larities between the societies of raiders and victims have been pointed out, which made it relatively easy for the Vikings to be assimilated or at least accepted as allies. But now, perhaps, historians are swinging in the other direction. If Coppergate (a Scandinavian name meaning 'street of wood-turners') shows the Vikings at work, so do the excavations at Repton (Derbyshire), which have revealed the careful way in which the Vikings plundered a monastery and stripped it of all its precious objects. Viking poetry, it has been argued, reveals a taste for violence 'verging on the psychopathic', while the Vikings may have been fanatical in their paganism, sacking monasteries as much for ideology as for opportunism, and sacrificing their opponents in a peculiarly bloody way.

Raiders or traders? The Vikings, of course, even individual Vikings, were both at the same time, for booty can easily be brought to a trading-place and exchanged for other goods, while, for a trader, theft was one easy way of obtaining goods. Other Viking leaders, like those in the Great Army, may have had political ambitions, while in the wake of successful armies came farmers and artisans. As far as the ninth century is concerned, however, the primary legacy of the Vikings was that of destruction; the more peaceful phase came later, as small-scale piratical raids were replaced by well-led expeditions with political aims, and as settlement and peaceful commerce followed stabilization. It is in 910 or thereabouts that Vikings in York laid out streets and tenements in the Coppergate area.

The first area of north-west Europe affected by the Vikings was probably Scotland and the Isles. In Orkney and Shetland the native language disappeared, and so, probably, did the natives: these islands remained Norwegian throughout the Middle Ages. The Outer Hebrides became Norse-speaking also: Gaelic did not take over until the sixteenth century. Viking settlement appears to have been less concentrated in the Inner Hebrides and mainland, although pagan inscriptions and graves show that the Isle of Man had become an important Viking base in the ninth century. Many of the Vikings who settled in south-west Scotland or in north-west England may have come via Man or the Isles, or perhaps from Ireland.

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