NARRATOR: 40 years ago,
this sleepy village in the heart of England
was the scene of a gruesome discovery.
Crammed in was literally this much of solid human bone.
NARRATOR: Nearly 300 battle-scarred skeletons.
Could these be the last remains
of a legendary Viking army
that swept through medieval Britain?
Wherever the Vikings go, they don't play by the rules.
NARRATOR: No one has been able to prove it until now.
CAT JARMAN: We can get an awful lot of information
out of these bones.
NARRATOR: Archaeologists are on the trail of the Great Viking Army.
♪
It took Britain by force,
helping to shape its laws, language, and very identity--
but left little trace on the landscape.
JARMAN: I think we are in the right place,
we just have to work out how to, to find the Vikings.
(oar master calling orders)
NARRATOR: Researchers unleash a boatful of modern-day Vikings
to retrace their voyage.
(all grunting)
NARRATOR: Using the latest scientific methods,
the team pieces together
extraordinary personal stories...
This was brought down with great violence.
NARRATOR: ...unearthing what could be
one of the biggest Viking sites in Britain.
(detector beeping)
One must imagine thousands of Vikings
covering this whole landscape.
JARMAN: This is what we're looking for.
(cheering and laughing)
NARRATOR: "Lost Viking Army,"
right now, on "NOVA."
♪
Major funding for "NOVA" is provided by the following:
♪
(bell tolling, birds calling)
NARRATOR: For 40 years,
the sleepy village of Repton in Central England
has harbored an extraordinary archaeological mystery.
♪
This garden in the shadow of the village church
is riddled with ancient graves.
JARMAN: I think this might break
in two pieces.
Yeah.
NARRATOR: It's still giving up bodies today.
JARMAN: Lovely.
That's lovely-- well done, Van.
NARRATOR: The first human remains were discovered here
in the 1970s,
under this mound of earth.
MARK HORTON: So the mound was just about here.
It's now been turned into a rather nice barbecue area.
Of course, the excavation completely removed the mound.
NARRATOR: Archaeologist Mark Horton was a 26-year-old grad student
supervising the excavation of the mound
when he was shocked to uncover what lay beneath:
a mass grave.
HORTON: Crammed in was literally
this much of solid human bone.
One kind of felt
sort of almost, like, "Crunch, crunch, crunch,"
as one moved across this sea of human charnel,
of human debris.
♪
NARRATOR: The archaeologists recorded the position of every bone,
and calculated that the grave contained the remains
of at least 264 people.
Many bones bore vicious scars,
suggesting the victims had died in battle.
But who were they?
Where did they come from?
♪
And why are so many buried in this garden?
Clues began to emerge,
including silver coins found with the bodies,
which the archaeologists were able to date precisely
to the 870s.
♪
This was a violent period in the history of England.
A great invasion force terrorized the land.
Christian monks charted the attacks of this "Heathen Army"
in a contemporary text called "The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle."
READER: The raiding army burned and demolished,
killed abbot and monks.
NARRATOR: In the year 873, the marauders swept into Repton.
♪
These heathens were Vikings.
Very little archaeological evidence
of the existence of their Great Army
has ever been found.
But that may be about to change.
♪
Could the bones discovered in the grounds around Repton Church
be the remains of the Viking war dead?
One skeleton, buried in a prominent position
away from the mass grave,
yielded compelling evidence.
HORTON: And if I can remember,
the warrior grave was located just about here.
The head was to the west.
The body was laid out so...
Probably, his feet were just about here.
In fact, when we excavated it,
we thought that he had three legs,
because one of them was a, was a sword.
♪
NARRATOR: The design of the sword was typically Viking.
And a special piece of jewelry found in the grave--
a silver hammer of Thor, the Norse god of thunder--
suggested this was a Viking warrior.
HORTON: Viking warrior graves
are very unusual,
and one that's quite so richly furnished
is very rare in, in Britain.
It seems that this was a man of great significance.
Are you there, are you holding on firmly?
Yes.
You don't let me fall over.
NARRATOR: Mark Horton has been pondering
the mysteries of the Repton graves
for four decades.
♪
But in 2012,
one of his former grad students took the lead on the case.
Scandinavian-born bioarchaeologist Cat Jarman
has been trying to prove that the skeletons at Repton
really are the remains of the Viking army.
It's like a forensic exercise.
You start with just a completely unknown skeleton,
and then you, you really start
to build up a story around this person
by looking at everything
from age and sex and cause of death
to things like diets and DNA.
