Tonight, on 'Blood of the Vikings',
I follow the events of 1066
that finally brought the Viking Age to a bloody end.
Did this man die defending York against a great Viking warlord?
Could these be the bones of warriors from the last Viking army?
And where can we find the Vikings' genetic legacy
in the British Isles today?
Tonight, in the last programme of the series,
we'll have the final results of the biggest ever genetic survey
to be carried out in the British Isles
looking for Viking blood in the population today.
We're in West Stow, not far from Cambridge,
where archaeologists have reconstructed an entire Anglo-Saxon village.
Using the results of the Blood-of-the-Vikings' genetic survey
we are going to try and turn the clock back 1,000 years.
We want to find out what happened in villages across the British Isles
when the Vikings arrived.
We're hoping to answer questions
which have baffled archaeologists and historians for centuries.
There are clues that some of the Viking raiders
settled down permanently over here.
But we want to find out how many stayed and where they put down roots?
Joining me are some of the scientists who've been conducting the genetic survey
and we'll also be talking to some to the people who took part in it,
including a few who think they might be direct descendants of Vikings.
But before we find out about the genetic legacy of the Vikings,
what do we know about how the Viking Age in the British Isles
finally came to an end?
On the 6th of January 1066
the death of Edward the Confessor, King of England,
sparked yet another battle for power.
Edward died without an heir or publicly naming a successor.
So up stepped Harold Godwinson
from one of the most powerful Saxon families in the land.
Only hours after Edward's body was laid to rest at Westminster Abbey
Harold seized the throne.
But the new king had powerful enemies overseas
who also had their eyes on the English crown.
The first direct challenge would come from the Viking king of Norway.
The mighty Harald Hardrada.
Harald Hardrada was an ambitious ruler
who's exploits earned him the name 'Thunderbolt of the North'.
His story is told here in the Heimskringla,
a collection of Icelandic sagas
that record the history of the Norwegian kings.
According to the sagas, at the age of 15 Harald fled Norway.
He made his way through Russia,
and eventually across the Black Sea to Byzantium, modern-day Istanbul.
Still in his teens, Harald became a mercenary
fighting around the Mediterranean for the Byzantine Emperor's elite force.
After ten years, he'd made a fortune
and headed home where he used his wealth to raise an army
and take the crown of Norway.
For the next 20 years he fought a bloody war against the Danes
before turning his sights on an even bigger prize.
Aged 50, the 'Thunderbolt of the North' launched an attack on England.
In September 1066, a terrifying sight appeared off the coast of Yorkshire.
Perhaps the greatest Viking fleet ever seen.
The chronicles tell of hundreds of ships carrying thousands of warriors.
And somehow the Vikings had managed to keep all their preparations secret
because when they arrived here at the mouth of the Humber,
King Harold of England was 200 miles to the south.
Harald Hadrada's fleet its way up the river Ouse towards York.
Ten miles from the city the Vikings moored their ships
and headed inland.
The English earls defending the city gathered what troops they could
and marched out to Fulford to confront the Vikings.
The English fought to the bitter end
but they were no match for Harald Hadrada.
Fulford is now a suburb of York.
A few years ago, when a new riverside development was being built,
an ancient burial ground was discovered.
Amongst the skeletons were some that showed signs of mutilation.
In this burial ground we found quite a number of skeletons,
but one particular group, close together, all of them had injuries on the bodies.
On this particular individual, for example,
we've got evidence of a fierce combat,
something nasty which left him marked in many ways.
Someone has slashed at him with a sword and cut deeply into the bone
right through.
He's also been thrust through the abdomen with a spear.
Someone's gone hard in like that.
So this is someone who's been involved in fierce combat.
Who's been hacked down, who's suffered many wounds
and, in that combination, there's only one way
he's gonna end up, and that's dead.
Almost every bone they looked at showed signs of violent injury.
This is another femur, another thigh bone,
and you can see very clearly this massive hacks in here,
which have done considerable damage.
Here we've got someone who's perhaps decapitated.
Here, someone who's actually had the top of their skull
virtually sliced off.
