THE DANES AND THE RISE OF WESSEX

The Coming of the Danes

The people who invaded England in the eighth and ninth centuries were hardy hunters and fishermen, neighbors and cousins of the Anglo-Saxons, living along the coast of Denmark and Scandinavia. They were fierce sea-robbers, barbarians in government and manner of life, whose object was plunder and conquest. Bred of a venturesome spirit in the midst of their fiords, those retreats which gave them the name of Vikings, or fiord-dwellers, they were always ready to start on freebooting expeditions toward the shores which lay nearest or which they could reach by sailing westward. Their methods of navigation were simple: they followed the coast, or, if compelled to push out of sight of land, they studied the stars, or let loose a raven and followed his course to land. Under single leaders, chosen for courage and ability, they appeared in their vessels, advancing without warning up the rivers, sacking cities, plundering fields, and destroying monasteries. They penetrated the Seine to Paris, the Loire to Tours, the Guadalquiver to Seville. Charles the Great defeated them in Frisia; Charles the Bald bought them off before Paris; the Moors in Spain fled in dismay before them, thinking them wizards. These were the invaders who threatened to conquer the Anglo-Saxons as effectually as four centuries before the Anglo-Saxons had conquered the Celts.

Though the Northmen or Danes first appeared in 781 off Wessex at Wareham, the first serious consequences of their attacks were felt in the north. In 793 the marauders attacked Northumbria and destroyed the monastery of Lindisfarne; they then pushed on toward the west, occupied Ireland in 795, and in 802 burned the buildings at Iona. By these acts they completed the crippling of Northumbria, broke up the unity of the Scots in Ireland and southwestern Scotland, and compelled the king of the Picts to transfer the seat of the Celtic church from Iona to Dunkeld. In the meantime the invasion of the centre and south was continued: in 794 the Northmen sacked Wearmouth, and from that time forward their attacks were frequent and persistent. At first their object was plunder, and for half a century they burned and despoiled, going away, however, as rapidly as they came. But in 851 we find the ominous record, This year the heathen men remained over year at Thanet."' It is evident that the era of settlement had begun, and that land as well as plunder was the object. Ecgbert fought against them as robbers, but his sons and grandsons fought against them as conquerors and permanent settlers. The Anglo-Saxons, divided among themselves, fighting on foot, with a poorly equipped army composed only of the freemen of their tribes, were unable to resist the Danish advance. In Kent and Wessex the Danes had already obtained a footing, and so numerous had they become that in 866, when thelred was king of the West Saxons, a great heathen army," as the. Chronicle calls it, "took up its headquarters among the East Angles, and there was provided with horses; and then the East Angles made peace." Thus a new phase of the struggle began: the Danes were no longer content to be mere settlers in the land; they wished to be conquerors also.

The Danish "Army."

The Viking host was not a national body in the sense that it represented a single people coming from a single kingdom. It was rather a collection of war-bands living on the country it invaded. Each band was under its own individual chieftain, and the whole "army" was divided into two groups, at the head of one of which were Danish kings, at the head of the other, Danish jarls. The invasion was in fact but the last phase of the old order of things ; that is, the last phase of the movement known as the Wandering of the Nations," of which the migration of the Anglo-Saxons themselves had been but a part. The invasion was the work of many warrior-leaders seeking adventure, booty, and homes. We read of Inghwar and his brothers and successors, Halfdene and Ubba; of Bagseg and his successor Guthrum. They began the conquest, attacking first one part and then another, sometimes destroying the inhabitants, sometimes making peace with them, sacking towns, seizing lands and parcelling them out among their followers in Danish fashion. In consequence, Danish names and customs are to be found throughout half of England, while Danish blood flows in the veins of those who inhabit the region once known as the Dane-law, where the Danes made permanent settlements.

Passing out of East Anglia, part of the army" under Inghwar and Ubba invaded Northumbria and captured York in 867. The next year it entered Mercia, where King Burhred, despite help furnished by the West Saxons, was forced to conclude a peace. Having reduced Mercia, the bulk of the army" returned to York, and in 870 under the same leaders went back to East Anglia, where in cold blood they slew King Eadmund and burned the abbey of Peterborough. Afterward the martyred king was revered as a saint, his body translated to a monastery in Suffolk, and the place of his burial called the abbey of Bury St. Edmunds. Thus Northumbria, Mercia, and East Anglia passed under the yoke of the Danes, who, in the following years and under other leaders, became settlers upon the lands they had conquered. Under Halfdene the lands of the Northumbrians were distributed in 876 ; in 877 the Mercian lands were divided; and in 880 a Danish band took possession of East Anglia and parcelled out the soil. A new people, kindred of the old, had become tillers and ploughers of the lands it had conquered.