THE SAXON AND DANISH PERIOD
The Saxon invasions were a rude disturbance to the progress of English
civilisation. The Romanised Britons lay more and more at the mercy of
the invaders, as the soldiery were called away to take part in the last
struggles of the western Empire in Italy. Barbarians from the country
north of the wall, Saxon and Jutish pirates from across the sea, saw
in the monuments of the Roman occupation fair ground for pillage.
It is difficult to estimate the destruction caused by the invaders.
But, apart from the havoc wrought by the Teutonic immigrants and the
northern tribes, it is certain that the walled city of Roman times
did not commend itself as a habitation to the new settlers. The fact
that their settlements flank Roman roads, like Ermine street or the
Fosseway, at distances of a mile or so from the main thoroughfare,
proves little in itself; for the villas of the Roman period, which
probably included, like the _latifundia_ of Italy, a considerable
population of labourers on each estate, lay at some distance from
the main roads. The frequent villages—hams, tuns, and worths—were,
however, a new feature; and the life of each village, for which a
clearing was made in the wooded country-side, was pastoral, not
military. This fact is of importance with regard to the scanty traces
of defensive fortifications constructed during the Saxon occupation.
Here and there natural opportunities prompted the Saxon invaders to
found settlements on sites of Roman cities. The geographical position
of London or Exeter, at the head of a broad estuary, made such places
natural centres of traffic, of high importance to trade routes. On the
other hand, while some of the larger provincial capitals preserved
their life in part, other _urbes_ and the smaller _oppida_, or walled
towns, were left desolate. Pons Aelii, near the east end of the Roman
wall, was abandoned until in the tenth century a small monastery was
founded on the site, and the cluster of houses which gathered round it
received the name of Muncanceaster (Monkchester). The place, however,
did not recover its importance or become a permanent settlement
until the Conqueror founded there his New Castle on the Tyne, which
became the nucleus of the city of the middle ages and modern times.
The military stations of the Saxon shore were ruined and abandoned.
We know of the sack of Anderida in 492 A.D.: the walls of the station
were left standing, but the later settlement of Pevensey grew up in
the open country outside the walls. Richborough, Othona at the mouth
of the Blackwater, Burgh Castle, sheltered no new settlements: the new
villages or towns, Sandwich, Bradwell, Burgh, were all at a distance
from the Roman walls or outside their area. Othona (Ythanceaster) was
deserted when Cedd made it a missionary centre in the seventh century;
and the little church, which exists to-day and may have been Cedd’s own
church, was built across the site of the east gate of the station. In
Leicester, which became an important Danish centre, the topography of
the Roman station was much disturbed, and the church of St Nicholas,
the nave of which is probably a little earlier than the Norman
conquest, was built within the walls directly in front of the blocked
west gate of the city. Towns like Chester, Gloucester, or Chichester,
which have preserved the line of their Roman streets with little
alteration, are rare; and the continuity of plan does not necessarily
prove that there was a similar continuity in the life of the places.
On the contrary, the present lay-out of either town shows four streets
meeting at an open space or Carfax in the centre of the city: no trace
remains above ground of the closed _forum_, which at Silchester and
Corstopitum formed the centre of the plan and directed the course of
the streets. Silchester, laid waste by Saxon invaders, has shared the
fate of Anderida, Othona, and many other once prosperous Romano-British
towns.
