HistoryExtra
type: channel
link: https://www.historyextra.com
description: Home of Britain’s bestselling history magazine and award-winning podcast
date: 2026-04-14T12:27:08.000Z
update period: hourly
update frequency: 1
update base: 2000-01-01T12:00+00:00
items: Aud the Deep-Minded: life of the week
items: This morbid Viking Age death pit is more mystifying than it first seemed – here’s why
items: Alfred vs the Vikings | Podcast series
items: Meet the mysterious leaders of the Vikings’ most fearsome army
items: Beyond the podcast: Alfred vs the Vikings
items: From health to wealth, here are the strange secrets medieval toilets reveal about life in the Middle Ages
items: It was an "extravaganza of brutality": how the Vikings menaced the Mediterranean
items: Thor was the Vikings’ “archetypal masculine god” – so why did he dress as a bride?
items: Inside the Viking battle of the genders
items: Everything you think you know about Vikings is WRONG

Aud the Deep-Minded: life of the week
type: item
date: 2026-04-14T12:27:08.000Z
creator: James Osborne
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Viking
subject: Life of the week (podcast series)
subject: Viking life and culture
description: Emily Lethbridge traces the story of Aud the Deep-Minded, one of Iceland's most prominent – and fascinating – early Norse settlers
encoded: It was the Vikings of northern Europe who first settled the harsh landscapes of Iceland in the ninth century. Most of the figures leading this movement were men – powerful chieftains who claimed vast swathes of land and parcelled it out to their followers. But among these pioneers was Aud the Deep-Minded: a woman who subverted the expectations of the Viking world. In this episode, Emily Lethbridge speaks to James Osborne about Aud's incredible life and legacy.

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This morbid Viking Age death pit is more mystifying than it first seemed – here’s why
type: item
date: 2026-04-12T10:45:46.000Z
creator: Tom Horne
subject: Anglo-Saxon
subject: Medieval
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Viking
subject: Discover / Apple News
description: A newly discovered burial pit dating to the Viking Age contains the remains of at least ten young men. But were they victims of battle, execution – or something else entirely?
encoded: Violence was a defining feature of 9th-century Anglo-Saxon England. This was a period of aggressive Viking invasions, violent rivalry between Anglo-Saxon kingdoms, and harsh systems of justice. Conflict could erupt between rival powers, or within communities themselves. Against this backdrop, archaeologists have uncovered a striking discovery at Wandlebury, Cambridgeshire: a 9th-century pit containing the remains of at least ten young men, all showing clear signs of a violent death. Much of the initial reaction to the find suggested that the buried individuals may have been Vikings from the famous Great Heathen Army that nearly toppled Anglo-Saxon England during the second half of the 9th century. But who these men really were – and why they were killed – remains uncertain. The 9th century saw a force of mainly Scandinavian warriors – known to Anglo-Saxon chroniclers as the “mycel here” or “hæþen here” and to modern readers as the Great Heathen Army – campaigning across Britain. The army landed in East Anglia in 865, and its activities in the area of the Wandlebury excavation included a prolonged stay over winter near Cambridge in 874–875. Historians and archaeologists increasingly refer to this period as the ‘Long Ninth Century’. Spanning the late 8th to the mid-10th centuries, it was a time of upheaval, as Anglo-Saxon kingdoms came under intense pressure and began to reshape themselves. In the long run, this period of disruption helped lay the foundations for new political entities, including the kingdom of England itself. Read more | The triumph of the Anglo-Saxons: how the kingdom of Mercia powered the rise of England But this wasn’t only a story of armies and kings. It was also a time when violence formed part of everyday life. Punishment could be severe, and both warfare and justice could end in brutal deaths. As early medievalist Alex Harvey emphasises, this violence in the uncovered Wandlebury excavation pit cannot be attributed solely to Viking activity. “W…

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Alfred vs the Vikings | Podcast series
type: item
date: 2026-04-10T10:26:26.000Z
creator: James Osborne
subject: Period
subject: Viking
description: In this four-part HistoryExtra podcast series, Viking expert Dr Eleanor Barraclough traces the struggle between Alfred and the Vikings
encoded: In this four-part podcast series, James Osborne is joined by Viking expert Dr Eleanor Barraclough to trace the struggle between Alfred and the Vikings, from the arrival of the Great Heathen Army in 865 to the decisive battle of Edington and its far-reaching aftermath. Across the series, they explore the story from both sides: the world of the Viking army and the realities of life within it, the collapse of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms, Alfred’s flight into the marshes, and the uneasy peace that subsequently reshaped England.

