From the moment that they ransacked a remote priory at Lindisfarne in 793, the Vikings have had a bad press.

The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle’s entry for the year says that the raiders made “lamentable havoc in the church of God in Holy-island, by rapine and slaughter”, fixing the popular image of the Vikings for the next 1,200 years. New evidence suggests that many of the Norse invaders were in fact model immigrants.

Historians will try to redress the balance today at a conference at the University of Cambridge and show that the Vikings who settled in Britain and Ireland were technologically sophisticated, swapped ideas and often lived in relative harmony with Anglo-Saxons and Celts.

“The latest evidence does not point to a simple opposition between ‘Vikings’ and ‘natives’,” said Fiona Edmonds, of the Department of Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic at the university. “Within a relatively short space of time — and with lasting effect — the various cultures in Britain and Ireland started to intermingle. Investigating that process provides us with a historical model of how political groups can be absorbed into complex societies, contributing much to those societies in the process. There are important lessons that can be gained from this about cultural assimilation in the modern era.”

The findings are based on new archaeological evidence, historical studies and analysis of the language, literature and coinage of the period. Together they illustrate how between the 9th and 13th centuries, the Vikings became an integral part of social and political life in Britain and Ireland and changed both countries more profoundly than is generally realised.

Máire Ní Mhaonaigh, who is organising the three-day conference with Dr Edmonds, said: “There have been significant advances in our understanding of the impact that the Vikings had on Britain and Ireland in the early medieval period and this conference shows that the three worlds were inexorably intertwined for hundreds of years.

“There is an Irish text called the Book of Rights from the early 12th century where the Vikings are presented as just another Irish territorial group and another from the later 12th century where they are called on as allies. Of course, there is a particular type of text where the Vikings are presented as bogeymen, but the writers do it for a reason, often to glorify their own ancestors for defeating them.”

Studies of coins from the period show that the Vikings were economically influenced by the cultures that they encountered. In East Anglia, for example, they developed a coin economy similar to the previous system.

“There is a sense that the Vikings adapted to the existing social and political structures that they found,” Dr Ní Mhaonaigh said. “There was intermarrying between Scandinavian dignitaries and their English and Irish counterparts and the sources tell us that some of them adopted Christianity by the mid-10th century, which also helped.

“They don’t tell us about those lower down the social ladder, but it was a very nobility-driven society so we have to assume they copied the nobles’ behaviour [by intermarrying and abandoning pagan gods].”

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