When the summer was drawing to a close, and when the long boats were gorged with the plunder of half a dozen counties, the unwel come intruders would return to their ships, glide away out of the channel in which they had cast anchor, and for that year the harried and wasted land would see them no more. This, at least, was the case in the first stage of the in vasions, for about 60 years after the sack of Lindisfarne. Then, in 851, as the Chronicles tell us, "the heathen men settled themselves over winter in Thanet." From that time the invasions of the Danes assumed a mlore and more permanent character: from mere free booters they became conquerors: Northumbria and Mercia were bound to their chariot wheels, and the whole of England Would have been sub jugated by them but for the war of liberation which was successfully waged against them by Alfred the Great (871-900).
Though Alfred broke the Danish yoke, and although his son and grandson, Edward and Athelstan, triumphantly asserted the suprem acy of the English crown over the Danish chief tains who were left in the land, the result of the warlike operations of the 9th and 10th centuries was to cause an immense infusion of Scandinavian blood into the population of Eng land. The Danelaw, as it was called, included the greater part of the country northeast of the Watling street, the old Roman road which ran from London to Chester; and in many parts of this region, notably in Lincolnshire and the East Riding of Yorkshire, the names lof places still bear witness by their terminations to the existence there of a large number of Danish settlements. It cannot be doubted that this Scandinavian element when subjected, as it soon was, to the humanizing influence of Christianity, was a most valuable and virile in gredient in the population of England.
Through the greater part of the 10th century the Danish inhabitants of England were kept under by the strong hand of the English kings, and the Danish invasions nearly ceased. Near the end of that century they were resumed, and owing to the portentous weakness of Ethelred and his counsellors, they achieved a greater measure of success than ever before. An arch bishop was martyred; six successive payments of tribute were paid in the vain hope of induc ing the invaders to cease from ravage; and finally the descendants of Cerdic had to quit the realm, and Canute the Dane sat upon the throne of England. As king, however, the Scandinavian conqueror healed many of the wounds which his countrymen had inflicted as ravagers; and the long and prosperous reign tof the Christian Canute marks practically the end of the period during which the Danish pirates were a source of terror to the Saxons. The
reign of Canute, however, coincided with one event in the nature lof a conquest, not favorable to England. In the year 1018 Malcolm, king of Scotland, won the battle of Carham over the men of Northumbria and thereby succeeded in forcing back the English frontier from the Firth of Forth to the line which it now occupies of the Cheviots and the Tweed. The rich coun try of the Lothians, which for near five centu ries had formed part of the kingdom of North umbria, was now permanently added to Scot land.
The line of Canute came to a speedy end in the persons of his worthless sons; and there after, during the centralyears of the llth cen tury, under the reign of Edward the Confessor, there was going forward a peaceful conquest of England by the Normans under favor of the Norman-minded king. In truth there was much to admire in this young Norman race, strong with Scandinavian energy, but refined and liberalized by the memories of Roman cul ture which still lingered in the shattered empire of Charlemagne. Hard and grasping as the Norman warrior might be — and William the Conqueror was a typical Norman in this re spect — he was at this period generally chaste and temperate. His devotion to the Church was not a mere hypocritical pretense, nor was it only testified by the magnificent cathedrals which he erected. As statesman, as architect, and as warrior, it must be admitted that the Norman knight much outshone the Saxon thegas whom he supplanted.
The peaceful conquest of England by Nor man influence which had been for a time ar rested by the successful rebellion of the half Danish family of Godwin was succeeded by the bloody conquest of 1066. Many causes con curred toward this event; the utter feebleness of the representatives of the line of Cerdic; an uneasy consciousness that Harold Godwineson, who had been raised to the throne on the death of Edward the Confessor, was no rightful -wearer of the West Saxon crown; the long-lasting fend between his family and that of the sons of Leofric ; but above all the ill-timed invasion of the Nor wegian Harold Hardrada. It was on an ill day for Scandinavia as well as for himself that he landed with his ally, the traitor Tostig, on the coast of Yorkshire. Unable to conquer Eng land himself, and winning nothing from her king but the seven feet of earth assigned for his grave at Stamford Bridge, he nevertheless left her panting and breathless for the en counter with a mighter and unwearied foe.