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Meet the mysterious leaders of the Vikings’ most fearsome army
type: item
date: 2026-04-10T09:53:10.000Z
creator: James Osborne
subject: Early medieval
subject: Medieval
subject: Period
subject: Viking
subject: Discover / Apple News
description: The Great Heathen Army wasn’t a single unified force, but rather a shifting coalition of warbands whose multi-layered leadership helped it outmanoeuvre the Anglo-Saxons
encoded: When the Great Heathen Army arrived in England in the mid-9th century, it marked a turning point in the history of Viking activity in the British Isles. Earlier Viking raids – such as the attack on the monastery at Lindisfarne in 793 – had been fast, opportunistic strikes. Viking aggression had continued like this for decades: plundering coastal regions for wealth, treasure, and people to enslave. Indeed, the Anglo-Saxons had grown accustomed to this style of attack from their Norse cousins from across the sea. That changed in the year 865, with the arrival of the Great Heathen Army. From then onwards, this force campaigned across Anglo-Saxon England, capturing kingdoms, overthrowing rulers and establishing long-term settlements. At the time, England didn’t even exist: Britain was a patchwork of rival states – including Northumbria, Mercia, East Anglia and Wessex – often competing with one another as much as resisting external threats. This political fragmentation made coordinated defence difficult. The Great Heathen Army was able to make much headway: plundering, pillaging and – crucially – taking formerly Anglo-Saxon land, rather than heading back to Scandinavia. But while the label ‘Great Heathen Army’ captures two essential facts about this force of Viking invaders – its size, and its paganism – it might otherwise be misleading. Rather than a unified force under a single commander, the Great Heathen Army was a shifting alliance of warbands drawn together for a shared purpose but operating with considerable independence. It was a force with many leaders – not one. How big was the Great Heathen Army? Contemporary sources, such as the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, offer only limited detail as to the size of the Great Heathen Army. Modern historians have attempted to reconstruct its scale using a combination of textual and archaeological evidence. “Some historians have thought it’s around a hundred ships,” explains Dr Eleanor Barraclough, an expert on the history of the Vi…

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Beyond the podcast: Alfred vs the Vikings
type: item
date: 2026-04-05T08:00:16.000Z
creator: James Osborne
subject: Anglo-Saxon
subject: Period
subject: Viking
description: In a four-part HistoryExtra podcast series, Viking expert Dr Eleanor Barraclough traces the struggle between Alfred and the Vikings, from the arrival of the Great Heathen Army in 865 to the decisive battle of Edington and its far-reaching aftermath. Below, find essential reading and listening to dive deeper into this pivotal moment in history
encoded: In the late ninth century, Anglo-Saxon England stood on the brink of collapse. A vast coalition of Viking warbands, remembered as the Great Heathen Army, swept across the country, shattering kingdoms that had endured for centuries. As Northumbria, Mercia and East Anglia fell, only Wessex remained – ruled by a young and untested king named Alfred. For the Vikings, this was the culmination of decades of expansion and ambition; for the Anglo-Saxons, it was a fight for survival. In this four-part HistoryExtra podcast series, Viking expert Dr Eleanor Barraclough traces the struggle between Alfred and the Vikings, from the arrival of the Great Heathen Army in 865 to the decisive battle of Edington and its far-reaching aftermath. Across the series, we explore the story from both sides: the world of the Viking army and the realities of life within it, the collapse of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms, Alfred’s flight into the marshes, and the uneasy peace that reshaped England subsequently. Below, I’ve selected some essential reading and listening from our archives to deepen your understanding of this pivotal moment in Viking and Anglo-Saxon history – including insights into Viking culture, the everyday experience of Anglo-Saxon communities, Alfred’s use of religion and learning as tools of political renewal, and the long legacy of the Danelaw on English identity and culture.

