#Rei alfred vikings mac#

He led the Viking army to a conquest of Mercia in 874 AD, organised a parcelling out of land among the Vikings in Northumbria in 876 AD, and in 878 AD moved south and forced most of the population of Wessex to submit. The man we then see more clearly in the sources as the Viking leader, Hálfdan, was later believed to be Ívarr's brother. The normally reliable 'Annals of Ulster' recorded Ívarr's death in Ireland in 873 AD and described him as 'king of the Northmen in the whole of Ireland and Britain'. Later traditions saw Ragnar Hairy-Breeks and his son Ívarr the Boneless as the two main Viking leaders, responsible not only for killing Ælla, King of Northumbria in 867 AD but also Edmund, King of the East Angles in 869 AD, and for destroying Dumbarton, the fortress of the British kings of Strathclyde. In 865 AD they forced the East Angles to help supply an army, which in 866 AD captured York and in 867 AD took over the southern part of the kingdom of Northumbria. The Viking raids in England were sporadic until the 840s AD, but in the 850s Viking armies began to winter in England, and in the 860s they began to assemble larger armies with the clear intent of conquest.

They also promoted the idea that St Columba, the founder of the monastery of Iona, was the apostle of all those in the north. They wove a new national history, which emphasised (or invented) many links between the Scottish and Pictish dynasties. They promoted themselves as the kings of all those in northern Britain, or 'Alba'.

#Rei alfred vikings mac#

The Scots took advantage of the presence of the Vikings, and, above all under King Cináed mac Alpín (Kenneth MacAlpine), they did so with considerable aggression and intelligence. In their place was a kingdom of Scotland, controlled by the Scots, who were the descendents of immigrants from Ireland in the fifth and sixth centuries. By the end of the ninth century they had vanished. In the eighth century, the Picts had one of the most important kingdoms in Britain. Lindisfarne was abandoned, and the monks trailed around northern England with their greatest possession, the relics of St Cuthbert, until they found a home in Durham in 995 AD. Other monasteries in Scotland and northern England simply disappear from the record. The remaining monks fled to Kells (County Meath, Ireland) with a gospel-book probably produced in Iona, but now known as the 'Book of Kells'. Iona was burnt in 802 AD, and 68 monks were killed in another raid in 806 AD. We know no historical details of the raids in Scotland, although they must have been extensive.

Over the next few decades, many monasteries in the north were destroyed, and with them any records they might have kept of the raids. Alcuin suggested that further attack might be averted by moral reform in the monastery.

It is clear from the letter that Lindisfarne was not destroyed. In 793 AD, an anguished Alcuin of York wrote to the Higbald, the bishop of Lindisfarne and to Ethelred, King of Northumbria, bemoaning the unexpected attack on the monastery of Lindisfarne by Viking raiders, probably Norwegians sailing directly across the North Sea to Northumbria. Yet the most significant development of the period was an indirect result of Scandinavian involvement in the affairs of Britain - the emergence of two kingdoms of newly unified territories, England and Scotland.