The Danelaw (or Danelagh; Dena lagu in Old English, Danelov in Danish), as defined in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, is the name given to the part of Great Britain where the law of Danes” (Dane), the Viking invaders from Denmark (as well as Norway), and where this law superseded that of the Anglo-Saxons. Modern historians have given the term a geographical meaning:the Danelaw stretched across the north and east of England.
The term Danelaw also describes the set of legal terms and definitions created by the treaties between the English King Alfred the Great and the Dane Guthrum the Elder, established after the latter's defeat at Ethandun in 878. In 886, the treaty between Alfred and Guthrum was formalized, defining the border between their kingdoms, with clauses for peaceful relations between Anglo-Saxons and Vikings.
Danish law prevailed in the ancient kingdoms of Northumbria and East Anglia, as well as in the region of the Five Burghers (Leicester, Nottingham, Derby, Stamford and Lincoln).
The prosperity of the Danelaw, especially the kingdom of Jórvík, made it a target for new Viking invaders. Conflicts with Wessex and Mercia undermined its power, and its weakening military power led to its submission to Edward the Elder in exchange for his protection.
Geography
The Danelaw occupied England north of a London-Chester line, except for that part of Northumbria east of the Pennines. Within this territory, five walled cities were of major importance:Leicester, Nottingham, Derby, Stamford and Lincoln, commonly called the Five Boroughs (Five Boroughs, from the Old English term burg designating a fortified settlement of any size ).
History
Grand Army campaigns (865-879).
From the beginning of the 9th century, the Danish offensives on the shores of the British Isles began to be accompanied by a movement of colonization. The Danes first settled in England in 865, when the brothers Halfdan and Ivar Ragnarsson wintered in East Anglia. In 867 they moved north and, taking advantage of the civil war that had broken out in Northumbria between Kings Osberht and Ælle, captured York, the kingdom's capital. Obserht and Ælle were killed and replaced on the throne by Ecgberht, a puppet devoid of any real power.
King Ethelred of Wessex and his brother Alfred led their army against the Danes at Nottingham, but the latter refused to leave their fortifications to fight. King Burgred of Mercia then negotiated with Ivar, leaving Nottingham to the Danes in exchange for peace for the rest of Mercia.
Led by Ivar, the Danes defeated King Edmund of East Anglia at Hoxne in 869 and conquered his kingdom. Ethelred and Alfred tried again to stop Ivar by attacking him at Reading, but they were repelled with heavy casualties. The Danes pursued them, but were defeated on January 7, 871 at Ashdown. The Danes retreated to Basing, where Ethelred revived them and was in turn defeated. Ivar confirmed this victory with a second, in March, in Meretum (now Marton).
On April 23, 871, Ethelred died, and Alfred succeeded him to the throne of Wessex. Weakened by recent defeats, he had to pay tribute to Ivar in order to obtain peace. The Danes then turned north and invaded Mercia, in a campaign that lasted until 874 and saw the deaths of both opponents, Ivar and Burgred of Mercia. Guthrum the Elder succeeded Ivar and continued the war. Within ten years, the Danes had conquered East Anglia, Northumbria and Mercia, and only Wessex still held their own.
War broke out again in 876. The Danes captured the fortresses of Wareham and Exeter, in which Alfred besieged them; they had to surrender after the loss of their reinforcements in a storm. Two years later Guthrum attacked again, surprising Alfred's troops wintering at Chippenham. Alfred was saved when the Danish army which was to take him from behind delayed to seize the fortress of Countisbury Hill, whose defenders, led by an ealdorman named Odda, massacred the Danes while they slept (Battle of Cynwit) .
Alfred had to hide for a time, then gathered an army in the spring of 878 and attacked Guthrum at Ethandun. The Danes, defeated, retired to Chippenham; besieged by Alfred, they soon surrendered. As a condition of this surrender, Alfred demanded that Guthrum be baptized; Alfred served as his godfather.
The peace lasted until 884, when Guthrum attacked again, this time on Kent. Alfred defeated him, and the Treaty between Alfred and Guthrum settled the terms of peace. This treaty fixed the borders of the Danelaw and granted autonomy to the Danes in this region.
At the beginning of the 10th century, the Danes had to face gifted adversaries, such as Ethelfleda, Lady of the Mercians, who retook Derby in 917, and above all Edward the Elder, Alfred's son, who won a great victory against the Northumbrians. in 911 at Tettenhall, annexed Mercia on the death of Ethelfleda, and recaptured Essex and East Anglia from the invaders:in 918, all the Danes south of the Humber were subject to him, and on his death, even Northumbria is occupied.
The Vikings continue their efforts in England for another two decades. In 937, Olaf Gothfrithson was defeated at Brunanburh by Athelstan of England, but he returned two years later and took advantage of Athelstan's death to retake York and the Five Towns. This reconquest will be ephemeral:from 943, Edmond, successor of Athelstan, takes over the Cinq Bourges, then York the following year. The death of Eric Bloodaxe in 954, who had briefly revived the Viking kingdom of York, marked the end of the Danelaw.
Scandinavian colonization
Number of colonists and course of colonization
As there is hardly any written source on the Scandinavian colonization of the Danelaw, the research has not yet reached a general consensus. Archaeological sources can also only partially answer open questions. The only contemporary written source mentioning the settlement of Norse settlers is the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle.
