in 954 the work of conquest was done.  Dogged as his fight had been, the Dane at last owned himself beaten.  From the moment of Eadred’s final triumph all resistance came to an end.  The Danelaw ceased to be a force in English politics.  North might part anew from South; men of Yorkshire might again cross swords with men of Hampshire; but their strife was henceforth a local strife between men of the same people; it was a strife of Englishmen with Englishmen, and not of Englishmen with Northmen.

Chapter IV
feudalism and the monarchy
954-1071

[Sidenote:  Absorption of the Northmen]

The fierceness of the northman’s onset had hidden the real character of his attack.  To the men who first fronted the pirates it seemed as though the story of the world had gone back to the days when the German barbarians first broke in upon the civilized world.  It was so above all in Britain.  All that tradition told of the Englishmen’s own attack on the island was seen in the northmen’s attack on it.  Boats of marauders from the northern seas again swarmed off the British coast; church and town were again the special object of attack; the invaders again settled on the conquered soil; heathendom again proved stronger than the faith of Christ.  But the issues of the two attacks showed the mighty difference between them.  When the English ceased from their onset upon Roman Britain, Roman Britain had disappeared, and a new people of conquerors stood alone on the conquered land.  The Northern storm on the other hand left land, people, government unchanged.  England remained a country of Englishmen.  The conquerors sank into the mass of the conquered, and Woden yielded without a struggle to Christ.  The strife between Briton and Englishman was in fact a strife between men of different races, while the strife between northman and Englishman was a strife between men whose race was the same.  The followers of Hengest or of Ida were men utterly alien from the life of Britain, strange to its arts, its culture, its wealth, as they were strange to the social degradation which Rome had brought on its province.  But the northman was little more than an Englishman bringing back to an England which had drifted far from its origin the barbaric life of its earliest forefathers.  Nowhere throughout Europe was the fight so fierce, because nowhere else were the fighters men of one blood and one speech.  But just for this reason the union of the combatants was nowhere so peaceful or so complete.  The victory of the house of AElfred only hastened a process of fusion which was already going on.  From the first moment of his settlement in the Danelaw the northman had been passing into an Englishman.  The settlers were few; they were scattered among a large population; in tongue, in manner, in institutions there was little to distinguish them from the men among whom they dwelt.  Moreover their national temper helped on the process of assimilation.