. A short history of England and the British Empire. of the Humber and Danes in theEast Anglian kingdom. It will thus be seen that parts of boththe eastern and the western shores of the island were beingvisited and seized. Like the Anglo-Saxons the Scandinavian invaders were ofTeutonic blood and spoke a Germanic dialect with enoughpoints of resemblance to the Old English to make civilization ofit possible for the two peoples to learn each others the Northmen,language without great effort. In religion the Northmen werestill heathen, worshiping the old gods that the English hadrenounced two hund
. A short history of England and the British Empire. of the Humber and Danes in theEast Anglian kingdom. It will thus be seen that parts of boththe eastern and the western shores of the island were beingvisited and seized. Like the Anglo-Saxons the Scandinavian invaders were ofTeutonic blood and spoke a Germanic dialect with enoughpoints of resemblance to the Old English to make civilization ofit possible for the two peoples to learn each others the Northmen,language without great effort. In religion the Northmen werestill heathen, worshiping the old gods that the English hadrenounced two hundred years In civilization theyoccupied a lower stage than the English, though in some respectsthey were their intellectual equals. In shipbuilding, for 1 Review sec. 26 THE OLD ENGLISH MONARCHY instance, they soon came to lead Europe, and for several cen-turies the Norse vikings ruled the European seas. Piracy wascommon among them, but loot and pillage were not the chiefobjects of their visits to Britain: it was land-hunger and eco-. Viking Ship Model of a ship found in 1880 in a burial-mound at Gokstad, Norway,where it had been buried nearly one thousand years before. nomic pressure that led the Northmen to emigrate, thoughlove of adventure and the prospect of sharing in plunderedwealth doubtless also proved strong incentives. 24. The Vikings as Conquerors. The earliest recordedvisit of the vikings to any of the English kingdoms for the THE VIKING ATTACK ON WESSEX 27 sake of plunder was in 793, when they pillaged the Northum-brian monastery at Lindisfarne. That was toward. The attack onthe close of Offas reign as king of Mercia and England. of the English, and while Cynewulf may still havebeen writing in some Anglian cloister. From that date for ahundred years, English history is an almost unbroken accountof warfare with the Scandinavian invaders. It was the customof the vikings to land and seize the horses in the regions visited,and thus mounted t
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