Vikings of the Irish Sea

by Griffiths, David

• ISBN13: 9780752436463
• ISBN10: 0752436465
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2010-04-15
• Publisher: The History Press

Summary

This book looks at the activities of the Vikings in the Irish Sea, a band of water that has been important since prehistoric times in the history of maritime cultural exchange between Britain and Ireland as well as the Scandanavian countries. The Vikings fully exploited their naval dominance to exert their influence across this area and David Griffiths presents a unique overview of the results of this dominance on the area. The book will look in detail at the activities of the Vikings in Wales, NW England, the Isle of Man, Scotland and Ireland. The archaeological evidence such as siver hoards and burials, along with the evidence of place-names, settlement and sculpture provide a fascinating insight into the mechanisms of Viking power in these areas.

Author Biography

David Griffith's is Lecturer in Archaeology in the Oxford University Department for Continuing Education and director of the MSc in Applied Landscape Archaeology at Kellogg College. He has recently been carrying out excavations at the Bay of Skaill in Orkney where medieval and Viking buildings have come to light.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations	p. 7
Preface	p. 11
Introduction	p. 13
Vikings	p. 13
The Irish Sea	p. 16
'The Irish Sea Province'	p. 18
The Irish Sea in the pre-Viking period	p. 19
Sources of evidence for the Viking period	p. 20
Raids and Early Settlement in Ireland	p. 25
Longphort and dún: the Viking base on land	p. 30
'Dark' and 'fair' foreigners, and the 'Gallgoídil'	p. 36
Exporting Violence and Seeking Landfall c. 850-c. 1050	p. 38
Weakness and opportunity: Galloway and Cumbria	p. 39
From Dublin to Brunanburh	p. 41
The later tenth and early eleventh centuries	p. 45
Land-take and Landscape	p. 48
Estates and landholding	p. 52
Territory, boundaries and defence	p. 60
Meetings and 'things'	p. 62
Rural settlement archaeology	p. 66
Burial: Changing Rites, New Places	p. 72
Ireland	p. 74
The Isle of Man	p. 80
From the Solway Firth to Wales	p. 89
Viking-period finds and burial in churchyards	p. 96
Trade, Silver and Market Sites	p. 100
Hoards and currency	p. 103
Single finds and market sites	p. 109
Towns and Urbanisation	p. 119
Tenth- and eleventh-century Dublin	p. 120
Anglo-Saxon urbanisation and tenth-century Chester	p. 129
Trade in the Bristol Channel, and the later Hiberno-Norse towns	p. 135
Assimilation and Cultural Change	p. 140
Burial and commemoration	p. 141
Religious conversion and Viking motifs	p. 143
An Irish Sea metalwork tradition?	p. 150
Architecture: urban and rural	p. 153
Language and inscriptions	p. 153
Hybridity and acculturation - the process of cultural change	p. 155
Conclusion	p. 157
List of Abbreviations	p. 161
Notes	p. 162
Bibliography	p. 172
Index	p. 185
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