The Northmen in Britain

Transcriber’s Note
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“ There is no man so high-hearted over earth, nor so good in gifts, nor so keen in youth, nor so brave in deeds, nor so loyal to his lord, that he may not have always sad yearning towards the sea-faring, for what the Lord will give him there.
“ His heart is not for the harp, nor receiving of rings, nor delight in a wife, nor the joy of the world, nor about anything else but the rolling of the waves. And he hath ever longing who wisheth for the Sea. ”
“The Seafarer” (Old English Poem).
The Coming of the Northmen
THE NORTHMEN IN BRITAIN
BY Eleanor Hull AUTHOR OF ‘THE POEM-BOOK OF THE GAEL’ ‘CUCHULAIN, THE HOUND OF ULSTER’ ‘PAGAN IRELAND’ ‘EARLY CHRISTIAN IRELAND’ ETC.
WITH SIXTEEN FULL-PAGE ILLUSTRATIONS BY M. Meredith Williams
NEW YORK THOMAS Y. CROWELL COMPANY PUBLISHERS
Turnbull & Spears, Printers, Edinburgh
Two great streams of Northern immigration met on the shores of Britain during the ninth, tenth, and eleventh centuries. The Norsemen from the deep fiords of Western Norway, fishing and raiding along the coasts, pushed out their adventurous boats into the Atlantic, and in the dawn of Northern history we find them already settled in the Orkney and Shetland Isles, whence they raided and settled southward to Caithness, Fife, and Northumbria on the east, and to the Hebrides, Galloway, and Man on the western coast. Fresh impetus was given to this outward movement by the changes of policy introduced by Harald Fairhair, first king of Norway (872–933). Through him a nobler type of emigrant succeeded the casual wanderer, and great lords and kings’ sons came over to consolidate the settlements begun by humbler agencies. Iceland was at the same time peopled by a similar stock. The Dane, contemporaneously with the Norseman, came by a different route. Though he seems to have been the first to invade Northumbria (if Ragnar and his sons were really Danes), his movement was chiefly round the southern shores of England, passing over by way of the Danish and Netherland coast up the English Channel, and round to the west. Both streams met in Ireland, where a sharp and lengthened contest was fought out between the two nations, and where both took deep root, building cities and absorbing much of the commerce of the country.