An area of Britain where the Vikings are thought to have arrived in some numbers is the Wirral and West Lancashire. Here Norse Vikings are thought to have arrived via Dublin (Griffiths 2010) and are often referred to as Hiberno-Norse. Ireland had become an area of intense Viking activity from the late 8th century AD and by 841AD the Vikings had a fortified camp at Dublin (Haywood 1995). Dublin remained as a Viking raiding base until 902AD when a number of sources, including the Irish annals, describe a battle (Griffiths 2010) which led to the expulsion of the Vikings from Dublin. The annals tell of Aethelflaed, Queen of the Saxons, granting the Vikings new lands near Chester, now thought to be the Wirral. A further group is thought to have eventually settled in Lancashire (Fellows-Jensen 1985; Higham 1992).
Certainly the place-name evidence strongly supports Viking settlement in this area: Norwegian place-name elements are common in north-west England (Fellows-Jensen 1985; Fellows-Jensen 1992; Fellows-Jensen 2000; Barber et al. 2009), and place-names with Scandinavian and Hiberno-Norse elements are found at high frequency in the Wirral and West Lancashire (Higham 1992; Cavill et al., 2000). Perhaps even more telling is the presence of the place name Thingwall (from Old Norse ping-vollr) meaning assembly field indicating a Norse meeting place or parliament and suggesting a community of sufficient size to warrant one—one of only a handful found in the British Isles. Further evidence of Viking settlement is found in the form of Viking crosses, hog-back tombstones, coins, the archaeological finds on the Wirral at Meols (from melr the Viking word for sand-hills), a Viking house at Irby, the Viking hoards of Chester, Huxley, Harkirke, Cuerdale and numerous other small finds in the area.
Thus the archaeological, linguistic, written and place name evidence suggests that the Vikings settled in the Wirral and West Lancashire. As geneticists, we are interested in the genetic contribution of the
Vikings to the population and ask whether we can find genetic traces of the Viking migration in the DNA of people of this area today.
World History
