More Vikings quickly sailed across the North Sea to join this new violent expedition into Anglo-Saxon land.

And these forces merged into a vast war band that ravaged Anglo-Saxon England as a huge mobile unit which became known as the Great Heathen Army.

When the Vikings weren't pillaging, burning, looting, enslaving, and plundering, what were they doing?

The Vikings are so defined in our imaginations by their physical and psychological aggression.

It is hard to imagine a Viking warrior simply watching a sunset or playing a game with a child. But surely they did do those things. Unfortunately, the question of what the life of a Viking was actually like when they weren't burning down monasteries or sailing stormy seas is a difficult one to answer. Partly, that's because the Vikings didn't often write about themselves.

Yes, they had runes, but this was a mostly oral culture for the span of the Viking Age. Instead, it was the people who encountered the Vikings, often violently, who wrote about them. The Anglo-Saxons described them in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. Ahmad ibn Fadlan, a 10th century Arabic traveler and writer, described his encounters with the Vikings of Eastern Europe, the Rus, describing his impression of them. Even the Old Norse sagas that described the adventures and mythology of the Viking Age can't entirely be trusted, mostly being written down centuries after the fact. So instead, when we're trying to piece together the lives of ordinary Vikings in their quieter moments from their own perspective, we have to look at archaeological evidence.

One vivid example of this evidence comes from Anglo-Saxon England during an incredibly important moment in the Viking Age. In the year 865, roughly 70 years after the Viking raid on Lindisfarne, a massive Viking invasion landed on the shores of Anglo-Saxon England and began a new phase of warfare.

Rather than skirting along the coast, attacking vulnerable settlements, and then sailing back across to their Norse heartlands, these Vikings stayed put. They didn't leave.

More Vikings quickly sailed across the North Sea to join this new violent expedition into Anglo-Saxon land. And these forces merged into a vast war band that ravaged Anglo-Saxon England as a huge mobile unit which became known as the Great Heathen Army. It stayed for over a decade, going from kingdom to kingdom, torching Anglo-Saxon land and taking its riches. It was a force that almost entirely put an end to the rule of the Anglo-Saxons.

This new Viking permanence left traces right across England. As the seasons changed, as the winters came, and as they were joined by increasing numbers of women and children, this Great Heathen Army needed camps. A camp creates a kind of society. It creates normalcy and moments of the mundane. In other words, it creates the perfect environment to look at what Viking life was like when they weren't roaring into battle. So what did Viking daily life look like in the camps of the Great Heathen Army?

What did these people do in their spare time? What did they eat? Were there many children around? I wanted to know the answers. So to find out, I put those questions to Dr. Eleanor Barraclough, who is an expert on the history and culture of the Vikings during the History Extra podcast. When you have those very early hit-and-run raids, it's for the most part it's going to be male. It's going to be a handful of ships, maybe one, two, three ships, something like that. You know, they might have to camp sometimes, but for the most part they're going to be sticking to the coastlines on their ships, getting in and out. But here, yeah, it's it's much more complex in terms of what we're seeing in terms of that social makeup of what these camps look like. What Eleanor's describing here is a shift from seeing Vikings as purely hit-and-run invaders to a much more permanent force, understanding them as camps of people on the move. And these camps weren't small. Estimates indicate that the Great Heathen Army had around 3,000 warriors.

But they weren't the only ones living on these sites. There's plenty of evidence of more ordinary human life, personal objects, tools, and waste that shows us how the Great Heathen Army built their own pseudo neighborhoods where men, women, and children all lived together.

These camps could support, you know, a few thousand people potentially, warriors definitely, yes, but also exactly as you say, women and children and enslaved people, some of whom might have been taken when they were, you know, in England itself, others who might have been bought at the slave markets in sort of Britain, Ireland, further afield. Um children, some of whom would have basically spent their young lives traveling with the Heathen Army because lots of children would have been born on these sort of in in these camps and on the marches. The women, some would have come over from Scandinavia with their menfolk, others might have been um local women because that's the other thing we see evidence of Anglo-Saxons in these camps as well.

