The Danish settlement of England was the gradual process by which the Danes (a group of seafaring Scandinavian peoples) settled in England from the late 9th to early 11th centuries AD. The Danes first arrived during the Viking invasions of England, and they conquered the kingdoms of Northumbria, East Anglia, and Mercia from 867 to 870, establishing Jorvik (York) as the center of their new kingdom. An estimated 25,000-35,000 Scandinavians migrated to England during this time (leading some experts to believe that the Danelaw left a negligible footprint on English DNA), although other scholars believed this to be an undercount due to the similarities between Anglo-Saxon and Scandinavian genetics, and the many migrations which occurred in the following centuries.
Because of the similarities between the Germanic Saxon and Norse cultures, assimilation was rapid, and the Danes often attempted to integrate themselves into English society after establishing or capturing settlements. The Danes of York submitted to the Anglo-Saxons in 954 AD, but the new Danish aristocracy and the descendants of the Danish settlers formed a new society which rivalled the Saxon society south of the Humber. The Danes were gradually Christianized, abandoning Norse paganism and becoming influential in English society. The Danes and Angles of northern England would remain rivals over the following decades due to Danish separatism and disloyalty during Sweyn Forkbeard and Canute's invasions, but, during the Norman conquest of England, the Anglo-Scandinavian residents of northern England united in rebellion against the invading Normans, resulting in the Harrying of the North and the destruction of the Anglo-Danish society. The Danish aristocracy was replaced by a Norman one, and the Danes, along with the native Anglo-Saxons, and invading Normans, all came to be seen as "English". The impact of the Norse settlers on England is still visible in the form of towns ending in "-thorpe", "-thwaite", and "-by" (most of which are in the former Danelaw), and in the English words anger, ball, egg, got, knife, take, and they.
History[]
Arrival of the Danes[]
The settlement began in 865 AD, when the Great Viking Army led by the sons of Ragnarr Lodbrok invaded and conquered the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of Northumbria, Mercia, and East Anglia; after the initial invasion petered out in 871 AD, the invading Scandinavian Vikings took up farming and settled in their conquered lands. The Anglo-Saxon city of Eoforwic (York) became the major Danish city of Jorvik, while the Danes also established the "Five Boroughs" as military and population settlements. Before the winter of 867, more Danes arrived on 36 ships, each with its contingent of warriors. The ships were pulled onto the riverbank for winter as the crews, laden with shields and weapons, marched to wherever they would spend the next few months. The Danes cast a light net of scattered garrisons over eastern Northumbria, and, while the leashed Northumbrian nobleman Ecgberht was the nominal King of Northumbria, Northymbre had become a Danish kingdom. The ealdormen and thegns who had not died at the Siege of York had been forced to bend a knee to the Danes, and, while the Danes had not subdued the wild western regions of Northumbria, there was no Saxon force there strong enough to resist them. In one example of Norse settlement in Northumbria, the Earl Ragnar settled his ships' crews in the valleys around York, taking the home of an English thegn who had died at York in 866. While the Five Boroughs and the rest of the Midlands were reconquered by Wessex and Mercia during the 910s and 920s AD, the north remained in Norse hands, although the Norwegians had replaced the Danes as the rulers of York around the same time.
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In 954, after several abortive attempts, King Eadred of England finally anexed York and Northumbria (the land between the Tees and the Tweed). Although northern England was once again under Anglo-Saxon rule, a Danish aristocracy had developed in Yorkshire, and Danish influence could be found in the distinctive body of customary law, its system of monetary recoking, and the names of the agricultural tenements of its peasants. At the same time, in the Pennine foothills on the west, remnants of both the Northumbrian aristocracy and the traditional social structure of the North survived the Viking invasions of England, and these invasions and the subsequent Danish settlement created a distinctive society in the eastern part of the shire. In 962 AD, King Edgar of England granted automony to the northern Danelaw in return for their loyalty, although he had less power in Yorkshire than south of the Humber. By the 11th century, Yorkshire had a unique culture with a dialect unintelligible to the southern English. Northumbria, on the other hand, had been spared significant Danish settlement and had an Anglian population similar to the one in Lothian across the Tweed, but it had its own system of law which was foreign both to the Danes and the English, and the 1086 Domesday Book did not treat Northumbria as part of England.