And then we can really put this person
into that bigger picture that we're looking at.
NARRATOR: As part of her investigation,
Cat's been re-examining the bones of the warrior figure
to see if she can find clues to his identity.
She's met up with pathologist Bob Stoddart.
He first analyzed the skeleton almost two decades ago.
STODDART: This was a chap
who was a professional soldier.
He was tough.
He kept fighting
when he was already severely injured.
♪
NARRATOR: The number of injuries suggests to Bob
that the attackers were intent on completing this kill.
♪
On the left thighbone, a deep, V-shaped gash
implies he'd been struck by a heavy-bladed weapon.
STODDART: He was stopped
by being hit with one of these,
and this was brought down
with great violence
into his groin.
This wound would have cut through his penis,
would have removed at least one testis.
So this was a very dramatic end.
Well, this isn't quite the end.
Oh, right, okay.
There's more.
Because he's now down,
but not yet quite out,
they now set about his head.
♪
NARRATOR: Bob believes that this large fracture to the cranium
was the result of a heavy blow
that smashed the man's helmet into his skull
and dislodged the visor protecting his face.
JARMAN: So he's wearing a helmet,
it's sort of all askew.
All tilts.
Tilted, which means that they can then attack...
They attack through the eyehole of his face guard,
but the eyehole has risen up.
♪
STODDART: He was stabbed with probably a spear,
which went through the skull,
through the brain,
a wound which could not be survived
for more than a few seconds.
♪
NARRATOR: As his men laid the dead warrior to rest,
they attempted to restore his mutilated body
in preparation for the afterlife
by using the tusk of a boar.
The boar's tusk was placed
right between his legs.
Yes.
Presumably to replace what he'd lost.
So there's some care in this,
thinking about what he would need.
Presumably he'd want his penis in the afterlife.
Yes, if he was going to enjoy Valhalla fully.
♪
NARRATOR: The extraordinary measures his enemies took to kill him,
and the special care his comrades took burying him,
suggest that this was no ordinary warrior.
Was he one of the leaders of the Great Viking Army?
♪
Cat's taken samples from the warrior's teeth
in the hope his 1,100-year-old DNA
will reveal some answers.
♪
If Repton is the final resting place
of the Viking war dead,
what brought the army to this remote spot?
In the ninth century,
England was under the control of the Anglo-Saxons,
Germanic tribes that had colonized the country,
splitting it into several kingdoms.
The most powerful was Mercia,
with Repton its political and religious center.
♪
Hidden beneath the village church
is an ancient Mercian site of unique importance.
HORTON: This is the most atmospheric space
to have survived from, from Anglo-Saxon England.
It's really the only substantial architectural remains
from the great Mercian monastery that was built here
from the late seventh century onwards.
Probably the richest monastery in Mercia
and the burial place of the kings of Mercia.
(bell tolling, birds calling)
NARRATOR: Saints were also interred in the monastery that stood here,
which grew rich from tributes paid by Christian pilgrims.
HORTON: The Vikings would have been attracted here
because it was such a wealthy place.
It would have been literally dripping
in precious stones and gold and silver.
(fires crackling)
NARRATOR: The Viking Army drove out the Saxon king, Burgred,
sacked the monastery,
and buried their dead in the consecrated ground.
But who were these ruthless invaders?
♪
The Vikings first emerged almost a century earlier.
They were comprised of disparate tribes
from the vast region we now know as Scandinavia.
SOØREN SINDB K: The people that we call the Vikings
certainly would not have thought of themselves
as a unified people.
But they had one thing in common, though.
They had the language which was mutually intelligible.
So a person from the far north of Norway
could actually speak to a Dane or to a Swede.
That's a huge benefit.
We call that language Old Norse.
But what really makes the Vikings the Vikings
are their ships.
You can't go from one place in Scandinavia to another
without them.
And for this reason, this is really a maritime culture.
Everything you do is connected to the sea.
♪
NARRATOR: At Roskilde in Denmark,
longships are still constructed in the Viking way,
using techniques derived from ancient Viking vessels
excavated from the mud of the estuary.
Cut marks on the original planks
reveal how the boat builders worked.
Instead of cutting across the wood grain with a saw,
they used an axe to shape the planks,
following undulations in the natural wood fibers.
SOØREN NIELSON: One of the keys for this way of constructing a boat
is that you follow the grain,
you follow the fibers in the trees.
