The Viking alternative Silk Road

I made a mistake in the last blog mentioning the alternative route to get silks into Europe was up the Danube. It would be easier to go through the Mediterranean but there may be a way up the Volga or the Dnieper from the Caspian or the Black sea to St Petersburg or Riga. Too circuitous, you say. Well, it was worth carrying silk all the way from China on horseback, why not use the Eastern European rivers wherever possible and mule trains over the rest to the Baltic and Western Europe. I'm sure the Vikings were capable of thinking that through. 
For historical things, my problem is that I worked for a multi national mining company in a department looking for new business. When the price of copper went up there would be a panic effort to find copper deposits. It irritated me that no one seemed to think every other multi national was doing the same thing and the projects would come on stream together, depressing the copper price. I did my best to convince people that the best approach was to think that with a higher copper price, people would be looking for an alternative and our efforts should be directed at finding what that would be and investing in that.
Which brings me back to history. People are inclined to find several pieces of evidence to support one theory and ignore other possibilities. I'm not a history buff but I did study the history of the Cape Route to the East and only found out that the Phoenicians had sailed round Africa in a throw away note by Herodotus that the Phoenicians had been lying when the said they sailed through the Pillars of Hercules, turned left and journeyed until the sun changed sides. How many throw away comments like that, notes that contradict established theory, have been ignored by historians. Did no one from Russia ever chase a Caribou across the ice in the Bering Strait and 'discover' America. Did no sailor ever slip down that continent's west coast and find the Isthmus, slip across and find a way from the west to Europe. Is there somewhere a business invoice from a Japanese businessman to show, like the Phoenicians over the route to Cornwall, they kept the route to Europe secret until some fool found his way round the other way?   
You may not believe it but all this study of trade and trade routes led to Drover, the story of the drover and his lass and the droving roads in Scotland.

www.sullatoberdalton.com/books/drover

WHere did the Vikings get weapons?

Let's take a look at these Vikings. They come in boatloads, all armed with two swords and a battle axe yet it is only the nobility that can afford proper weapons in Britain and Western Europe. What's the difference? Massive iron ore deposits in Scandinavia. When you look at the North Sea area you begin to understand why it created such powerful groupings. Tin, copper, lead and a wee bit of gold from Britain, Iron ore and timber from Scandinavia and through the Baltic, down the Danube to the East.
To dismiss them as slave traders is to sell them short, just as to assume they were pure Norse. On a lengthy voyage, some crew members would die and be replaced by slaves. The first time the normal crew went ashore and stirred up the wrath of the locals, it would be obvious to the slaves that if they wanted to survive they had best grab a sword and join in with the crew.
Of course they were fierce, can you imagine sailing down past Scotland's west coast to the Irish sea among Highlanders, mad Welshmen and fight loving Irish without being fierce? There again, can you imagine a wild Highlander or Welshman or an Irishman not wanting to join in and go looking for senioritas to capture, never mind gold and loot?
The picture of Vikings we have been given by historians is of a grim death dealing masochists but in any group that is a the fanatical minority, the bulk would be adventure loving chaps, who enjoyed a good fight, like some soccer supporters today.
Let's stop thinking about people in history having different appetites and desires to us and enjoy our heritage as human beings and begin to worry about what happens when Europe has no natural resources to offer the world.
The Photo is of an Irish uncle, appropriate for this time of remembrance.

www.sullatoberdalton.com/books/drover

Burned cakes and Vikings

After Patrick and Columbus,came the Vikings. According to my history teacher, wild savage men who did terrible things to the people of Britain. Somehow they came to Lindisfarne out of the mists of the North Sea. What mystified me was that they should be lucky enough to land on an isolated island full of treasure. It turns out that these Vikings were originally merchants trading in amber, fur and walrus ivory, and it was most likely that the traders went back to Viking land and told them the Brits stored their gold and silver in churches with only men in frocks to guard them and that brought the soldiers. Have we any of our own empire building to confirm this kind of thing? There is the East India Company. It started as a few trading posts and, within a hundred years had become a private army that controlled a sub-continent. The Brits just did it on a massive scale. The story goes on that Alfred the Great and his sons had chased the Vikings out of Britain about a hundred and fifty years later. Can you imagine what effect the Americans who came here during WW2 would have had on the population if they had stayed for a hundred years? Mixed race wouldn't look at it! Not only that but the Vikings who came in the first lot would not be over keen to share what they had fought to get with the late-comers, so the whole history book story seems a bit dubious. If you've ever argued with a sea-side boarding house landlady, you'll know what I mean and can sympathise with Alfred when his landlady spoke to him about burning the cakes and understand why the epic tale has survived for so many years.