So, the Great Heathen Army was a moving society with a diverse mix of people, including those who had no choice in being there.

And for the youngest children, it might have been all they'd ever known.

But what did these camps actually look like? One of the best studied sites that shows evidence of the Great Heathen Army's presence is Torksey, which is in modern-day Lincolnshire, where the Great Heathen Army waited out an entire winter season. Torksey is one of their overwintering sites, nearly a decade after they first land. But what's really interesting there is, yeah, we can see evidence for, say there might have been, I don't know, anything up to maybe even a hundred longships of various sizes moored up, pulled onto land. We know that the ground was very, very marshy, so it's almost like being on an island, which is really good for security. Um the Vikings definitely had the advantage because of that. There's only going to be a few ways through the wet onto the island and therefore into the camp. The camp itself, we have to think, okay, there would have been canvas tents, there might have been furs and textiles making, you know, these warmer because we're overwinter. So again, this is always something I These overwintering camps would have been quite grim places in a way because the weather wasn't good. There'd be rain, there'd be wind, snow, whatever there might be. With so many people living side by side, often in bad weather, what would it actually have physically felt like to be there? You've got to think of the smoke and the smells. Obviously, they've got to be latrines of some sort there. There's going to be a lot of smells that we wouldn't really not going to be as good as the smell of cooking food, put it that way. There's also going to be illness. There's going to be people dying there over the winter.

There's another site at Repton where we have evidence uh a lot of evidence of, you know, the the dead from the Viking Army in its various capacities. And so you really have a say I mean, it's it's been described in various ways as sort of like a heavy metal festival, a music festival, something that if it were like a festival, it's not like a festival I would ever want to spend any time in. I think it could be quite a dangerous place, quite a violent place, particularly if you've been sort of kidnapped and taken there as a hostage.

So survival itself was a challenge, and food and eating were an important part of that survival. How did the Vikings source this food? They used their raiding abilities to supplement themselves. There's lots of evidence for the sorts of food they would have had.

They would have been raiding and um should we say otherwise extracting food from the local surroundings. We have evidence of those raids. So we think things like, I don't know, beef and pork and mutton and hens, you know, they're all in there. Fishing, we know that they're fishing. There's evidence of those fishing weights. So we know that sort of food. It's winter, so vegetables, fruit not quite so great, but you know, some of those around.

Bread, particularly if they could pillage some grain from the local granaries. We also have to remember that the Great Heathen Army used these camps as only temporary dwellings.

They were always preparing for the next battle, and that meant weapons needed to be repaired and Viking ships needed maintenance. You've also got a lot of industry and craft work, and that's an element that has become increasingly apparent because the archaeologists have found evidence of essentially metal smiths melting down the loot that that these, you know, that they're taking from the local environs. So in these camps, there's huge amounts of industry.

They'll be blacksmiths, they'll be making rivets to repair the ships, but they'll also be, you know, shoeing horses or sharpening swords. This is what gives us insight into how the army's camps functioned as a kind of mobile workshop as well as a place where people lived. They work out from the organized spaces where skilled labor was used to keep the army strong and ready for the next fight. But amid all the hard work, these warriors and their families still found ways to have fun.

At the same time, we have evidence for um gaming pieces, for example. People are playing games there, singing songs, maybe playing instruments, you know, they're telling stories around the fires. So it's a very, very noisy bustling place. The gaming pieces that Elena mentions are from a Viking board game called Hnefatafl, which was a bit like a Viking version of chess. That alone gives some sense of what these moments of leisure might have looked like in these camps. It's those smaller details that remind us that Viking life wasn't defined solely by violence and raiding.

Though those things were still very important, they were only made possible by a broader framework made up of families and trade and industry and food and yes, completely unglamorous things like latrines.

That's what we can learn by studying the archaeology of the Great Heathen Army.

And I think that creates a much more textured, three-dimensional picture of the Vikings. For more on life in the Great Heathen Army, you can check out my full conversation with Elena in which we discussed the Great Heathen Army's battle against Anglo-Saxon England in a four-part History Extra podcast series.