This introduction gives an overview of the scope of “bitch”, following its twists and turns from its humble beginnings as a word for a female dog, through to its popularity in the present day.

This chapter focuses on the idea of rivers as frontier or boundary, beginning with stories from Late Antiquity, and including a discussion of the ways that river frontiers are porous and permeable. A case study of the monastery of Prüm shows the complexity of these dynamics. The main focus of the chapter is on the impact of the Viking raids on medieval monastic writers, and how their stories about this moment created a new view of rivers as sites of danger and disruption. Then, the chapter explores ways that rivers were seen as sites of destruction and oblivion – an alternate to the idea of rivers and memory explored in the previous chapter. Finally, it looks at how monastic communities reinvented their histories in the wake of the Viking attacks, and how this helped them in turn to reimagine and restore their relationships with rivers.

Asser’s biography of king Alfred gives a vivid portrait of the man. It combines the use of earlier Anglo-Saxon chronicles as sources with Asser’s own composition, often based on his personal acquaintance with the king. Here some excerpts are given from both categories, showing that Asser’s style changes somewhat depending on the source. For the chapters covering the period 874-8 which give an account of Alfred’s dealings with the Danes, relevant excerpts from the Old English version in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle are given in an appendix to the Section.

Alcuin’s letter no. 16 is addressed to Æthelred, king of Northumbria in 793, the year in which Lindisfarne was destroyed by the Vikings in their first attack on England. In the letter Alcuin blames the king and the people for their immoral lives, and like Gildas before him, sees the foreign invasion as God’s just punishment for such immorality. The excerpt from Symeon of DUrham’s twelfth-century history shows the portents seen shortly before the Viking attack.

For centuries, the homeland of the Germanic people was in southern Scandinavia, butaround 1500 BC some of them set off on the journey that was to lead them to England – and then far beyond. The journey went down along the Jutland peninsula until by about 1200 BC Germanic-speaking people were occupying the whole of Jutland, as well as a small area of northern Germany from the mouth of the River Elbe to the mouth of the Oder. Here, they came in to contact with Celtic-speaking peoples.

This chapter concludes the volume’s first thematic strand (Home and Away) with a study of Scandinavia and the North Sea world in the age of William the Conqueror. Beginning with Denmark and Norway, it moves on to scrutinise the legacy of Cnut’s North Sea empire, before turning to Scandinavia’s Christianisation and the consolidation of its Church. This is followed by a study of towns, trade centres, and the settlement and increasing urbanisation of the North Atlantic. The chapter is rounded off by discussions of Sweden and the two Baltic Islands of Gotland and Bornholm.

Between 919 and 936, Viking attacks caused a sustained crisis in Breton politics: much of the ruling elite fled to Francia or England. By the time a new duke of Brittany was installed with the help of the English king Æthelstan, Frankish aristocrats had encroached on Breton territory, introducing the French language and social norms. However, the new ruling class embraced a Breton political identity. This involved, for the first time, the promotion of a British secular founding figure for Brittany as a whole, a certain Riwal, for whom a genealogy (a very Insular kind of ‘charter’ to rule) was constructed using materials that seem to have originated in south-west Britain. The relics and Lives of Breton saints had been exported to many parts of France and England, and as a result a number of centres outside Brittany produced Lives of Breton saints, or hagiography apparently influenced by Breton motifs, during the tenth and eleventh centuries. Within Brittany, eleventh-century writings produced at Rhuys (the Life of St Gildas) and at Landévennec (the cartulary) show renewed contact and input from Wales, Ireland and perhaps northern Britain.

The history of war in the Scandinavian world is inseparable from the history of the Vikings. The stereotype of Norse violence, still prevalent today, was fostered by contemporary writers such as Alcuin, who lamented the strike on Lindisfarne in his native Northumbria (793 ce) as a pagan contamination of Christian society. ‘The heathens’, he wrote to the monks there, ‘have stained the sanctuaries of God, poured forth the blood of the saints all around the altar, laid waste to the house of our hope, and trodden upon the bodies of the saints in the temple of God as if they were dung in the street. What can I say except to lament in spirit with you before the altar of Christ and say “spare your people, Lord, spare your people, and do not give your inheritance to the pagans lest they might say where is the God of the Christians”?’ A century later, a horrified Abbo of St Germain-des-Près recounted how so many Viking longships went down the Seine to Paris that the river itself seemed to have disappeared. According to the view presented in medieval sources from the British Isles and France and replicated in modern textbooks and popular histories, Scandinavians were decidedly ‘other’ to the Europe they plundered.

The Scandinavian seaborne raiders known as the Vikings are famous for their violence. Initially operating in small bands, by the second half of the ninth century they put together large armies comparable in size and weaponry to those of the kingdoms of Europe, some of which were brought to their knees. The purpose of the Vikings’ violence was to acquire wealth, which fed into the political economy of northern Europe, notably in the form of gift-giving. Viking warriors were motivated by a warrior ideology of violence that praised bravery, toughness, and loyalty. Any fallen warrior who had excelled in these qualities expected to go to Valhöll, the great hall of the god Odin, where they would constantly be feasting. The unexpected raids by previously barely known peoples from northern Europe was shocking to their victims, who tended to exaggerate the fighting prowess of the Vikings and to ascribe a particular propensity for violence to them. The idea that the Vikings were more violent than others took root in European culture and spread also to Scandinavia itself, leading to unfounded myths such as berserks and the ritual of the bloodeagle. The violence of the Vikings was, however, not dissimilar from the violence of other early-medieval Europeans.

Prehistoric origins of food conflict. Role of food in the growth and collapse of empires. Food wars in recent centuries.