To get a group like this suggests they're the product of some major fight,
so we think that these are people who were killed in the Battle of Fulford,
20th of September 1066.
And this could be people victims of that fight
who were taken back to one of the nearest Anglo-Saxon churches for burial.
It was first blood for Harald Hadrada.
These men had been struck down defending York
but now the Vikings would have to face the full might of the English army.
After his great victory, Harald Hadrada withdrew from York
to await hostages and ransom money he'd been promised.
In the afternoon of Monday, September 25th,
just five days after the Battle of Fulford,
King Harold of England reached the Viking camp at Stamford Bridge.
According to the chronicles, as he came up over this hill,
he saw the Vikings camped out in the valley below.
Harald Hadrada, taken totally by surprise by King Harold's lightning-quick march,
only had about twenty minutes to prepare for battle.
To reach the Vikings the English had to cross the river,
and according to the chronicles,
the narrow bridge was held by one ferocious Viking warrior.
It looked as it there was no way to dislodge him
until an English soldier went underneath the bridge...
and skewed him from below.
Now the real battle began.
The English were outnumbered
yet slowly they wore down the invaders
until finally Harald Hadrada himself was killed.
But how did King Harold manage to defeat one of the greatest of Viking warriors
with an army that had just marched 200 miles?
Above all it was the determination probably to hang on to this kingdom
that he'd only managed to win nine months before.
He wasn't gonna give that up early
and so that's probably above all what inspired him and his men
to win what was an amazing victory here at Stamford Bridge.
Stamford Bridge today is a peaceful Yorkshire village.
Strangely, no traces of this legendary battle have ever been found.
Despite all the carnage, not a single bone or weapon
has ever been unearthed here.
But 10 miles down river, at a place called Riccall,
some intriguing finds have been made.
In 1956, a farmer dug up some skeletons.
And a few years ago, when the Water Board were working down here,
they found even more.
In a series of excavations,
archaeologists have unearthed more than 60 skeletons.
Perhaps, as many as 600 bodies were buried here.
Apparently all at the same time.
Who were these people? And why are they here,
miles from the nearest churchyard?
It does seem strange to find so many burials out here,
in the middle of nowhere.
But according to the chronicles,
Riccall is where the battered remnants of the defeated Viking army,
retreated to their ships moored on the river Ouse and fled England.
Could this be the resting place of the Viking dead
from the Battle of Stamford Bridge?
For years the bones from Riccall
were left in the care of the York Archaeological Trust.
They were a bit of a puzzle
and no one knew quite what to do with them.
We asked the York team to take another look.
The first challenge was to establish
whether these people were locals or Viking invaders.
Amazingly, thanks to a new forensic technique,
the answer might lie in their teeth.
Teeth from six skulls were sent
to the British Geological Survey Laboratories near Nottingham.
By analysing the enamel
it might be possible to tell where their owners came from.
When fragments of tooth are vaporized by a powerful laser beam
oxygen is given off.
Oxygen atoms can exist in two slightly different forms, or isotopes.
And the relative amounts of these two isotopes
can reveal where a person grew up.
The isotopes in this man's teeth
will tell us about the rain water he drank in childhood.
And the mix of oxygen isotopes in English rainwater
is very different from the mix in Scandinavia.
As soon as the results of the tooth analysis were ready
I went to find out what Paul Budd and the team had discovered.
So what we have on our diagram here
is these are the six individuals that we looked at from Riccall,
and on this scale here is the oxygen isotope composition
of the drinking water that they had in childhood.
But the interesting about it from our point of view
is that the sort of values that you would get in the UK
would really cover the range going from about -5 to -5.5
in the far south west of the country
through to the north-east of the country about -8.5,
and that's what we've marked on here with this dashed line this -8.5.
All of our people are significantly lower numbers than that.
They are in this range about -9 to -11.
So you're saying that somebody from the British Isles
- would have to be above that line. -Exactly. Yes.
So, where do this people come from then?
We can have a look at that now.
This is a map showing the oxygen isotope composition of rainwater
as it's falling across north-western Europe today.
Now, you remember, the range that we had for our people
was something like -9 to -11.
