Southern England.
Road builders dig foundations for a new highway.
Cutting through the chalk,
excavators make a shocking discovery.
In a shallow grave is a tangled mass of headless skeletons...
..and, to one side, a pile of severed skulls.
Who are these victims?
Why were they killed?
Who committed this brutal atrocity?
To find out, investigators must solve an ancient murder mystery...
..piecing together ancient texts...
HE SPEAKS OLD ENGLISH
..heroic sagas...
I would rather face the blow, so strike me in the face.
..and using cutting-edge forensic science,
will lead them to a story of greed betrayal and revenge.
Dorset, the south coast of England.
On a hill, at a junction of a Roman road and an ancient track,
known as the Ridgeway, lies the burial pit.
It's clear that this is not a recent burial,
so it's a case for archaeologists rather than the police.
There's a large pile of skulls here. They are piled up.
Dr Tal Simmons is a forensic anthropologist
and war grave specialist.
I've not seen anything like this before.
I think it's rare to see mass-scale decapitations.
I've only seen one other, sort of, modern forensic decapitation,
which was in Bosnia.
The challenge is as macabre as any modern murder.
It really is chilling. I'm finding it very difficult to take in.
It's just this mass of bodies.
And then that separate pile of heads! I mean, it's...
Clearly, it's an atrocity.
This is a really terrible moment in human history.
Something really, really bad happened here.
We need to know, who were these people? Mm-hm.
Well, that's always the first question, yeah.
Who are they? What is their identity?
The trouble with this site is that they're not buried with anything.
There are no artefacts. There are no things that give us a date
or give us any idea of who they were as specific individuals.
Strangely, the burial contains only bones.
We would expect to perhaps pick up a few brooches,
something like that, so we could perhaps begin to...
..to consider the possibility that... They were stripped. ..they were stripped.
Which makes you think it's an even more horrific atrocity. Mm-hm.
Angela Boyle and the team from Oxford Archaeology
are lifting every bone to take back to their laboratory for analysis.
But clues are already emerging.
This is a fragment that I have just literally
lifted from the ground.
And look at that!
So what do you think about that one? That's amazing.
What we have there is part of the right temporal,
which is just round about here. Yep.
It has a very visible, well-defined cut mark.
That is so clean, isn't it? It is.
Yep. Yes.
I mean, you'd think sword, wouldn't you? That would be my first thought... Yes. Yes.
..because of the flatness of it and the cleanness of it.
But I don't think you can cut somebody's head off -
a living person's head off with a sword -
unless you tie their hands up. Mm-hm.
You see, if I kneel down to be executed...
..I'm going to be like that, cowering and my whole shoulders are...
You can't get at my neck.
But if you give me a good push, Tal, I can't help but do this
to stop myself falling on my face! Uh-huh. Yeah.
I'll throw my shoulders back and lift my head up.
It's a grim thought. Yeah.
So I don't believe you can execute somebody unless their hands are tied.
Only one problem. Yes? None of these have their hands tied.
Was it an execution?
Or were they decapitated postmortem? That's the big question!
The site already presents some key pieces of evidence.
There are 54 skeletons,
but just 51 skulls.
They were naked. Their hands were not tied,
and their bodies were thrown into the pit.
Is this the aftermath of a battle,
a massacre, or some violent sacrifice?
Hidden in the skeletons are vital clues
that could unravel the mystery of this atrocity.
For centuries, England was wracked
with violence, invasions and civil war.
So there are many possible explanations for our mass grave.
Before the investigation can make progress,
we need to know exactly when the victims died.
Depending on the date, they could be anything from Celts to Romans,
Saxons or Vikings.
Every skeleton contains a hidden clock.
When a person dies,
carbon-14 isotopes in their bones begin to decay.
Radiocarbon dating measures this level of decay,
zoning in on the date.
The answer comes back from the lab.
The victims almost certainly died between 980 and 1030 AD,
one of the most turbulent times in British history.
A thousand years ago,
Anglo-Saxon England was under attack from pagan warriors.
Vikings...
..sailing from Scandinavia in search of riches.
Archaeologist Dr Britt Baillie was raised
in a country with Viking heritage,
modern-day Denmark.
She has a lifelong fascination with her ancestors
and the destruction they wrought.
She has come to Britain's south coast,
to the very place where the Viking age had its violent beginning.
