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and sometimes treated with greater cruelty than they
intended to inflict. There is no trace, in the earlier
period, of needless cruelty on their part, except the
fact, which seems needless to us but was by no means
so in that age, of their making any such attacks at all.
It was only later, by contact with the South, that they
learnt to torture ; but we cannot say that they met
easy deaths when they were captured (see for example
page 68).[1] Nor was their life easy; hard fare, heavy
labour at the oar, exposure in open boats to all the
storms of the North, difficult navigation of unknown
seas, comfortless and homeless wanderings in hostile
lands,—the fate of a galley-slave in everything but
freedom and the chances of glory and gold.
It was not a heroic life, as we count heroism to-day.
The thirst for gold, torn from fine reliquaries and
shrines and the jewelled covers of psalm-books, to be
hammered into arm-rings or hoarded in holes, seems
childish to a modern reader ; and the traffic in slaves,
which formed the largest and most lucrative part of
the Viking’s booty, shocks our sentiments. But in
the ninth century the Viking could plead ample precedent ;
he was only doing what the most civilised
were doing ; his fault was that he did it rather more
skilfully. For indeed he was, in his time, the most
capable of mankind ; not fully matured, but not without
his own high civilisation, having more than the
rudiments of domestic comforts and graces, more than
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