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Zitat

In this year King Brihtric married Offa’s daughter Eadburh. And in his days there came for the first time three ships of Northmen from Hæreðalande. The sheriff rode out to meet them and tried to force them to go to the king’s residence, for he did not know what they were; and they slew him. Those were the first ships of Danish men which came to the land of the English.

Zitat

The earliest raids seem all to have been on a small scale. Where numbers are given,
only very small numbers of ships or men are cited, such as the three ships that attacked
Portland in what may have been the earliest recorded Viking raid, in the reign of
Beorhtric of Wessex (786–802). Where numbers are not given, the choice of wealthy
but exposed coastal monasteries such as Lindisfarne and Iona rather than larger targets
also suggests relatively small forces. Such small raids were probably undertaken by
local groups under their own leaders. The raiders at Portland apparently came from
Hordaland in western Norway, while Frankish sources identify attacks by men from
Vestfold in southern Norway (ASC E–F, sub 787 [789]; Nelson 1991: 55 n. 2). Raiding
on a small scale continued throughout the Viking Age. A battle off the coast of Wessex
in 896, described in unusual detail by the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (ASC A, sub 897
[896]) involved only six shiploads of Vikings, and much of the raiding around Scotland
and the Irish Sea apparently continued to involve small fleets as late as the eleventh and
twelfth centuries.
However, the ninth century certainly saw an increase in the scale of Viking forces.
The size of fleets mentioned in English, Irish and Frankish sources increased, often
numbered in hundreds of ships by the mid-ninth century, and led by named kings
or earls. These titles probably reflect personal status and lineage, and do not necessarily
mean that such leaders ruled major territories in the Viking homelands. These were not
yet fully unified into the modern Scandinavian kingdoms, which begin to emerge fully
only towards the end of the Viking Age. Nevertheless, such titles indicate that the
leaders of Viking raids now came from the highest levels of Scandinavian society,
although lesser chieftains no doubt also continued to play a major part.
While there is no doubt that the scale of the raids increased in this period, historians
have disagreed over the extent of the increase, and on the impact of these larger forces.
Peter Sawyer, in his influential book The Age of the Vikings, argued that while the smaller
numbers such as three and six ships seemed to be exact, the larger fleets were always in
suspiciously round numbers, and were therefore unreliable. He questioned whether any
Viking leader could realistically have mustered fleets of hundreds of ships, and suggested
that the figures in the sources are much exaggerated, with even the largest Viking armies
numbering only several hundred men (Sawyer 1962: 117–2. However, Nicholas
Brooks (1979) noted that there is close agreement between independent Anglo-Saxon,
Irish and Frankish sources on the size of fleets, and argued that the figures cited in the
various chronicles were more reliable than Sawyer had suggested, and that the larger
armies probably numbered in the low thousands. More recent thinking has tended to
fall between these two positions. Interpretations of early medieval warfare generally
since the mid-1980s have tended towards relatively small armies, but it does seem hard
to reconcile contemporary accounts of the largest Viking forces with numbers below the
low thousands.