Chapter 6

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and then descended upon the luckless kingdom of Æthelred the Unready (p. 264). The Jomsvikings plundered pitilessly in the south of England, wintered on the Thames, and made more than one attack upon London; then in 1010 they went into East Anglia, defeated the local levies, plundered inland to Northampton and burnt that town; in 1011 they moved south again and sacked Canterbury. They murdered the archbishop, after holding him to ransom, and when at length Æthelred had bribed them with sufficiently enormous sums of money Thorkel, with forty-five of his ships, and Olaf too, abandoned their maraudings and suddenly professed themselves willing to take up arms on behalf of the English king. In the wars with Svein in 1013 these Jomsvikings and Norwegians helped Æthelred to defend London against the invading Danes, but when in 1014 the English cause seemed to be hopeless Thorkel, though he received yet another payment from Æthelred, sailed off to Denmark and placed himself and his vikings at the disposal of King Cnut.
       It was in the year 1043 that young Magnus Olafsson the Good, king both of Norway and Denmark, put a sudden end to the great stronghold of Jomsborg and its famous vikings. They were, he must have believed, endangering the existence of his flimsy double-kingdom, for the Jomsvikings did not consider that they owed Magnus allegiance nor that the homage paid to him by Svein Estridsson of Denmark affected their own imagined independence; moreover, it was clear to Magnus that they might at any time throw in their lot with the numerous and powerful Wends who were now threatening hostilities against the Scandinavian power. Therefore he sailed at the head of a mighty fleet and took Jomsborg, then under the command of Harald Thorkelsson, by storm; he destroyed it utterly, burning the buildings to the ground and putting the captured vikings to the sword.
       So ended in fire and massacre the stronghold that Harald Gormsson had built, the fortress whose fierce and terrible warriors had been renowned above all other vikings. But though Magnus had shown the strength of his arm in Wendland, the peaceful town of Jumne, for over eighty years defended by the vanquished Jomsborg, remained. And the Wends rose in this same year; with a huge army they invaded Denmark and there on Lürschau Heath, west of Hedeby, they pitted themselves against the conqueror of the Danish fortress that had for so long protected their coast-lands. The victory went to Magnus, and so it came about that the fall of Jomsborg was the immediate prelude to the decisive battle that for ever put an end to the further expansion of the Slavs northwards and westwards.




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       All the east German coast from Jomsborg to the Kurisches Haff lay exposed to the attacks of Danish and Swedish buccaneers, but except for the commercial importance of the rivermouths neither merchants nor marauders found much inducement to exploit these flatlands where west of the Weichsel dwelt the Wends and where in East Prussia a partly Baltic and partly Germanic folk, who had resisted the Slavonic invasion, maintained a precarious existence.
       In Wendland, apart from the Jomsborg, there are no signs of occupation by the vikings. Mecklenburg has next to no archaeological material as witness to their presence, (1) and in Pomerania only a few viking graves have been found; in this last-named province, however, some discoveries unconnected with burials have been recorded, mostly gold ornaments and combs of viking types, and from the bed of the Oder viking swords have been dredged up, while on the coast near Leba the hull of a viking ship was found.
       But further to the east the Weichsel, the great river that had borne so many of the Scandinavian emigrants on their way to the south, was a trade-route known to the men of the north from ancient days, and here on the lower reaches that were the boundary between the Slavs and the German and Baltic people there are still three or four Scandinavian place-names (2) to attest the existence of viking settlements at the head of this important thoroughfare. There is, indeed, no doubt that the vikings took their share of the trade along this river, for up-stream far inland near Mewe there was discovered the grave of a viking merchant who lived in the latter part of the eleventh century that contained not only his sword and spear but his weights and scales as well.
       In the Gulf of Danzig and along the coast of East Prussia the Swedes were jealous rivals of the Danes, (3) but in the second half of the ninth century when the Englishman Wulfstan made his celebrated voyage to Truso (Meislatein) near Elbing, this famous mart was in the undisputed possession of the native folk.