Now, that's where we've ***putting us across here, in this band
going across from Central and Baltic Europe through Sweden and Scandinavia.
Given what we know about went on at Riccall
it seems to me that the most likely explanation
is that these people come from somewhere in Norway.
Yes. Certainly the results are consistent with that.
It's quite interesting, isn't it? Because it's the history and the science
actually seem to fit together. They're telling the same story.
- Not what I expected actually. - Wasn't it?
No, I must admit when you first came to me with the material
and the material was undated, I thought, you know,
these will all come up with UK values.
They'll be typical for the Riccall area, I thought. But no.
- So, were you really surprised? - I was very surprised. Yes.
The results of the tooth analysis are very exciting
but they're not quite enough on their own.
These are the six skulls whose teeth were analysed
and we now know that all of these people grew up in Scandinavia.
So it looks like the bodies buried at Riccall were Vikings,
but did they fight alongside Harald Hadrada at Stamford Bridge?
The bones are mostly men's.
But there are also a few women and children.
Could they all be Vikings killed in battle?
We needed to know how these people died.
If we were lucky the bones might provide the answer.
So we called in forensic pathologist Dr Bob Stoddart.
Bob, do any of these bones show signs of violent injury?
Yes, they do. For example, this bone...
shows numerous surface cuts at a variety of angles,
so the individual concerned had multiple blows
with a sharp-edged weapon
cutting across the muscle blocks along his left leg.
This bone is a sacrum of an adult male
and here is a wound which has been produced by the tip of a sharp weapon,
such as perhaps a sword. So it has gone in just above the pubic bone,
probably gone through the bladder, and the rectum, into that.
So that bone is actually from the back, but the wound has gone in from the front?
- Stabbed right through into the bone? - Yes.
Remarkably, a quarter of the bones
show unmistakable sings of sword cuts and stabbings.
But what about the rest? Could they too have died in battle?
Many of those victims are going to be people who suffered soft-tissue injuries
and they bled to death, or they had some essential organ irredeemably damaged,
but the bones may not show any sing of that.
But what about the women and children whose bones were found at Riccall?
What were they doing in a battle?
Well, it could be that the Viking army
included women and children to help cook and care for the warriors.
After all, Harald Hadrada hadn't come on a quick raid.
He was expecting a long campaign to conquer England.
Thanks to this new research, I'm now convinced
that this bones are the long-lost remains of Vikings who fought at Stamford-Bridge.
Fatally wounded in battle or cut down as they fled to their ships.
The defeat of Harald Hadrada was a turning point.
The people buried here nearly a thousand years ago
were part of the last great Viking army to die fighting on English soil.
Never again would Vikings attempt a full-scale invasion of England.
For 250 years, marauding Vikings terrorised the British Isles.
Thousands of them must have made the voyage across the North Sea
and we know that some of them stayed here.
The evidence comes from ancient chronicles,
from the Viking artifacts we've found
and from hundreds of place names of Scandinavian origin.
But we've no idea of how many immigrants there were
and where exactly they settled,
which is why we commissioned a survey of the British Isles
looking for Viking blood in the people today.
We've been working with scientists from University College London
led by Pr. David Goldstein.
Over the last year they've collected DNA samples from nearly 2,000 men
in Britain, Ireland and Scandinavia.
Rub it either side of your cheek, yes.
Giving a DNA sample, mostly meant
just scraping a few skin cells from the inside of the mouth,
but we were also helped by blood donor centres and dentists.
Only men were sampled as the scientists were studying the Y chromosome
which only men have,
because it changes very little over the generations.
The Y chromosome my son Barnaby inherited from me
was handed down almost unchanged from my father
and from his father before him, and so on.
The Y chromosome provides a direct link to the past.
The team first's task was to collect samples from Scandinavia.
They looked at the Y chromosomes
of males most likely to be descendant from Vikings
and found distinctive genetic markers.
They then looked for these markers in the Y chromosomes of British men.
Unfortunately, these markers won't identify Viking ancestry
on an individual basis.
But the proportion of people
with Scandinavian markers on their Y chromosomes
will tell us about the overall amount of Viking ancestry in that area.
