英語聽力：愛爾蘭的故事—21

For over 40 years, the Vikings raided Ireland’s coastal villages and monasteries, carrying off plunder and slaves in their long boats. They struck suddenly and caught the Irish unawares. So the Vikings became bolder and began to sail down the rivers of Ireland. The raiders were to become settlers. These coasts of Ireland were strategically well placed for trading with an expanding Viking world.

In the winter of 842, a substantial Viking fleet rounded the headland of Howth and sailed up the river Liffey. Here at the black pool in Irish, Dubh Linn, the Vikings hauled their long boatsashore. And just a few yards away from the banks of the river Liffey, they began to construct the first defensive stockade. From these small beginnings, Ireland’s greatest city would emerge.

Over the next century, Dublin would become a boom town with the largest slave market in Europe.

The Vikings had a huge trading network which spread all the way down the Russian river systems to the middle east, Constantinople, all the way across the North Atlantic, and Dublin was quite centrally placed within these long-distance routes.

What kind of things would people have been buying at these markets?

Amber from Baltic, silk from Byzantium, gold, silver, looted goods from Irish monasteries, all would have been traded through the port of Dublin. It would have been a very noisy place,bustling, crammed, houses next to each other, narrow streets, lots of people milling around, shopping, exchanging things, gossiping, kids, pigs, everything.

And you’d probably have been seeing people from right across Europe in Dublin at this point?

It would have been a really cosmopolitan place with traders from all across Europe, and this is followed by a series of royal intermarriages and a lot of cultural interchange. So by the 10th century you’ve got a whole new culture emerging which is a kind of hybrid of Scandinavian and Irish. And it’s very distinctive. You can see it in art styles and the culture of these 2 peoples.