Just over there is the site of our mass grave.
But here, on the Isle of Portland, this is where the first
recorded Viking raid on England took place.
Three ships sailed here in 789,
The King's reeve rode down from Dorchester
to meet them, thinking that they were traders,
but, instead, they killed him.
And this marked the beginning of the Viking age in Britain.
And wave after wave of raids followed on
from that first, initial attack.
After 100 years of conflict, a treaty was finally signed.
Vikings settled in Britain
and established their own, separate kingdom, Danelaw...
..alongside the Anglo-Saxons to the south...
..and west.
For a century, they lived in relative peace
and the Anglo-Saxon kingdom prospered.
England, at the turn of the millennium,
is the most precociously organised state
in the whole of Western Europe.
It has a single language.
It has a single religion.
It has a single chain of authority,
descending from a king,
which reaches to almost every corner of the kingdom.
Not only is England incredibly efficient as a state,
it is also very rich.
But if you have great wealth, it can also lead to great vulnerability, as well.
This is the England the victims in the pit would have known.
Now their bones are out of the ground,
they are digitally mapped to record where every victim lay.
Archaeologist Angela Boyle begins her analysis of each skeleton.
It's a unique find.
There's nothing to parallel this.
And that makes it very, very exciting. Also quite...
..sad. Quite moving, and emotional, as well, because
clearly, all of these individuals met a very unhappy end.
All 54 victims are male
so, given the times in which they lived,
they are most likely a band of warriors.
Angela's analysis of their bones
starts right at the bottom of the pit, with the first man to go in.
The development of the skeleton's not entirely complete.
The fusion of the long bone ends is still happening,
which you can see, indicated by this line here.
This gives Angela a good idea of his age.
He's quite a young male.
Probably about 19 or 20.
The length of his thighbone gives his height.
This particular individual was about 5 ft 9.
The bones are quite big and robust.
What's interesting is the fact that his...
..upper body seems rather more well-built.
And there's one other striking discovery.
The head of his femur is smaller than the head of his humerus.
And that suggests to me that perhaps, some sort of...
..activity, which involved the upper body, was being regularly undertaken.
In 980, after a century of peace...
..Viking raiders returned to plunder the riches of the Anglo-Saxon kingdom.
Many believed it was the beginning of the end.
There was a feeling in the shadow of the year 1000
that the order and prosperity that the English had previously enjoyed
seems to be breaking down.
That all these, maybe, calamities
that are serving to herald that ultimate breakdown,
which will be represented by the Day of Judgment.
One of the greatest pieces of ancient literature
is the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle,
a record of events written by monks, begun around 890 AD.
HE SPEAKS OLD ENGLISH
In 979,
it documents the crowning of an unpopular king
who would fuel fear of the apocalypse...
..Ethelred the Unready.
In this year, Ethelred was consecrated king
on the Sunday 14 days after Easter.
And in this same year, was seen a bloody cloud,
many times,
in the likeness of fire.
This is particularly unnerving because
it is well-known that clouds of blood appearing on the sky
will be a marker that the end days are approaching.
So, right from the beginning, there is this sense
that Ethelred is a king who is marked by looming calamity.
The carbon dates show the 54 men in the pit
could have died during the troubled reign of Ethelred.
But whose side were they on?
The Vikings returned to Dorset again and again.
It was from here that they could drive deep into that kingdom.
And therefore, it's likely that the bodies
that we find in the mass grave
are probably Anglo-Saxons,
defending themselves from these raiding sea pirates.
But no objects of any description were found in the pit.
So far, the burial offers no clear answer to the men's identity.
The investigators must dig deeper... ..by turning to science.
The victims' life story is locked in their teeth.
Professor Jane Evans of the British Geological Survey
has taken one of them for analysis.
I think if you start to think what one tooth can tell you,
it's absolutely fantastic.
And what we can build up about a person's past
and their childhood, and their subsequent movement,
just out of a tooth.
We're going to separate strontium and oxygen
out of the tooth enamel of this individual,
and we're going to look at the isotope composition.
The strontium isotopes tell us about the type of area the person grew
up in, geographically, and the oxygen isotopes will tell us
something about the type of climate in which they spent their childhood.
Tooth enamel is created during childhood
and its composition remains unchanged throughout life.
