Scandinavian-Britain

72 SCANDINAVIAN BRITAINand the Norwegianincursions. The Danes camechiefly for plunder, and returned to their own sunnyand fertile country to enjoy the fruits of their industry ;while the Norse, living in a ruder climate, morestraitened for the means of life in their narrow fieldsalong the fjord-sides, and less spoiled by commercewith the rich south, came to find new homes inmilder and more spacious regions. To them theNorth of Britain, and still more the coasts of the IrishSea, were southern lands :they could never havefound in the bee-hive huts and rude oratories of theOrkneys and the northern Hebrides that wealth ofplunder which attracted the first Vikings to Lindisfarneand lona; but they found ready-made housesand cultivated fields, or the space they needed forexpansion. Even the Faeroes were colonised by theNorse fifty years before any settlement was effectedby the Danes in England and if the methods of the;two classes of Vikings were hardly distinguishable bythe natives who resented their presence, their aimswere not the same. It might be said, as a roughsumming-up of the earlier Viking period, that theDanes showed the way westward to the Norse,but the Norse set the example of conquest andcolonisation to the Danes. We shall see (p. 182onward) that the most permanent foreign settlementson British soil were chiefly Norse in origin andcharacter.It was perhaps owing to the rivalry created by theeajjier Norse invasions that the Danish attacks beganagain in 820 or 822. They had the same object, gold