In French history there was no such interruption as the Saxon invasion
caused in our own. The consequence is that the chief provincial
capitals of to-day, the centres of local government and religion, are
and always have been cities of Roman origin, which, although their
Latin name has not always been kept, preserve the names of the Gallic
tribes amid which they were founded. Reims, Paris, Amiens, Beauvais,
Bourges, Le Mans, Tours, Rouen, Sens, Troyes, Chartres, cities which
have taken a most prominent place in French history, and contain
the most noble monuments of French religious architecture, have an
unbroken history from Roman times and even earlier. The cathedrals
of Christianised Gaul rose in the centre of the cities: outside the
walls, as time went on, rose abbeys like those of Saint-Ouen at
Rouen, Saint-Taurin at Evreux, La Couture and Le Pré at Le Mans. The
fortresses of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, like the older
castle of Rouen, were founded in a corner of the city, possibly on
the site of the Roman _arx_ or citadel, of which we have substantial
remains in the abandoned Roman station of Jublains (Naeodunum
Diablintum). In time the city grew, extending into suburbs far
outside the original walls: a suburb sprang up round the neighbouring
monastery. The circuit of the walls was extended beyond their old
limit. The eastern Roman wall might be broken down, as at Le Mans,
where the cathedral was in a corner of the city, to make way for the
thirteenth-century quire of the principal church:[23] the defences of
the city were here transferred to a new outer ring of wall, the line of
which can be seen on the bank of the Sarthe. Within the present extent
of such cities the plan of the Roman station can frequently be traced:
whatever the vicissitudes of the place may have been, no year has
passed in which the chatter of the Vieux-Marché has been silent, or the
Grande-Rue has been untrodden daily by busy footsteps. But in English
towns of corresponding importance the case is different. If the cities
were preserved from pillage, traces of Christianity and civilisation
were obliterated. If York kept its position as an inhabited town,
its population must have been small and poor: the Anglian sovereigns
of Northumbria dwelt, not in the old Roman capital, but at country
settlements like Goodmanham. The history of York begins again with the
mission of Paulinus and the foundation of the first Saxon cathedral
there. We also hear of Lincoln in connection with Paulinus, who
consecrated a church there; and this city, like York, was large and
important at the time of the Conquest. But, in both these cases, the
Anglian invasion first, and the Danish invasion later, caused a serious
disturbance to civic and religious life. Although there is evidence
that the Saxon bishops who ruled at Dorchester (Oxon.) in the tenth
and eleventh centuries looked upon Lincoln as the real seat of their
authority, it did not recover its position as an ecclesiastical capital
until a Norman bishop raised his cathedral in the south-eastern corner
of the hill city. Even then the cathedral stood, not with its front to
the _via principalis_, as at Le Mans, nor with its face to the _forum_,
as at Coutances, but in an enclosure of its own, apart from the main
life of the city. When we think of the great ecclesiastical centres of
England, there are some names which recall the Roman occupation; but
of these Chichester, Exeter, Lincoln, did not become sees of bishops
until the time of the Norman conquest; Chester, although regarded
as one seat of their authority by the medieval bishops of Lichfield,
was never the real capital of their diocese. Bath and Old Sarum were
given episcopal rank by Norman prelates. The true Saxon cathedral
towns were villages of post-Roman origin—Lichfield, Wells, Sherborne,
Durham, Ripon, Elmham, Thetford. The fact is significant; for, upon the
continent of Europe, the ecclesiastical importance of a city was the
result of its prominent position as the civil metropolis of a district.
The choice of these obscure villages for the sees of Saxon prelates
is a testimony to the practical abandonment of Roman cities by the
invaders.
As a matter of fact, the Saxons trusted little to walls: their
strength, after they had settled in the country, lay neither in
earthwork, nor in stonework, but in the boundary of wood or marsh
that extended round their settlements. Consequently, during the six
centuries and a half between the final departure of the Roman legions
and the Norman conquest, the history of military construction in
England is very obscure. Work in stone, which can be distinguished as
Saxon, is practically confined to churches. Such fortifications of this
long period as can be identified are entirely in earthwork. In only a
few cases we hear of a stone wall of _enceinte_ being built, or an old
Roman town wall being repaired. Further, it may safely be said that
these fortifications, at any rate until the end of the period, whether
their builders were Saxons or Danes, were intended to protect, not
private individuals, but a community. Of the private citadel or castle
we hear nothing until the period immediately before the Conquest, and
then it is heard of only as a foreign importation.
