The Vikings brought Ireland’s Golden Age to an end. The earliest known Viking raids were on England: Portland in Dorset was sacked c. 789 and the Northumbrian monastery of Lindisfarne got the same treatment in 793. Two years later a Viking fleet sailed south through the Hebrides, sacking Iona before descending on the Irish coast, where several other monasteries were sacked. Wealthy and unprotected, monasteries became a favourite target for the Vikings, who took full advantage of their swift ships to launch hit-and-run raids, plundering, kidnapping and withdrawing before the locals could organise a defence. As the Vikings became bolder they sailed up Ireland’s many navigable rivers right into the heart of the country: the Shannon became a Viking highway and longships anchored on Lough Neagh and Lough Erne. Ireland’s fragmented political structure meant that there was no coordinated response to the raids and at times it seemed as if the Vikings could go anywhere and do anything they wanted. The saints seemed impotent to defend their monasteries - Armagh was sacked three times in one month alone in 840. Much of the damage done by the Vikings was short term. The loss of crops and livestock would cause hunger but they could be replaced in a season or two. Most Irish houses, even those of kings, were built of wicker and thatch and what burned easily was also easily rebuilt. The losses of manpower (and womanpower) to Viking slave raids must have been a more serious long-term blow to farming communities but the better off, at least, stood a chance of being ransomed. The cultural damage caused by the attacks on the monasteries was, however, immense and long lasting. Books were destroyed for the sake of their decorated covers and reliquaries and vessels made of gold or silver were hacked up to make it easier for the raiders to share out the loot among themselves. Worst of all, the communities of learned monks were dispersed; many of them were killed or sold as slaves.
In the 840s the Vikings began to build fortified camps called longphorts around the coast, to use as bases from which to raid all year round. By the tenth century, some of these - Dublin, Wexford, Waterford, Cork and Limerick - had developed into Ireland’s first port towns. In contrast to England, where the Vikings conquered and settled large areas of countryside, in Ireland they were never able to win permanent control over any land outside the immediate vicinity of their coastal bases. On the face of it.
Plate 26 Devenish monastic round tower; belfry, treasury and refuge from Viking raiders
SoHrce: John Haywood it would have seemed that Ireland’s disunity should have made it more vulnerable to conquest by the Vikings than England, which was divided into only four powerful centralised kingdoms. In fact the opposite was true. In early medieval Europe it was always the centralised kingdoms that got conquered most easily. After the ‘Great Army’ of Danish Vikings invaded England in 865, the kingdoms of Northumbria and East Anglia both collapsed as soon as their kings had been killed in battle. Mercia too collapsed when its king decided he would prefer not to get killed and fled the country. Only Wessex survived to prevent England becoming Daneland. The centralised nature of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms meant that it was relatively easy for the Vikings to destroy the small ruling class and take over; just one battle might do the trick. Little trouble would then be expected from the leaderless peasantry. Ireland, however, had hundreds of kings and even more lineages from which new kings could be chosen. Many Irish kings did die in battle against the Vikings. Six were killed in one battle alone at Islandbridge near Dublin in 919. But with such decentralised leadership no victory could ever have the decisive knockout effect it could in England. Nor was there much chance of a lasting peace agreement with so many kings to negotiate with. Once they were settled in their towns, the Vikings lost their main military advantage over the Irish, that is their mobility, and they became more vulnerable to counterattack. By 1000 all the Viking towns had been forced to acknowledge Irish kings as their over-lords and had become integrated into Irish political life, tolerated for the trade they brought and their fleets of warships, which made them useful allies in the wars of the Irish kings. Converted to Christianity, and in many cases Gaelic speaking, the Irish Vikings had, by this time, become known as Ostmen, to distinguish them from real Scandinavians.
World History
