The Children of Ash and Elm: A History of the Vikings

by Neil Price

If the data from the Continental written sources is combined, the protection money paid to the Vikings during the ninth century totalled about thirty thousand pounds’ weight of silver, most of it in cash: a sum equivalent to seven million silver pennies over a period when the estimated total output of the Frankish mints was in the region of fifty million coins. This equates to approximately 14 percent of the entire monetary output of the Frankish Empire—for a century—evaporated in the payment of extortion demands that produced no tangible positive gain and, in many cases, failed to appease the Vikings anyway. In addition even to that, the Scandinavians were given grain, livestock, produce, wine, cider, horses, and other commodities as part of their terms for not attacking— literally for not doing anything—and, of course, the same things were often lost when they did. Between 830 and 890 in Frankia, some 120 named settlements were sacked and destroyed, besides the unspecified accounts of regional devastation. And of course, the human cost was incalculable. Ermentarius of Noirmoutier did not exaggerate in choosing imagery reminiscent of a Viking apocalypse.