51 Headless Vikings Found in English Execution Pit?

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."

you’re gonna make me have to look all this up but it involves the Viking lines in the Norse Saga of Rognvald, Rollo and Rolf the Granger..and oh yeah, the Vikings were meaner than hell...they only spared breedable females and little kids ...the latter if they had a mind to...and a few slaves if need be.....rowing being such a pain you know.

i recall reading it in Churchill’s volumes and thought it an excellent refrain of courage from a soon to die warrior

and it had prophetic consequences in time for Saxon England.

the Saxons are so interesting to have once been hell on wheels and to have been so romaticized bu history from Robin Hood and King Arthur..although King Arthur may actually have been Briton but anyhow...the Saxosn became postoral but never really got the government thing like the Normans did...true feudalism

but the Saxons and their homies the Jutes and Angles were hell on wheels in their day befroe they became farmers

i find all this stuff all fascinating...when Hollywood makes guys in bearskins roaming with long hair and broadswords they are thinking of Saxons...like Skarsgaard cool acerbic portrayal in that funky Arthur movie....

isn’t it weird how Scandinavians are so passive now?...the English are not.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jutes

The Jutes, Iuti, or Iutae were a Germanic people who, according to Bede, were one of the three most powerful Germanic peoples of the time. They are believed to have originated from Jutland (called Iutum in Latin) in modern Denmark, Southern Schleswig (South Jutland) and part of the East Frisian coast.

Bede places the homeland of the Jutes on the other side of the Angles relative to the Saxons, which would mean the northern part of the Jutland Peninsula. Tacitus portrays a people called the Eudoses living in the north of Jutland and these may have been the later Iutae. The Jutes have also been identified with the Eotenas (iotenas) involved in the Frisian conflict with the Danes as described in the Finnesburg episode in the poem Beowulf (lines 1068-1159). Others have interpreted the iotenas as jotuns (”ettins” in English), meaning giants, or as a kenning for “enemies”.

i did look it up last night....one of the sons conquered East Anglia and took York in late 800s

thrown in an adder pit (not cooked) and his last defiant words were: (Ragnar maybe)

” piglets will grunt when they hear of how it’s fared for the old boar”

hence the Blood Eagle revenge...I know I don’t need to explain that on you probably already know and that they did

they is legend about how all sons reacted so violently to the old man’s execution that they struck serious fear even in their own tribes

one of the sons...the youngest ...his spawn eventually took Normandy from Philip in France and we now how that ended for the merciful ol Saxons

When I think of where Saxons come from I always think of Holstein cows and Atom Heart Mother

the good thing about all this was it set the stage at the time for Alfred’s consolidation of territory in response as young man too

btw, this Norse Saga stuff is bound to have some hyperbole in it

:’) The Normans tried the same thing as the Saxons had before them (uh, whoops, see that article on Anglo-Saxon genocide of the Britons), but only managed to replace the ruling class. A good many of Harold’s lords lay dead on the field of Senlac (the other name for the Battle of Hastings; the actual site of the battlefield is overlooked by the Battle Abbey, if memory serves), and the countryside was recarved into fiefs to reward William’s henchmen. One of the big genealogy kicks in the 19th century US was to look for ancestors who sailed over with the Conqueror. Some of my ancestors may or may not have (don’t really care) — but most of ‘em didn’t, and were good old solid rural farmers for dozens of generations, at least, by the time 1066 rolled around.

William’s son was an even bigger a-hole than his dad; he died in a “hunting accident”, shot (I think) by his “friend” who claimed he thought “Rufus” was a deer or some crap. The House of Normandy was just four kings long, and wound up degenerating as one would expect of an extended family of cutthroats, with a civil war between Wm I’s grandkids. The Conqueror’s granddaughter never ruled per se, but gave birth to the first of the Plantagenets, which itself wound up riven into Lancaster and York branches, and spent 35 years fighting the Wars of the Roses.

Anyway, in 1215 at Runnymede, King John, a politically incompetent and weak king, was forced to sign the Magna Carta by rebellious barons allied with the King of France. It sez here he later got the Pope to approve his own repudiation of the treaty, signed as it was under duress, and he tried to pick off the barons one by one. He died, and the Magna Carta (a small trickle of Roman imperial law) endures as the foundation of English common law and our own legal traditions.

The use of French language at court was one result of the Conquest; that continued for a long while, perhaps until Henry VII (first of the Tudors and another usurper), dunno. The struggle with France over the French crown went on for over a hundred years (still call it the Hundred Years War though ;’) and one idea I’ve seen repeated here and there is that the end of the HYW led to homecoming for loads of British professional soldiers, who were then idle, out of work, and highly skilled at pretty much just one thing; this surplus of armed veterans helped lead to the Wars of the Roses.

The English language remained the common tongue, and despite having royal houses from France, various parts of what is now Germany, and whatnot, English (with plenty of grammar and loanwords from Latin and French and others) wound up the way it is today, and the aristocracy — which is often at least party of Norman descent — is just a slowing withering appendix.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_of_England

[snip] Winston Churchill summarised the legacy of John’s reign: “When the long tally is added, it will be seen that the British nation and the English-speaking world owe far more to the vices of John than to the labours of virtuous sovereigns”. [end]

The battlefield site... yeah... it’s known... can’t remember... There’s a cool anecdote (actually a couple of them)... during the parley (Earl Tostig and King Harald were both surprised that King Harold had mustered an army and made it all the way to their landing site so quickly; the spot was chose because the local population had a significant degree of Viking ancestry) what treaty terms were offered. Tostig was offered his lands, and some extra stuff, and a little cash, and all he had to do was renounce all claims to the throne and swear fealty.

When asked what was offered Hardraada, the apparent herald said, “six feet of English Earth, or however much more his height exceeds that of other men.” That offer wasn’t acceptable, and the English parley rode back to their lines. Hardraada asked who the herald was. “King Harold” was Tostig’s reply (IOW, King Harold had ridden up with a handful to do the parley in person). Hardraada was impressed, and said so, I think complimenting his dash, elan, and talent with horses. Anyway, Hardraada’s ability to innovate and counterpunch ran out that day.

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