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In the last years of the Roman occupation, it seems Britain was still pagan, with druids cutting mistletoe and curing all kinds of ailments with frog spittle and duck feathers. Then a lad called Patrick was taken prisoner and sent to the galleys as a slave. This Patrick was a bright lad and learned all their was to know about the new religion, Christianity. When he escaped he to Ireland and did a kind of Moses thing, waving his staff and sending all the snakes rushing into the sea. That made him famous and he started preaching about this new religion, not the way the Romans thought about it with a Pope in charge, but something the Irish could accept. He was all for a system where, even if they were joined by the same belief, each little valley or glen had its own priest, who gave the local chief advice on how things should be.  The Scots, I won't call them Scotti, heard about it when a chap called Columbus took up residence in Iona, an island half way between Ireland and Scotland. (Columbus went there because there was nothing to fight over as there was in Ireland or the Highlands, and he could have time to think.) His religion seeped down the west coast to Wales but didn't get much further because the lords in the South of England didn't like this business of local chiefs doing as they liked. They had wide flat lands and could make sure everyone who lived there did as they were told. When the Pope sent a missionaries to teach the people how to be proper Christians, the missionaries organised a meeting in Whitby to get everyone to agree on whether Patrick and Columba, or the Pope, were right. The only people who could get there were the people from the south of England, you weren't going to struggle down from Auchterarder or across from Pontarddulais, so it was naturally decided that the Pope was right and they should all be Roman Catholics. Which set up the situation that grew into Methodists in Wales, Presbyterians in Scotland and Anglicans in England, all believing the same thing in different ways and burning people to prove they were the peace makers and to prove that, while God gave life, he had authorised them to take that gift away.

www.sullatoberdalton.com/books/land-fit-heroes

What happened to Nero from Yorkshire

I was taught that the Romans left Britain in 410 AD to go to defend Rome. Well, it seems the army was about 500,000 strong and maybe 100,000 were in Britain, so where did they all go? 500,000 soldiers crowding into Rome all at once? They must have been standing on each others heads.The ones that had been in Britain and elsewhere for four hundred years  would have women and children, so we are talking more than a million refugees all cramming themselves into one walled city in Italy. No wonder the Italians are unhappy about the present influx. Did the Brits who had joined up go away, or stay behind. Was it like the aftermath of WW1 with all the young men gone and more women than men in Britain and more men than women in Italy? There really are a million stories in this, not stories about wars and heroes but tales of families left behind. Were all those soldiers killed, or did they go home and become outlaws. The Roman empire moved to Constantinople so, are the present immigrants the descendents of Roman soldiers trying to go home? Maybe one or two could claim British passports because their ancestor was the Yorkshire servant of a centurion in 45AD. This new fad of DNA history could backfire in ways we didn't expect.

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Roman VAT

I have a Scottish upbringing. Maybe that's why I am sceptical of glib explanations. I'm told the Roman legions, with their shields making a tortoise to cover them from rocks or spears or arrows fired at them were terrified of the Scots and particularly the Picts of the Western Highlands and that is why they ran back and cowered behind Hadrian's Wall. I can't see either that, or the tale of the Picts gathered together a great army. The Picts were a mixture of McDonalds and Campbells and McLeans and Macbeths, all stealing and squabbling among themselves, so what really happened? The Roman's found tin in the south, then copper further north, then lead, zinc, a bit of silver and some gold in southern Scotland and that explains Antonine's wall to protect that. What happened then was that the money men in London complained about the cost of the lead etc. it was costing. The agents explained they paid for the stuff in Scotland but the couriers got robbed in the border country and it all had to be bought back from the robbers at Hadrian's Wall. At that point the London men sent word to pull back to Hadrian's Wall and buy from whoever brought the stuff. If it was the producers, fine. If it was the robbers, that's life. Now, that seems are more likely explanation than the legionnaires being terrified of a bunch of naked, blue painted screaming savages.
Since the gates in the walls were also places where duty was collected, it may be that there was too much smuggling across the firth of Clyde (unlikely what?) and it was easier to control at Hadrian’s Wall. Which means that sales tax started with the Romans and even in 43AD, there was no escaping VAT.

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Picts Scots and Romans

As I pursued the research for the history talk, I was surprised to find how many people in England believed the Romans only went as far as Hadrian's wall. In fact the Roman legions marched up beyond Aberdeen and the King of Orkney submitted to Claudius at the time of the 43AD invasion. They built Antonine's Wall between the Clyde and Forth before pulling back to Hadrian's more southerly version. In researching this I found that the names Picts and Scots, which I had believed stretched back into antiquity came with the Romans; Picts being late Latin for a barbarian painted people, which explains the legend of Brits being painted blue, Scotii being the Roman's name for a bunch of Irish pirates who kept Scotland's west coast province of Dalriada in terror. The Painted People were still taking off plaids and shirts to charge half naked at the Redcoats in 1745, by the way. All of this goes to confirm my wife's uncle Ken's warning not to get involved in family history or you'll find you are related to tinkers.

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