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Rh softening of their manners as Christianity made headway among them. It seems also clear that few of the rank and file cared much by whom they were ruled, as long as they ran no risk of losing the fertile lands won by their fathers forty years before. Land-hunger had brought the vikings to England, not desire for national expansion, and so their ideal was peace, plenty and opportunities for trading, and not political independence. It is well also to remember that at the very moment when Aethelfleda succeeded her husband, the treaty of St Clair-sur-Epte provided a congenial asylum for the more ambitious and wilder spirits, so that from 911 onwards there was a constant drift of English Danes to Normandy, eager to take service under Rollo in the new Frankish Danelaw. A noticeable example of this movement is on record in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, which tells how Thurkytel, jarl of Bedford, made peace in 914, but a year or two later, with Edward's assistance, "fared over sea with such men as would follow him." This trend of events evidently was not overlooked by Edward, and fairly accounts for the confident way in which he kept pushing forward. Having reached the Humber and Mersey, he might well have paused for a year or two to consolidate what he had won. On the contrary, in the next year he is found advancing as steadily as ever, bent on regaining for Mercia the northern half of the ancient Westerna, the land "betwixt the Mersey and the Ribble," and, in order to control the road from Chester to York, building a fort at Manchester, well within the borders of the Danes of Yorkshire. These Danes had long been a prey to internal dissensions, the old curse of Northumbria, as it were, resting upon them, but they had recently accepted a new king in the person of Regnald of Waterford, an Irish viking, who had first got footing in Cumberland and then spent most of his time in ravaging the territories of Ealdred, the high reeve of Bamborough, and of Constantine III, King of the Scots (900-942). Edward's bold advance justified itself more rapidly than he could have hoped. In 920, while building a borough at Bakewell in Peakland, he received the homage of all who dwelt in Northumbria, both English and Danes, that is to say of both Regnald and Ealdred of Bamborough, Nor was this all. According to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle there also appeared an embassy from Donald of Strathclyde and from Constantine, saying that the whole nation of the Scots was prepared to take the West Saxon for their "father and lord." Patriotic Scots have mostly challenged the credibility of the annal which makes this assertion, especially as it later became the basis of the claim put forward by the Plantagenet kings of England to suzerainty over Scotland. It seems probable, however, that the embassy really did come to Bakewell, but meant no more than that Constantine and his neighbours wished to offer Edward their congratulations and pave the way for an alliance. It is quite gratuitous to suppose that they held themselves to be in any way submitting to him as vassals in