During its formation, strontium and oxygen are incorporated from
the local food and drink,
fixing the isotope signature of that place into the teeth.
So, what this machine is doing at the moment is measuring
the isotope composition of the strontium that's in this
machine, that comes from a tooth.
And when it's completed its analysis,
we will get a ratio that we will be able to use to diagnose where
that person spent his childhood.
It's absolutely fantastic when you're sitting at the mass
spectrometer and the answer comes out and you sit there
and you think, "Oh! Yeah!" The only person that knows that -
you want to run down the corridor and tell somebody.
But you usually check with your calculations first,
before you do that.
The most likely scenario is that the victims in the pit are local
Anglo-Saxons, killed by Viking raiders.
If this is true, their teeth should show
they grew up in Southern Britain.
This is the field that we would expect them to plot in,
if they had spent their childhood in Britain, and all the individuals
plot to the left-hand side, which is the colder climate side.
So all these individuals spent their childhood in a colder climate.
This is Britt's first opportunity to analyse Jane's isotope data.
The results are totally unexpected.
What's immediately apparent is that the victims in the mass
grave are not from England.
They're not Anglo-Saxons. They're from Scandinavia.
And that must mean that they're Vikings.
Argh!
Rargh!
We usually think of the Anglo-Saxons as victims of the Vikings,
and not the other way round.
So this changes the way that we need to approach this grave, entirely.
Surprisingly, the victims are Scandinavian.
Now, Britt must work out why 54 Vikings were beheaded.
It's likely a mass Viking execution would have been
recorded in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle.
Just nine copies remain.
The oldest is held here at the University of Cambridge.
Not only is it written by Anglo-Saxons in the period
that we're looking at, but it's also written in their own language,
in Old English or Anglo-Saxon.
MAN SPEAKS IN OLD ENGLISH
It very much gives us
a year-by-year account of the major salient episodes of what's going on.
So the text is divided into two columns.
One lists the dates down the side, and the other,
the entries for each year.
Hopefully, somewhere in these pages, there'll be clues,
telling us what happened on that day, on the Dorset Ridgeway.
Britt searches for incidents that may have resulted in Vikings
being captured and killed.
We know that this is a period where we're seeing
an increase in the scale of the battles.
And in 991, we come across an entry for the Battle of Maldon.
Olaf Tryggvason raided Folkestone with 93 ships.
He then went on to Maldon in Essex.
There, Ealdorman Byrhtnoth met him with his army and fought.
The Chronicle documents that Byrhtnoth led the Anglo-Saxon
army against the Viking horde.
Precise details of the battle were recorded in an epic
Anglo-Saxon poem.
Here stands a good earl, in the midst of his men
Who will defend his homeland, the kingdom of Ethelred
You heathens shall fall in battle
Byrhtnoth drew his sword from its sheath
Broad and bright-edged and struck against the armour
Warriors in conflict fell
The slain fell on earth, they stood steadfast
Byrhtnoth stirred them
Fiercely with his sword, he didn't restrain the blow
And the doomed warrior fell at his feet.
Despite their gallant fight, ultimately,
Byrhtnoth's Anglo-Saxon army lost the battle.
The poem tells us
both sides suffered terrible injuries in battle.
Could the men in the pit be captured warriors, or prisoners of war?
If so, their bones should show evidence of battle injuries.
Do we see trauma on the leg bones, or any that would have been
incurred perhaps in a fracas or some type of battle?
There's actually a surprising lack of trauma that's not
related to the beheadings.
There are virtually no battle scars, just some minor injuries.
There are a coupe of examples and it's trauma to the hand,
to the left hand.
Again, with a sharp-bladed weapon.
It's what we would describe as a defensive wound.
The individual's put their hand up.
With so little trauma to the bones,
it's clear the victims aren't war dead.
If the victims in the mass grave weren't the victims of battle, one
needs to look for other incidents in which they might have died.
One of the things that the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle
mentions is the massacre on St Brice's Day.
By the dawn of the first millennium,
it seemed the prediction of apocalypse was coming to pass.
Viking raids were on the rise.
King Ethelred took drastic action.
November 13th, 1002, St Brice's Day,
was one of the darkest days in Britain's history.
The king ordered all the Danish men who were among the English
race to be killed on St Brice's Day,
because King Ethelred was told they wanted to ensnare his life
and all his councillors and take his kingdom.
