Page:Source Problems in English History.djvu/37

 8. What specific point of time in the period here shown would you pick out as marking the crisis or turning-point in the struggle?

9. How do you account for the slight entries in the chronicles for some of these years?

10. What seems to have been the typical viking method of making an incursion into a country?

11. By studying it in connection with the other sources, assign a date to Alfred and Guthrum’s Peace. Find out whether or not the date you have chosen is the one which has usually been assigned to it.

12. What are the objects of the last four articles of Alfred and Guthrum’s Peace, and what kind of relations between English and Danes do they seem to expect? Are English and Danes placed on a strict equality? What three well-known early judicial practices are illustrated in this document?

13. What indications are there of relations, political or of other kinds, existing between Wessex and the Continent?

14. Draw up a statement of the continental invasions of the Northmen based on the accounts here given.

The following suggestions for further study involve some supplementary reading:

1. By use of Plummer’s Life and Times of Alfred and Stevenson’s Asser’s Life of King Alfred, trace the history of the old legend of Alfred in the cowherd’s hut and the burning of the cakes. Show first what is known of the origin of the story; secondly, when and how it became incorporated in Asser’s text; and thirdly, how modern scholarship has dealt with it.

2. In some detailed history of the period, look up the legend of the Raven Flag mentioned in the Chronicle as lost by the Danes in 878.

3. Why was it that the final conquest of England by the Danes in the eleventh century did not threaten English or continental civilization to the same extent that these ninth-century invasions did?