Lesson video

Hello, my name is Mr. Cooper, and I will be your teacher for this inquiry about Alfred the Great.

And why is he known as Alfred the Great? Not many Kings or Queens get this title.

So we'll be looking at this over the pit over course of four lessons and today's, we will be learning about the Vikings and who were the Vikings? Where did they come from? And what did they do? Short answer, not great in this country, but we'll be exploring that in a little bit more detail.

So first of all, if you haven't, if I've not taught you before, don't worry hopefully you'll find my lesson interesting.

I've really enjoyed teaching these lessons so far fingers crossed you won't zone out.

So what I'd like you to do, first of all, is to get your piece of paper or your book, whatever you're using, write the date of whatever it is, whatever day it is that you're doing this lesson on.

And then also the title, which is The Invasion of the Vikings, and underline both tidy notes, tidy mind, hide your phone as well.

Hide it don't have any, not a good idea, right? So when you've done that, and don't forget, you can pause this video at any point.

So if you get bored of my voice, you may just, you can mute me, you can sign, I won't take it personally because I won't know that you're doing it.

Anyway, so off you go, pause it, get this done, get the title down, and then we will start with the lesson.

So if you could please just make sure you have the title, The Viking Invasion, underlined with the date of whatever day you're doing this lesson on then restore video, and we will get on with the lesson.

So this is the start of a new inquiry, and it's the start also in, the history of not just England, but Britain and Europe as a whole of what we call the Viking Age.

The Vikings were a group of, people coming from, Northern Europe.

And they cause a lot of chaos.

They cause chaos, absolute chaos.

For many years.

The Viking Age starts with an attack on this place.

This is the Holy Island at Lindisfarne in Northern England.

Now the castle on top of this Hill, was not there when the Viking's attacked in 793 AD.

This castle was built later on, but on the top of this castle was a monastery, a monastery, a holy place where a place for holy men lived worshipped and prayed.

And this monastery had been founded by an Irish monk called Aiden about just over 100 years before the Vikings attacks.

The Vikings travelled across the sea.

They arrived out of nowhere, no one had ever seen them before.

And when they arrived, they stormed the monastery, they killed monks.

They stole the treasure, the gold the silver in the monasteries church, and they took some monks prisoner.

So this was a truly horrific moment according to the reports that were then written down.

The Vikings were known for primarily but above all for the way they travelled, actually as well as the viciousness that they were known for the way they travel.

This is an illustration, a picture that was actually made, several years, quite a long time after the Vikings had first attack Lindisfarne in North Umbria.

But we get a pretty clear view of who these guys were.

They travelled in long boats, and you can see these boats the shape was very, well known.

And at the head of the shapes were were usually, the heads of monsters or animals.

And then if you actually look at the bottom right hand side of the picture, you can see, the Vikings getting off the boats.

Now, one of the most, one of the really important things about these boats is that they were very shallow.

So the bases they didn't go that far beneath the surface of the sea, which meant that they could travel up shallow water.

Which meant they could push the boat up onto the beach or up a river, and then quickly attack and then pull out very quickly.

And this is exactly what, exactly what happened for 100 years or so, before there was a big change in what they wanted, but we'll come to that later in the lesson.

And this is one of the most famous descriptions of the terror that the Vikings caused.

Alcuin was a very important scholar will come across him later in this lesson, he worked for King Alfred.

And this is what he said, "Never before has such a terror appeared in Britain as we have now suffered from a pagan race.

The heathens poured out the blood of saints around the altar, and trampled on the bodies of saints in the temple of God, like dung in the streets." So this is a pretty clear description of the kind of behaviour that the Vikings were known for.

One of the discussions, however is whether or not whether the Alcuin and the other monks were being a little bit.

They were exaggeraiding what had happened, but really what is clear is the Vikings did cause a lot of death, they did cause a lot of destruction.

They did enslave a lot of people.

Now there's a word here, heathen, this is another word for, barbarian or savage, and quite common when describing the Vikings.

Pagan if you've done the previous unit that I was teaching, you'll know is that they were not Christian.

So we have a pretty clear description here of what the Vikings were like.

And just again, give you an idea of why we're talking.

So, the timeline on the screen, starting with 1 AD of the birth of Jesus, Jesus Christ.

That's how we measure our years in parts of the world, not all the world, parts of the world.

And then we have present day on the right hand side 2020.

So we're talking about the pink line, the Viking Age and the fight back against the Vikings, because really our inquiry about Alfred, asking this big question of Alfred.

