1100 years ago marked the start of a Viking invasion of the Mersey region, which reached out into Chester, West Lancashire and beyond. The Vikings left behind place-names like Kirkby, Kirby, Meols and Croxteth, which can also be found in Iceland, another region they were invading. This book is about these people in peace and war, their customs, traditions, pastimes, their paganism and their Christianity, their governments and their financial centre at Chester. It also includes a section on how modern genetic research is being used to discover the descendants of these Invaders in the modern day population.

Focusing on men from old families in England’s Wirral and West Lancashire regions, this survey traces the DNA of the local populace back to their Viking ancestors in order to determine the impact of past societies on their genetic make-up. Arguing that the areas exhibit many archaeological and historical features proving them to have had a clear Viking presence, this account provides background information on Viking settlements as well as conclusions drawn from the DNA testing. An illustrated example of how DNA methods can be used to learn about the past is also included.

The Viking Age lasted a little over three centuries, but has left a lasting legacy across Europe. These dynamic warrior-traders from Scandinavia, who fought and interacted with peoples as far apart as North America, Russia, and Central Asia, are some of the most recognizable historical figures in the western world. In the modern imagination they re

Around 1,100 years ago a group of Viking settlers from Scandinavia arrived somewhere between Þorsteinnstún (Thurstaston) and Melar (Meols) on the shores of north Wirral – a small peninsula lying between the Rivers Dee and Mersey – having been driven out of Ireland. This initiated a mass migration of their fellow countrymen into the area and soon they had established a community with a clearly defined border, its own leader, its own language, a trading port, and at its centre a place of assembly or government – the Thing at Þingvöllr (Thingwall). This community was answerable to nobody else: the English, the Welsh, the Dublin Norse, the Isle of Man, Iceland, and not even Norway. The Wirral-Norse settlement therefore satisfied all the criteria of an independent, self-governing Viking state – albeit a mini one! This book, written by Wirral-exile and scientist Steve Harding, is about these people, why they left Scandinavia, where they settled, their religion and their possible pastimes. Wirral was also probably witness to one of the greatest battles in the history of the British Isles – Brunanburh. The third edition of this highly popular book has been updated to incorporate the identification of the mysterious Dingesmere in the Battle, the importance and relation of Wirral to the wider Viking Commonwealth, including the Isle of Man, North Wales, Scotland and Ireland, together with the results from the Wirral and West Lancashire Viking DNA project, where up to 50% of the DNA of men from old Wirral and West Lancashire families appeared to be Scandinavian in origin.

The twenty-eight papers in this volume explore the practical !ife, domestic settings, landscapes and seascapes of the Viking world. Their geographical horizons stretch from Iceland to Russia, with particular emphasis on new discoveries in the Scandinavian homelands and in Britain and Ireland. With a rich combination of disciplinary perspectives, new interpretations are presented of evidence for buildings and technology, navigation, trade and military organization, the ideology of place, and cultural interactions and comparisons between Viking and native groups. Together, these reveal the multivalent importance of settlement archaeology and history for an understanding of the pivotal phase within the Middle Ages that was the Viking Period.

With many rare and previously unpublished images this book celebrates the famous ferry operator Stena Line.

The United Kingdom comprises thousands of islands and for many centuries transport between the main islands and the outlying communities has required reliable shipping routes, both long and short-haul, for commerce, trade and travel. Ferries have become an essential means of transport for many outlying populations and down the years routes have continually changed and been adapted to meet the requirements of the period. This remains so today, with established ferry routes in a constant state of flux, with the dire economic circumstances of the present imposing their own financial restraints upon routes and timetables. This volume presents a snapshot of the major Offshore Ferry routes as they currently stand, with details of the routes, the ships and the amenities; added to which are the outline histories of companies and links. This volume encapsulates all these strands and should prove a useful aide to all travellers.

Gender in English changed dramatically from the elaborate system found in Old English to the very simple he/she/it-alternation in use from (late) Middle English onwards. While either system is well described and understood, the change from one to the other is anything but: more than 120 years of research into the matter provided no prevailing opinion – let alone a consensus – regarding how it proceeded or why it occurred. The present study is the first to address this issue in the context of language contact with Old Norse, assessing this contact influence in relation to both language-formal and semantico-cognitive factors. This empirical, functional account uses rigorous, innovative methodology, interdisciplinary evidence, and well-established models of synchronic variation in diachronic application to draw a fine-grained picture of the variation, change, and loss of gender from Old to Middle English and its underlying mainsprings. The resulting plausible and parsimonious explanations will prove relevant to students and scholars of historical linguistics, morpho-syntax, language variation and change, or language contact, to name but a few.

List of members in v. 3, 5.

The Vikings and sainthood are not concepts normally found side by side. But Norway’s King Olaf II Haraldsson (c. 995-1030) embodied both to an extraordinary degree. As a battle-eager teenager he almost single-handedly pulled down London Bridge (as in the nursery rhyme) and took part in many other Viking raids . Olaf lacked none of the traditional Viking qualities of toughness and audacity, yet his routine baptism grew into a burning missionary faith that was all the more remarkable for being combined with his typically Viking determination and energy – and sometimes ruthlessness as well. His overriding mission was to Christianize Norway and extirpate heathenism. His unstinting efforts, often at great peril to his life, earned him the Norwegian throne in 1015, when he had barely reached his twenties. For the next fifteen years he laboured against immense odds to subdue the rebellious heathen nobles of Norway while fending off Swedish hostility. Both finally combined against Olaf in 1030, when he fell bravely in battle not far from Trondheim, still only in his mid-thirties. After his body was found to possess healing powers, and reports of them spread from Scandinavia to Spain and Byzantium, Olaf II was canonized a saint 134 years later. He remains Norway’s patron saint as well as a legendary warrior. Yet more remarkably, he remains a saint not only of the Protestant church but also of the Roman Catholic and Greek Orthodox Churches – perhaps the only European fighting saint to achieve such acceptance.