In all we looked at more than 30 sites across the British Isles.
The team focused on small towns
where historically there has been little migration.
And we only sampled men who could trace their male line back
at least two generations in the same area.
How many generations can you trace your male line?
- Seventeen. - Seventeen?
So the proportion of Scandinavian Y chromosomes
in the modern population of an area
should indicate the scale of the original Viking settlement.
Joining us here at Stow we've got Pr. David Goldstein,
who was in charge of the entire project,
and Jim Wilson, Neil Bradman and Julia Abernethy
who've all been working on the genetic results.
- Thank you all very much for coming. - A pleasure.
Now, David, what exactly were you hoping to find from this survey?
Well, in short, what we were trying to do is assess the magnitude
of the genetic contribution of the Vikings to the British Isles.
But is it actually going to tell us how many Vikings came over here
and exactly where they settled?
Well, I don't think that we would ever get a very precise number
for how many Vikings came over and settled,
but it still can give you a sense,
because if we see a lot of Y chromosomes today in some part of the British Isles
have an origin in Scandinavia,
then clearly there had to be a fair number of individuals
coming over to bring those Y chromosomes.
Now, we know that the Viking raids at the British Isles
came from two separate places, from Norway and from Denmark.
So we've been looking for two separate sets of gene markers.
Now, let's start with the Norwegians.
From Norway they crossed the North Sea to Shetland and Orkney.
In Shetland I saw the unmistakable remains of Viking longhouses.
Heading south I arrived in Orkney
taken over by Vikings and ruled by Norway until the 1400's.
From the archaeological evidence,
it seems obvious that there was a strong Viking presence in these islands.
And the early results of our genetic survey
appeared to confirm that.
David, your initial results for Orkney and Shetland
suggested that there was about 30% of the chromosome types were from Norway
but you suggested that these figures might go up
with the detailed statistical analysis and, have they?
Well, remember, we first talked about just looking through the Y chromosomes
and identifying those that look pretty clearly like they had a Norwegian origin.
And when we did that it was something like 30%
that looked pretty clearly like they were from Norway.
But then we carried out a statistical analysis
to make an overall assessment
of the proportion of the chromosomes that had a Norwegian origin
and when we did that, the figure was at 60%.
- 60, so it doubled? - Yeah.
That's an enormous number.
Yes. It tells us that the majority of the Y chromosome heritage
traces back to Norway.
And Jim, you were not only a member of the survey team,
but you come from Orkney as well.
You must have had some idea that there was going to be a strong
Viking legacy there.
But did you expect that it was going to be anything like this?
Well, you can never really know, but I thought...
I expected we would find quite a lot
because of the strong cultural Norse heritage we have.
But, yes. I was also a bit surprised.
From Orkney, the Vikings took the sea road south west to the Hebrides.
And on the north coast of Scotland, in Durness,
we found a strong Norwegian genetic signature
suggesting that they'd settled here along the way.
And in the Hebrides, where we found new evidence of Viking longhouses,
more than 30% of the men we sampled had Norwegian chromosome types.
From the Hebrides, the Vikings sailed round into the Irish Sea.
One target was the Isle of Man.
Each year, the island still gather for an open-air Viking-style parliament.
A number of pagan graves have been unearthed here
with beautiful Viking artifacts.
What you have do is to scrape inside your mouth ten times...
And the results of the genetic survey
suggest that at least 15% of the men we sampled on the Isle of Man
have Norwegian ancestry.
So, all along the sea road,
we've been able to detect the Vikings' genetic legacy.
David, are you pleased with these results?
We're delighted to get a clear signal. Often when you do these kinds of studies
the results that you get are difficult to interpret and not clear.
But here we, in fact, have some very, very clear signals.
It's very clear that there was a significant genetic contribution
from Norway to Shetland and Orkney.
Now, as you continue moving -
you get to the Hebrides, to the Isle of Man -
the contribution lessens but we still see clear evidence
of Norwegian contributions there too.
Now, the real prize for the Vikings lay at the end of the sea road:
Ireland.
The samples we took in Castlerea
produced no hint of Scandinavian chromosome types.
