Thread by @DrFrancisYoung

You’ve heard of the Norman Conquest in 1066; but have you heard about the Lithuanian invasion of England in 1069? Buckle up… (thread)

If you read the standard Oxford edition of Orderic Vitalis’s Ecclesiastical History, edited by Marjorie Chibnall, you’ll find that Chibnall identifies the soldiers employed by King Sweyn II of Denmark for an attempted invasion of England in 1069 as Lithuanians

The ‘Lithuanians’ were recruited by Sweyn and tried to land at Dover, then Sandwich, but were repulsed; they then landed successfully at Ipswich and sacked it, later moving to Norwich, where they were defeated by Ralph de Guader and forced to retreat

So, did England narrowly avoid the fate of becoming part of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania? Well, not exactly…

The offending passage (in Latin) is this one:

And in English translation:

Chibnall, following earlier authors, identified Leutecia as Lithuania – mainly because the Leutecians are described as pagan (which the Lithuanians famously were until the late Middle Ages)

But nowhere else in medieval sources will you find a reference to Lithuania as Leutecia (or anything sounding much like it), and there is no evidence Sweyn or his father ever attacked or subjugated Lithuania. So something is a bit fishy here…

In fact, as long ago as 1873 Edward Augustus Freeman realised that Leutecia was a mistranscription of Leucetia, i.e. Lechitia, the country of the Lechites (another name for the West Slavic Wends). This is borne out in contemporary scholarship

The Wends, like the Lithuanians, were famously pagan. Orderic Vitalis applied a kind of ‘interpretatio Nordica’ to Wendish religion, identifying their gods with the familiar Norse gods Odin, Thor and Freya

The Wends (who spoke a Slavic language a bit like Polish) were indeed frequent subjects of attacks by Sweyn because they lived in what is today northern Germany, close to Denmark

So (disappointingly, perhaps) England has never actually been subjected to a Lithuanian invasion; but it is still extremely interesting that Sweyn II employed pagan Wends to attack Norman England

Thanks to @neilmcguigan for alerting me to this fascinating yet rather alarming error in Chibnall’s edition!

(As an aside, it’s because of Sweyn’s victories over the Wends that, to this day, the full title of the King of Sweden is ‘King of the Swedes, Goths and Wends’ – even though the Wends live nowhere near Sweden)