If any of us are prone to a bit of pillaging now and again, it’s maybe because 20% of the DNA of the average English person is owed to the Vikings, according to a new study.
The first Viking longships appeared off the North East coast in 793.
The monks of Lindisfarne felt the full force of these fearsome new warrior invaders from Scandinavia.
In the aftermath of the first attack, one monk wrote: “The church of Saint Cuthbert is spattered with the blood of the priests of God, stripped of all its furnishings, exposed to the plundering of pagans”.
The same monk had a warning for the religious centres of Wearmouth and Jarrow.
“You live by the sea from whence this plague first came,” he wrote.
A year later, Viking vessels sailed up the River Tyne where they came across the gentle monastic setting of Jarrow, or Donmouth as it was know then.
Legend has it that the invaders set fire to the monastery, but the Viking leader was captured and killed by the locals as a punishment from St Cuthbert.
Jarrow has retained its Viking links, with modern-day statues of two Norsemen dominating the town centre, and a pub called the Viking being a popular haunt in the 1970s and 80s.
And it turns out around 35,000 of them might have finally settled in Britain.
Ellen Royrvik, from the University of Warwick and Jane Kershaw, from University College London believe there is plenty of evidence for large-scale Viking presence in England, and not just in place names.
“Fields, hedges, small streams, and other rural landscape features have Scandinavian names, suggesting that they were named by a Norse-speaking population, living in the countryside and working the land,” Dr Kershaw told Science Nordic.
If you suddenly have the urge to build a Viking longship, you know why!