This area, the rural heart of Ireland,
turned out to be almost totally of ancient Briton or Celtic ancestry.
The Vikings are much more likely to have settled along the coast.
They founded several towns, including Dublin,
one of their most important trading centres.
Dublin was once the centre of a major Viking slave trade.
Were these shackles meant for the necks of Irish slaves
to be shipped to Viking colonies?
And dozens of burials have yielded the largest collection
of Viking weaponry outside Scandinavia.
So Dublin would seem an obvious place
to search for the Vikings genetic legacy in Ireland.
So where do you look in Ireland then, David?
Well, we wanted to pick a place where there was a record of Viking activity
but we didn't want to have a metropolitan area
that had a lot of recent immigration, like Dublin.
So we took an area north of Dublin called Rush.
And what did you find?
- Very little. - Very little?
Yeah. We didn't find any evidence that there was much of a genetic contribution
from Norway to that area of Ireland.
Maybe they just didn't settle there in large numbers.
They just traded there, or raided there, but didn't settle.
We don't know. But in any event, we don't see much genetic evidence
of Norwegians there.
There may be surviving pockets
of Viking descendants in other places along the Irish coast,
but if the Vikings of Dublin never settled outside the city walls,
we may never find their genetic legacy.
From Ireland, the ancient chronicles
tell of Norwegian Viking raids off the coast of Wales,
on Anglesey.
It looks like it's a male.
Here I helped to excavate contorted remains,
the likely victims of a Viking attack.
And I was shown hacked pieces of silver and inscribed weights,
evidence of Viking traders.
But again, the genetics results failed to show any clear signs
of Norwegian ancestry on Anglesey.
Or in either of the two other sample sites in Wales.
Like central Ireland, Wales seemed to be predominantly ancient Briton or Celtic.
From their basis in Ireland, there's evidence that the Norwegian Vikings
also occupied parts of England.
Particularly the north-west, around the Wirral and Cumbria,
including one of our sample sites, Penrith.
On the Wirral, the chronicles tell of a Viking army landing here in the year 902.
A few miles away, at Thingwall,
this hill was almost certainly the site of a Viking parliament, or "thing".
Further north, stone sculptures provide clear evidence of a Viking presence.
And there's another strand of evidence that the Vikings were here.
In some Cumbrian villages, people speak a dialect that contains many words
derived from the old Norse that the Vikings spoke.
They're more likely to be understood in Oslo than in London.
Ted Relf and Jean Scottsmith gave me a quick lesson.
I'll tell thew something, Jean,
we've picked a gay *** spot for a bit crack this morning.
I'll tell you Jean, we've certainly picked a cold spot for our conversation.
Aye, we have. Did thew come up here laik when thou was a barn, Ted?
Did you come up here play when you were a child, Ted?
Aye. I can mind yance* we came up here with our *** eggs
to roll 'em down this ***.
Yes, I remember coming up here in Easter and rolling my Easter eggs down the hill.
Well, ars about nithered. I think we'd better gar yarn,
find a bit eldi*, and make a good lau*.
Well, I'm about frozen. I think we'd better go home,
get some firewood, and get a good fire on.
I heartily agree. Come on!
Aye. It's a bit *** over here.
Given all this evidence of Norwegian Vikings,
what would the DNA sampling from these areas reveal?
So, David, what did you find in the north-west of England?
When we looked at all the English sites together,
one of the sites actually stood out
as having the most Norwegian genetic material,
and that was Penrith. So that's very exciting because of the correspondence
with the material archaeological evidence of Viking activities there
and the genetic legacy.
Now, Neil, I understand that you looked at the Wirral.
That's somewhere else where there's quite a lot of evidence for the Vikings.
So what did you find there?
Well, the Wirral's interesting because in the north of the Wirral
we had a mini-Viking kingdom which we didn't have in the south.
However, when we look at the genetic data,
we find no difference between the north and the south.
But what's exceptionally interesting is that the Wirral,
while being very similar as a whole to the rest of England,
is different from Wales, probably because of the Welsh being Celtic.
So we had this clear distinction that the Wirral goes with the area to the north,
where it's English, and different from the south, the Welsh.