We cannot understand Alfred and his supposed greatness without understanding who the Vikings were.

So we're talking about this kind of this last, this last section of the Anglo-Saxon period.

And just zooming in here.

So the first attack, the first attack by the Vikings was in 793, which is the start of our pink line there.

793 was this attack on Lindisfarne the Holy Island.

And then the Vikings continued to be a big part of, a big policy of, European, British, English politics, culture society until the 11th century.

So we're talking about sort of two, 300 years of the Vikings causing a lot of trouble.

And again, here we have, so we have these, just one of the tricky things we have is the Vikings don't leave much evidence behind.

And this is a big question about, we'll be looking at, in this inquiry about evidence.

How do we as historians piece together, what happened so long ago when we have limited sources, limited sources from which we can get evidence to prove what we're doing.

So this is a good example.

So we've already seen a picture painted of the Vikings that was painted by someone outside who was not a Viking.

Here interestingly, we have something that was, that was created by the Vikings.

And this was found in Sweden, the modern country Sweden.

And this is a decorated stone.

And you'll hopefully be able to see, a long boat, a long ship and Viking soldiers themselves.

So we've got these two different images made by one by Vikings.

One not by Vikings, but they both agree with each other.

So on that basis, we can be pretty sure that this is how Vikings travelled and what they look like.

And as well as this, as well as these images that have survived, we've even found ships, Viking ships.

So this is known as the GOC stands ship.

Now this was dug up quite a time ago, the picture as you can see, it's pretty old.

This was found on the ground, in I believe it was Norway, possibly Sweden, my apologies for not knowing exactly where, but the key thing is that this ship was found, in the Viking Homeland.

So where the Vikings came from, not where their attacks, but where they came from.

So this was carefully dug up and is now, I believe this might be reconstruction, but this is the kind of ship, that the Vikings were known for.

Now, if you look at the ship, you will see some holes in the side.

So this is where you put ores, so that you'd have maybe, a lots of people in the ship.

Ores are so that if there's no winds you would be able to row, you've also got the mast in the middle.

So if there was was wind, then you could use the wind to travel.

And, the very important thing I've already mentioned is how shallow the ship is.

It's very wide and shallow, and this means that the ships could be, get right up onto the beach or up, rivers, which have very shallow beds.

And this meant that it was easy for Vikings to raid quickly, get what they wanted and get out.

And this is why actually one they've been described at the time as Hornets are those really nasty stinking, stinging Hornets.

And here we have a really, really important map.

So I'll talk you through what the map is.

This is of Europe and parts of Russia.

And then also you can see Canada in the left hand side.

So the Vikings, as well as raiding they also traded.

We have the Vikings as these violent raiders, but also as traders.

And this is very important we think about who the Vikings were.

The green blurred areas are the Vikings homelands, so where the Vikings came from.

So these countries now, Norway, Sweden, Denmark.

So these are the areas where the Vikings came from.

The arrows, the green arrows are the direction that they travelled in.

And we can see the huge distances that the Vikings travelled in.

All the way over to North America, to Greenland, to Iceland, and then right, the other direction to Baghdad's.

So really huge distances that they were travelled.

Now, the really important thing that we'll be looking at of course, is what they were doing in England and Britain.

The orange blurred areas tell us, where the Vikings settled.

So for the first 100 years or so, the Vikings raid, they don't want to stay.

They just want to get people.

They want to enslave people that they can sell the slaves.

They want to get the gold and they want to get the treasure.

They raid, that's their big thing.

Something shifts though, something happens.

We'll look at this in more detail, but this happens in 865, so about less than 100 years after the first raid on Lindisfarne the Vikings, they come and they stay.

And we see on this map, the orange areas, the Viking settlements, and this is where the Vikings stayed.

And this really is when we're talking about Alfred and why he is known as great Alfred, King Alfred was with the Anglo-Saxon King, who was the King who, stopped the Viking advance.

And we'll be looking at in the next lessons.

But first we have to look at what happened when the Vikings arrived.

So I just want you to pause here, write down two or three things about what you think made long shifts, so effective, for raiding places on the coast.

So this is really the big thing that the Vikings were known for, at least at the start.

They raided quickly.

Now look at this picture, I've already described various things to it.

There were two or three things that you could write down about this shape, what made them so effective raiding places on the coast.

So pause now and have a go.

So hopefully you've written something about the mast so the ship can be moved by wind also the holes for oars, the fact it's wide, so you could fit lots of people, the the fact it's shallow.

The shallowness is probably the most important thing for understanding, why long ships were so effective.