I've got a piece here.
So you can see here the long fibers.
And when you try to cut it...
It's not easy, as you can see.
NARRATOR: Long, unbroken fibers
gave great strength and flexibility
to the planks.
NIELSON: In the beginning,
we were a bit afraid of the flexibility,
because you, you know,
of the big schooners and ships from today,
it's, they are stiff and, and very strong.
But, but the strength is the flexibility.
♪
NARRATOR: The huge forces exerted on the ships by pounding waves
were absorbed by the flexible hulls.
With so many strong seafaring ships,
parties of Vikings began to brave the North Sea
and conduct lightning raids
on English coastal communities.
SINDB K: People return from expeditions to the British Isles
with huge treasure,
and nobody in Scandinavia can just ignore that.
If you're a chieftain,
you need to reward your warriors,
you need to reward them better
than the neighboring chieftain.
So the moment that somebody starts this new game in town,
bringing ships across the North Sea,
raiding foreign lands,
it's all over-- everybody has to go.
So within one generation,
we go from a few isolated raids to large armies.
♪
NARRATOR: There could be another reason
why the disparate tribes started to unite.
By the mid-ninth century,
Scandinavia's barren land may have struggled
to support its growing populations.
Fertile England must have looked alluring.
SINDB K: Resources in Scandinavia are under pressure.
If you're the younger son in the family,
chances are that you're not going to set up your own farm.
There's no new land to be taken that's worth having.
As the Viking age progresses,
what they're really after
becomes not the things to be taken home,
but the things that you can gain out there-- the land.
♪
NARRATOR: United under the banner of conquest,
the largest-ever force of Vikings
crossed the North Sea to England in the year 865.
♪
This time, it was no smash-and-grab raid.
They had come to stay.
♪
Because the Viking army left so little physical evidence behind,
historians have to make educated guesses
about how they operated.
Hi, Vikings!
We've chosen a windy old day, haven't we?
NARRATOR: So Mark Horton is joining a group of reenactors
who try to get into the heads of the enigmatic Norsemen
by living like them.
Have you ever taken a longship on the Trent before?
No, it's going to be a bit of a new experience for us.
By my calculation,
it's probably the first time in a thousand years.
♪
Cast off aft, please.
NARRATOR: Under the command
of Captain Steve Etheridge,
these enthusiasts wear meticulously recreated clothing,
carry replica weapons,
and sail in a reconstructed longship.
That's the local sailing club.
I don't think they've seen one of these things
for some time.
ETHERIDGE: Let's hope they don't remember last time, eh?
(laughing)
♪
NARRATOR: No one knows how big the Viking fleet was.
But the "Chronicle" tells us one flotilla alone
contained 250 longships.
For eight years, the Vikings used the river network
to take their bloody campaign across Eastern England.
♪
Then, in 873,
they sailed into the very center of the country...
...up the River Trent to Repton.
♪
Mark's crew is retracing the last leg of that journey.
(oar master calling orders)
HORTON: It's like a sort of open gate into Britain.
ETHERIDGE: Absolutely.
HORTON: We're just one ship,
but you imagine 50, 100 of these vessels,
we're talking about three miles' worth of ships
moving their way up the Trent.
ETHERIDGE: It would have been terrifying.
It's a city on the move,
not just an army.
You're, you're bringing everything that you need
with you.
♪
If you want to move thousands of people,
supplies and stores and weaponry,
these are the motorways of the Dark Ages.
♪
This is the way into the heart of England.
This is how you conquer England, up this river.
♪
NARRATOR: The "Chronicle" records numerous battles
between the Vikings and Anglo-Saxons
along the way.
READER: King thelred fought against the raiding army,
and great slaughter was made on either side.
NARRATOR: At first, these written accounts appeared to be corroborated
by the battle-scarred bones found at Repton.
But in the 1990s,
when the archaeologists carbon-dated those bones,
the results were shocking.
Many of the bodies appeared to be a century too old
to belong to the Great Viking Army--
a mystery Cat Jarman has been determined to solve.
JARMAN: Everything-- the bones, the artifacts, the coins--
is really screaming, "Viking Great Army."
But the science, the radiocarbon dates said,
"That's not possible."
NARRATOR: Scientists date bones
by measuring the amount of carbon-14 they contain.
This radioactive isotope remains in the skeleton after death.
It decays over time at a steady rate.