So, are you telling me that there were no Vikings in the Wirral then?
Well, we're not even saying that there is no genetic legacy from Norway there
in the Wirral today, and we're certainly not saying
there were never any Vikings there.
But what we're saying is that can't see any evidence
of a greater genetic contribution from Norway
to the Wirral than other parts of England.
Out of the whole of England,
only Penrith provided definite evidence of Norwegian Viking settlement.
But we also know that Norwegian Vikings, in alliance with the Danes,
controlled much of the north-east.
During the Viking age, York was ruled by a series of kings
whose origins were in Norway.
But in York our genetic survey failed to find evidence of Norwegian ancestry.
So maybe the Norwegian Vikings in Yorkshire were just a ruling elite,
and their genetic input was too small to be detected.
Or perhaps, as scientists discover more about the human genome,
we'll uncover more evidence for the Viking settlers in England.
On the Wirral, even though the population as a whole
failed to show any significant Norwegian input,
by chance, a sample produced one very intriguing individual case.
I went to Hoy lake, on the tip of the Wirral, to meet Bill Hously.
Before we told him what we'd found in his DNA
I wanted to know whether there was anything about his family history
that might suggest a Viking connection.
Bill, how long have your family lived in this area?
My family, looking back at family records,
go back about 150 years, which is quite a long time.
- That's not bad, is it? - No. Not at all.
But, do you think your family might go back even further than that in this area?
Yes, I would think so.
I should imagine, yes, we probably do go further back than that.
Housley men had been seafarers for several generations.
His father was a fisherman, and his father before him.
His great uncle Stephen was a member of the local lifeboat crew in the 1920's.
And the connection with the sea still continues today.
I was never a full-time fisherman. The main reason for that because,
by the time a reached an age whereby I was able to use or work a boat,
fishing was on decline.
I came out of the Army after completing my national service
and suddenly looked at the industry and thought,
"No. I can do a little bit better than this."
Started* selling fish then.
So, I've been involved in the industry now for 36 years.
On the very shore where the Housleys have moored their boats for generations,
archaeologists have uncovered evidence of a flourishing Viking beach market.
Over the years, hundreds of pieces of jewelry have been found.
Lost by Viking traders and trampled into the soft sand.
Could Bill and his family be the modern-day descendants of a Viking
who came and settled on the Wirral a thousand years ago?
It was time to tell Bill that we'd found a distant relative of his
amongst our Norwegian samples.
So, David, could you tell us the result of Bill's test?
We looked through all the Y chromosomes that we observed in the Wirral,
compared them to Norwegian ones and looked for matches.
And we actually found a perfect match between your Y chromosome
and Y chromosomes that we observed in Norway.
Now, I have to say that we can't be certain from that
that your Y chromosome actually came from Norway.
But if we had to take a guess, it would be that it's a Norwegian origin.
So, there we are Bill, you seem to be one of the few people
who we can point to and say that you're probably of Viking ancestry.
I'm actually delighted. I just can't get over this.
So, how do you feel about this, Marilyn? Your husband...
This explains a lot. Doesn't it?
Because he doesn't show evidence of Viking behaviour, does he, at times?
Oh, yes.
You may not be able to blame that on his Y chromosome.
Do you think it is going to make any difference to your life?
I don't suppose so, really.
I mean, it's a nice thought and feeling to know there is a strong possibility
I am descended from the Vikings in Norway.
And it's something I'm just delighted with.
Anyway, thank you very much for coming.
Thank you for having me. It's been most very interesting. Thank you.
Bill's ancestors, the Norwegian Vikings, mainly colonised the north.
But what could we find out about the Danish Vikings,
whose armies made such a huge impact on the rest of England?
In 878, the half of England
that lay above a line drawn roughly from London to the Wirral,
was officially handed over to the Danish Viking army.
It became known as the Danelaw
and was dominated by Vikings for half a century.
Here at West Stow, in Suffolk, we'd have been within the Danelaw.
Now, later, in the 11th century, England,
which had been lost to the Vikings, was reconquered by King Canute.
And for the next 20 years the whole country was under Danish rule.
There's strong evidence that some of these Danes settled in England.