The latter mentions, for the years 876 and 877, the sharing of lands in Northumbria and Eastern Mercia respectively between the members of the Great Army.
For the year 892 the chronicle records that the Great Army embarked with horses for England, and for the year 893 the English army seized all the possessions of the Danes, as well as on women and children, during the attack on the Viking army camp at Benfleet. The following year it is written that the Danes took their women to safety in East Anglia. In 896, the chronicle reports that, after the dissolution of the Danish army, part went to Northumbria, part to East Anglia, and that the poorer embarked for further plunder in France. When several Irish kings joined forces in 902 and defeated the Vikings of Dublin, the latter came to settle in the northwest of England.
It is estimated today that the size of the Great Army of 865 was 500 to 3,000 men. This small number should not, however, make us forget that the army, made up of well-led and combat-trained Vikings, was most often opposed to hastily enlisted peasants who had little chance of winning. Similarly, the large army which, according to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, had come from the continent in two groups of 250 and 80 ships, would have numbered well under 10,000 men by current estimates. To explain the strong Scandinavian imprint in the Danelaw, research suggests that a second wave of immigration took place after the military occupation. However, it is difficult to prove this assertion.
Toponymic heritage
The list of place names given in the Domesday Book of 1086 supplements the information given by the sparse written sources about colonization. The Domesday Book enabled King William the Conqueror (king from 1066 to 1087) to identify the forces of the lands which belong to the crown. There are three important forms of place names of Scandinavian origin:
Names made up of an Old Norse personal name and the Old English suffix -tun, meaning village or farm. (example:Grimston, Barkston, Thurvaston, etc.)
Purely Scandinavian names ending with the suffix -by (village, farm). There are nearly 800, including 200 in Lincolnshire alone14. (examples:Derby, Selby, Danby, Thoresby).
Places whose names end in the suffix -thorpe, which described a remote hamlet. (examples:Scunthorpe, Swainthorpe, Weavethorpe)
There are, in addition to the aforementioned cases, other suffixes of Scandinavian origin which, although less used, appear in many place names. These are, for example, nouns in -ey, -bost, -dale, -gate, -kirk or -toft. In the territory of the Cinq Bourges alone, the Domeasday Book lists more than 500 names of villages of Danish origin.
Earliest scholars assume that the Great Army, under the leadership of its leaders, established itself in Danelaw territory in large numbers. The observed large concentration of free peasants (socmen) in the Danelaw is one of the arguments put forward to support the thesis of a large number of settlers. However, this does not directly result from the different economic and social conditions that the Scandinavian settlers would have imported. On the contrary, the defensive war waged in the kingdom of Wessex against the Scandinavian invaders rather led to a centralization of administration and a concentration of economic resources. There was thus an increased formation of landed lordships populated by unfree peasants and the result was a decrease in the number of free peasants in the Anglo-Saxon world. The Danelaw, on the other hand, remains politically divided between local chiefs and the free peasants are more numerous. Their status is not determined by their origins:only six of the 74 free peasants mentioned in documents from the 11th century bear Scandinavian names.
Reflections on the history of colonization also focus on the territorial distribution of the different types of names in comparison with agricultural data. Places with village names with a -tun suffix are most often found on good arable land. These are pre-existing Anglo-Saxon villages that have been renamed by their new Scandinavian occupants. The villages with a name with a suffix in -by seem to refer to a second phase of settlement where land still fallow but usable was seized. These places are much less often found on good arable land. Places with a -thorpe suffix are almost always on the edge of cultivable land and seem to have been founded last.
Linguistic heritage
The legacy of the Viking invasion is not limited to toponymy alone, but also to the spoken language. In Danelaw times, mutual understanding between Old Norse and Old English still existed, albeit weakly. This led to the incorporation of many Norse words into the English vocabulary, such as the words law ("law"), sky ("sky") and window ("window"), as well as the third person plural pronouns they, them and their (“they, them, their(s)”). Many Norse words still survive in the dialects of North East England.
Genetic inheritance
In 2000, the BBC commissioned a team of scientists led by Professor David Goldstein to carry out a genetic investigation into the genetic impact of the Viking presence in Great Britain. The name of this mission entrusted to biologists from University College London was "Le Sang des Vikings" or "Blood of the Vikings". In 2001, the BBC documentary series Blood of the Vikings compared DNA samples from 2,000 Britons from across the island with that of Scandinavians, to find out how far the Vikings left their mark on the island. . The study showed that Norwegian influence had spread across Britain, with the strongest sample being that of Penrith in Cumbria. Invaders from the North colonized more particularly certain areas of the British Isles such as Orkney and Shetland. This study focuses on Norwegian colonization because the descendants of the Danes cannot be genetically distinguished from the Anglo-Saxons.
Legislation
The Danelaw was an important factor in establishing a civil peace between the Anglo-Saxon and Viking communities, defining for example equivalences on points of legal dispute, such as the exact price of the wergild. Most of the legal concepts of the two nations were compatible:for example, the Viking wapentake, the standard unit of land measurement, was technically interchangeable with the Anglo-Saxon hundred. The use of the execution site and cemetery in Walkington Wold, East Yorkshire, suggests that court practice went smoothly.