The Vikings knew that the Archbishop of Canterbury would fetch a huge ransom but Ælfheah refused to be ransomed. He refused to admit the Norsemen and refused to capitulate: after three weeks an abbot took it upon himself to open one of the city gates, Canterbury fell and Ælfheah was taken prisoner and put into the cage where he remained for the rest of his life. Ælfheah was the Archbishop of Canterbury when Viking invaders laid siege to the Kentish city in September 1011. Ælfheah’s martyrdom, enshrined today a stone’s throw from the Thames, is part of a wider, underreported story. For one thing, their helmets didn’t have horns.įor another, far from the occasional bit of peripatetic looting and burning, the Vikings were persistent harriers of eastern and southern England for centuries and occupied large portions of the country for long periods either side of the first millennium. It’s easy to think of the Vikings as a burly bunch of bearded lads with horns sticking out of their hats who would occasionally paddle across the North Sea, pillage a village then sail back to Scandinavia to get roaring drunk in a big hall. Sometimes it even feels as if the story of this island begins in 1066.

The broad sweep of Britain’s historical narrative generally passes straight from the Romans to the Normans, missing out a huge chapter of several hundred years. It’s also difficult to imagine how Ælfheah’s demise took place during a brutal foreign invasion, one that has been overlooked to the point of being written out of the history of these islands.

Tore skeie the wolf age