Alfred and Guthrum's Peace

This time the peace was kept. Guthrum, the Danish king, entered into friendly relations with Alfred, was baptized with thirty of his followers, and during the following years settled down in East Anglia, as the peaceful subject of the king. In 885 Alfred occupied London, and the next year made a second treaty with Guthrum, the kingdom. "This is the peace," says the old text, that King Alfred and King Guthrum made and the witan (wise-men) of all the English race and the whole body of the Danish people who are in East Anglia." By this treaty the boundary between English and Danes is defined as extending up the Thames to the Lea, along the Lea to its source, thence to Bedford, thence up the Ouse to Watling Street, and thence probably to the Severn and the Welsh frontier. On one side of this line, which divided England into two parts, were the Danes in East Anglia, the Danes in the Five Boroughs, Derby, Stamford, Nottingham, Lincoln, and Leicester, which had been founded by them in Mercia, and the Danes in Northumbria as far as the Tees ; on the other side were the West Saxons, whose authority extended from Cornwall to Kent. The English and the Danes on one side obeyed the Dane-law; the West Saxons, Mercians, Surrey-men, South Saxons, and Kentishmen on the other obeyed the West Saxon law.

The consequences of this arrangement were of vast importance for England. Alfred had emerged from the struggle strengthened rather than weakened, for he now ruled over a territory nearly twice as large as that which his brother had controlled, and the opportunity was at last offered of erecting a powerful English kingdom in the south. The growth of this kingdom marks the foundation of an English state and an English nation.

Effects of the Danish Conquest

The evil effects of the Danish conquest were, in the beginning, everywhere apparent. Monasteries had been sacked, towns destroyed, harvests ruined, and hundreds of prisoners taken and sold into slavery. Whole districts had been devastated, the English had been driven out or subjected, the monastic centres of learning and Christian influence had practically ceased to exist, and many parts of the centre and north had come under pagan control. In the region north of the Tees, English rule was still maintained ; but further north, the Celtic king, Constantin, had been harassed by Norwegians as Alfred had been by Danes.

Extract from King Alfred s Translation of Gregory s Pastoral Care

South of the Thames the effects were startling. Alfred says, in his preface to the translation of Pope Gregory's Pastoral Care: So clean was learning fallen away among the English that there were very few on this side of the Humber who knew how to render their daily prayers in English, or so much as translate an epistle out of Latin into English. I weep that there were not so many beyond the Humber. They were so few that I cannot think of a single one south of the Thames when I took the kingdom."' This was the condition of learning a century and a half after the death of Baeda, and but a century after Alcuin had become the great literary leader at the court of Charles the Great. At the same time the long-continued wars were changing the social condition of the people. Many who had been free possessors of their own folklands were compelled to seek the protection of those stronger than themselves and to bow their heads for meat in the evil days.

On the other hand, the good effects of the Danish conquest were many. Indirectly, the conquest was beneficial for England. By forcing political unity upon Wessex, the kingdom in which lay the future of England, it prepared the way for the unity of all Christian England. Hereafter the Celts in Devon and Somerset were to become Englishmen equally with the Saxons in Mercia and the Jutes in Kent. Furthermore, the Danes brought a fresh supply of Teutonic blood into England and strengthened the institutions which the Angles and Saxons had already established. In law and language, in habits and customs of life, the two peoples had so much in common that for their union into one nation only a reasonable period of time was now necessary.