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| "Fetch me my axe, dear." |
Posted on 07/28/2009 1:34:43 PM PDT by SunkenCiv
Naked, beheaded, and tangled, the bodies of 51 young men -- their heads stacked neatly to the side -- have been found in a thousand-year-old pit in southern England, according to carbon-dating results released earlier this month. The mass burial took place at a time when the English were battling Viking invaders, say archaeologists who are now trying to verify the identity of the slain. The dead are thought to have been war captives, possibly Vikings, whose heads were hacked off with swords or axes... Many of the skeletons have deep cut marks to the skull and jaw as well as the neck... The bodies show few signs of other trauma, suggesting the men were alive when beheaded. One victim appears to have raised an arm in self-defense: "The hand appears to have had its fingers sliced through," Score noted... Unusually, no trace of clothing has been found, indicating the men were buried naked. Even if their weapons and valuables had been taken "we should have found bone buttons and things like that, but to date we've got absolutely nothing," Score said... The burial has been radiocarbon-dated to between A.D. 890 and 1034... The team hopes chemical analysis of the buried men's teeth will show whether they grew up in Britain or Scandinavia... There was little to differentiate Vikings and early English warriors on the battlefield, said Siddorn, founder of Regia Anglorum, a historical-reenactment society... Both used spears as their primary weapons, with swords and axes as backups, Siddorn added... "During the height of the Viking raids, it's reasonable to say it was unsafe to live anywhere within 20 miles [32 kilometers] of the coast."
(Excerpt) Read more at news.nationalgeographic.com ...
The vikings must have tried to force nationalized health care against the will of the people.
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| "Fetch me my axe, dear." |
Went snoozin’ after cruisin’ and wound up losin’ their heads.
Someone que the VIKING KITTYS!
The Isle of Man was rediscovered by Vikings; it was already occupied long before that. :’)
And they didn’t have panties back then.
The Viking invasions (which included the reign of Canute / Knut; his father Svein Forkbeard spent 20 years in Denmark preparing his conquest, and died just before it began) went on for a few hundred years, peaked early, and finally ran out of gas in 1066 (the Battle of Stamford Bridge). What it did was unify the seven kingdoms and motivate their kings to build what may have been the best national army in Europe (again, until 1066; of course, waiting a few days, or maybe a couple of weeks, for mustering to complete, probably would have made the difference at Hastings, when Harold II fell to William the Usurper/the Bastard/the Conqueror).
If I hear “What’s in your wallet?” one more time, I’d do the whole bunch myself with a rusty shovel.
bttt
Thanks!
Yah. It’s all in the book and my genealogy.
Whoops, Svein lived to invade England, then died right after. :’o
Being Irish, Scots, Welsh and Danish, I find myself feeling rather conflicted regarding this.
[bloody Sassenachs!]
“The past is something, we all have some / universal history is a bundle of fun...” — Incredible String Band
My only Danish connection may be confectionery ;’) but basically it’s difficult to tell. I’m English with Scottish and a tad Welsh (one side) with German, Irish, Dutch, Jewish, and who knows what (the other), plus there’s always surprises in the family trees and nowadays in the DNA. ;’)
Agreed.
Saxons could be pretty obtuse as a peoples but being one of them I hold them dearly.
what an irony...fight those pesky raiders for 100s of years and then in 1066 they just waltzed right in under another name and took over forever....more or less though the Saxon bloodline did sneak back in with Henry II’s momma.
oh well brutal necessities of brutal times
there is a story of a Viking King who is captured by the Saxons and as they are about to roast him alive he declares defiantly something like “laugh now because even though the boar is in a pickle when my little piglets hear of this they will surely squeal...and squeal;
he had several sons who all henceforth waged war on the Saxon lands brutally and whose greatgrandchild was ultimately William the Conquerer who as mentioned above waltzed in with a new fancy name
these weren't truly Britons, the Saxons had killed most of them off or intercopulated them baring Wales and other extremities...these were more precisely Saxons in Sussex.....lol...i know
guess these unlucky fellers had come in too far from shore and been outnumbered and shown some Saxon "mercy"
must have been a lot of Saxons because Vikings were indeed hell on wheels or more accurately hell on Draakars.
some of these Viking raids came from the northeast of Britain where Vikings lived as farmer Danes but not this bunch too far south and too close to the coast....Vikings went everywhere friggin where but never really settled for long except Danelaw where they finally just faded into the soup.
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