From the desk of the pastor for Aug. 24, 2025

The Lord be with you! Although The History Channel is not the best place for well researched information about the past, it is the great popularizer of such events. Its hit show Vikings may have stretched the truth (a lot), but it did cover a very important and often forgotten event: the Viking conquest of England.

Around AD 780 Vikings began to raid England, France, and parts of Germany. The Vikings would raze towns to the ground, enslave women and children, and steal whatever valuables they could find. Across Western Europe the Vikings were able to raid deep inland due to their ships having very low drafts, i.e. they did not need deep rivers and could go almost anywhere the water flowed. Eventually, these raids forced the Frankish kings to organize relatively large armies or buy the Vikings off.

The peoples of England were less lucky. At the time of the first Viking raids, Picts, Britons, and Scots lived in modern day Scotland. South of them in Wales and England lived Angles and Saxons who were Germans but increasingly grew into one ethnic group and, of course, the Welsh. These groups did not like each other much, but they did accept Christianity and so tolerated other Christians. England only had a half a million people in it with very few towns of note - York and London being the only ones with any great level of development. Scattered across the island, however, were monasteries that slowly gained wealth in the form of religious art and church vessels (chalices and vestments). The Vikings discovered that England lacked any strong powers and that monasteries were easy pickings - monks did not fight very well.

The resulting raids intensified over the next century till the Vikings actually invaded England for outright conquest. By AD 865 eastern England had became the Danelaw - a territory occupied by Vikings who treated the populace as a conquered race. For a while the Vikings attempted to consolidate their holdings but were unable to do so. The Vikings would only be forced out of England entirely at the Battle of Stamford Bridge in 1066. If that year sounds familiar, it should. For in that year the Normans successfully invaded and conquered England, but that is a story for another day.

The Viking raids against England, and Western Europe more generally, reveal how fragile and chaotic politics were at that time. The lack of military power available to kings, dukes, and counts forced them to create defensive works to protect their own territory. Wooden palisades eventually gave way to stone keeps. The Middle Ages of great castles and powerful noblemen started to exist because of the Vikings.

Eventually, missionaries were accepted in Scandinavia and those lands too became Christian. The conversion of the Baltic would take more than kind words: crusades would be launched. Perhaps the most misunderstood part of the Middle Ages, the crusades will be our next topic.

In His Sacred Heart,

Fr. John