So by measuring what's left in the bones,
scientists can figure out roughly when the person died.
JARMAN: What we didn't realize 20 years ago,
we actually have to take into account
how the carbon that we're dating gets into our bodies.
And it actually gets into our bodies
through the food that we eat.
♪
NARRATOR: It turns out that people with a diet high in fish
absorb older carbon than meat-eaters.
♪
That's because the oceans contain carbon
that is hundreds of years old.
When fish ingest this,
and people in turn eat the fish,
the ancient carbon enters their bones.
Scientists now know that the bones of people who eat fish
appear older than they really are,
skewing carbon-dating results.
Cat has also been able to calculate
just how much fish each person has eaten
by using the distinctive chemical markers
seafood leaves in human bones.
JARMAN: I looked at all these different bones,
and it turned out,
everybody with a sort of wrong date, as it were,
had been eating a lot of fish.
That was a really brilliant moment, actually,
to be able to,
to see those dates fitting perfectly.
And that meant the entire mass grave
could now be dated to the late ninth century,
meaning it's completely consistent
with the Viking Great Army.
♪
NARRATOR: Now that she's proved they're all the right age to be Vikings,
Cat wants to put flesh back on their bones.
(wheelbarrow squeaking)
Her research has revealed a surprise
about the demographics of the army.
JARMAN: We've been very lucky
in that we've successfully extracted ancient DNA
from these skulls,
and we've been able to determine
what sex these individuals were.
And out of these five,
these three are men,
but these two are actually women.
and that fits really well with the rest of the mass grave,
because about 20% of those individuals are women.
NARRATOR: What were so many women doing here?
Were they supporting their menfolk?
Or is there more to the story?
♪
In Sweden,
the remains of an 1,100-year-old Viking
might offer a clue.
This skeleton was found in 1889, 30 miles from Stockholm,
at the Viking stronghold of Birka.
Charlotte Hedenstierna-Jonson
has recently reopened the case file
on the Birka Warrior.
JARMAN: Wow.
This is my, my baby...
Yes.
At the moment, yes.
Oh, wow.
NARRATOR: Charlotte's been able to use
the original archaeologists' field drawing
to reconstruct how the skeleton was found.
The body was buried with a sword, battle-ax,
and some unexpected companions.
In the foot end of the grave,
there was two horses.
Two complete horses?
Two complete horses.
So this is a very spectacular, high-status grave.
♪
From the very beginning, it's been interpreted
as a warrior grave.
And we would, of course, interpret this as a male.
But last year, we got the results back
from an ancient DNA analysis,
and it's definitely confirmed to be a woman.
Fantastic. And that caused quite a stir.
♪
NARRATOR: DNA extracted from the jawbone
proved that this was a strong, healthy woman in her 30s.
Her bones show no sign of how she died.
But the weapons in her grave
suggest the position she held in life.
HEDENSTIERNA-JONSON: She is buried as a warrior.
We can of course never prove
that she was actively a warrior in life.
But I think that she was a warrior,
and I think that's the message that they wanted to convey
that we are reading now 1,100 years later.
♪
NARRATOR: Was she a real-life shield-maiden--
a woman who, according to Norse mythology,
fought alongside men?
JARMAN: This is really exciting,
because I'm looking at what we think is a war grave
which has women in it.
And to have examples like this,
where the woman is represented in that warrior role,
we have to take that back to Repton
and think about those women.
♪
NARRATOR: The bones of some of the Repton women bear scars,
perhaps of battle.
And they were buried alongside male warriors.
Could they have been shield-maidens, too?
HORTON: In, out.
NARRATOR: On the Trent,
Mark's crew of modern-day Vikings
is a mile from their landing site
just outside Repton.
HORTON: It's quite a difference now, isn't it,
the wind's against us?
It's actually incredibly hard work.
ETHERIDGE: Starboard side, big strokes.
MAN: Keep going.
(yelps)
Keep pulling, starboard side.
(oar master calling orders)
NARRATOR: By the time the Great Army reached Mercia,
it had conquered most of Anglo-Saxon England,
but not just with strong-armed tactics.
♪
The "Chronicle" tells us the Vikings struck peace deals
with embattled communities
and replaced local rulers with puppet kings.
♪
(oar master calling orders)
NARRATOR: It also records
how the army camped for the winter at Repton.
Have you ever beached a longboat before?
ETHERIDGE: No, first time for this.
We're going to give it a go.