So don't panic.

I know this map is a little bit confusing.

Something big happened in 865, 865 AD.

So 793, the Vikings first arrived there at Lindisfarne, 865, I can't count, but that's less than 100 years later.

We have something very, very, very, significant, very important happening when the great heathen army arrives.

Now we've already heard this word heathen, this is another word for you would describe a savage, pagan, barbaric.

It's like basically a bad thing.

And this was how, this was the name that was given to this army of Vikings who arrived in England.

And they came to stay not just to raid, but to stay.

So there's a few things going on in this map.

Now first of all, if you look at the box, the white box, you've got all these different, you've got this guide to what's going on in this map.

So first of all, let's look at the arrows, the arrows in the lower half of the box.

And they tell us the directions that the Vikings travelled and the Great Heathen Army travelled in between 865 and 878.

Because 878 is when this kind of stops.

And we'll look at it on the next lesson.

The red line was their first sort of entry to England.

So they arrived in East Anglia, and then they travel up to North Umbria.

Now they destroyed the kingdom of East Anglia, killed its King Edmond, who is full of, he was shot with those arrows in a tree.

They travelled up to North Umbria, and did the same thing to the Northumbrian King there.

Then the orange line, you see, they travel back down, they do all sorts of things.

They travelled around then the lighter orange line and the yellow line and the green line.

So what we see is that they made their base at York, then the town of North Umbria, and then they spent the next, 10 years or so actually, causing absolute chaos, absolute chaos throughout, the Anglo-Saxon world.

And most of the kingdoms, so East Anglia, Northumbria and big parts of Mercia as well, were destroyed by the Vikings.

So this is the situation that we come to when, it's very important we consider this, when we think about what made Alfred's so great because King Alfred of Wessex, you see the kingdom on the bottom of the lower part of of England, was one of the few Kings to be able to stand up to the Vikings.

And this is why he's remembered by some people as great.

Now we're going to zoom in, to the place where the marker is to a place called Derby.

And actually, if you look, we'll just go back to the map on the previous thing.

So if you look in the middle, so you see the spotted blue line, you'll see, on the edge, in about the middle of Mercia, a place called Repton, and we're going to zoom into Repton now, and we're going to see something quite grim, not this is actually quite, well not grim at all actually.

So I'll just give you some an explanation.

So when the Vikings arrived, Repton was a very important town, very important town for the Kings of Mercia.

And at Repton was a very, very big church.

So it was a Holy place, and it was where the bodies of the Mercian Kings were buried and had been buried for many hundred years.

So when the Vikings came to, when they came to England, they decided to set up a camp at Repton.

Now archaeologists, so we know that they set up camp at Repton because there's some there's something called the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle which is something we'll look at in more detail in later lessons.

One of the written sources we have is the Anglosaxon Chronicle, which is kind of like a year by year, like almost like a diary entry for each year.

So we know that the Viking armies stayed at Repton.

And so what archaeologists did, knowing that something had happened at Repton they decided to dig up, and this is what we see on the screen right now.

So in 1981, a long time ago, the archaeologist decided to have a look to see what they could find in Repton.

And you might be able to spot, there's kind of a, ignore the bit where that's been dug up.

There's like a slope actually.

So you've got the lawn and there's a slight slope.

So the archaeologist just suspected there was something in there.

And my goodness, they found something very interesting, indeed, lots of bones.

So in this mound, they found at least 265 people.

And if you look at that, you could actually, it was found in the Repton Vikings died in.

So, he probably had maybe like dinner parties or he sort of sat there reading with the local villages.

Under the ground, was a mound of 264 people.

And what archaeologists had been able to do with the help of, other types of scientists, for example, they were able to identify these bodies.

Most of them were men.

Most of them were between under the age of 45.

There were some women as well.

But lots of them had very, very unpleasant battle wounds.

So there was scars all over the bones and basically what the archaeologists have done is, highlight that this was almost certainly, where the bodies of, Viking soldiers were buried in this hole.

They also found something else there.

So they found all sorts of interesting things.

So one of the things they found that actually confirmed that this was the Vikings, this is called Thor's hammer.

And this is a quite common, quite a common thing that the Vikings.

Lord Thor of course was a Viking god.

They were not Christian, they were pagan.

And so they found these kinds of things in this mound.

And again, that allow the archaeologist to really confirm this we were looking at, they were looking at, a Viking army.

Then it gets even more interesting.

So if you look down on the left hand side, we have something called the Charnel Mound.

