The Vikings In Britain 1 20
Mops
The Scandinavion world ond Europe in the eorly
Viking Age
I
Scandinavia in the Viking Age
63
2
Scandinavian settlement in Eneland
83
The making
of modern Europe was a slow and laborious
business
which the historian simplifies at peril. Modern conceptions of national growth and of national types are too easiiy applied to situations in the past where they are distorting, anachronistic and positively misleading. To be obsessed with the image of peaceful and peaceJoving Scandinavian farmers, taken from the history of
Scandinavia over the last two centuries, can lead to falsification as great as that provoked by the nursery and early schoolboy image
of
ruthless Viking axemen, horn-helmeted and heathen, breakers of skulls and despoilers of churches. Reality was much more complex.
Not all farmers love peace. A ravager in May can turn a skilful hand to corn-harvest in August. One of the main objects of this book is to point to the highly complex human situation of raid and settlement, of piracy and cultivation that we mask under the conveniently smooth description of the viking Age.
This Viking Age with its rough chronological extent from 800 to
I 100 had a tremendous effect on the making of modern Europe. The process of recovery from the economic dislocation and political disaster which attended the fall of the Roman Empire in the West was not far advanced when the fresh wave of barbarian invasion struck. The historian, and especially the social and economic historian with his knowledge of happenings still to come, can see that this recovery was more than recovery, that Europe was proliferating
ln new growth, that the Carolingian world was different from and in many ways superior to the late Classical world it aped and thought to be reconstituting. But when Charles the Great was
crowned emperor in the basilica of St Peter's at Rome by Pope Leo
2
The Vikings in Britain
The Scandinavian
III
on Christmas Day, 800, to many contemporaries it must have
The Scandinavion world ond Europe in the eorly
Viking Age
I
Scandinavia in the Viking Age
63
2
Scandinavian settlement in Eneland
83
The making
of modern Europe was a slow and laborious
business
which the historian simplifies at peril. Modern conceptions of national growth and of national types are too easiiy applied to situations in the past where they are distorting, anachronistic and positively misleading. To be obsessed with the image of peaceful and peaceJoving Scandinavian farmers, taken from the history of
Scandinavia over the last two centuries, can lead to falsification as great as that provoked by the nursery and early schoolboy image
of
ruthless Viking axemen, horn-helmeted and heathen, breakers of skulls and despoilers of churches. Reality was much more complex.
Not all farmers love peace. A ravager in May can turn a skilful hand to corn-harvest in August. One of the main objects of this book is to point to the highly complex human situation of raid and settlement, of piracy and cultivation that we mask under the conveniently smooth description of the viking Age.
This Viking Age with its rough chronological extent from 800 to
I 100 had a tremendous effect on the making of modern Europe. The process of recovery from the economic dislocation and political disaster which attended the fall of the Roman Empire in the West was not far advanced when the fresh wave of barbarian invasion struck. The historian, and especially the social and economic historian with his knowledge of happenings still to come, can see that this recovery was more than recovery, that Europe was proliferating
ln new growth, that the Carolingian world was different from and in many ways superior to the late Classical world it aped and thought to be reconstituting. But when Charles the Great was
crowned emperor in the basilica of St Peter's at Rome by Pope Leo
2
The Vikings in Britain
The Scandinavian
III
on Christmas Day, 800, to many contemporaries it must have