Even in France, where difference of language and difference of custom seemed to interpose an impassable barrier between the northman settled in Normandy and his neighbours, he was fast becoming a Frenchman.  In England, where no such barriers existed, the assimilation was even quicker.  The two peoples soon became confounded.  In a few years a northman in blood was Archbishop of Canterbury and another northman in blood was Archbishop of York.

[Sidenote:  The three Northern Kingdoms]

The fusion might have been delayed if not wholly averted by continued descents from the Scandinavian homeland.  But with Eadred’s reign the long attack which the northman had directed against western Christendom came, for a while at least, to an end.  On the world which it assailed its results had been immense.  It had utterly changed the face of the west.  The empire of Ecgberht, the empire of Charles the Great, had been alike dashed to pieces.  But break and change as it might, Christendom had held the northmen at bay.  The Scandinavian power which had grown up on the western seas had disappeared like a dream.  In Ireland the northman’s rule had dwindled to the holding of a few coast towns.  In France his settlements had shrunk to the one settlement of Normandy.  In England every northman was a subject of the English King.  Even the empire of the seas had passed from the sea-kings’ hands.  It was an English and not a Scandinavian fleet that for fifty years to come held mastery in the English and the Irish Channels.  With Eadred’s victory in fact the struggle seemed to have reached its close.  Stray pirate boats still hung off headland and coast; stray wikings still shoved out in springtide to gather booty.  But for nearly half-a-century to come no great pirate fleet made its way to the west, or landed on the shores of Britain.  The energies of the northmen were in fact absorbed through these years in the political changes of Scandinavia itself.  The old isolation of fiord from fiord and dale from dale was breaking down.  The little commonwealths which had held so jealously aloof from each other were being drawn together whether they would or no.  In each of the three regions of the north great kingdoms were growing up.  In Sweden King Eric made himself lord of the petty states about him.  In Denmark King Gorm built up in the same way a monarchy of the Danes.  Norway itself was the first to become a single monarchy.  Legend told how one of its many rulers, Harald of Westfold, sent his men to bring him Gytha of Hordaland, a girl he had chosen for wife, and how Gytha sent his men back again with taunts at his petty realm.  The taunts went home, and Harald vowed never to clip or comb his hair till he had made all Norway his own.  So every springtide came war and hosting, harrying and burning, till a great fight at Hafursfiord settled the matter, and Harald “Ugly-Head,” as men called him while the strife lasted, was free to shear his locks again and