The Viking expeditions to England and France stand now in close connexion. In 841 the valley of the Seine was ravaged as far as Rouen, in 842 Étaples in Picardy was destroyed by a fleet from England, while in 843 Nantes fell a prey to their attacks. From their permanent quarters at Noirmoutier the Vikings sailed up the Garonne and penetrated inland as far as Toulouse. In 844 we hear from Arab historians of their vessels swarming on the coasts of Spain like 'dark red sea-birds,' but while they effected landings at Lisbon and Cadiz and at Arzilla in Morocco, and captured Seville, with the exception of its citadel, the Mussulman resistance was too stout for them to effect much.
As a result of this expedition the Emir of Cordova, Abd-ar-Rahman II sent an embassy to the king of the Madjus (i.e. the magi or the heathen, one of the commonest Arab names for the Vikings). The ambassador found the king living in an island three days' journey from the mainland, but we are told that the heathen occupied many other neighbouring isles and the mainland also. He was courteously received by the king and became an especial favourite with the queen Noud (? O.N. Auðr). His companions were alarmed at the intimacy and as a result the ambassador paid less frequent visits to court. The queen asked him why, and when he told her the reason she said that, owing to perfect freedom of divorce, there was no jealousy among the Madjus. The details of the story are too vague to admit of certainty, but it would seem as if the embassy had visited the court of the great Turges and his equally remarkable wife Auðr in Ireland, or perhaps that of Olaf the White and his wife Auðr (v. infra, p. [66]).
In 845 Hárekr of Denmark sailed up the Elbe and destroyed Hamburg, while in the same year the dreaded Ragnarr Loðbrók, most famous of all Vikings, sailed up the Seine as far as Paris. While on its retreat from Paris, after the usual devastation, a strange and deadly disease, possibly some form of dysentery due to scantiness of food resulting from a hard winter, broke out in the Danish army. Various legends arose in connexion with this event, and it finds a curious echo in the story told by Saxo Grammaticus of an expedition made by Ragnarr among the Biarmians (in Northern Russia) when that people by their prayers called down a plague of dysentery upon the Danes in which large numbers perished. In the end the historical plague was stayed when Hárekr commanded the Vikings on their return to Denmark to refrain from flesh and meat for fourteen days. Whether as a result of the plague or from some other cause Hárekr now showed himself ready to come to terms with Lewis, and for the next eighty years there was complete peace along the Eider boundary. The whole of the coast was still open to attack however; Frisia was hardly ever free from invaders; Brittany was obliged to buy off Danish attacks in 847, while Noirmoutier continued to form a basis of attack against Southern France in the Gironde district. The Viking invasions in France had attained much the same stage as that to which we have already traced them in England and Ireland.
CHAPTER III
THE VIKINGS IN ENGLAND TO THE DEATH
OF HARTHACNUT
The great development of Viking activity which took place after 855 was certainly not unconnected with the course of events in Denmark itself. Hárekr was attacked by his two nephews in 850 and compelled to share the kingdom with them. In 854 large bands of Vikings returned to their fatherland after twenty years' ravaging in Frankish territory. Trouble now arose between Hárekr and his nephew Godurm (O.N. Guðormr), one of the returned leaders. Civil war broke out and ultimately, after a great fight, the kingship fell to a younger Hárekr, a relative of the late king. A severe dynastic struggle of this kind must have been accompanied by much unsettlement and perhaps by an actual proscription. It would certainly seem that there was some definite connexion between these events and the coincident appearance of the sons of Ragnarr Loðbrók as leaders of a more extended Viking movement both in England and in France. Three of his sons—Halfdanr, Ubbi and Ívarr—took part in the first wintering in Sheppey in 855, while in the same year another son Björn Ironside appeared on the Seine.
The figure of Ragnarr Loðbrók himself belongs to an earlier generation, and great as was his after-fame we unfortunately know very little of his actual career. He would seem to have been of Norwegian birth, closely connected with the south of Norway and the house of Guðröðr, but like that prince having extensive interests in Denmark. He probably visited Ireland in 831, for we read in Saxo of an expedition made by Ragnarr to Ireland when he slew king Melbricus and ravaged Dublin, an event which is pretty certainly to be identified with an attack made on the Conaille district (co. Louth) by foreigners in 831 when the king Maelbrighde was taken prisoner. He led the disastrous Seine expedition in 845 (v. supra, p. [21]). The next glimpse of him which we have is probably that found in certain Irish annals where he is represented as exiled from his Norwegian patrimony and living with some of his sons in the Orkneys while others were absent on expeditions to the British Isles, Spain and Africa, and a runic inscription has been found at Maeshowe in the Orkneys confirming the connexion of the sons of Loðbrók and possibly of Loðbrók himself with those islands. The expeditions would be those mentioned above and the yet more famous one made to Spain, Africa and Italy by Björn Ironside in the years 859-62 (v. infra, pp. [46]-[7]). Ragnarr Loðbrók's later history is uncertain. According to the Irish annals quoted above, his sons while on their expedition dreamed that their father had died in a land not his own and on their return found it to be true. This agrees with Scandinavian tradition according to which Ragnarr met his death at the hands of Aelle, king of Northumbria, by whom he was thrown into a snake-pit, while the capture of York by Ívarr the Boneless in 866-7 (v. infra) is represented as part of a great expedition of vengeance undertaken by the sons of Ragnarr. This tradition (apart from certain details) is probably historical, but we have no definite confirmatory evidence.
With this note on the history of Denmark at this time and on the career of the most shadowy, if at the same time the most famous of the Viking leaders, we may turn once more to the history of events in England.