The most formidable earthworks of the Saxon period are the great dykes
known as Wansdyke and Offa’s dyke, with the subsidiary works of the
Bokerley dyke and Wat’s dyke. Offa’s dyke, which ran from the Dee in
the north to the Wye in the south, with a ditch along its western side,
and the parallel line of Wat’s dyke,[24] are generally acknowledged
to have formed the boundary line between the Mercian kingdom of Offa
(757-96) and the territory of the conquered Britons. The object and
date of Wansdyke and the Bokerley dyke is not so clear. The Wansdyke
ran from the Bristol Channel near Portishead, across north Somerset and
along the downs south and south-west of Bath, passed through Wiltshire,
north of Devizes and south of Marlborough, and, leaving Wiltshire east
of Savernake park, turned southwards in the direction of Andover. The
Bokerley dyke, in its present state, is only some four miles long, and
forms the boundary between Wilts and Dorset, on the road from Salisbury
to Cranborne. In both cases the ditch is upon the north or north-east
side of the bank or dyke, which is clear proof that the defence was
provided against attack from that quarter. The Wansdyke is obviously
a late Roman or post-Roman work, for it encroaches in places upon the
adjacent Roman road. The system on which it is planned resembles that
of the Roman wall, in that its course includes a series of forts,
presumably of earlier date. The conclusion which seems irresistible
is that propounded by the late General Pitt-Rivers, that the Wansdyke
was raised by the Roman Britons, to defend their last refuge in the
south-west against the invading Saxons. If this is really the case,
one can only wonder at the energy of despair which constructed this
huge rampart, and at the uselessness of its builders’ attempt to ward
off an invasion from the inland country alone. Ceawlin’s victory at
Dyrham in 577 brought Gloucester, Cirencester, and Bath into the hands
of the Saxons, and cut off the communication between the Britons of
the south-west and those of Wales. Whatever part the Wansdyke, on the
hills north of which the battle was fought, may have played during the
century before the fight at Dyrham, its history must have closed with
Ceawlin’s conquest.
The first work of fortification by the Teutonic invaders, of which
we have any account, is the royal city of Bebbanburh or Bamburgh in
Northumberland, which Ida (547-59), king of Northumbria, called after
his wife Bebba. This, says the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle,[25] was first
girt by a hedge, and afterwards—probably long after the days of Ida—by
a wall. One of the most noble of English castles stands upon the
basaltic rock of Bamburgh, and its walls embrace the site of Ida’s
capital. But the later stronghold must not be confounded with the
earlier. The _burh_ of Ida, which Penda sought to burn in 651,[26]
was not the private castle which William Rufus afterwards besieged.
The name of Bebbanburh is significant. _Burh_ or _burg_ was a term
applied by Saxons to fortified places. Cissbury in Sussex, Badbury and
Poundbury in Dorset, Battlesbury and Scratchbury in Wilts, Cadbury,
Dolebury, and Worlebury in Somerset, are early camps to which Saxons
gave the name of _burh_. Searobyrig, the later Salisbury, was the
name given by them to the great fortress of Old Sarum. Peterborough
and Bury St Edmunds bear names derived from _burh_ and its dative
_byrig_, and were towns enclosed by a rampart.[27] And, although, by
a not very satisfactory method of argument, the Saxon _burh_ has been
taken very generally as the prototype of the castle, the very cases on
which this argument chiefly rests show that the _burh_ was a fortified
town, and not the fortress of an individual lord. It is true that, at
any rate until the time of Alfred the Great, the word _burh_ implies
a fortified house as well as a fortified collection of dwellings; but
the _burhs_ of which we read in connection with the Danish wars were
towns and villages. The term is equivalent to the Roman _oppidum_, the
French _bourg_, or the German _burg_. The first of the Saxon emperors,
