Speaker unverified: belief

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…And so they, the word of the raids sent terror through England and through Europe. How much of the raids were reconnaissance, and how much was it just raids, and how much was it preparing for greater scale? That’s a good… That’s a really good question. I think a lot of the early raids are probing raids, to see what’s there. Definitely when Ragnar Lothbrok, for example, sacks Paris in 845, that definitely results in waves of Viking attacks throughout the 860s, trying to copy that. And he actually is the template which everyone wants to follow. And so that provokes large-scale invasions. And they hit England. They kind of switch off. When France is pretty much exhausted, they switch over to England, and then when England is pretty much conquered, they switch back to France. So I think a lot of these are just probing raids at first, but they’re proof of concept and then they come in force. For example, there was one king in England, his name was Ethelred the Unready, which is a pretty fun, funny… Pun on his name. But he paid, in one year, 7.5 million silver pennies to the Vikings to get them to go away, which is a bit like someone’s mugging you, so you pay them more money so they’ll go away. It’s- That’s not gonna work, is it?…

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