I think the St Brice's Day massacre,
far from illustrating a king who is somehow losing it, is the mark of
someone who feels that he is getting the kingdom back under his control.
Are the skeletons in the Dorset Ridgeway pit victims of this
massacre on the 13th of November, 1002?
The best way to find out is to compare them
with other burials that are closely linked to St Brice's Day.
A gruesome mass grave was recently discovered 150km away, in Oxford.
Britt's come to see
if they have similar injuries to the men in the Dorset Ridgeway pit.
In terms of cause of death, what do we know about these individuals?
This guy here's a good example. He's actually got multiple injuries.
He's got some sword cuts to the back
of his spine. This is a leg bone.
It's quite a clear blade cut, either from a sword or an axe.
So this guy's actually had a cut to the back of the leg there.
This skull seems to show some quite clear traces of trauma.
What happened to this individual?
This chap has actually been hit by a bladed weapon,
either a sword or an axe, several times,
so we've got two clear scars on the front of the skull and then,
there's further marks on the top of the skull and the back.
In addition to that, we believe he's also been speared twice
because there's two triangular holes in the top of his skull.
Clearly they wanted him quite dead.
Yeah, and by the looks of it, he might have put up quite a fight. Mm.
These individuals from the Oxford burial seem to have been killed
in some kind of frenzied massacre
by perhaps even a mob.
Whereas our bones from the Ridgeway site,
appear to have been killed in a much more orderly fashion,
perhaps even an execution.
Most of the skeletons from the Dorset Ridgeway have just one wound.
The beheading.
It's very different to the multiple injuries of those killed
in the Oxford massacre.
But do the Dorset bones reveal any more about the way they died?
This is the second cervical vertebrae.
So from around about here. Mm.
And part of that bone has something called an odontoid... Mm-hm.
..which is a little peg-shaped area of bone. Mm.
You can see here, it has been sliced.
Clean through. Clean through.
Mm.
It's a very, very good example of a clean cut.
This tiny clue could speak volumes about how they died.
Do we have any indication of what angle
they were being decapitated from?
It would appear that the majority are from the front.
So they were facing their executioners?
They were facing their executioner, yes.
CHEERING AND LAUGHTER
And were all the executions executed so cleanly?
The majority, yes.
There are a small number of...
..examples where maybe two or three blows have been inflicted.
SCREAMS
This has probably occurred where the first blow to the vertebrae
hasn't been sufficient to kill the individual, remove the head.
Evidence shows the weapon used was brutally efficient.
That's the left ear hole. Mm-hm.
Now, this area here, which has been removed,
again you can see - very, very clean cut,
this is the mastoid process,
which is the knobbly bit just behind your ear hole.
Now, that's one of the thickest...
..parts of the skull... Mm-hm.
..and the blade has sliced completely and very cleanly
through that part of the skull.
Most of the skeletons in the pit show just one cut, to the throat,
and they must have been alive at the moment of beheading.
Knowing what the murder weapon was and how it was wielded
may provide the key to why they were killed.
Britt turns to weapons expert Gordon Summers.
We now know that they were alive when they were beheaded,
so it's the beheading itself that killed them. What would they have used?
Had you told me that the beheading was postmortem,
then I would have said it was an axe.
You've got a corpse on the ground, just like you might cut a log,
the axe is the tool to use.
That has got a considerable weight. That would shatter the vertebrae.
So I think it's reasonable to assume that an axe
wasn't the weapon of choice. What does that leave us with?
The prime candidate for this act is the sword.
This is a very prized weapon of the period,
both for Vikings and Anglo-Saxons.
To the outside edges of that are forged hardened steel.
Steel capable of taking a very fearsome edge.
It's a weapon that is handed down through the generations.
A neck of lamb is going to help demonstrate
the devastating power of the Anglo-Saxon sword.
Well, it hasn't completely come off,
but you can really get a sense of how deep that cut is, can't you?
There's no shattering in that vertebrae at all.
It has gone completely through that vertebrae.
What's holding it on is the muscles at the back.
Clean cuts on the skeleton are only half the story.
This is quite extraordinary.
What would it have meant to these Vikings to die by the sword,
looking their killer in the eye?
To use the sword against somebody showing that degree of bravery
is perversely showing them a considerable degree of respect.
