Humber

The Viking fleet landed up on the north coast of England, sort of came bumping down the north coast there, hitting and running and, you know, raiding as they could.

They turned into the Humber estuary, which if you look at a map, sort of this big bay that sticks into the eastern side of England.

And they used that to get to a river that would take them up to York.

Their idea was to lock down the north of England and be ready, have that as their support base by the time the English army did come up from the south.

So they were looking to conquer the north and get their foothold up there.

So they come in the Humber, go up the river towards York.

What they find up there is the local earls up there have mounted their own defense.

Independent of the English army, they come to a place called Fulford, which is actually, I think it's a suburb of York now.

But we quite like doing it for rural areas.

But from 1997 onwards, once the new Labour government came in, they gave more full support to this mechanism and so for the next decade up to the financial crash period um there it became the norm for most in most areas and certainly south of the Humber, River Humber, if you like, or south of England, that it would be the norm that you would have affordable policies in local plans and expectations of a certain quota of affordable provision and the use of planning agreements, so-called Section 106 agreements, to enforce that.

And so by the mid 2000s late 2000s that that was accounting for half or more of social housing and affordable housing provision was coming under those planes so it wasn't trivial it was tens of thousands of stuff of units um and of course the purpose of this is to drive down the land valley to to make uh if if developers know that they will be obliged to make provision for 20% of affordable housing, they will reduce the amount of money they pay to the farmers, basically.

If it's a level playing field, they all know they have to do it.

So that when it was doing turning, it was up in the air, people were watching it.

This is in the city of Hull over the River Humber doing these turning operations much too fast for the altitude that it was at, which would have been revealed in the tests that they had done if anybody had really paid attention.

And so lo and behold, the thing basically breaks in half and falls into the river in this absolutely horrific disaster that disproves all of these claims that Britain is just going to be this world beater of this new technology.

There's an explosion, the hydrogen.

The change came in 866 when a large Danish force, which had been bribed to leave the Seine by Charles the Bald, sailed to England and took up its quarters in East Anglia.

In 867 they crossed the Humber and captured York, their task being made easier by the quarrels of Aelle and Osbert as to the kingship of Northumbria.

Next year the rivals patched up their differences, but failed to recapture York from the Danes under Ivar and Ubbi.

Setting up a puppet king, Ecbert, in Northumbria north of the Tyne, the Danes next received the submission of Mercia and returned to York in 869.

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.

The submission of Rognvaldr, king of Northumbria, and the mention of Norsemen need some comment.