Danelaw

Between 886 and 890, Alfred concluded an agreement which established Anglo-Saxon and Viking territories.

The Danelaw, an imaginary line, divided the two spheres of influence.

Running up the Thames to the River Lea, the Danelaw then followed the Lea to its source.

From the Lee, the line went to Bedford and followed the river Ouse to Watling Street.

The Danelaw then followed the old Roman road to Chester.

All land to the north and east of the Danelaw was deemed to be under Guthrum's control.

All land to the south and west was under the rule of King Alfred.

Alfred's territorial success was obvious.

and he had a strong claim to the throne despite the fact that alfred had nominated his son edward as his successor the big problem in england had been the fact that whenever things became stable with a strong man in charge when that man died things went wobbly.

The Saxons fell to fighting amongst themselves and the Vikings took advantage of this and would attack and increase the size of their territory, which became known as the Danelaw.

This was the Viking part of England in East Anglia and the north with their capital at York.

So Edward really didn't want any kind of civil war when he came to power, but it was out of his hands.

Now this is significant because he's declaring himself not just the ruler in Wessex, but the overlord of Mercia as well, king of all the Anglo-Saxons.

It was to be his son Athelstan who went as far as declaring himself king of the English and is considered the first bona fide king of England.

With Athelwald out of the way, and the Viking army he had left so badly bruised in East Anglia that they weren't really a threat, Edward set about consolidating his position, building more burrs, and starting to think about actually pushing into the Danelaw, clawing back from the Vikings land and towns that had once been Saxon.

And he was not alone in this.

They moved back to East Anglia and England was divided in two along a roughly diagonal line from the north-west to the south-east.

This meant that the Vikings had most of northern England, some of Mercia, and all of East Anglia, this area becoming known as the Danelaw, with their capital in York.

And Alfred had the South and the West, including crucially London, but he still had to probably pay the Danes what was known as the Danegeld to keep away, to keep them off his back Guthrum largely behaved himself, but inevitably other Viking warlords attacked, particularly in Kent.

And there were large incursions coming over from mainland Europe through the 890s.

But Alfred was organized enough to repeatedly drive them off, either back over the sea or up into the Danelaw.

And it was roughly around this time that the whole of the Saxon part of the country agreed to have Alfred as their ruler.

He became King of the English.

Life was disrupted and the whole system of learning and literacy was falling apart.

It is interesting to note that these vessels were manned in part by Frisian sailors, probably because of the low ebb to which England seamanship had sunk.

When once Edward the Elder's claim to the throne was firmly established in the battle fought at the Holm, somewhere in South Cambridgeshire, he commenced, with the active cooperation of his brother-in-law Ethelred ealdorman of Mercia, the great work of strengthening the hold of the English on southern Mercia preparatory to an attempt to reconquer the Danelaw.

Chester was rebuilt in 907.

In 910 a fort was built at Brahmsbrigg, possibly Bromsberrow, in Gloucestershire.

He was now ruler of the whole of Mercia, owing to the death of his sister Ethelflied, and in 919 he fortified Thelwall in Cheshire on the Mersey and rebuilt the old Roman fort at Manchester.

In 920 he built a second fort at Nottingham and one at Bakewell in Derbyshire.

The reconquest of the Danelaw was complete and Edward now received the submission of the Scots, the Strathclyde Welsh, of Regnold of Northumbria, and of English, Danes and Norsemen alike.

The Danish settlers accepted the sovereignty of the West Saxon king and henceforward formed part of an expanded Wessex which had consolidated its power over all England south of a line drawn roughly from the Humber to the Dee.

You know, those sorts of words.

But then there are other everyday ones that are much more related to that later settlement period, so sort of 9th, 10th century, um, in the area that later becomes known as the Danelaw.

So we're talking sort of Yorkshire and like down the east coast and sort of East Midlands, that sort of area.

Um, words like egg, that's a particularly good one.

And he promoted a translation movement to get foundational works of Christian literature translated into Anglo-Saxon, works by writers like St. Augustine of Hippo, Boethius, and Bede.

King Alfred of Wessex also formally recognized the Danelaw, or a large northeastern swath of Anglo-Saxon territory governed by Scandinavian rules, but only after the Danish king of East Anglia, Guthrum, converted to Christianity.

By the 900s, Britain had absorbed five centuries of immigrant populations from the East, first Germanic and then Scandinavian.

Monasteries were an ineradicable part of life on the island.

There are 10 kingdoms collectively called the Tiendums.

These kingdoms are Northumbria, Danelaw, Wessex, Kent, Strathclyde, Fortu, Dyfed, Demonia, and then something else that I cannot remember or find in the book when I was trying to look it up.

Because it doesn't really matter.

It doesn't really

matter.

One thing I found really kind of interesting is that the main female characters from Danelaw and from the sound of it, everybody still worships the Norse gods, which makes sense because that's what they would do in Danelaw, were also set around what would be the Victorian era if there had been a Queen Victoria era.

So like 19th century technology, if that technology had kind of evolved alongside magic.

Also, there are people who can choose to belong to organizations that are referred to as the orders.

You know, we- the Danes came over, the Vikings come over.

Um, we had the Danelaw.

Half of England was run by the Vikings.

Um, so, you know, there's a lot of ancestry links to Britain as well.

Viking armies, mostly Danish, conquered East Anglia and Northumberland and dismantled Mercia, while in 871, King Alfred the Great of Wessex became the only king to decisively defeat a Danish army in England.

Leaving Wessex, the Danes settled to the north in an area known as Danelaw.

Many of them became farmers and traders and established York as a leading mercantile city.

In the first half of the 10th century, English armies led by the descendants of Alfred of Wessex began reconquering Scandinavian areas of England.