reign saw the start of wide-scale Viking settlement in north-west England. What evidence there is suggests that this immigration was, in part at least, related to the expulsion from Dublin and other regions in Ireland c. 902 of large numbers of Scandinavians under the leadership of Hiberno-Norse kings (Wainwright 1975, p. 219).
Colman Etchingham has argued that the Vikings whose base of power was centred on Dublin from the mid-9th century and who are at times referred by Irish annalists as OI Finngaill (white foreigners) were
The battle of the Holme took place c. 902; the peace at Tiddingford in 905 or 906.
‘primarily Norwegian’ and distinguished by the Irish from the Dubgaill (‘black foreigners’). This second term, according to Etchingham, ‘most commonly denotes Vikings active in Britain, who were primarily Danes and who intervened in Ireland in 851-2 and 875-7’ (Etchingham, 2014, p. 37). Etchingham here counters a theory put forward by David Dumville (2005, pp. 78-93) and more recently developed by Clare Downham (2007, pp. xvi-xx, 14-15 and 22-23; 2009, pp. 150-152) that Dubgaill refers to a family dynasty that established itself in Dublin in the early 850s and expanded its rule to York in the 860s, creating a sort of Scandinavian axis between these two centres of power.5 6
World History