Organization of society[]
A new Danish settlement in England
The Danes created the institution of the soke, an estate consisting of a main village with dependent pieces of property called berewicks and sokelands. The sokes were held together by suit, rents, and nonderogatory service, and they differed from shires. The Danish invasions had been a folk migration of free and equal peasant warriors who had come in massive numbers, and the sokes resulted from the settlement of the rank and file of the Danish armies around the men who had led them in the invasion. The free warriors' descendants, the sokemen, came to inherit their ancestors' estates, and the Danes came to occupy the Yorkshire moat and the lands to the south. The Danes destroyed the shire system throughout most of Yorkshire and created a Danish culture in the region, although the sokelands came to be both Danish and Anglo-Saxon.
Separatist fears[]
There were occasionally fears of northern separatism at the court of King Edgar, especially in 966. However, all Archbishops of York after Wulfstan I of York in the mid-10th century came from south of the Humber and from the eastern Danelaw, as the King sought to provide archbishops able to deal with the Danish inhabitants without sympathizing with the independence movement. The Danes of the north periodically displayed disloyalty towards their Anglo-Saxon rulers, particularly in 993, when an English army raised to fight off an invading Danish army in Lincolnshire and Yorkshire refused to fight the Danes. The leaders of the army fled their men because they were descended from Danes, and, from 993 to 1013, there were no more Danish raids on Northumbria, as Sweyn Forkbeard had deduced that the inhabitants of the northern Danelaw were already sympathetic to his cause and should thus not be raided. When he invaded England up the Humber and Trent towards Gainsborough in 1013, the North immediately submitted to him, with Uhtred the Bold leading the way, and being followed by the Danes of the Five Boroughs, thsoe of Lindsey, and finally all Danes north of Watling Street. Uhtred's murder in 1016 and the prospect of a Danish monarchy exacerbate the hostilities between the Northumbrians and the northern Danes, and a revolt broke out beyond the Tees. Uhtred's successors refused to make a formal submission to Canute, but Northumberland was unable to stand alone, and Northumberland thus never rose in a formal rebellion.
Heightened tensions[]
Following the betrayal and murder of Earl Eadwulf III of Bamburgh by King Harthacnut in 1041, Earl Siward of York became Earl of Northumbria from the Humber to the Tweed, thus adding Northumberland to Yorkshire. The murder of Eadwulf was no more effective in reducing Nortumberland than had been the murders of Uhtred and Ealdred, and, in 1042, Siward had to invade Northumberland and waste the countryside to gain control of the province, which had risen up under Uhtred's last son Cospatric. Cospatric was then forced to flee to Scotland. By 1043, the men from above the Tees hated and feared the Danes, who had not been loyal to the West Saxon kings during the invasions of Sweyn and Cnut; there was an important Danish separatism when the Danes invaded. Siward would be the last great earl of the North before the debacle of the 1060s.
Tostig's mismanagement[]
Following Siward's death in 1055, Tostig Godwinson was appointed the new Earl of Northumbria in an attempt ot integrate the North more closely into the Anglo-Saxon kingdom. The earldoms of the eastern Midlands and East Anglia were commonly given to younger members of the families of the earls of Wessex and Mercia under King Edward the Confessor, but Tostig was an unfortunate choice, as he was in a weaker position than his predecessors. In 1058 and 1059, King Malcolm III of Scotland launched small raids on northern England to test Tostig. Tostig did not respond with raids on Scotland, instead preferring to negotiate. Malcolm sought the return of Cumberland, but the two sides instead agreed to a peace treaty, Malcolm and Tostig became sworn brothers, and Malcolm gave Tostig hostages for his good behavior, granting the English a diplomatic victory. In 1061, Malcolm invaded again while Tostig was on pilgrimage to Rome, and northern Lancashire was wasted to such an extent that many of the estates remained without a lord until after the Norman conquest of England. Tostig's continued inaction led to his continued unpopularity, and his hold on the North was too insecure to risk an invasion of Scotland. In 1065, Tostig was unseated by a revolt, having provoked a serious response by murdering the important Northumbrian nobles Gamel Ormsson, Ulf Dolfinsson, and Cospatric in 1063. The North generally rose against Tostig, with the Northumbrians leading the way. The men of York joined the Northumbrians, killing the leaders of Tostig's huscarls as they tried to escape the city; 200 of his retainers were killed across Yorkshire. The rebels then met together and outlawed the Earl, and they later crossed the Humber, marched to Lincoln, and slaughtered more of Tostig's retainers. They were joined by groups of men from Lincolnshire, Nottinghamshire, and Derbyshire, and the whole force moved on to Northampton. The rebellion ultimately impoverished the north, as many natives were killed, their homes burned, their winter supply of corn destoryed, hundreds of men enslaved, and thousands of heads of cattle stolen. The revolt brought back to power the traditional ruling family of Northumbria and Siward's son, and, while the northerners were initially afriad to accept Tostig's elder brother Harold Godwinson as King in 1066, they were reassured by an Easter trip to York by the King.
