Original subtitles

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

Tonight, in the last programme of the series, we'll have the final result of

biggest ever genetic survey to be carried out in the British Isles,

Viking blood in the population today.

We're in West Stoke, 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're going to

and turn the clock back a thousand 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

and we'll also be talking to some of 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 6th 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

Harald Hardrada.

Harald Hardrada was an ambitious ruler.

whose exploits earned him the name Thunderbolt of the North.

His story is told here in 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

modern -day Istanbul.

Still in his teens, Harold became a mercenary, fighting around the

for the Byzantine Emperor's elite force.

After ten years, he made a fortune and headed home where he used his wealth to

raise an army and take the crown of Norway.

For the next twenty years, he fought a bloody war against the Danes before

turning his sights on an even bigger prize.

Aged fifty, the Thunderbolt of the North launched an attack on England.

In September 1066, a terrifying fight 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 of their preparations secret.

Because when they arrived here at the mouth of the Humber, King Harold of

England was 200 miles to the south.

Harold Hardrada's fleet made 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

out to Fulford to confront the Vikings.

The English fought to the bitter end.

but they were no match for Harold Hardrada.

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, perhaps 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

who's suffered many wounds, and in that combination, there's only one way he's

going to 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 these

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 slide 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 Salford,

September 1066.

And these could be people, victims of that fight, who were taken back to one

the nearest Anglo -Saxon churches for burial.

It was first blood to Harold Hardrada.

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... Harold Hardrada withdrew from York to await the

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 the brow of a hill, he saw the

Vikings camped out in the valley below.

Harold Hardrada, taken totally by surprise by King Harold's lightning

march, only had about 20 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 if there was no way to dislodge him until an English soldier

underneath the bridge and skewered him from below.

Now, the real battle began.

The English were outnumbered, yet slowly they wore down the invaders.

Until finally, Harald Hardrada himself was killed.

But how had King Harald managed to defeat one of the greatest of Viking

with an army that had just marched 200 miles?

Above all, it was the determination, probably, to hang on to this kingdom

he'd only managed to win nine months before.

He wasn't going to give that up early.

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 have ever been unearthed

here.

But ten miles downriver... At a place called Rickle, some intriguing finds

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

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

But according to the chronicles, Rickle 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 Rickle 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 vaporised 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 rainwater he drank in

childhood.

And the mix of oxygen isotopes in English rainwater is very different from

mix in Scandinavia.

As soon as the results of the tooth analysis were ready, I went to find out

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 Rickle. And on this scale here, this is the oxygen isotope

composition of the drinking water that they had in childhood.

But the interesting thing about it from our point of view is that the sort of

values that you would get in the United Kingdom would really cover the range

going from about something like minus 5, minus 5 .5 in the far southwest of the

country.

through to the north -east of the country, about minus 8 .5.

And that's what we've marked on here, this minus 8 .5 here, this dashed line.

All of our people are significantly lower numbers than that. They're in this

range about minus 9 to minus 11.

So you're saying that somewhere from the British Isles would have to be above

that line? Exactly, yeah. So where do these 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 northwestern Europe today.

Now, you remember the range that we had for our people was something like minus

9 to minus 11.

Now, that's really putting us across here in this band, going sort of across

from sort of central Europe to Baltic Europe through Sweden and then

Scandinavia. Given that... what we know about what went on at Rickle, it seems

to me that the most likely explanation is that these people come from somewhere

in Norway.

Yes, but certainly the results are consistent with that.

It's quite interesting, isn't it? Because it's the history and the science

actually fit together.

Yeah, it's unusual. Not what I expected, actually.

Wasn't it? No.

No, I must admit, when you first came to me with the material, and the material

was undated, and, you know, I thought, well, these will all come up with UK

values. It'd be typical for the Rickall area, I thought, but no.

And were you really surprised? I was very surprised, yeah.

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 unlined. And we now know that all

these people grew up in Scandinavia.

So it looks like the bodies buried at Rickle were Vikings.

