Building a coffee business?

Serving the best Americano in town is up to you.

But winning back time and growing your business, leave that to sum-up. Take orders and payments anywhere with the new SumUp terminal. Turn occasional customers into regulars with a free loyalty program. And with the SumUp point-of-sale system, you'll always know when you're running low on your best-selling blends. Visit sumup.co.uk to learn more. This is John Batchel, speaking with the author-historian Eleanor Barakloff about her new book,

Embers of the Hands, Hidden Histories of the Viking Age. Here Eleanor addresses the story of

England being invaded by the Norsemen, the Northmen, who had been raiding for

about 100 years at this point, but in the middle of the 9th century, the great heathen army,

or was it? Here's Eleanor Barakoff on the origin story of what we now call the United

Kingdom, all mixed up, embers of the hands.

So the thing with the United Kingdom is there are so many origin stories,

and that's what makes it such a fascinating melting pot of cultural influences and incomers.

I mean, the Anglo-Saxons are sort of what we tend to

characterize these kingdoms at the time of the sort of Norse incursions, as you say,

you know, this proper, you know, more military conquest-style invasion. But of course, the Anglo-Saxons themselves are different cultural groups

that have come over to England a few centuries earlier. Before then, it's the Romans.

So it's much more interesting, you know, and it's much more complicated, that sort of melting

parts. But certainly, yes,

what's sometimes called the Great Heathen Army that, like, Mitchell, Hara in Old English,

arrives in around 865. And it's been suggested that actually, rather than thinking of it as one big invading force,

it's more useful to think of it as smaller mobile war bands with different leaders,

which makes it much more possible for them to essentially, you know, nipping through the waterways,

they can overwinter, and then they can keep going inland, and they have then

the element of surprise. They can also sort of split up. Some can head north, some can head south,

...