There are all the place names ending in 'by',
the Danish for 'farmstead' or 'village'.
But were these villages taken over by a small Viking elite,
or was there a mass migration of Viking peasants?
This was the main question that we hoped our genetic survey would help to answer.
But in England, the number of Viking descendants today
may have been greatly distorted
by the dramatic events which unfolded at the end of the Viking Age.
In 1066, just days after the English king Harold
had defeated the great Viking army of Harald Hadrada,
England was invaded again.
Duke William and his Norman army crossed the Channel
and landed at Pevensey, near Dover.
Two weeks later, they defeated King Harold
in one of the most famous encounters in English history,
the Battle of Hastings.
On Christmas Day 1066, Duke William of Normandy
was crowned King William I of England.
But from our point of view,
if we're searching for Viking blood in today's population,
then William the Conqueror's victory complicates matters.
The problem is
that William the Conqueror was the direct descendant of a Viking.
But what about the rest of his army?
Were they descended from Vikings too?
Did they all bring Scandinavian Y chromosomes to England?
The story of the Normans began 200 years before the Battle of Hastings.
In the middle of the 800's
the Vikings began raiding the rich lands of northern France.
They sailed up rivers to plunder the poorly defended monasteries.
In the spring of 841, they reached the Abbey of Jumièges,
conveniently located on the banks of the River Seine.
With over 900 monks, Jumièges was one of the largest abbeys in France.
The Vikings knew that on a Sunday
everyone here would be peacefully at prayer.
So, according to the chronicles, that's when they chose to attack.
20 miles up the River Seine lies Rouen.
By 861 it had been sacked and burned six times.
After 60 years of being overrun by the Vikings
the French king decided to do a deal with them.
He arranged to meet the Vikings at a place called Saint-Clair-sur-Epte
to draw up a peace treaty.
Rollo, the Viking leader,
was apparently made to swear an oath on these,
the sacred but rather grisly relics of Saint Clair himself.
In return for ceasing his raids
and protecting the rest of the country from other Vikings,
Rollo was given the city of Rouen by King Charles 'the Simple',
and all the surrounding lands along the north coast of France.
Rollo's descendants became the Dukes of Normandy.
So, by 1066, when the Normans invaded England,
from a genetic point of view,
was this effectively another Viking invasion?
It all depends on how many Vikings originally settled in Normandy.
In Rouen I went to meet a local expert in Scandinavian languages.
Prof. Jean Renaud believes that clues to the original number of Viking settlers
might be found in Normandy's place names.
The most interesting place names ought to tell us how many the Vikings could be.
It's the oldest ones, I mean, the real Scandinavian place names,
made out of two Scandinavian elements.
A place name like Bricquebec
is very typical of an original place name for the first generation.
Bricque is 'brekka', a slope, and 'bec' is 'bekkr', a little brook.
So Bricquebec is the little brook down the slope.
This is a very typical Scandinavian name.
Jean Renaud has identified only a couple of hundred villages in Normandy
with pure Scandinavian names
compared with the thousands in England.
So he believes that Viking settlers can't have made a great impact
on the genetic mix of Normandy.
Therefore, the Norman army
probably didn't bring much Viking blood to England in 1066.
And our genetic survey seems to support this.
In the Channel Islands, which were heavily colonised by the Normans,
we found only a tiny hint of possible Scandinavian ancestry.
But in other ways, the Norman conquest could still have had
a major impact on the Vikings' genetic legacy in England.
In 1069, the people of York, traditionally a Viking stronghold,
attacked the Norman garrison on the Castle Mound.
They resented the heavy taxes imposed by their new King William,
and when Danish Vikings offered assistance,
simmering resentment erupted into open rebellion.
William's reply to the York uprising was swift and vicious.
The Vikings fled without a fight.
And William's troops stormed into town.
King William was determined that Viking sympathisers throughout the north
would never again be a threat to his authority.
The fate of villages like Middleham, 30 miles from York,
is recorded in the famous Domesday Survey.
The Domesday Book was written in 1085
and lists the taxable value of every town and hamlet
before and after William's conquest.
