Between AD 865 and 878, a Viking army wreaked havoc on the kingdoms of Anglo-Saxon England, leading to political conquest, large-scale settlement, and extensive Scandinavian cultural and linguistic changes. The raiders’ tactics moved away from the largely coastal hit-and-run affairs of previous Viking incursions on the British Isles, which had begun in the 790s as a quest for portable wealth in the form of silver and slaves, and they instead now penetrated deep into the countryside, moving rapidly by road and river, exploiting internal divisions, and overwintering at strategic locations. Their new aims were longer-term: land seizure and political conquest.
This critical period for English history led to revolutionary changes in land ownership, society, and economy, including the growth of towns and industry, while transformations in power politics would ultimately see the rise of Wessex as the pre-eminent kingdom. Yet despite the pivotal role of the so-called Great Army (micel here in Old English) in these events, little was known of it until recently. Our primary documentary source, a set of annals compiled in the late 9th century called the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, provides few insights into its activities and intentions, other than the names of its winter camps, and archaeological evidence largely remained elusive. Some historians questioned whether the Chronicle, which described Viking fleets as comprising hundreds of longships, could be trusted, and they played down the scale of the Viking threat.
In the last decade, however, our understanding of the Great Army has been transformed by a wealth of newly recovered evidence. This enables us, for the first time, to identify the precise locations and immense scale of the winter camps. We now know more about the activities of the Army, which extended far beyond the purely military to include trade, manufacturing, and craft-working. The new evidence provides fresh insights into a period that was crucial to the emergence of a unified English kingdom, the development of urban centres, and the precipitation of its first industrial revolution. Now that the archaeological signature of the Great Army has been identified, its traces are starting to be revealed beyond the winter camps, across the rural landscape of northern and eastern England, revealing a story of major changes in the countryside too.