Norman conquest[]
In 1066, following William the Conqueror's seizure of power in southern England at the Battle of Hastings, William set about establishing his control in the north. King Malcolm III swore fealty to William through ambassadors in 1068, but the imposition of direct Norman rule in the North and the gelds of 1067 and 1068 struck the men of York as a direct parallel to the government of Tostig. The Normans also stole estates from the Anglo-Saxons, angering the nobles. In the winter of 1068, William appointed Robert de Commines the new Earl of Northumbria and sent him north with 700 men. The residents of Durham grew concerned about the Norman invasion, so they ambushed the Norman force upon its entry into Durham and slaughtered them all except for one or two survivors; Robert was cut down in traditional fashion as he tried to escape the burning house in which he had sought refuge. The massacre of the Norman force at Durham led to the last general rising of the North, and a band of rebels murdered the Governor of York Richard fitz Richard. Cospatric, Maerleswein, and Edgar the Aetheling returned from Scotland and joined forces with the great Yorkshire thegn Archil and the four sons of Carl. The union of Anglian and Danish former rivals in one army was appalling, indicating the degree of northern hostility to the Normans. The King quickly responded to the northern uprising in the "Harrying of the North", defeating the rebels near York. In the fall of 1069, King Sweyn II of Denmark and his fleet invaded England, and the fleet included warriors from Poland, Saxony, and Frisia in addition to Danes. However, the Danes's sluggish invasion destroyed any chance of surprise, and, while they succeeded in capturing York and burning the city, they had lost time and men. As William would not give the Danes a place to spend the winter, they were forced to disperse several times was William pursued them,and William bribed them and promised that they could forage along the coasts of the North in exchange for their departure in the spring.
Harrying of the North[]
The North was now fully exposed to William the Conqueror's wrath, and the most intense destruction took place in Yorkshire. William's forces marched in two major groups through eastern and central Durham to the Tyne, where they destoryed Jarrow and devastated the Tyne valley, and, in January, William led his army on to York and garrisoned the castles there. He then struck west over the Pennines to harry Cheshire, and, by the spring of 1070, the rebels did not emerge from the hills to continue their revolt. The harrying succeeded in producing an artificial famine, and, while some of the greater nobles survived, the mass of peasantry was reduced to eating their domestic animals and horses or selling themselves into slavery to avoid starvation. Others joined outlaw bands and plundered villgaes that escaped the Normans, while many starved to death. Substantial numbers of northerners fled to the south and even to Scotland, ensuring that the North would never again threaten William's control of England. Native society in Yorkshire had been destroyed, while it had been severely damaged in Durham. By 1074, William's authority in the North had once again collapsed as the Northumbrians threw out his tax collectors, and he was initially unable to repel Scottish invasions. A Danish fleet sacked York in 1075 before retreating, and the coalition of anti-Norman forces soon fell apart. William treated the Northumbrians with leniency this time, but, following Bishop of Durham William Walcher's murder by Northumbrian rebels in 1080, William sent his half-brother Odo of Bayeux with an army to punish the Northumbrians.Odo slaughtered and maimed both the innocent and the guilty, killing or driving into exile many of the nobility's members. There were no more native revolts above the Tees after 1080, as the Northumbrian nobility joined the nobles of York. William then founded Newcastle upon Tyne as a base for his new regime, integrating Northumbria more closely into his kingdom. From 1080 to 1087, Norman power was uncontested, and the North was finally at peace. War would not return until 1091, when open warfare with the Scots broke out.
End of Northern society[]
The Normans deposed the Danish and Anglian nobles of northern England and replaced them with Norman barons, and English society was soon divided between a Norman ruling class and the Anglo-Saxon (and, in northern England, Anglo-Scandinavian) peasant class. The Normans established manors and motte-and-bailey castles, and the Francophone elites presided over vast estates of Germanic villeins. By 1135, the year of Henry I of England's death, the destruction of northern society and its rebuilding was complete in its essentials. Henry had brought to England a group of western Normans and Bretons who were willing to take lands in England and Galloway, and Norman nobles pushed up the east coast plain from the Tyne to the Forth and even into Fife. Norman colonization of the North was in effect a reverse mkigration, as Danes form eastern Englan had played a major role in the Scandinavian colonization of Norway (just as Norwegians frm the Irish Sea littoral dominated Lower Normandy), and the descendants of the latter supported Henry I against the Upper Norman establishment. By the mid-12th century, the Danes, Saxons, and Normans had blended into a loosely-shared "English" culture.