But did they fight alongside Harold Hardrada 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 that has been produced by the tip of a sharp weapon,

as perhaps a sword.

So it's gone in just above the pubic bone, probably gone through the bladder

rectum, into that.

So that bone is actually from...

In the back, but the wound has gone in from the front.

Stabbed right through and into the bone?

Yes.

Remarkably, a quarter of the bones show unmistakable signs 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 have suffered soft tissue

injuries and they've bled to death or they've had some essential organ.

irredeemably damaged, but the bones may not show any sign of that.

But what about the women and children whose bones were found at Rickle? 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, Harold Hardrada 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 these 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 Harold Hardrada was a turning point.

The people buried here nearly 1 ,000 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 artefacts we

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

Professor David Goldstein.

Over the last year, they've collected DNA samples from nearly 2 ,000 men in

Britain, Ireland and Scandinavia.

Look at either side of your cheek, yes.

Giving a DNA sample mostly meant just scraping a few skin cells from the

of the mouth, but we were also helped by blood donor centres and dentists.

Only men were sampled, but the scientists were studying the Y

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's first task was to collect samples from Scandinavia.

They looked at the Y chromosomes of males most likely to be descended 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

basis, but the proportion of people with Scandinavian markers on their Y

chromosomes will tell us about the overall amount of Viking ancestry in

area.

In all, we looked at more than 30 sites across the British Isles.

The team focused on small towns where historically there's been little

migration, and we only sampled men who could trace their male line back at

two generations in the same area.

How many generations can you trace your male line? 17.

17?

So the proportion of Scandinavian Y chromosomes in the modern population of

area should indicate the scale of the original Viking settlement.

Joining us here at Stowe, we've got Professor David Goldstein, who was in

of the entire project, and Jim Wilson, Neil Bradman and Julia Abernethy, who've

all been working on the genetic results.

Well, thank you all very much for coming.

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

contribution of the Vikings to the British Isles. But is it actually going

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 that 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 raid in the British Isles came from two separate

places, from Norway and from Denmark.

So we've been looking for two different 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

until the 1400s.

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 from 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.

I mean, have they? Well, remember, we first talked about just looking through

the Y chromosomes.

and identifying those that looked 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

the proportion of the chromosomes that had a Norwegian origin.

And when we did that, the figure was at 60%. 60 % doubled?

Yeah. That's an enormous number.

Yeah, it tells us that the majority of the Wycromson heritage traces back to

Norway. Now, Jim, I mean, you're not only a member of the survey team, but

come from Orkney as well, and you must have had some idea that there was going

to be a strong Viking legacy there. But did you expect it was going to be

anything like this?

Well, I mean, you could never really know, but I thought, I expected we would

find quite a lot because of the strong cultural Norse heritage we have. But,

yeah, I was also a bit surprised.

From Orkney, the Vikings took the sea road southwest 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 type.

From the Hebrides, the Vikings sailed round into the Irish Sea.

One target was the Isle of Man.

Each year, the islanders still gather for an open -air Viking -style

A number of pagan graves have been unearthed here with beautiful Viking

artefacts.

What you have to do is scrape the inside of my mouth ten times.

And the results of the genetic survey.

suggested at least 15 % of men we sampled on the Isle of Man have

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

the results that you get are difficult to interpret and aren't clear. But here

we, in fact, have some very, very clear signals.

It's very clear that there was a significant genetic contribution from

Shetland and Orkney. Now, as you continue moving, you get to the

get to the Isle of Man, the contribution lessens, but we still see evidence,

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 Castlereagh produced no hint of Scandinavian

types.

This area, the rural heart of Ireland, turned out to be almost totally of

ancient Britain 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,

we didn't want to have a metropolitan area that had a lot of recent

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...

We didn't find 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

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, can you imagine?

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 Britain or

Celtic.

From their bases 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 Ralph and Gene Scott Smith gave me a quick lesson.

I tell you something, Jean, we've picked a gay wild spot for a bit crack this

morning. I tell you, Jean, we've certainly picked a cold spot for our

conversation.

Aye, we have.

