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This chapter discusses the historical accounts of Viking raids in Ireland and Britain during the last years of the eighth century or the early years of the ninth. It compares the accounts of Bede and Alcuin of York and the historical relevance of the role of the Mayo monastery, Bishop Colmán, and Gerald of Mayo. The chapter provides background information on the lives of both Colmán and Gerald.

In the first half of the eleventh century, the impotence of the Capetians was openly acknowledged by their subjects. The strength that kingship had derived from its new royal family—the more extensive demesne, the rather different image—was not sufficient to halt its slide. However, what was important from the point of view of political history was less the further decline — in any case not extensive — than the prolongation of weakness, the continuation of a situation in which royal intervention outside the demesne was a rarity. The weakness of the king, as well as the changing attitude towards private warfare that was not purely confined to churchmen, gave rise to a peace movement. The medieval church's powerful impetus towards change evoked a strong and widespread response throughout the church and its lay adherents in the eleventh century. And nowhere was that response richer, more varied, more creative than in West Francia. The period 980–1020 was the culmination of the monastic reform movement which had begun in the aftermath of the Viking raids.

In about 800 AD the monastery of Portmahomack was attacked in a Viking raid. The vellum workshops were incinerated and Christian sculpture broken up with sledge hammers. Several monks were found to have died from blade wounds. Then, curiously, the northern workshops revived, but now as a metal-working area. The same techniques were employed as before, with moulds and crucibles, but the smiths were now making more secular objects. These events are placed in the history of the area: the Norse conquest and domination of Orkney and Caithness; their struggle against the men of Ross and Moray and the triumph of MacBeth the Christian Scottish leader. The new masters were most likely the Scots of Moray, who held the Moray Firth against the Norse invaders for a century or more.

This chapter gives an account of the emergence of pilgrimage in Norway and its intersections with medieval warfare, trade, and travel. Coastal Norway was the main travel and access route before modern travel. Viking raiders encountered Christianity in the British Isles, and Christian communities spread first along the coast. Eventually, baptismal covenants came to replace the increasingly brittle bonds of Viking raiders to their leaders and a different form of social contract, as well as a different faith, is introduced. St. Olav plays a central role in this shift toward greater political and religious unity, though his own overreach eventually resulted in his death, though not in the defeat of the project of unification under one Christian law and crown. The cult around his relics begins shortly after and renders Nidaros/Trondheim a central location in the sacred geography of Norway. During the Reformation, however, pilgrimage and the cult of saints became widely repressed in Norway, and shrines are either destroyed or relics moved to unknown locations.