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Rh more of King Svein until he returned in 1003 to avenge the ill-advised massacre of St Brice's day. Year after year the kingdom was ravaged, Danegeld after Danegeld was paid, until in 1013 Aethelred fled to Normandy and Svein became King of all England. A few months later he died suddenly at Gainsborough in Lincolnshire (February 1014). His English realm went to his younger son Knut. On the death of Aethelred in 1016, his son Edmund Ironside offered so stout a resistance that for a few months, until his death by treachery, he compelled Knut to share the realm with him. Knut then ruled alone, firmly and well until his death in 1035, having succeeded to the Danish throne also in 1018. On his death the succession was not settled but, after some difficulty, Harold Harefoot succeeded his father in England. He was succeeded in 1010 by his brother Harthacnut (O.N. Harðacnútr), but neither king was of the same stamp as their father and they were both overshadowed by the great Godwin, Earl of Wessex. When Harthacnut died in 1042 the male line in descent from Knut was extinct and, though some of the Danes were in favour of choosing Knut's sister's son Svein, Godwin secured the election of Edward the Confessor, who had been recalled from Normandy and highly honoured by Harthacnut himself. With the accession of Edward, Danish rule in England was at an end, and never afterwards was there any serious question of a Scandinavian kingship either in or over England.

We have now traced the story of Viking activity in its chief centres in the British Isles and the mainland of Europe. A word remains to be said about other settlements in Western Europe, in the Orkneys, the Shetlands, the Western Islands (or as the Norsemen called them "Suðreyjar" (i.e. Sodor), the southern islands) and Man, and the Scottish mainland, and then we must turn our attention to Eastern Europe, to the famous Jómsviking settlement in North Germany and to the important but little known movements of the Vikings through Russia down to the shores of the Mediterranean. We have seen how early the Shetlands were settled, and there is no doubt that it was not long before Vikings made their way by the Orkneys round the coast of Scotland to the Hebrides. From the Orkneys settlements were made in Sutherland and Caithness, while Galloway (possibly the land of the Gall-Gaedhil, the foreign Irish) was settled from the Hebrides. In the ninth century the Norse element in the Hebrides was already so strong that the Irish called the islands Innsi Gall (i.e. the islands of the foreigners) and their inhabitants were known as the Gall-Gaedhil. Olaf the White and Ívarr made more than one expedition from Ireland to the lowlands of Scotland, and the former was married to Auðr the daughter of Ketill Flat-nose, who had made himself the greatest chieftain in the Western Islands. When Harold Fairhair won his victory at Hafrsfjord he felt that his power would still be insecure unless he gained the submission of these Vikings who belonged to the great families in rivalry with him. He made therefore a mighty