Danish Viking Settlement in the Five Boroughs

Photo: Lynda Mallett

The 10th and 11th century settlements of the Danes differed from those of the English; they were the encampment of armies, and their boundaries were the fighting fronts sustained by a series of fortified towns. Stamford, Nottingham, Lincoln, Derby, and Leicester were the bases of the new invading force. Behind their frontier lines the warriors of one decade were to become the colonists and landowners of the next. The Danish settlement in England was essentially military. They cut their way with their swords, and then planted themselves deeply in the soil, as did their English predecessors. The warrior type of farmer asserted from the first, a status different from ordinary agriculturist.

They had a status of freemen or Sokemen. By the time of the Norman invasion free peasants formed the third largest group among the peasantry, almost 14% of the recorded population. In economic terms, they were among the most substantial groups within the peasantry, possessing on average 30 acres of land and two plough oxen.

Freemen (Status) and freemen (Peasant) appear in large numbers only in the Danelaw where their numbers were very considerable, up to half the rural population in some counties. The peculiarities of this distribution have excited considerable debate. Most historians would agree that the distribution reflects the impact of the Viking invasions of the ninth century, though just how this effect was produced is disputed. Some believe that the free peasantry of the Danelaw recorded in the Doomsday Book represent descendants of the rank and file of the Danish armies who had settled in the ninth century, others that they were the descendants of a mass immigration of Scandinavian peasants which followed in the wake of this military conquest. A third view is that the effects of Viking conquest were indirect and cultural, the native peasantry of the Danelaw acquiring free status under Viking rule. It has also been argued that the free peasantry were widely distributed throughout the country before the Viking invasions, the once free peasantry of Wessex losing their freedom in the struggle for survival against the Vikings. However, in the area of the Five Boroughs within the Danelaw the rights and customs of freemen continued long after the Norman conquest.