Daily Medieval

It may well have been news of the wholesale slaughter of Danes  in 1002 that was ordered by King Æthelred that motivated Sweyn Forkbeard t...

Clashes with Danes in England resulted in establishing the Danelaw, originally just the set of Danish laws agreed upon with Alfred the Great...

The Danish raid on Canterbury in 1011 included a leader named Thorkell the Tall. He was an important enough man that his name was recorded o...

The Archbishop of Canterbury, Alfheah  (also called Alphege), was captured during an invasion of Vikings in 1011.  Eadric Streona  was suppo...

Eadric, the son of Ethelric, started as a relative unknown. His father was at the court of Æthelred the Unready , but was not distinguished....

When King Edmund of East Anglia bought off the Vikings of the Great Heathen Army in 865, he might have thought he was safe from that point...

In the sixth season of the TV show Vikings , a whale has washed up on shore. One character, Kjetill, claims it for his own. Others insist th...

And now for the absolute largest Viking hoard of silver treasure ever found (I should add: "so far"). In 1999, a Swedish televisio...

The Vale of York Hoard was the largest hoard since  the Cuerdale Hoard. So what was special about Cuerdale? Well, the York Hoard had over 6...

(Parts one and two ) There are plenty of historical records of Vikings raiding for plunder and slaves, from the northern coasts of the Brit...

When King Oswald of Northumbria invited St. Aidan to come from Iona in 634-5 CE and start a monastery, Aidan chose an island off the northea...

You've seen them. Lots of times. Three circles interlinked. You find them in jewelry, and in the label of Ballantine beer . They may ...

Charles the Simple Charles III, called "the Simple" (from Latin Carolus Simplex ) was a King of Francia (what we think of tod...

Statue of Olaf in Trondheim King Olaf Tryggvason is the subject of far more stories than we have facts to support them. (He was implica...

An 11th-century depiction of Varangian Guards. In recent posts on the 4th Crusade and the Siege of Constantinople, I mentioned the Vara...

A sign of Viking presence in Ireland: a Viking ship built in Dublin c. 1042 As alluded to in the post on King Edmund I , Ireland was th...

A new TV show started in 2013 and has proven popular enough that it has been renewed for a couple more seasons. It is called "The Vikin...

Today is an important day in Sweden : Anna's Day, celebrating all people named Anna. It is also the traditional day to start preparati...

Clement being thrown into the sea, by Bernardino Fungal of Siena (1460-1516) If Clement truly was the second pope, following Peter (the...

When we think of the Viking invasions of England, we usually think of the destruction of villages and people's lives. This is understa...