Did you come up here late and when there was a barn, Ted?

Did you come up here playing when you were a child, Ted?

Aye, I can mind yance we came up here with our pace eggs to roll them down

row. Yes, I remember coming up here at Easter and rolling my Easter eggs down

the hill.

Given all this evidence of Norwegian Vikings, what would the DNA sampling

these areas reveal?

So, David, what did you find in the north -west of England?

When we looked at all the English fights 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

there and the genetic legacy.

Now, Neil, I understand that you looked at the Wirral, right?

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 looked 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,

because of the Welsh being... So we have 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's no genetic legacy from Norway there in

the Wirral today. We're certainly not saying there were never any Vikings

But what we're saying is that we 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

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 sampling produced one very intriguing individual case.

I went to Hoy Lake, on the tip of the Wirral, to meet Bill Housley.

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

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

Yes, I would think so. I should imagine.

Yes, we probably do go further back than that.

Housley men have 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 1920s,

and the connection with the sea still continues today.

I was never a full -time fisherman.

Main reason for that, because by the time I'd reached an age whereby I was

to use or work a boat, fishing was on decline.

I'd come out of the army after completing my national service and

looked at the industry and thought, no, I could do a little bit better than

this. So I 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 jewellery have been found, lost by

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?

Well, we just looked through all the Y chromosomes that we observed in the

world, 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, our guess 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 a... Viking ancestry.

I'm absolutely delighted.

I just can't get over this. So how do you feel about this, Marilyn?

He explains a lot, doesn't he?

Oh, dear.

He doesn't show evidence of Viking behaviour, does he, at times? Oh, yeah.

You may not be able to blame that on his white chromosome.

Do you think it's going to make any difference to your life?

I don't suppose so, really.

I mean, it's nice.

thought and feeling to know that there is a strong possibility I am descended

from the Vikings of Norway and that's something that I'm just delighted with.

Anyway, thank you very much for coming. Thank you for having me. It's been 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

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 Weststow 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 B, 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

army of Harold Hardrada, 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

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

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 800s, 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

So, according to the chronicle, that's when they chose to attack.

20 miles up the River Seine lies Rouen.

By 861, it had been sacked and burnt 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 St. Clair -sur -Epte to

up a peace treaty.

Rollo, the Viking leader, was apparently made to swear an oath on these, the

sacred but...

rather grisly relics of St 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,

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.

Professor 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 to tell us how many the Vikings could be is the

oldest ones.

I mean, the real Scandinavian Viking names, I mean, real place names, made

of two Scandinavian elements. A place name like Brickbeck.

is very typical of an original place name for the third generation.

Bric is Bricci, the slope.

Bec is Beccur, the little brook. So Bric -Bec 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 believed the 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

1066.

And our genetics survey seems to support this.

In the Channel Islands, which were heavily colonised by the Normans, we

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,

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 Doomsday Survey.

The Doomsday Book was written in 1085 and lists the taxable value of every

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.

Value before 1066, 20 shillings.

Now Ribbold has it, waste.

So, before 1066, Middleham had been a relatively prosperous hamlet owned by

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, at the time of the Doomsday 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

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

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

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

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,

some surprising results.

Curiously, in England, we found that a higher proportion of people in the north

that descended from these invaders than along the south coast.

David, what's the picture from the whole of England, then?

Well, one thing really that's...

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

great deal of mixing.

Is that the same with 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 estimate for

So we found the highest concentration of the continental invader's 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 find populations almost entirely

descended from ancient Britons 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

ancestry.

There can be no doubt these were the lands of the Vikings.

So David, do you think that you've found all the Vikings in the British Isles?

Well, we certainly haven't found all the Vikings, and in fact it's not even

really the right way to look at it, because what we're doing is looking at

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.

Vikings in the Middle East, perhaps the Vikings even made contributions to, say,

the Caribbean through British...

presence in the Caribbean, though in fact I would suspect that there are

Norwegian and Danish genetic contributions running through lots and

people in the British Isles. So individually we're all a wonderful

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 long ships, 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

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 whom 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.