Page:A School History of England (1911).djvu/45

 destroyed or left desolate, must always have been a more important place of trade. From Egbert King George V is directly descended!

Egbert and his son and grandsons had to meet a new and terrible foe. Down the north-east wind, from Denmark, Norway and the Baltic, all through the ninth, tenth and eleventh centuries, a continual stream of fierce and cunning pirates began to pour upon Western Europe. We call them ‘the Danes’, or North-men. The British Isles lay right in their path, and at one time or another they harried them from end to end. The churches, in which the principal wealth of the country was stored, were sacked; the monks were killed, and then the pirates went back to their ships. From Britain they went on to France and even into the Mediterranean: some of them, indeed, crossed the Northern ocean to Iceland, to Greenland, to North America. Their ships, some 80 feet long, and 16 feet broad, with a draft of 4 feet, might carry crews of fifty men apiece, armed to the teeth in shirts of mail, and bearing heavy axes with shafts as long as a man. Often they came under pretence of trading in slaves, and would trade honestly enough if they thought the country too strong to be attacked. About the middle of the ninth century they began to settle, and make homes in the very lands they had been plundering. Lincolnshire, Nottinghamshire, the East Riding of Yorkshire, were regularly colonized by them. So were the Orkney and Shetland Isles, the Hebrides, Caithness and Sutherland, as well as the Isle of Man and the eastern coast of Ireland.

Their numbers were, however, small, and if Saxon England under weak kings had not enjoyed too much ‘freedom’, they might have been beaten off; but it