This is the entry for the Manor of Middleham.
"In Middleham, three ploughs possible. Gilpatrick had a manor there
"valued before 1066, 20 shillings.
"Now Ribald has it waste."
So, before 1066, Middleham had been a relatively prosperous hamlet
owned by a Dane called Gilpatrick, presumably a Viking settler.
But in 1069, William's men came along, turfed him out,
and so comprehensively destroyed the place that 16 years later,
by the time of the Domesday Survey,
there wasn't a single acre of land here being cultivated.
William's troops swept through the land.
Families fled south to sell themselves into slavery.
It was a devastating blow
to the descendants of Danish Vikings in the north.
The Norman campaign of 1069
was a savage attack on the civilian population of England.
And many of the villages destroyed
were just the sort of places where the Danish Vikings would have settled.
And this came on top of the St Brice's Day Massacre,
another mass-slaughter of Danish immigrants in England
that had taken place 70 years earlier.
So the story of the Vikings in England raises many fascinating questions.
Was there ever a mass settlement of Viking peasants?
And how many of the settlers survived the subsequent persecutions?
We'd hoped our genetic survey might help solve these mysteries.
But we knew that identifying the descendants of Danish Vikings
might be very difficult.
It turned out to be impossible.
The Danish Vikings came from virtually the same population stock
around north Germany
as the Angles and Saxons who'd invaded Britain 400 years earlier.
Disappointingly, our survey revealed that their chromosome types
are too similar to allow us to say anything
about where Danish Vikings settled in England.
But when we looked at all these continental invaders as a single group
we saw some surprising results.
Curiously, in England, we found that a higher proportion of people in the north
are descended from these invaders that along the south coast.
David, what's the picture for the whole of England, then?
Well, one thing that really stands out
is that there's a little bit of everything everywhere.
So, we don't see really sharp differences from one place to another.
Things are just graded.
We can see small differences but not sharp differences
so there's really been a great deal of mixing.
Is that the same in Scotland as well?
Well, in fact, it is similar because
in the coastal sites in southern England that we looked at
we estimated an indigenous component there that's very similar
to what we estimated for Scotland.
So we found the highest concentration of the continental invaders' DNA
in northern England.
But surprisingly, mainland Scotland had about the same percentage
of German and Danish descendants as southern England.
Only in central Ireland and Wales did we we find populations
almost entirely descended from ancient Brittons or Celts.
Along the northern sea road,
there's a different picture.
From Shetland all the way down to Cumbria,
we found strong signs of Norwegian ancestry.
There can be no doubt these were the lands of the Vikings.
So, David, do you think that you found all the Vikings in the British Isles?
Well, we certainly haven't found all the Vikings.
And, in fact, it's not really the right way to look at it
because, what we're doing is looking at just the Y chromosome,
and we can say something about the origins of sets of Y chromosomes.
However, that doesn't tell us about the rest of the genetic makeup
of the individuals that we looked at.
And, in fact, in the case of the Vikings,
they spread so far and wide that I wouldn't be at all surprised
if they made genetic contributions... in fact, I'm sure they did,
to peoples in all sorts of places.
The Vikings in the Middle East, perhaps the Vikings even made contributions
to, say, the Caribbean, trough British presence in the Caribbean.
So, in fact, I would suspect that
there are Norwegian and Danish genetic contributions
running through lots and lots of people in the British Isles.
So, individually, we're all a wonderful mixture
and, as a nation, we're a wonderful mixture as well.
That's exactly it.
For nearly 300 years, the Vikings terrorised northern Europe.
With their longships, they conquered kingdoms
and opened up trade routes stretching from the Arctic to the Middle East.
But then they vanished into the shadows of Dark Age history.
Now, at last, archaeological discoveries combined with new scientific techniques
are helping to reveal the true story of the Vikings.
I grew up thinking of the Vikings as a brief, violent episode in our history.
Marauding invaders that we fought off and sent home.
But now we know that they didn't just sail away.
They stayed and became an integral part
of the rich genetic mix of the population.
And a thousand years later, many of us still have flowing through our veins
a little of the blood of the Vikings.
Transcription by Fry.