Vikings at Bouin: France’s Second Earliest Raid (Allegedly).
A Deep Dive into the Viking Invasions of Western France — Episode 2
Last week, I wrote about the alleged Viking raid on Noirmoutier in 799, an event debated by scholars but central to understanding the beginnings of Scandinavian pressure on the Frankish Empire. This week, we turn to another early raid: the attack on Bouin. The sources disagree on when exactly this occurred—some say 813, others 820—but either way, the event sheds light on the early presence of Vikings in Aquitaine. Along with other scattered evidence, it suggests that Scandinavians may have been more active on the Atlantic coast during the reigns of Charlemagne and Louis the Pious than the scant surviving records let on.
An Island No More
Drive today from Nantes toward Noirmoutier and you’ll pass through broad, reclaimed country, flat fields punctuated by salt pans and marsh birds. A road cuts straight across to the island of Noirmoutier, famous for its beaches, salt, and potatoes. But along the way, you pass through Bouin, a quiet town that looks landlocked. It is hard to imagine that, in the early ninth century, Bouin was surrounded by the sea and that it was one of the first communities in France to feel the sting of Viking raiders.
In the ninth century, Bouin sat in the Bay of Bourgneuf, a low-lying island facing Noirmoutier. The two were part of a maritime landscape dominated by tidal channels, marshes, and salt production. For Scandinavian raiders probing the Frankish coast, Bouin and Noirmoutier were tempting targets: wealthy, accessible by ship, and poorly defended.
That geography has since changed. From the seventeenth century onward, Dutch engineers reclaimed marshland in the Marais breton-vendéen, building dikes and polders that linked the islands to the mainland. Today, Bouin is no longer an island at all, but a small town on the road to Noirmoutier. In the Viking Age, though, it was ringed by water, its salt pans and stores of fish and livestock an inviting prospect for men in longships.
813 or 820?
So when did the Vikings strike Bouin? Here, the sources diverge. Some secondary accounts give 813, but the secure evidence is for 820.
The Royal Frankish Annals (Annales Einhardi), written close to the events, record that in 820 a Viking flotilla, after unsuccessful raids in Flanders and at the mouth of the Seine, turned south to Aquitaine. There, they “completely devastated a vicus called Bundium [Bouin] and returned home with immense booty.”
But even if the attack we can name and date happened in 820, the evidence suggests Bouin and its neighbors were harassed long before.
“Because of the Frequent Incursions”
One year earlier, in 819, Emperor Louis the Pious issued a royal diploma for Abbot Arnulf of Noirmoutier. It authorized the foundation of a satellite monastery at Déas (today Saint-Philibert-de-Grand-Lieu), further inland. The reason was explicit: it was needed “because of the incursions of the barbarians who frequently ravage the monastery at Noirmoutier.”
This is not a monk’s lament written years later; it is a hard administrative document (Ah, l’administration Française!). Even before the 820 annalistic entry, the monks of Saint-Philibert were under sustained pressure and had to move their community inland to survive. The Bouin raid of 820, then, is not an isolated incident but part of a pattern of harassment in the Loire estuary.
Charlemagne and the Northmen
Evidence for this pressure reaches even earlier. Einhard, Charlemagne’s courtier and biographer, writes in his Life of Charlemagne that the emperor had organized coastal defenses against the Northmen, just as he had against Muslim raiders in the south. While Einhard gives little detail, it shows that the threat from the sea was recognized during Charlemagne’s reign.
The most famous anecdote, however, comes from Notker the Stammerer, writing later in the ninth century. He tells of Charlemagne at a villa on the coast of Narbonnesian Gaul when word came that Northmen had been sighted offshore. The emperor rose from the table, looked out the window, and saw the ships fleeing “with marvellously rapid flight.” The Franks could not catch them—their boats were too fast. Charlemagne wept, saying he was “sick at heart,” not out of fear for himself, but because he foresaw the destruction these enemies would visit upon his descendants.
Notker’s account, considered fictitious by most historians, is colored by hindsight and moral lesson, but the vignette captures something essential: there was already a memory of Viking ships on the Aquitanian coast in Charlemagne’s time, and even the great emperor could do little to stop them.
Why Bouin? The Salt Hypothesis
Why would Vikings keep probing these particular islands? One answer lies in geography and trade.
Both Noirmoutier and Bouin were salt-producing islands. Salt was the essential preservative of the medieval world, and it may have had growing importance in the early ninth century as Baltic herring fishing expanded. Scandinavian traders, according to my theory, may have needed vast quantities of salt to cure fish for export to eastern markets. If we take the 819 diploma at its word— speaking of “frequent and persistent raids”—then it suggests Vikings may have been targeting a resource they needed.
This is the core of what I have called the Salt Hypothesis: that the early Viking focus on places like Noirmoutier and Bouin was motivated in part by the need to secure reliable access to salt for trade.
Seen in that light, the Bouin raid of 820 is evidence of a structural demand driving Viking activity decades before the big riverine campaigns of the 840s.
What We Can and Can’t Know
As with much of early Viking history, the picture is frustratingly incomplete. The annals give us a few fixed points, but they are terse and sometimes contradictory. Monastic charters and anecdotes fill in some gaps but are shaped by their agendas. We can say with confidence that Bouin was raided in 820, that Noirmoutier was repeatedly harassed before then, and that Charlemagne implemented defensive measures in response to this activity toward the end of his reign (defensive measures I discussed in last week’s episode).
What we cannot say is how many other raids went unrecorded, or how the local communities endured the strain year by year. For every entry that survives, there may have been several summers of tension that left no written trace.
Conclusion
The attack on Bouin may seem like a footnote compared to the dramatic sack of Nantes in 843. Still, it deserves attention as it anchors the earliest phase of Viking activity on the Frankish Atlantic seaboard. It’s the second step in a relentless progression of Viking activity in Western France that would endure more than a century.
Next week, we’ll be taking a dive into the 820s, a decade that shows just how much pressure the monks of Noirmoutier were under. Royal charters from this period hint at the economic importance of their salt and the extraordinary measures they took to protect themselves from Viking incursions.
And, as always…
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