![]() Modern historians remained convinced by this story of violent Scandinavian invaders until the 1960s, when the established historical narrative about Scandinavian migration came under critical examination. In the eighteenth century, the Vikings' migrations to England were treated in a similar way, which could be summed up in two words: ‘rape’ and ‘ pillage’. Scandinavians were, to use today’s phrase, ‘othered’, treated as aliens, as bloodthirsty and pagan. In the late eighth and ninth centuries, Scandinavians were treated by some chroniclers and letter-writers, and especially by theologians, as scourges sent by God to punish sinful Anglo-Saxons and Irish and, across the Channel, Franks (people in lands now inhabited by French, Dutch, and Germans). They arrived in eastern England by boat, then got horses, and using Roman roads, raided on land. The Scandinavian migrants were chiefs with followings, sometimes of hundreds of men. ![]() Most scholars don’t think this was a migration caused by push factors like overpopulation at the source, but rather by pull factors such as the availability of high-value moveables in the British Isles and on the continent, especially in what is now northern France and Belgium. The migrants came mainly from Denmark and southern Sweden, which was ruled by Danish kings in the ninth century. At first these raids were very few, but from the 830s they became more frequent and from the 860s were serious. From the late eighth century, Scandinavian raids on Scotland, Ireland, and England began to be recorded.
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