"They got hard blows instead of shillings,
And the axe's weight instead of tribute;"
so they betook themselves elsewhere, to strive with less valiant kings beyond the seas.
Division of Britain.
By Alfred's agreement with Guthrum, England was divided into two halves, of which one was Danish and the other English. The old document called Alfred's and Guthrum's Frith gives the boundary of the Danelagh, or Danish settlement, thus: "Up the Lea and then across to Bedford, up the Ouse to Watling Street, and so along Watling Street to Chester." That is to say, that Northumbria and East Anglia and Essex, and the eastern half of Mercia, were left to the Danes, while Alfred reigned directly, not only over his own heritage of Wessex, Sussex, and Kent, but over western Mercia also. The nine counties [6] west of Watling Street became part of Wessex, so that Alfred's own kingdom came out of the Danish war much increased. Beyond its bounds he now had a nominal suzerainty over three Danish states, instead of four English ones. Guthrum reigned in the East, another Danish king at York, and between them lay the "Five Boroughs," which were independent of both kings, and were ruled by their own "jarls," as the Danes called their war-lords.
Danish rule in England.
The Danish rule in North-Eastern England was made comparatively light to the old inhabitants of the land when Guthrum and his men embraced Christianity. Instead of killing the people off or reducing them to slavery, the Danes now were content to take tribute from them, and to occupy a certain portion of their lands. The limit and extent of the Danish settlement can be well traced by studying the names of places in the northern counties. Wherever the invaders established themselves we find the Danish termination by in greater or less abundance. We find such names strewn thick about Yorkshire, Lincolnshire, Nottinghamshire, and Leicestershire, less freely in Derbyshire, Northamptonshire, and the eastern counties. Rugby, close to the line of Watling Street, is the Danish settlement that lies furthest into the heart of Mercia. The Viking blood, therefore, is largely mixed with the English in the valleys of the Trent and Ouse, and close to the eastern coast, and grows proportionately less as Watling Street is approached. The Danes took very easily to English manners; they had all turned Christians within a very few years, and their language was so like Old English that their speech soon became assimilated to that of their subjects, and could only be told from that of South England by differences of dialect that gradually grew less. In the end England gained rather than suffered by their invasion, for they brought much hardy blood into the land, and came to be good Englishmen within a very few generations.