Henry the Fowler, made the founding of _burhs_ a leading part of his
policy:[28] Merseburg, Brandenburg, Würzburg, all bear the familiar
suffix. And, had not a later age chosen perversely to call the greatest
of our prehistoric camps Maiden Castle, we should have had a Maidenbury
of our own to show, far more ancient than the German Magdeburg.[29]
Some uncertainty attaches to the rare remains of fortifications
of _burhs_ “wrought” by Saxons and Danes. It would seem that they
cannot have been very strong. The defences consisted of the usual
earthen bank with a stockade on the top and an outer ditch; but one
may safely assume that the strength of the defence lay mainly in the
actual stockade, and that the bank and ditch never reached formidable
proportions. Thelwall, near Warrington, takes its name from the wooden
stockade, the wall of thills or upright palisades with which Edward the
Elder surrounded the village in 923.[30] There are exceptional cases
in which we hear of a stone wall; but in these instances the _burh_
was a Roman city or station, and the wall was a Roman wall. This may
be fairly assumed with regard to the wall of Edward the Elder’s _burh_
at Towcester (921). It was certainly the case at Colchester, where the
Danish defenders were worsted in the same year by the _fyrd_ of Kent
and Essex. When Alfred the Great “repaired Lundenburh” in 886,[31] he
undoubtedly made good the weak places in the stone wall which the
Romans had made round their city of London.
The _burh_, the fortified stronghold of a Saxon community, comes into
prominence as the result of the Danish invasions of the ninth century.
The method of the invaders was in almost every case the same. Seamen
before everything else, they sought in their long ships the estuaries
of rivers, and proceeded to penetrate inland as far as the stream
would take them. From a base of operations, preferably an island in
the river, where they could harbour their boats safely, they rode into
the surrounding country, burning and pillaging. In 835, allied with
the Britons of Cornwall, they came up the Tamar, and fought a battle
with Egbert at Hingston down, west of Tavistock, in which they suffered
defeat.[32] In 843, they effected their first permanent settlement
in France, on the island of Noirmoutier, south of the estuary of the
Loire: they invaded the banks of the river, sacking Nantes and killing
the bishop, and, after their summer campaign was over, settled down
to build houses for winter quarters on their island.[33] Each of the
great French rivers was infested during the next few years by bands of
northern pirates. Northmen in 845 sailed up the Garonne to Toulouse,
and up the Seine to Paris, where destruction was avoided only by
buying them off. Towns which lay near the rivers or sea coast were
invariably sacked. Sometimes the pirates, growing bolder, left their
ships and rode for some distance inland. In 851, starting from Rouen,
they pillaged Beauvais. In 855, after burning Angers, they took to
the land and sacked Poitiers. In both cases, however, their return
journey was successfully cut off by a French army. In 856 the Danes of
the Seine made their winter quarters at Jeufosse, on the bend of the
river between Vernon and Mantes, and within no great distance of Paris.
Within the next few years, they established themselves in strong posts
at Oissel, above Rouen, and at Melun, above Paris. The greater part of
the last sixteen years of Charles the Bald (_d._ 877) was occupied in
defending Paris against their annual forays, repairing the bridges they
had destroyed, and so cutting off their return from expeditions up the
Marne and Oise. But, although they were constantly checked, they always
returned. They abandoned the siege of Paris in 885-6, but only after
Charles the Fat had paid them off. The last great invasion of France by
the Northmen was in 911, when, by the treaty of Saint-Clair-sur-Epte,
Charles the Simple ceded the duchy of Normandy to Rollo.
The actual settlement of the Northmen in England began in 851, eight
years after the occupation of Noirmoutier. They wintered in Thanet, and
sailed thence up the Stour and Thames, taking Canterbury and London.
