The Legitimacy of Historical References from the Annals of Monasteries of Europe

The Middle Ages regarded as a period in European time frame where in essence discomfort was a player in the lives who lived; but this period had its fair share of eventful sagas. One such saga would be that of the Vikings where their existence was recognized by the historians of the day, mainly the clerical scribes. Although biased to a degree these historical documents have a legitimate background. In essence the historical annals written by the historians in the Middle Ages presenting the Vikings were plausible sources in providing the knowledge about the subject matter. These sources of information has bit of credibility because the accounts were written in a clear, concise, and chronological order of events; and the documents in question contain sufficient information to describe who the Vikings were, and how they etched themselves in Medieval Europe. With these conditions in mind the documents shape into factual data from slight imperfections.

When looking for sound historical data and that too of medieval era sources are more than usually clustered with some sort of biases. The information in these documents are presented in a articulately organized manner to which a reader can sense that the information was important course of event. For instance

“845: Twice in the canton of Worms there was an earthquake; the first in the night following Palm Sunday, the second in the holy night of Christ's resurrection. In the same year the heathen broke in upon the Christians at many points, but more than twelve thousand of then were killed by the Frisians Another party of invaders devastated Gaul; of these more than six hundred men perished…”

In the above statement the scribe goes into detail of when and where the events occurred, he gives an account of when there was an earthquake in Worms and then tells the reader when the raids of Vikings over Frisia and Western Europe and how much people would had been affected by them. The six hundred men would be a plausible amount since instead of one great battle the Vikings raided several different towns. The Annals of St.Bertin’s accounts of that same year goes to explain situation even further.

“845. The Northmen with a hundred ships entered the Seine on the twentieth of March and, after ravaging first one bank and then the other, came without meeting any resistance to Paris. Charles [the Bald] resolved to hold out against them; but seeing the impossibility of gaining a victory, he made with them a certain agreement and by a gift of 7,000 livres he bought them off from advancing farther and persuaded them to return…”

The clerical scribes from St. Bertin give the raids in Gaul in more detailed description where the Vikings came from the river banks of Seine which is located in Frisia and ended up in Paris. The twentieth of March date might be debatable but the date would be around that time since raids, wars, sieges, battles would be launched during