(blowing horn)
(shouting happily)
NARRATOR: Viking nails found by the river
suggest the invaders dragged their boats ashore
for repairs.
But they left no record of how.
HORTON: This is terrifying.
♪
NARRATOR: So Steve's crew...
Put it down there, so Daddy can get up.
NARRATOR: ...and their friends and family on the bank...
WOMAN: Okay, another roller!
NARRATOR: ... will improvise.
Heave!
(straining): Come on.
MEN: Pull! Pull!
We've got so far, and we're stuck.
HORTON: Hi, there!
We're having a struggle.
(Horton chuckling)
NARRATOR: Luckily, Mark spots a passing boat crew.
MAN: One, two, three, heave!
(men struggling)
(men cheering)
MAN: That'll do.
MAN: Let's stop there.
(laughing): Yeah.
MAN: That worked, yes.
(cheering)
NARRATOR: Now our team can set up camp,
just as their Viking forebears did.
HORTON: So, I mean, what makes one think
is actually just how important it was.
ETHERIDGE: Yeah.
To come to dry land for the winter.
Yeah, we've been struggling today.
HORTON: Yeah.
And you want to find somewhere
where you can pull your boats up,
make yourself secure.
You're staying here until spring,
and then the raiding begins again.
♪
NARRATOR: The army often hunkered down
through the worst of the winter weather.
But what happened inside their temporary camps
had been lost to history,
until a series of recent discoveries
made at a site 60 miles downriver,
called Torksey.
The chroniclers record the army sat out winter
in these Lincolnshire fields
the year before they reached Repton.
Now a team of metal detectorists and archaeologists
has unearthed intriguing evidence
of that occupation.
JULIAN RICHARDS: We've got about 2,000 finds.
Most of the objects that are here
have been brought to the site as plunder.
It's, it's the stuff that they've looted
from mainly Anglo-Saxon churches
over the previous season of campaigning.
And they're bringing it here, melting it down,
turning it into other objects, trading with it, so forth.
And, as well as all the, the small objects, the loot,
we've also got quite a lot of iron objects from the site.
We've got here the hilt from a sword.
You can see that the hole there
is where the blade would have passed through.
And we do have a number of axes.
This was found just this last year.
But my favorite objects are actually these.
These are gaming pieces.
You can imagine them overwintering,
they've got a lot of leisure time.
In total, we've got over 300 of these gaming pieces.
♪
They seem to provide a bit
of what we, we call the signature
of the Viking Great Army.
♪
NARRATOR: These modest lumps of lead are unique to Vikings,
and the calling card of the Heathen Army.
(fire crackling)
Archaeologist Adam Parsons
has been researching how they were used
in a game called Hnefatafl.
HORTON: Can I have a little look?
Of course you can.
So if you now make your gaming board
and auger some little holes in it,
and you could now place that piece in there,
and whether it's on a ship,
or somebody drunk in a camp gambling,
wouldn't knock the board over.
The crucial thing archaeologically, of course,
the peg would rot away.
Yeah.
So when you find them,
they've got a small hole in the bottom of them.
Because we would just think it would be an empty hole.
Mm-hmm.
So how was the game actually played?
Well, from what we can tell,
there was a king piece that was placed
in the center of the board,
and he had a small army
of perhaps 12 men surrounding him.
And the king's job was to either escape
to the corner or the edge of the board.
This is a kind
of everyman's game.
Exactly.
The soldiers in the camp
can make these pieces quickly and cheaply,
make a cheap wooden board,
perhaps even scratch one in the dirt.
It means that they can while away these boring, wet evenings,
you know,
perhaps gambling away some of the, the money
they've just stolen from various places.
But also, the key thing is, they're so easy to lose.
Yes.
And that's what's so good for archaeology.
You just drop them down there in the grass,
and they're gone.
♪
NARRATOR: Archaeologists have learned to cherish such humble finds,
as the Vikings rarely left dramatic relics behind.
(drone buzzing)
But at Repton, they made an exception.
HORTON: Some 40 years ago,
we found the end
of what appears to be a great Viking fortification.
What we seem to have found is a kind of D-Shaped enclosure.
The trouble is
that surface indications have all disappeared.
NARRATOR: While excavating the Viking burials in the 1980s,
the archaeologists uncovered traces
of a massive defensive ditch.
HORTON: We can begin to lay it out.
One, two, three, four.
About here.
NARRATOR: They only excavated
a few sections of the structure.
