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The Viking Age
Appears in
Published 2016
The Vikings were raiders or pirates from Scandinavian countries. In 793 CE a few boats arrived and Vikings raided the abbey on the holy island of Lindisfarne in Northumberland. This was recorded in the Anglo–Saxon Chronicle, an account of events in Anglo–Saxon and Norman England. The Vikings weren’t planning on staying, they initially just wanted to plunder and take riches back to their homelands across the sea; however, many did stay eventually as some were looking for land to farm.
The Vikings coming to England were mostly Danes. They chased away or massacred the Saxons, as the Saxons had done to the Britons earlier, though genetic research shows that in some areas these different peoples remained to live with their own kin. No entire tribe of people was completely wiped out, as was previously assumed of the Saxons and the Britons.