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From health to wealth, here are the strange secrets medieval toilets reveal about life in the Middle Ages
type: item
date: 2026-03-12T13:24:15.000Z
creator: James Osborne
subject: Anglo-Saxon
subject: Medieval
subject: Period
subject: Viking
subject: Discover / Apple News
description: From lost silver coins to fossilised faeces, medieval cesspits have become some of the richest archives of everyday life in the Middle Ages
encoded: A cesspit isn’t where most people would choose to look to learn more about the story of the Middle Ages. Cesspits – lined shafts or dug-out pits designed to hold human waste – were a very ordinary feature of medieval towns and settlements. The Middle Ages saw towns’ populations growing in number and density, and that meant more waste – waste that needed managing. So, in towns from Anglo-Saxon Southampton to Viking York, pits were dug, lined with timber or stone, and periodically emptied. They were unglamorous but absolutely essential. Perhaps surprisingly, for archaeologists, these old waste chutes have become some of the richest sources of evidence for how people lived. Because cesspits were used daily by ordinary households rather than reserved for elite figures of society, they can preserve the material culture of everyday medieval life. “We need to remember that people dropped things in toilets then, as now,” says historian Katherine Weikert, speaking on the HistoryExtra podcast. The dense organic material at the bottom of a cesspit cushions whatever falls into it. “We often find things that are unexpected. You can find something in a cesspit and it’s intact. It lands in a smoosh, then it gets covered up.” Read more | What was life like in a medieval town? A historical A-Z Under certain conditions, these have become a treasure trove for archaeologists. “If that cesspit doesn’t get cleared out or gets abandoned, it’s just there waiting to be found, which is amazing.” In these sealed environments, various fragments of everyday life survived, waiting to be uncovered: pottery, leather, seeds, scraps of material and, in some cases, objects whose journeys began far beyond Britain. A silver coin from Córdoba One of Weikert’s favourite examples of an important archaeological find from within a cesspit comes from ninth-century Southampton, then known as Hamwic – an Anglo-Saxon trading centre on England’s south coast. Hamwic flourished between the 7th and 9th centuries as…

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It was an "extravaganza of brutality": how the Vikings menaced the Mediterranean
type: item
date: 2026-01-19T15:30:53.000Z
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Viking
subject: Historical events
subject: Historical people
subject: viking
subject: Viking life and culture
subject: Viking warfare
description: Killing, burning, pillaging, enslaving. Even when heading to sunnier climes, Viking raiders deployed the same tactics that they had used along the shores of northern and western Europe, reveals Thomas Williams
encoded: The poor citizens of Al-Jazira al-Khadra never knew what hit them. In 859, an unfamiliar fleet sailed into the bay separating this Muslim settlement – which later evolved into the city of Algeciras, now in southern Spain – from Gibraltar. Making landfall nearby, the alien ships disgorged their fearsome crews: Vikings. In a sequence of events terrifyingly familiar to victims in more northerly parts of Europe, these formidable marauders wreaked havoc. They occupied the city, burned the mosque, ravaged the countryside – and then moved on to the next target, and the next. The campaign later known as the ‘Great Raid’ was well and truly underway – part of a chapter in Norse history that’s less known today, but no less bloody. Stone cold killers The Vikings of our imagination are emphatically creatures of the north – avatars of cold climes and bleak weather, manifestations of ice and snow made flesh and steel. Dragon-prowed ships slice through the frigid waters of steep-sided fjords swathed in midnight-green pine forests. Fur-clad adventurers hunt walrus amid the crashing icebergs of the northernmost seas. Giants haunt the ice-capped mountains in an unreal world of midnight sun and northern lights. We are used to reading tales of Viking rampages through lands both near and far from home: around the Baltic coastline, in Britain and Ireland, in what’s now northern France, Russia, even Canada. But none of these places seem so different from Scandinavia, in climate at least; indeed, some boast similar extremes of latitude. Even in the most temperate of these places, a sharp north-easterly or a rare winter snowstorm may come and go without raising an eyebrow. Likewise Vikings in times past. But, like the ice, it can feel jarring to find Vikings in places where we feel instinctively they don’t quite belong. Like Mallorca, southern France, even Egypt. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/01/CreditCopyright--Museo-San-Isidoro-de-Leon-Derechos-r…