HORTON: Three, and four.
Here, I think.
NARRATOR: Now, Mark wants to reveal the whole picture
for the first time.
HORTON: It's actually only by laying it out on the ground
that one can really understand how it worked
and get back into the ninth-century shape of the land.
(drone buzzing)
Okay, so let's put it... which way are we facing?
Where is it?
♪
There we go.
Oh, I can see it.
It looks beautiful.
What you can actually see is the exact shape of the enclosure.
♪
NARRATOR: The enclosure opened onto the River Trent,
which used to run close to the church.
When the archaeologists first discovered the ditch,
they believed it could have encircled
the Vikings' winter camp.
But Mark has a problem with this theory.
HORTON: One thing that immediately strikes me
is just how small it is.
It's scarcely more than four acres.
I mean, you know, you could just about squeeze
maybe 1,000 men shoulder to shoulder.
Don't forget, they've also got to have their ships
and their workshops and all the other things that go with it.
I mean, it was a tiny area.
♪
NARRATOR: Is it possible that the Great Army
was in reality not that great in size?
(drone buzzing)
HORTON: Right.
NARRATOR: That's what some historians have concluded.
But at Torksey,
the archaeologists' recent finds are scattered
across a site 30 times larger.
RICHARDS: This is a huge site,
135 acres in total.
That has implications for the size of the Viking army.
You've got to imagine behind me what is in effect a small town,
a sort of bustling area.
And given the scale of the camp,
we think that probably it was up
to about 5,000 warriors and camp followers.
This is a huge number of people to be gathered in one place.
It's larger than most Anglo-Saxon towns.
♪
NARRATOR: But if there were 5,000 Vikings camping at Torksey,
where did they stay when they reached Repton?
(metal detector beeping intermittently)
A local metal detectorist may have found some crucial clues.
(detector beeping)
♪
Cat's on her way to meet him.
JARMAN: I'm really, really excited and intrigued
to find out what this guy has actually discovered.
♪
Repton is kind of full of unresolved questions, really.
There's a lot we don't understand,
there are things that aren't there.
And these things that he's found
could be exactly what we've been looking for.
The actual missing link.
♪
NARRATOR: Rob Davis is a specialist metalworker
and keen amateur historian.
I've just brought a good selection.
Oh, wow.
NARRATOR: He's been quietly finding Viking artifacts
on a stretch of farmland near Repton
for more than a decade.
♪
Now he's invited Cat to see his collection for the first time.
These are so brilliant.
(chuckling): Um, and I just want to pick them up
and look at them.
Yes.
It's a nice Scandinavian brooch here.
Oh, wow, yeah.
That's beautiful.
That is typical Viking type of brooch.
The day I found that,
I found the pendant.
A Thor's hammer pendant.
Oh, wow.
That's incredible.
You can't really get much more Viking than that, can you?
It's almost identical to the one found in Repton
around the neck of the warrior.
This is just shouting, "Viking Army," isn't it, really?
Yeah.
♪
This is exactly the sort of thing we're looking for
when we're looking for Great Army sites.
And these are all from the same fields?
Yes, all, all from the same field.
One field in particular.
♪
NARRATOR: Rob made his extraordinary discoveries
on this hillside,
just outside the tiny hamlet of Foremark,
two miles east of Repton.
JARMAN: So most of this seems to be coming out from the field
just behind that tree,
that's the one over in the middle, is that right?
That is the main field.
Yeah.
NARRATOR: Unlike some metal detectorists, who frustrate archaeologists
by removing artifacts from sites
without recording where they found them,
Rob has kept a careful record, which Cat can now use
to begin mapping the ancient history
of this landscape.
JARMAN: Foremark Church, which is right here.
It stems from a Scandinavian name, "Fornwerk,"
which means "the old fortification."
JARMAN: So it's like the clue was in the name all the time,
and we just didn't realize.
♪
I think we've got a really, really important site here.
NARRATOR: Rob's discoveries place the Vikings at Foremark.
♪
Was it here on top of this hill, rather than at Repton,
that the army spent the winter of 873?
Cat wants to find out.
JARMAN: We've got the fields that Rob has been detecting,
literally just on the other side of this fence.
That's all been plowed.
That means that Rob's been able to go across it
and find all those metal artifacts
that, that come up with a plow,
and that's not great for us as archaeologists,
because it actually ruins a lot of the archaeology.
But here, nobody's actually done any plowing
or any sort of recent agriculture.
