The Danes in Lancashire and Yorkshire

by S. W. Partington

Lancashire was the southern portion of Deira, which was one of the two kingdoms, Bernicia being the other, into which the conquests of Ida, king of Northumbria, were on his death divided. In 559 A.D. Ida died, and Aella became King of Deira, and afterwards sole King of Northumbria, until 587 or 589. In 617, Edwin son of Ella was King of Northumbria, the greatest Prince, says Hume the historian, of the Heptarchy in that age. He was slain in battle with Penda of Mercia. In 634 the kingdom was again divided, Eanfrid reigning in Bernicia, and Osric in Deira. Then Oswald, saint as well as king, appears to have reunited the two provinces again under his kingship of Northumberland. Authorities, in more than one instance, vary as to the exact dates, within a year or two.

The Saxon kingdom of Northumbria reached from the Humber to the Forth, and from the North Sea to the Irish Sea. For two centuries after the death of Ecgfrith the Saxon king and the battle of Nectansmere, history only records a succession of plunder and pestilence.

Green the historian says "King after king was swept away by treason and revolt, the country fell into the hands of its turbulent nobles, its very fields lay waste, and the land was scourged by famine and plague."

The pirate Northmen or Vikings as they were called first, began to raid the coast of England with their fleets with the object of plunder. The English Chronicle records their first attacks in the year 787. "Three of their ships landed on the western shores, these were the first ships of Danish men that sought the land of Engle-folk."

The Monastery of Lindisfarne was plundered six years later by their pirate ships, and the coast of Northumbria was ravaged, Jan., 793.

The following year they returned and destroyed the monasteries of Wearmouth and Jarrow. This was the beginning of the Norse raids on our Eastern shores.

In 875 Halfdan returned from his campaign against Alfred and the year after he divided the lands of Northumbria amongst his followers. In many parts we find groups of Scandinavian place-names so close and thick, says Mr. W. G. Collingwood in his "Scandinavian Britain," that we must assume either depopulation by war, or the nearly complete absence of previous population.

There is no reason to suppose that the earlier Vikings depopulated the country they ravaged. Spoil was their object and slaughter an incident.

As Canon Atkinson has shown in his "Analysis of the Area of Cleveland under Cultivation at Domesday Period," very little of the country in that district was other than moor or forest at the end of the eleventh century, and that most of the villages then existing had Scandinavian names. His conclusion is that these districts were a wilderness since Roman and prehistoric days, and first penetrated by the Danes and Norse: except for some clearings such as Crathorne, Stokesley, Stainton, and Easington, and the old monastery at Whitby.

This conclusion receives support, says Mr. Collingwood, from an analysis of the sculptured stones now to be seen in the old Churches and sites of Cleveland. It is only at Yarm, Crathorne, Stainton, Easington, and Whitby, that we find monuments of the pre-Viking age, and these are the products of the latest Anglian period.