So the Charnel Mounds, so I should have actually mentioned just, I'll just go back actually.

So in here, so these bodies, it wasn't a hole that was dug.

It was actually a building.

So it was a building, from the Repton monastery, which had been there for hundreds of years, and the Vikings are taken control of the monastery, and they decided to put all of these bodies into a building in the monastery.

So what this tells us is that Vikings didn't really care that it was a monastery.

They didn't care that it was a holy place.

They just treated it.

However they wanted to.

So these were chucked into the body, into a building in the monastery.

And then also, the Vikings decided to do.

So we have St.

Western's church.

So you can see the shape of the cross there, the dark shape there.

That was one of these very ancient churches, these very important churches for the Mercian kings.

The Vikings decided to turn the church into part of part of the wall, a D shaped wall.

So you'll see at the top of the screen, there's a river.

So of course the Vikings travelled down rivers in their long ships, and then what's very common, we know that this is a Viking style creation because in their homelands in Norway and Sweden, you see D shaped defensive walls all over the place.

So basically the Vikings, they arrive at this ancient, this very important, Holy place, one of the most Holy places in England, and they don't care that it's holy.

They just take it over.

They turn one of the buildings into a mass grave, and they turn a church into a basically a part of a wall.

And this tells us a lot about how they treated or how they viewed, these kind of buildings.

Now, what I've done here is kind of, to give you an idea of the location.

So the purple line is where the river Trent used to go.

So if you've done geography, you'll know all about, how river has changed the directions they go in.

So archaeologists think the purple line is where, the river used to go over a thousand years ago.

And then the Vikings, they decided to make this fortress, it's not of a capsule as such.

It was based just like a, a wall made of earth.

And they turned the church into part of the wall.

So when we think about whether or not the Vikings were that bad, and lots of historians have said, the Vikings weren't that bad, they were just as bad as everyone else.

And that the accounts, the descriptions we have within the written by monks and holy people.

So of course, they're going to be exaggerating how bad they were.

Well, I mean, we need to just look at the archaeology, and the archaeology tells us, the Vikings were very happy to cause a lot of destruction damage.

They were very willing to, completely destroy these holy places and turn them into effectively, just their own sort of their defended homes.

And the great thing about archaeology.

And I do hope that some of you will explore this further.

Actually the digs continued.

So I've just been showing you, was the dig that was done in the 1980s.

And actually this is a picture here of archaeologists in the last few years, having a look beneath the ground.

So this is something that continues to this day.

There's all sorts of interesting things.

They keep finding about who the Vikings, who was there? What were the Vikings up to? So this is the kind, this is the importance of, using archaeology to better understand the periods.

When we simply don't know a lot of what happened.

We have very few written sources because people didn't write so much.

And therefore it's really important that the historians work with archaeologists to understand what was going on.

And I think why I actually love this, but there's a dog, I think there's a dog lying down just in front of the dig.

And I think that might be the place where the vicar lives.

So I think I just, again, I just think it's really, and what's not funny as such, but the fact that we beneath the ground all around us, we have the remains of the past, sometimes mass graves, like the one that found at Rapson.

So, yeah, really, really, really important that the archaeologists are able to kind of dig into the ground and find out what was going on.

So what I'd like you to do is simply pause here and I'd like you to fill in the gaps, using the words in the box blade.

Maybe I would have done this ready for me, but don't worry if not very simple.

Maybe what is best to write out the paragraph in full, leaving gaps where the words, we're leaving gaps so you can then add in the words after, so read through, then you can kind of work out what works best.

So write out the paragraph and then filling the gaps, using the coloured words in the box below.

So it should look like this.

And if it's not like this, correct it.

No problem if so.

So in 793 AD, the Vikings launched their first attack on Britain.

The target was the monastery at Lindisfarne.

Just under 100 years later, the Great Heathen Army arrived in Britain this time to stay.

The Vikings wrecked Britain destroying most of the Anglosaxon kingdoms, even Wessex seemed close to destruction, until Alfred managed to fight.

So make sure you got that.

And then we will continue the lesson where you can always pause at any point in this and just to remind you.

You will likely have done this before.

If not, do not worry.

All you're going to do now is to pause the video close the video, put next to the bottom right hand corner of the screen to the next part of the lesson.

You will then read through the slides, that appear on your screen.

And then at the end of those slides, you'll find these five questions.

Now it's really important that you write a full sentences.

Cannot emphasise this enough.

If you write single word answers, that's not going to be helpful to you at all.

Full sentences will allow you.

