Dorset's killing field

They knelt and cowered together - a once proud and fearless band of raiders stripped and humiliated by their Saxon captors. One by one, their executioners stepped forward, uttered a prayer and brought their axes and swords crashing down on the necks of the Viking prisoners. The axes fell until the roadside was sticky with blood from the decapitated corpses of the 51 men, most barely in their twenties.

Soon the excited crowd joined in, spearing a couple of heads on stakes, placing the rest in a neat pile and tossing the bodies into a ditch. For more than 1,000 years this bloody roadside act was forgotten, one of many atrocities in the long and violent struggle between the Anglo-Saxons and the Norse invaders.

Now, thanks to an extraordinary piece of luck - and detective work - the massacre has been uncovered by archaeologists in a discovery that sheds fascinating new light on life in Viking Britain. The 51 beheaded skeletons were discovered last summer near Weymouth, Dorset, during excavations for a relief road.

Over the following two months, Oxford Archaeology removed the skulls which had been placed together in one part of a pit, and the bodies which had been thrown roughly into a heap a few feet away. A chemical analysis of teeth from ten of the men showed they grew up in countries where the climate is far colder than Britain - with one individual thought to have come from within the Arctic Circle.

Carbon dating showed they were buried between 910 and 1030AD, a time when England was being unified under Saxon kings and when Vikings from Denmark had begun a second wave of raids on the South Coast.

Oxford Archaeology project manager David Score said: 'To find out that the young men executed were Vikings is a thrilling development. 'Any mass grave is a relatively rare find, but to find one on this scale, from this period of history, is extremely unusual.'

For researchers, there is no question that the victims were Vikings. And not the Vikings who had settled and lived in Britain for generations, but almost certainly a captured raiding party. In the heart of Anglo-Saxon Wessex - the stronghold of Alfred the Great and his descendants - justice against rogue Vikings would have been violent and swift.


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