They are warriors being killed by a warrior's weapon
and being allowed to exhibit the qualities of a warrior,
so valued at the time.
So who were these brave men
who had the courage to look their killers in the eye?
An ancient Viking saga bears a striking resemblance
to the events on the Dorset Ridgeway.
It's about a particularly fearsome group - the Jomsviking.
Though the historic accuracy of these texts is debated,
they provide an insight into the world the Vikings inhabited.
What's very curious is that we have a description
in the Jomsviking Saga which seems to tell of an execution
very similar to the type that we see at the mass grave
in the Dorset Ridgeway.
This saga details a battle which happened in Norway
at which Vikings were taken prisoner
and executed by another group of Vikings.
The Jomsviking Saga is written in old Norse and it tells us...
"Bior jarl nu fara eptir eim ok taka hondum.
"Roa nu til eira ok vorousk eir a ekki.
"Varu..."
TRANSLATION: The Earl ordered men to go after them.
To take them prisoner.
The Vikings put up no resistance.
The 70 of them were brought ashore
and the Earl had them all tied to one piece of rope.
Valkyrja then proceeded to cut off their heads.
The Viking said,
"I am content to die,
"as are all our comrades.
"But I will not let you slaughter me like a sheep.
"I would rather face the blow.
"So strike me in the face and watch carefully to see if I pale at all."
Here we have a Viking who wants to look death in the eyes,
he wants to look his executioner in his eyes.
He wants to die a brave death.
LOUD CRY
Perhaps what we are seeing here
is a repeat of this execution ritual on English soil.
Can the skeletons reveal an even closer tie
between the Jomsviking Saga and the events on the Ridgeway?
Angela has found some remarkable clues.
I'm really very excited.
These are the front teeth, these are the first incisors.
Now, what is interesting here
is the fact that both of these teeth have grooves.
They've been filed. Right.
There are a number of really quite fine lines.
And do you find this kind of dental modification anywhere else?
As far as I know, there are no other examples of this,
in the UK, certainly, to date.
There are a small number of examples known from Scandinavia.
So the fact that we've got the first example of this in the UK
in a Viking context is extremely exciting. It's remarkable.
There has been one school of thought which thinks
that some of these grooves might have been filled with either
a coloured paste or some kind of modification
to make them even more apparent in the mouth. Yes.
This profound and unique discovery provides a crucial link
to a description of the most famous Jomsviking warrior of all.
One clue to this teeth-filing phenomenon
that we see in the mass grave
may come from a very high-status individual from Viking times,
King Harald Bluetooth.
SCREAMING
Perhaps what they were referring to is the fact that he filed his tooth
and filled it with a blue colouration.
Medieval sources claim Harald Bluetooth founded the Jomsviking,
one of the most feared bands of Viking mercenaries.
Professional warriors who would fight for anyone for money.
The filed teeth of some of the men in the pit
could link them to the Jomsviking mercenaries.
With this new clue, Britt returns to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle
to search for incidents involving such warriors for hire.
From 980 until the year 1000, we see an increasing number of Viking raids
and also battles being fought between the Anglo-Saxons and the Vikings.
There was great hostility in the land of the English race.
The Viking ships burned and raided everywhere.
The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle tells us King Ethelred paid enormous
sums of money to the Vikings to put an end to their attacks.
And to stop this great terror, which they wrought along the sea coast,
it was decided to pay off the Danish men.
LAUGHTER
This payment was £10,000.
That's over 75 million US dollars in today's money.
It had little effect.
So, Ethelred changed tack.
He offered Viking crews gold and silver
to switch sides and fight for him instead,
as mercenaries.
He was hiring Vikings to fight off other Viking bands.
And we particularly hear of one Viking mercenary called Pallig.
Pallig and his mercenary crews
were paid by Ethelred to protect his kingdom.
But as the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle records,
he betrayed the King.
These are soldiers who will fight on behalf of the lord
who's willing to pay them the most.
But these mercenaries are quite fickle and they will often switch
their allegiance to whichever lord is willing to pay them more.
Pallig deserted King Ethelred,
despite the gifts of gold and silver that he had given him,
and he joined the Vikings with all the ships he could muster.
The evidence points to the bodies in the pit being Viking mercenaries.
They may have paid the ultimate price for their treachery.
But one mystery still remains.
Why was an exposed hilltop location chosen as an execution site?