It will mean that when you come back to look at your notes or your books, you will have an useful fact in your books.

If it's just a single word answer, you will have no idea what the question was or why that particular word you've written down is useful.

So pause the video, read the slides on the next page and answer the comprehension questions.

And then when you've done that, restart the video and I'll go through the answers together.

It shouldn't take you more than 10 minutes maximum.

So first question, what happened at Lindisfarne in 793 AD? The acceptable answer, the first Viking attack.

The good answer, the first Viking attack took place at the monastery at Lindisfarne in 793 AD.

So clearly the main and only difference is one is a full sentence.

The other one isn't.

And just imagine, just to explain why I'm asking you to do this.

You've written down the answers.

You've done the acceptable answer, and then you come back to look at your books in about a month's time, the first Viking attack, huh? That makes no sense.

If however you come back in a month time and you see this sentence, the first Viking attack took place at the monastery at Lindisfarne in 793AD.

That's really useful.

That's a useful fact, and it's something that you can then use in whatever you're doing.

That requires you to be looking at your book.

Two, what made longboats so effective? Acceptable answer, they were a good shape.

Good answer, the shape of the longboat meant they could transport lots of people and could travel in shallow water like rivers.

You might also want to make a point about the fact they had both a sail and ores which meant that they could deal with the fact, they could deal with whether or not there was wind or not.

Three, which Anglo-Saxon kingdoms were destroyed? East Anglia and Northumbria.

The good answer, the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of East Anglia and North Umbria were destroyed and Mercia was weakened.

So again, full sentences and also mentioning Mercia.

So Mercia, we'll talk about this in the next lesson a bit more.

Mercia was chopped in half.

So half of it was taken over by the Vikings and the other half was not.

Four, why do some historians think that people exaggerated how bad the Vikings were? Acceptable answer, early monks wrote what happened? Good answers, the only accounts that survived are written by monks who were especially badly affected.

So, because the Vikings went for the monks because they were unpathetic.

They didn't fight back cause they didn't use weapons.

And because they typically often have lots of, lots of Holy like treasure, not treasure as such but crosses and stuff made out of gold.

The Vikings went for the monks and of course the monks therefore were particularly unhappy about this.

And therefore some people say, what of course the monks were making them out to be much worse than they actually were.

However, and this is the next question.

Why does the archaeology erupt and tell us about what the Vikings were like, except for lots of they were violence.

The good answer, the archaeology at Repton tells us that the Vikings were violence and pagan.

They were happy to destroy churches and the bones show that the victims died in unpleasant ways.

So we have to think again, very important.

We we're doing this kind of, this kind of history.

We have the written sources, so what was written down, and then we have the archaeology, which is what we find in the ground.

And actually what we see is that the two in this situation, they kind of match each other.

They both confirm each other, the Vikings were extremely violent and they did not care they were certainly not Christian at this point.

And they were very happy to cause all manner of chaos and destruction.

And this is what I'd like us to have a go right now.

So how violent were the Vikings? This is a big argument that's been taking place for many years, actually.

Whether the Vikings were that bad or whether they were actually just is that, they were as bad as everyone else, at this time.

So we've already, you might hopefully, or you would have done the previous, inquiry, or you might have done this in your lessons at school, if you're back in school at this point when you're watching this lesson, you would have hopefully heard about what, who the Anglo-Saxons were when they first arrived.

They were quite violent as well.

So the question really is, are the Vikings really that bad or are we just exaggerating? So what I'd like you to do is to pause here and make a table a short table, write down three reasons for each column.

So one column, the Vikings were more violent than the Anglo-Saxons.

And then the other column, the Vikings were as violent as the Anglo-Saxons.

So we've got these two columns.

Now you might not be, you might find this quite difficult.

That's absolutely fine if you do.

I will give you a hand in a moment, but see based on today's lesson and any other nurses you've done, especially on the Anglo-Saxons and see if you can write down a few things to complete this box.

Now for the Anglo-Saxons, you might've seen the burial of the, the king at Sutton Hoo.

So think of the helmets, think of where the Anglo-Saxons came from, think you might even have done "Beowulf" in English, this poem about what life was like in Anglo-Saxon England.

So see if you can have a go, do not worry if you can't.

This is absolutely fine, no stress whatsoever, because I will give you a few suggestions in a moment.

So pause now, have a go and then restart when you're ready.

So I've put four in each, you can actually write down.

So if there are things that you haven't got down, then get them down, especially on the other column actually, the column on the right, because you might not have as much knowledge about the Anglo-Saxons.

