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When the Vikings sailed west to England more than a millennium ago, they brought their animal companions with them and even cremated their bodies alongside human ones in a blazing pyre before burying them together, a new study finds.These animal and human remains were found in a unique cremation cemetery in central England that has long been assumed to hold the remains of Vikings — in particular, the warriors who sailed west to raid the countryside in the ninth century A.D. However, the new analysis revealed that several of the burial mounds didn’t contain just the remains of humans but...

Dr Jane Kershaw from Oxford University, who is leading the dig, said it may have been used by the famous commander Halfdan to launch attacks on the Picts.A number of objects have been found there over the years, using metal detectors, such as lead gaming pieces and copper coins known as stycas.'Incredible finds'Volunteers are also working at the field, which Dr Kershaw believes could have been home to a "town of tents" in the 9th Century."They found some incredible finds that can really only belong to the Viking Great Army and their activities in the 870s ," Dr Kershaw told...

Two amateur treasure hunters were sentenced Friday to lengthy prison terms for stealing millions of dollars worth of 1,100-year-old coins. The coins date back to the period when the Anglo-Saxons were battling Vikings for control of England. British metal detectorists George Powell, 38, and Layton Davies, 51, dug up the 300 coins along with gold and silver jewelry in 2015 on farmland in central England but never reported it. That reporting is a legal requirement. Prosecutor Kevin Hegarty said the coins were estimated to be worth $3.9 million to $15.4 million. The archaeological wonders are believed to have been buried by a member of the Viking army that was being pushed across England...

THEIR reputation for raping and pillaging may not have set them out as the ideal role-models for an environmentally-friendly way of life. But it seems that lessons could perhaps be learnt from the Vikings after the intriguing discovery in Yorkshire of what is believed to be a metal recycling centre dating back to the 11th century. Historians and metal detector enthusiasts have made the find which is being heralded as evidence of how the Norse invaders recycled their fearsome array of weapons. Hundreds of pieces of metal including arrowheads, shards of swords and axe heads have been unearthed as part...

On Christmas Day 1013, Danish ruler Sweyn Forkbeard was declared King of all England and the town of Gainsborough its capital. But why is so little known of the man who would be England's shortest-reigning king and the role he played in shaping the early history of the nation? For 20 years, Sweyn, a "murderous character" who deposed his father Harold Bluetooth, waged war on England. And exactly 1,000 years ago, with his son Canute by his side, a large-scale invasion finally proved decisive. It was a brutal time, which saw women burned alive, children impaled on lances and men...

A mass grave of 300 bodies uncovered in Derbyshire could be the burial site of the Viking Great Army's war dead, a new study has found. The mass grave was found in Repton in the 1980s and dating techniques at the time suggested it consisted of bones collected over several centuries.

According to historians, the Viking Age began on June 8, A.D. 793, at an island monastery off the coast of northern England. A contemporary chronicle recorded the moment with a brief entry: "The ravages of heathen men miserably destroyed God’s church on Lindisfarne, with plunder and slaughter." ...In the centuries that followed, the Vikings' vessels carried them deep into Russia and as far south as Constantinople, Sicily, and possibly even North Africa. They organized flotillas capable of carrying warriors across vast distances, and terrorized the English, Irish, and French coasts with lightning-fast raids. Exploratory voyages to the west took them...

Viking sagas describe the ritual execution of blood eagle, in which victims were kept alive while their backs were sliced open so that their ribs, lungs, and intestines could be pulled out into the shape of bloody wings. PinterestA blood eagle execution. The Vikings didn’t come into towns walking on moonbeams and rainbows. If their sagas are to be believed, the Vikings cruelly tortured their enemies in the name of their god Odin as they conquered territory. If the suggestion of a blood eagle was even uttered, one left town and never looked back. Viking sagas define blood eagle as...

Throughout history, there have been groups who have struck fear into the hearts of those who heard their name… and those who saw them coming. The Vikings were one of those peoples, renowned in their own time for their brutality and the devastation their longboats brought.They first landed on British shores in 789, and according to the BBC, the people of Wessex first extended the hand of cautious peace. They sent a reeve — a local magistrate — to meet them, and he was immediately killed. That pretty much set the tone for the decades of Viking incursions that would...

"Viking genetics and Viking ancestry is used quite a lot in extremist right-wing circles," says Cat Jarman at the University of Bristol in the UK, who wasn't involved in the study. Many white supremacists identify with a "very pure Viking race of just people from Scandinavia, who had no influence from anywhere else".

The Viking Great Army's arrival in 865 was recounted in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle:.. According to the Chronicle, the Vikings spent years campaigning through the territory of the four Anglo-Saxon kingdoms -- East Anglia, Mercia, Northumbria, and Wessex... By 880, all the kingdoms had fallen to the Vikings except Wessex, with which they made peace... Excavations conducted [at Repton, the capital of Mercia] between 1974 and 1993 by Martin Biddle and his late wife, Birthe Kjolbye-Biddle, had revealed a small, heavily defended enclosure covering just an acre or two... some experts took these findings to suggest that the Great Army was...