♪
NARRATOR: Because plowing rips ancient artifacts
from their archaeological context,
Cat's assembled a team to search for traces of the winter camp
in the only part of this land
which has not been intensively farmed.
♪
JARMAN: We have no idea how far down we need to go.
I'm definitely feeling very nervous about it,
because I've had to pick a spot out of this giant field,
and I could have picked entirely the wrong spot.
It could all go terribly wrong,
or we could find something amazing.
♪
NARRATOR: If the army did camp at Foremark in 873,
it still doesn't explain
why there are so many bodies buried back at Repton.
But there has been a development
in the search to identify the mutilated warrior
buried near the church.
Next to him,
the archaeologists found the remains of a younger man.
The close proximity of the two bodies
suggests they may have known one another in life.
Hey, hi, Lars.
(on computer): Hey, Cat, how are you?
I'm good, thanks, how are you?
NARRATOR: Cat's had DNA analysis done
on both men's remains.
It's actually quite exciting.
We can now definitely confirm that the warrior
and the other burial found with the warrior
are first-degree relatives.
Oh, brilliant.
And it gets better.
We can say that they didn't have the same mother,
but that they have the same paternal lineage,
which actually only leaves that they were father and son.
That's wonderful.
♪
That's something very new.
We suspected they had some kind of close relationship,
but there was no way of knowing that.
This is so unique.
As far as we know,
there are no other known father-son burials.
We know there are lots of other double graves
in the Viking worlds,
but we've never been able to find out
what the relationship is between those two individuals,
so I'm, I'm just thrilled.
♪
NARRATOR: The revelation that the warrior is buried with his son
narrows down the historical candidates
as to who he might be.
"The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle" offers no clues.
So Cat has asked medieval historian Clare Downham
to follow a lead in another ancient text,
this time from Ireland.
It's called "The Annals of Ulster."
This tells us
about a really interesting father-and-son relationship
which might tie in to the burials at Repton.
Their names are Olaf and his son Eisten.
NARRATOR: Written in Middle Irish and Latin,
the "Annals" record the exploits of King Olaf,
a Viking chieftain based in Ireland
who led raids around Britain.
(reading "Annals" in Middle Irish)
(continues reading)
So this is, "Olaf returns to Dublin from Alba,"
which is North Britain,
"with a fleet of 200 ships."
And these ships contain all the accumulated booty
from their years
of raiding and traveling around in Britain.
♪
NARRATOR: The "Annals" tell us it was in Scotland
that Olaf finally met his match.
DOWNHAM: This time, he's trying to gather taxes and tributes
from the Scottish people,
which of course would make him deeply unpopular.
In the year 874,
he's raiding around Scotland,
and the king of Scotland at that time
encounters Olaf and kills him.
NARRATOR: Could the body then have been carried to Repton
and there, the following year, have been joined by his son,
who was also killed in battle?
(bell tolls)
But if the two bodies are Olaf and Eisten,
why would pagan Vikings carry their dead
from distant battlefields
and lay them to rest in the Christian burial place
of Anglo-Saxon kings?
Archaeologist Howard Williams has a theory.
WILLIAMS: Given the political and the religious importance
of Repton for the Mercian kings,
the Viking Army coming here has a modern-day equivalent
in taking over both Buckingham Palace
and Saint Paul's Cathedral together.
So we have to see this as a grandstand political gesture.
The mass grave would have been not simply a burial,
but a monument in the landscape.
It allowed you to show your claims to the land
and your, your assertion
that you intend to be here for generations.
♪
NARRATOR: Perhaps the mass grave at Repton
is at last giving up its secrets.
But it still leaves the mystery of where the army camped
through the winter of 873.
And the new dig at Foremark is not offering any answers.
We've been here for a few days now,
and our best finds so far
are a Victorian marble and a musket ball.
I still think we are in the right place.
We just have to work out how to, to find the Vikings.
NARRATOR: But in a far corner of the site,
metal detectorist Rob has found something intriguing
a foot beneath the surface.
Right, what have you got?
Quite a deep piece of iron.
You can just see the rust there.
Yeah, okay.
(trowel scraping)
Hmm.
Looks very much like a plowshare.
NARRATOR: It's not what anyone was expecting to find
in a Viking campsite.
A plowshare is the blade of a plow,
designed to cut a channel through the soil
into which crops would be planted.
Used in Britain from the seventh century,
these were precious pieces of equipment.