So for, in order to be able to do this this answer to this question, it's really important that we have a way of comparing the two, Vikings and Anglo-Saxons.

So in the Viking column I put, they raided holy places.

They destroyed lots of Anglo-Saxons kingdoms. They killed Anglo-Saxon Kings in unpleasant ways, and they destroyed Repton monastery.

So we have four different things here, that tells us that Vikings were more violent than the Anglo-Saxons.

Then on the other column we have four points here.

So Anglo-Saxons fought each other for hundreds of years.

So the point here is that fighting was pretty normal at this time.

Everybody fought each other.

It was a very violent world, much more violent than it is now.

Another one, Anglo-Saxons kings, had to be great warriors.

So to be a good king, you have to be a good fighter.

So again, this was another sign that maybe the Vikings weren't that bad, because Anglo-Saxons kings, what made them successful kings was whether they were good at fighting.

Very important point here, the Anglo-Saxons kept slaves.

So this might not be something you're familiar with.

In England at this time, Anglo-Saxons kept a lot of slaves.

They captured slaves, they sold slaves, they bought slaves.

So this stopped after the Northern Congress in 1066.

But at this time at the Anglo-Saxons kept slaves as did the Vikings.

Then we also have a very important minute here.

Anglo-Saxons were pagan before they converted.

So if you've done the previous inquiries if you've done a few lessons in this before, you will know that when the Anglo-Saxons first came to England, they were pagan.

They were not Christian.

They worship many gods.

Some of them the same as the Vikings, for example, Thor.

The Anglo-Saxons had a very similar god that they worshipped.

Unsurprising cause they came from a similar, or they came from the same sort of part, the same area, just at different points in time.

So again, we have these two columns, that allow us to, answer this question which we're now going to do.

How violent were the Vikings? Now, on the screen, I've put two options for your first sentence.

The first sentence, when you're writing your question has to clearly answer the question so that whoever's reading your paragraph knows exactly what your answers your answer is.

So I've put two starters, two sentences that you have to choose from.

So one way of answering this question, the Vikings were more violent than the Anglo-Saxons.

If you agree with that, that's what you wrote down.

The alternative, the other option is the Vikings were just as violent as the Anglo-Saxons.

So if you don't think they were more violent, you think they were just, they were about the same? So that's fine.

And as historians, we can have opinions, provided we have evidence, or we can support our argument.

You can't just make a claim like the Vikings were more violent, than the Anglo-Saxons and leave it there.

What you then have to do is to prove that you're right.

And this is what we have to do in the second part of writing our paragraph.

So I've put, you see, I've put then.

Three sentence starters there.

This is shown by an example of this archaeologists have discovered.

So these are three ways of starting sentences.

And what I want you to do is to whichever first sentence you've chosen, whether it's the Vikings were more violent or just as wild, you need to prove to me, prove to whoever to prove that your answer is correct.

And you do this by thinking of examples and evidence to prove that you're right.

So what we've done in the lesson just now, and also in the two columns that you've presented into your books, you've got these different bits of evidence now that you can write or use to prove that your answer is correct.

So what I'd like you to do is just to spend no more than five or 10 minutes on this.

And also if you find it difficult, that is absolutely fine.

If you didn't find it difficult, you would not need to be studying history.

And this is all about practise, practise, practise.

And it's something that I have to do with my A-level students.

And it's something that I myself have been asked to be better to practise as well.

So this is something that we do all through our lives, as long as you're studying history and practising writing, this is absolutely just how it is.

So don't worry if you find it difficult, have a go, that's the main thing.

So no more than five or six sentences, no more than five or 10 minutes and when you're done, restart the video, and that will take us to the end of the lesson.

So if you'd like to, please ask your parent or carer to share your work on Instagram and Facebook or Twitter tagging @OakNational and #LearnwithOak.

This is not a compulsory task at all.

It's simply if you'd like to share your work.

Cause I'd love to see it.

So that brings us to the end of today's lesson on the Vikings, the first of four lessons in this inquiry, why is Alfred's remembered as great? I hope you find it interesting.

It's pretty great.

I have to say, I kind of enjoyed reading about this when I was reading it don't know what that makes me.

But there we go.

So what I'd like you to do is finished the quiz, very important you do the quiz, this is five questions won't take you long.

And all this does is make sure that the stuff that we've learned in the lesson today is lodged in our brains so that we can build up the knowledge that we know as we go through these lessons.

When you've done that, if you don't have any more lessons to do, have a great day, and I will see you for lesson two.