General approaches:

A study of the Viking age between 750 and 1066 will require a chronological teaching approach that illustrates the developments throughout the Viking age in the respective parts of the curriculum content. At the beginning of each sub-topic, either themed or depth, students need to be grounded in the context of the time not only in the Viking homelands but also in the European states that surrounded them. As the course is taught, it would be useful to link the sub-topics together to help with understanding and deepen knowledge; it would be useful to firstly teach the sub-topics in order to help achieve this. Once students have a strong understanding of Viking society, religion, culture and economy pre-expansion, the focus can be on how this continued or developed during the course of the Viking expansion into Europe and beyond. As this topic is covered broadly, a study of key individuals and events as turning points will add complexity allowing opportunities to incorporate Depth Studies at suitable points.

Common misconceptions or difficulties students may have:

Common difficulties students may encounter come in understanding the context of the time. To help aid this and enable students to gain a better understanding of the context of the time, students need to know that Europe was made up of small independent squabbling states and was not as centralised as it has been since the turn of the century. Communication was poor and knowledge of the world was limited and due to this, concepts such as nationalism, religious freedom, and equality were almost non-existent. Scandinavia was far more progressive, in so far as, women enjoyed grater freedoms compared to their European counterparts and Viking society had an established and widespread autonomous class known as Yarls (similar to yeoman of the later middle ages). However, this class was hierarchical and had slaves and serfs as well as elites in its function. Students will need to recognise that loyalties lay with those in the local community and to the chieftain as opposed to any notion of country and nation. Moreover, because religion was not centralised and had no influence over political decisions on the scale that Christianity did on western powers, there was also no constricting loyalty to organised religion. Therefore, students cannot really use much of the prior knowledge of medieval Europe to help them to understand Viking society.

Conceptual links to other areas of the specification – useful ways to approach this topic to set students up for topics later in the course:

Due to the period being so unique in history students won’t directly have any historical backdrop from which to reference. However, their knowledge of second order historical concepts and enquiry skills should come into developing and understanding and aid the learning within the classroom. A wealth of excellent resources is available online which can be used for prior reading; documentaries on sites such as YouTube are also helpful. These can be adopted and adapted according to the pace of the course.