As in France, their landward excursions from their boats were less
successful, and they were seriously beaten by Æthelwulf at Ockley in
Surrey. But failure did not hinder them from returning. As in France,
the system of buying off their attacks was adopted—a ready inducement
to repeated plunder. In 887 they were in the Humber, and dealt a final
blow to the decaying power of Northumbria at York. Next year they
invaded Mercia up the Trent, and established themselves at Nottingham.
The years 870 and 871 were remarkable for their land operations. The
defeat of the East Anglian king Edmund in Suffolk laid Mercia and
Lindsey open to their ravages, and so established their power in what
was to become the Danelaw; while in 871, within reach of the Danish
camp on the Thames at Reading, occurred the great series of battles
in Berkshire and Wiltshire, in which Alfred’s bravery was proved. The
details of Alfred’s defence of Wessex against the Northmen are well
known: the compromise effected at Wedmore in 878 preserved the south of
England to Englishmen, but established the Danes north of a line which
may roughly be represented by the course of the Welland, Soar, upper
Trent, and Mersey.
England, however, had to endure a long intestine warfare for years
after the death of Alfred. The strenuous efforts of his children,
Edward the Elder and Æthelflæd, prevented the men of the Danelaw from
extending their power southwards. But the Northmen used persevering
tactics, and not merely the enemy within, but fresh invasions from
without, disturbed the peace of the monarchs of Wessex during the later
part of the tenth century. After the disastrous reign of Ethelred the
Redeless came a period of Danish rule over the whole of England; while
the reigns of the last Saxon kings formed the prelude to the final
invasion of the Northmen, the Norman conquest.
The most interesting feature, from a military point of view, of the
contest between Wessex and the Danelaw, is the systematic defence of
the Midland rivers by _burhs_ during the reign of Edward the Elder,
either by himself or his sister Æthelflæd. Æthelflæd, who fixed
her chief residence at Tamworth, on the edge of Staffordshire and
Warwickshire, ruled over Mercia, and fortified her frontier between
909 and her death in 921. Her brother died in 925: his activity in
constructing _burhs_ began about 913. Of the construction of these
fortresses two phrases are used: their builders either “wrought” or
“timbered” them. Both words probably mean the same thing: the town
or village to be fortified was enclosed within the usual wooden
stockade.[34] The identity of a few of the _burhs_ is uncertain; but
the remainder may be classified as follows: (1) _Burhs_ wrought by
Æthelflæd on the river banks of her frontier: these include Runcorn and
possibly Warburton on the Mersey, Bridgnorth and possibly Shrewsbury
on the Severn, Tamworth and Stafford on tributaries of the Trent, and
Warwick on the Avon. (2) Frontier _burhs_ taken by Æthelflæd from the
Danes were Derby and Leicester, both on tributaries of the Trent.
(3) Eddisbury in Cheshire, an early hill fortress, was the site of
one of Æthelflæd’s _burhs_: here the inference is that the existing
hill fort was palisaded by her orders, and garrisoned as a camp of
refuge. Of Edward’s _burhs_, Witham and Maldon on the Essex Blackwater,
of which some probable traces remain, belong to class (1), as also
does Thelwall, his fortified post on the Mersey. To class (2) belong
Colchester, Huntingdon, and Tempsford, the first on the Colne, the
two latter on the Great Ouse. None of Edward’s works bear any analogy
to class (3), unless his last _burh_, Bakewell in Derbyshire, may be
taken into account. But (4) Bakewell represents a push northward along
a hostile border, and may be claimed, with Towcester, as belonging
to a fourth class of _burh_, unconnected with a navigable river, but
providing a constant menace to the enemy. (5) Towcester may, however,
also be classed with Colchester as a Roman _burh_ with stone walls.
A sixth class of _burh_ was riverine, like class (1), but with this
difference, that it was double. There was one _burh_ on one side, the
other on the opposite side of the river. The cases are Hertford on
the Lea, Buckingham and Bedford on the Ouse, Stamford on the Welland,
and Nottingham on the Trent. At Hertford and Buckingham both _burhs_
were the work of Edward. At Bedford, Stamford, and Nottingham, the
northern _burh_ was in the hands of the enemy, and Edward took it by
converting the southern suburb into a fortified and garrisoned post.