Britt is taking landscape archaeologist Alex Langlands
to the crime scene.
Are you nervous, Britt? About flying? No. I know you are, though.
You'll be all right. I'm terrified.
I'm just hoping, once we get up there, we get to see some fantastic things
and it'll take my mind off this.
The landscape really comes alive from up here, doesn't it?
Yes, it really does.
To the south of us, we can already start to see Portland.
It is here that the Viking period really starts in England, isn't it?
Right there, that's where we have the first raid in 789.
That's right, and that's what's so tantalising
about where you've got your execution cemetery.
Now, this is the site of our execution here.
It's at this location, this really important crossroads,
we've got Dorchester to the north, we've got our beach to the south,
you've got the Roman road connecting them,
but they would also be using the Ridgeway as well
so you've got this really important crossroads,
probably one of the most important crossroads in the county, actually. Right.
Here's our Ridgeway here, just down here.
This would have come into being in the prehistoric period,
but of course, by the time we get to our period,
it's forming a major highway.
All along the Ridgeway are ancient burial mounds known as barrows.
Look at that barrow there.
Spectacular.
And they're peppered all along this Ridgeway.
Obviously these barrows predate the Saxon period.
How would they have been interpreted and viewed
by the people at that time? They still had a ritual significance.
It's just that that significance is changing
in a more Christianised landscape, and they're becoming associated
more with sinister, demonic and devious aspects of society.
You know, if you're going to kill someone who has committed crimes
against this kingdom, what you're going to want to do is kill them
in a place that's going to take that death and, if you like, magnify it
a thousand times, so to kill someone on or near one of these barrows
would have been very profound, actually, for both the Anglo-Saxons
and the Vikings at the time.
Standing at the execution site, Alex thinks there's another reason
why 54 skeletons and 51 heads were discovered right here.
This is a highly, highly visible place.
From where we're stood now, we can see the island of Portland,
we can see Weymouth, we can see Dorchester as well,
and all that traffic using the road there,
they would have known, there's that execution site.
If you've got heads missing,
we often get referred to in documents concerning the landscape,
we get reference to "hofud stakur", which means heads on stakes. Right.
So if you've got missing heads... We are missing some heads.
You think they might have taken those heads and put them on stakes,
to make it visible as people came up over that roadway? Absolutely.
JEERING
This is a statement not just to passing Vikings and other raiders,
it's also a statement to the local people.
It's the King saying, "Look, I'm in charge here."
Here we have a piece of English history
which had been completely forgotten for a thousand years,
and suddenly, we've been able to piece it back together.
A vivid picture of a dark episode emerges.
It's clear from the skeletal evidence that these people
were probably not killed during battle
and therefore it's almost certain that they were ambushed.
Now! Arrgh!
Outnumbered, surrounded and disarmed,
the men who were ambushed were led from the site of their ambush
to a very significant site, the Ridgeway on the crossroads
between a major Roman road and the Ridgeway line itself.
The Vikings were led by their captors up the Ridgeway
to a site next to a burial mound, with its dark, pagan associations.
54 dead bodies in the pit.
This number must be significant.
We know that Viking longships at this time
could carry a crew of 60 men quite easily.
So perhaps what we are looking at is a crew from a ship.
The skeletons back this up.
The head of the hip bone was smaller than the head of the shoulder bone.
Several of the skeletons had well-developed upper bodies.
And that's consistent with the physique that one would expect of a rower.
These men were a band of brothers
who would have lived together and fought together.
And the skeletons held another clue to how they died.
One expects to see people beheaded from behind
but here we have a very unusual case.
These men were beheaded from the front.
Vikings went into battle looking for honour and glory.
These men wanted to show that they weren't afraid to look their
executioners in the eye, they wanted to die with their honour intact.
CHEERING
At the turn of the first millennium,
the Jomsviking Saga would have been known throughout the Viking world.
Perhaps what we're seeing here is a group of men who wanted to emulate
the deaths of these great Viking heroes from the sagas.
Not only do these men live together and fight together,
they went to their deaths together.
Ultimately, the mass execution was in vain.
Anglo-Saxon England was doomed.
King Ethelred's kingdom collapsed
and Vikings took over the whole of England.
The beheaded Vikings lay in the shallow grave
for a thousand years.
Only now,
can their story be told.
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