Yeah, it's brilliant.
An enormous piece of iron that is.
People don't leave plowshares just lying around.
This is their livelihood.
If they lose something like that,
you would literally starve,
because you couldn't cultivate your fields.
So this quite exceptional.
They're really very rare finds.
♪
NARRATOR: 11th-century records reveal
there was once an Anglo-Saxon settlement on this site.
But why would its inhabitants abandon such an important item?
♪
The plowshare has told the team how deep they need to dig
to look for further traces of habitation,
so they can step it up a gear.
(engine running)
HORTON: Digging stuff out by hand is really boring.
♪
This bucket enables us to get down to the archaeology
much more quickly.
This will do just the job.
♪
God knows what's in that one.
♪
(talking in background)
There's something there.
(detector emitting tone)
(scanner beeping)
Wow.
(chuckling)
JARMAN: You found me something?
HORTON: We have something to show you.
♪
Ah!
Amazing.
Yes.
That's brilliant-- it's a gaming piece.
Hole in the bottom.
Yep.
(cheering)
(laughing)
Brilliant.
This is what we're looking for.
NARRATOR: This lead gaming piece is almost identical
to those found at Torksey.
That's the presence of the Viking army.
Yeah, I mean, this is the smoking gun,
isn't it?
That's right.
(trowels scraping)
(wind whistling)
NARRATOR: The gaming piece was found only 30 feet away
from where the plowshare was discovered.
And now that spot of earth is beginning to tell its story.
See it there, yes.
What's that? Yeah.
HORTON: You can see where it's got a lot redder.
JARMAN: It's really clear.
I would say that this orange sand here
and the red sand
is evidence of burning.
Because when you burn sand at a high temperature,
it goes to all of these beautiful sunset colors.
These are some of the things
that have come out of this trench here,
in this area that we are associating with the burning.
We have found a huge amount of charcoal,
some really, really big lumps, and these are brilliant,
because you can actually see that these are planks of wood.
They were found in a nice, rectangular line
and putting it all together,
we seem to be getting a building,
and that building may well have burnt down.
HORTON: Okay, I've got a theory.
Do we have a Pompeii moment
down there, hmm?
(laughing): Okay.
HORTON: By which I mean, a catastrophic event happens
and freezes everything in time.
This is actually a Saxon building.
We know the Vikings are here.
Yeah.
HORTON: They're burning Saxon houses down.
The inhabitants fled,
and nobody came back to recover the artifacts.
♪
NARRATOR: According to Mark's theory,
the precious plowshare was left behind
because the wooden Anglo-Saxon building it was in
was burned down by the Viking army.
JARMAN: I think that's,
that's not quite as crazy as it sounds.
(both chuckling)
♪
NARRATOR: The artifacts discovered by detectorist Rob
already point to a Viking camp at Foremark.
And now, Cat's team is beginning to unearth evidence
of the terror the army might have brought
to the local population.
JARMAN: If this really is what we think it is,
then that's hugely exciting,
because it's actually directly showing evidence
of those attacks and what that must have been like
for the people living here at the time.
♪
NARRATOR: Together, Foremark and Repton now form
one of the most important Viking sites
in Britain,
which Cat's team will continue to explore
for years to come.
JARMAN: I'm really pleased.
We've definitely found the Great Heathen Army.
It's all in the tiny little bits of evidence.
It's not the big structures,
it's not big fortifications and whole ships.
It's just the small, single items
that tell us so much of the whole story.
I actually think we're now just scratching the surface,
that further investigations of this site
is, is going to totally change our understanding
of the early Viking age in England.
(crackling)
NARRATOR: According to the "Chronicle,"
after moving on from its winter camp,
the Great Army began to fragment.
Meanwhile,
the Anglo-Saxon tribes rallied together,
and by the year 878,
they had finally gained the upper hand.
The Great Army scattered,
many of its warriors settling in England.
♪
Local children were now being born
with Scandinavian blood.
And, as at Foremark,
English places were given Norse names,
a reminder today
of a land once occupied by the Vikings.
It was the relationship between the Vikings and the Anglo-Saxons
that led to the formation of England as a single nation.
♪
The Vikings changed England forever.
JARMAN: The Vikings made a huge impact,
not only on this part of Derbyshire,
but on the whole country.
This is the real evidence, this is the actual,
on the ground, the real, hard facts.
And I'm so, so happy to have been part of that.
♪
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♪