His proceedings were exactly analogous to those of Charles the Bald in
862. He gained control of the navigable rivers by placing garrisons on
both their banks; the natural places which he chose were the existing
towns on the river, and the garrison, as at Nottingham, was formed out
of the inhabitants.
Some of these _burhs_, as we have seen, were in the occupation of the
Northmen; and at a later date, when the frontier of the west Saxon
kingdom had been pushed back, and English kings were again placed on
the defensive, Lincoln, Nottingham, Derby, Stamford, and Leicester
became known as the five _burhs_, the centre of Danish power in the
Midlands. There is no reason to suppose that there was any essential
difference between the _burhs_ of Danes and Saxons—that the _burh_
which Æthelflæd took at Derby was in any way different from her own
_burh_ at Tamworth. When the Danes first landed on a river bank or
island and beached their ships, they constructed what is called in the
Chronicle a _geweorc_, _i.e._, a thing wrought. This probably consisted
of a slight bank and ditch enclosing the landward side of their
position. Where they raised permanent dwellings within the _enceinte_,
the _burh_ grew out of the _geweorc_, just as a Roman station developed
out of a mere camp. However, it is unsafe to push the phraseology
of the Chronicle too far, or to fasten a too technical meaning upon
its words; and the fact remains that the term _geweorc_ may be very
well applied to a wrought _burh_. The Danish _burhs_ at Huntingdon
and Tempsford, the landmarks of their progress up the Ouse to recover
Bedford in 921, are called indiscriminately _burh_ and _geweorc_.
[Illustration: Map of Saxon and Danish Burhs
[The line from the Mersey to the Wash roughly indicates the Danish
frontier.]]
Many of the _burhs_ wrought or taken during the Danish war became,
after the Norman conquest, sites of castles; and the presence of a
Norman castle at such places has led to the still popular inference
that the castle simply usurped the earthworks of the earlier
stronghold, and that therefore the _burh_ was equivalent to the later
castle.[35] It is not surprising that all the five places where we hear
of a _burh_ on either side of the river should have been chosen for
the foundation of later castles. But the castle earthworks of Hertford
and Bedford, the castles of which there is record at Buckingham and
Stamford, were private strongholds which formed part of the defences of
one of the _burhs_, but were not identical with either. The Conqueror’s
castle of Nottingham, greatly transformed in its present state, looked
down from its sandstone cliff upon the northern _burh_ where Edward
welded together Englishman and Dane in one common work of defence and
bond of citizenship.[36] But even were it not self-evident that the
_burh_ is identical with the _burgus_ or _burgum_ of Domesday and the
“borough” whose organisation plays so large a part in English history,
there is one fact which makes its identification with the castle
impossible. At Hertford, Buckingham, Bedford, Stamford, Nottingham,
there were two _burhs_, but there never has been more than one castle.
When the Conqueror wrought a castle on either side of the river at
York, he did not repeat Edward the Elder’s tactics literally: he
applied them to a form of fortification of which Edward knew nothing.
If the test by which the Norman castle is identified with the Saxon
_burh_ fails in these instances, we are obviously forbidden to make the
identification in the cases of single _burhs_ like Warwick or Tamworth.
The great earthen mount and curtain wall which stand in the south-west
corner of Tamworth, beside the Tame, are not the remains of Æthelflæd’s
_burh_, although it is not improbable that they were raised on the site
of her dwelling-house. Her _burh_ is the town of Tamworth itself; and
although her wall of palisades is gone, there are still traces of the
ditch with which, in the eighth century, Offa had ringed the _burh_
about.
[Illustration: Earthwork at Tempsford.]
There is no trace of any _arx_ or citadel within these enclosures.
