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Danish Vikings could have been economic migrants to Britain

The Viking invasion of Britain in the ninth century may have been the result of economic migration, a study has found.

Jane Kershaw, a postdoctoral fellow at University College London,  believes that they crossed the seas find a better life, the Local reported.

She told the told the Danish magazine Videnskab that their motivation was little different from migrants arriving in the United Kingdom and Denmark today.

"At that time, there may not have been enough resources in the Vikings' homeland, but in eastern England the Vikings found an agriculturally rich area," she said.    "We are currently living in a time of large-scale migration,” she added. 

“We must open our eyes to the fact that the same thing happened 1,000 years ago, rather than think of our ancestors as people who just stayed at home and never left their farms.”

Their arrival was greeted with hostility by the Anglo-Saxons already living in England, said  Professor Søren Sindbæk, a researcher at the University of Aarhus,

Such was the resentment that King Aethelred the Unready ordered their mass slaughter in 1002, in what was later called the St. Brice's Day massacre.

“They were certainly getting tired of immigration in England around the 1000s,” Prof Sindbæk told Videnskab. 

“We do not know how many ended up being killed, but there is no doubt that a mass murder took place.”