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Thor was the Vikings’ “archetypal masculine god” – so why did he dress as a bride?
type: item
date: 2026-01-01T10:15:48.000Z
creator: James Osborne
subject: Period
subject: Viking
subject: Discover / Apple News
description: One of the earliest Norse myths depicts the so-called god of thunder in women’s clothing. Far from undermining Thor’s power, the story speaks volumes about how the Vikings understood humour and the gods themselves
encoded: Thor, bearded with hammer in hand, is one of the central and most recognisable characters of Norse mythology. He was synonymous with strength, virility and thunder; a figure closely associated with physical labour, farming and warfare, all of which were aspects central to life across the Norse diaspora. In the context of the Viking Age, Thor was widely revered as a dependable presence in a dangerous world. And that makes the poem Thrymskvitha, one of the earliest surviving Norse myths about him, all the more surprising. “Thrymskvitha is the oldest complete poem we have about the gods,” says Dr Jackson Crawford, speaking on the HistoryExtra podcast. It’s preserved in the Poetic Edda – the compilation of Old Norse poems recorded in the 13th century – and tells of how Thor disguises himself as a bride-to-be and attends a wedding feast in order become the ‘wife’ of a powerful Jotun, a giant from the realm of Jotunheim. But it’s all a ruse. Planned alongside his adopted half-brother, the trickster god Loki, the disguise is part of a scheme for Thor to recover his precious hammer Mjölnir, which has been stolen by the Jotun. Thrymskvitha – or Þrymskviða – was likely composed and circulated well before the Norse conversion to Christianity. Crawford describes it as “a really goofy adventure-comedy story”, yet it also offers a revealing insight into how Viking Age audiences related to their gods. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/12/GettyImages-152204607-e0e1556-e1766500509342.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="This Viking Age relief from Gosforth churchyard depicts the god Thor fishing for the Midgard Serpent alongside the giant Hymir, a scene drawn from Norse Poetic Edda." title="Relief sculpture of Scandinavian origin from the Gosforth churchyard, depicts Thor fishing with the giant Hymir" /> Thor’s place in the Norse world Unlike Odin – Thor’s father, ruler of Asgard, who was associated with kingship, poetry and hidden knowledge –…

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Inside the Viking battle of the genders
type: item
date: 2025-12-29T07:00:56.000Z
creator: James Osborne
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Viking
description: Dr Jackson Crawford explores the history and stories of Old Norse mythology told in the Poetic Edda, including what we can learn about the relationships between men and women
encoded: What do we know for certain about Old Norse ideas about masculinity and femininity, and can Viking Age mythology provide any answers? In conversation with James Osborne, Dr Jackson Crawford discusses the second edition of his translation of the Poetic Edda, and explores what can still be learned from the collection of Old Norse narrative poems that forms the foundation of our understanding of Viking mythology.

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Everything you think you know about Vikings is WRONG
type: item
date: 2025-12-11T15:50:14.000Z
creator: Kev Lochun
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Viking
subject: Viking life and culture
description: You KNOW who the Vikings are – bearded, brutish, spoiling for a fight, and ever ready to raid an Anglo-Saxon monastery near you. Or do you?
encoded: The Vikings were bearded, brutish, spoiling for a fight, and ever ready to raid an Anglo-Saxon monastery near you. How true is that, really? It is a stereotype beloved across pop culture – most visibly in TV and film – but it’s also an oversimplified fiction. HistoryExtra’s Kev Lochun braves the ire of a sword-wielding colleague to break down what we get wrong about the Vikings – not least, that they didn’t even exist. Confused? It’s all downhill from the horned helmets. View Green Video on the source website

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