Page:Medieval Military Architecture in England (volume 1).djvu/30

14 Mediæval Military Architecture in England. parties, they had the substance of their speech, their customs, and their gods in common. They had the same familiarity with the sea, the same indisposition to occupy Roman buildings, the same absence of all sympathy with the native Britons. If they still held most of their lands in common, the house and the homestead were already private property. Their family ties were strong, as is shown in the nomenclature of their villages. As they conquered, they settled, and practised agriculture, and as they embraced Christianity they gradually established those divisions, civil and ecclesiastical, sokes and rapes, tythings, hundreds, wapentakes, and parishes, which still remain to attest the respect to which they had attained for law and order, for the rights of private property, and their capacity for self-government.

Much akin to, and before long to be incorporated into the English nation, were the Norsemen from the seaboard country north of the Elbe, the Danes of English history and of local tradition, who in the eighth century played the part of the Saxons in the fifth. They scoured the same seas, and harassed the Saxons as the Saxons had harassed the Britons, only the invaders and the invaded being, generally, of the same blood, finally coalesced, and the distinctions between them became well-nigh effaced ; still, for three centuries, the ninth, tenth, and eleventh, the Danish name was the terror of the British Isles. They infested every strand, anchored in every bay, ascended every river, penetrated and laid waste the interior of the country.

Orkney is full of their traces, their language is the key to the topographical nomenclature of Caithness, the gigantic works at Flamborough Head are attributed to them ; the great cutting, by which they carried a branch of the Thames across Southwark, is on record. In the year A.D. 1000, Ethelred found them forming much of the population of Cumberland. Such terminations as eye, ness, holm, and by, so common along the shores of England, or over the lands watered by the Trent and the Humber, the Tees and the Tyne, and not unknown on the western coast, show the extent and permanence of their settlements. It does not, however, appear that the Danish earthworks differed materially from those thrown up by the other northern nations in England. Camps tending to the circular form and headlands fortified by segmental lines of bank and ditch belong to all, and all when they settled and acquired property underwent very similar changes in their habits and modes of life.

No doubt, among the earlier works of the Northmen, those thrown up to cover their landing and protect their