Their defenders were the citizens. In France, for reasons sufficiently
indicated, the art of fortification was more advanced. Roman traditions
survived there without that abrupt break which the historical
continuity of England had suffered. No fortress of stone and wood, such
as that which Charles the Bald, in 869, built within the _enceinte_
of the abbey of St Denis, is heard of in Saxon England. The state of
society in which, as early as 864, Charles found it necessary, by the
edict of Pistes, to forbid his vassals to raise private fortresses
without royal authority, did not exist in England, and was only
beginning to exist there two centuries later. In both centuries we
have to deal with the same invaders, but with defenders whose state of
social development was quite different. Although the private fortress
or castle was introduced into England by the Normans, and although
the type of earthwork associated with it was developed to its highest
extent by Northmen, not only in Normandy and England, but also in
Denmark, it is nevertheless probable that the earliest development
of that form of earthwork took place on Frankish soil. The Danish
_geweorc_ or _burh_, where it can be traced with any certainty—and this
is in very few cases—supplied accommodation for the force, and probably
a harbour for its vessels, but no private stronghold belonging to a
prominent leader. The earthwork called Gannock’s castle (32), close
to the Ouse near Tempsford, is sometimes supposed to be the _geweorc_
wrought by the Danes in 921. In plan, it very closely resembles a
rather small mount-and-bailey castle of the usual early Norman type,
and could have accommodated only a very small body of defenders. But
the point in which it differs from the ordinary mount-and-bailey
plan—the smallness of the mount, which is a mere thickening of the
earthen bank, and the absence of a moat round its base—may show that
here the Danes anticipated their Norman successors with a plan with
which some of them may have gained acquaintance during marauding
expeditions in France. This, however, is mere conjecture, and the
utility of such a fortress for the immediate purposes of the Danes may
well be questioned.[37] Of the private dwellings of the Danish leaders,
and how far they may have approximated to the later type of the castle,
we know nothing. St Mary’s abbey at York is on the site of Galmanho,
the residence of the Danish earls outside the western wall of the
Roman city, but nothing of its earthworks remain. If they were at all
considerable, like those of a mount-and-bailey castle of Norman times,
it seems strange that no trace of them should be left.
The details of the doings of the Danish army, during the reign of
Ethelred the Redeless (979-1016), are recorded at great length in
the Chronicle. They show the old tactics, familiar for two hundred
years: the long ships are brought to the nearest point convenient
for a campaign of pillage; there the “army is a-horsed,” and they
ride at their will inland, lighting their “war-beacons,” the blazing
villages of the country-side, as they go. Year after year records
its tale of disaster, until the partition of England in 1016 between
Cnut and Edmund Ironside. The whole story of river and land warfare,
of plundering and burning, of the paying of Danegeld as a temporary
sop to the army, is in no way different from the record of the
Danish operations in France during the ninth century. In France the
Danish conquest was quicker, because the invaders had to deal from
the beginning with a worn-out civilisation: the partition of France,
owing to the superiority of the Danes to their opponents, was effected
within seventy years of their first settlement. The power of Normandy,
however, was checked by the rise of the Capetian dynasty in the later
part of the tenth century: the Northmen were kept strictly to their
Danelaw, and their subsequent expansion took place, not in France, but
in England. On the other hand, in England, the Danish invaders of the
ninth century had to contend with the rising power of Wessex and a race
younger and more vigorous than the contemporary Gauls of Neustria.
Their inroads were therefore checked and their conquest was delayed
until the house of Wessex had run its natural course, and Englishmen
and Danes had had time to be practically amalgamated into one nation.
The glory of Wessex ceases with Edmund Ironside, the glory of the Danes
with Cnut. Before Cnut died, the child William already had succeeded to
his father’s duchy of Normandy, and thirty-one years after the death of
Cnut, William was king of England, and, for all practical purposes, the
inroads of the Northmen from Scandinavia were over.