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the Great Army completely and forced their commander Guthrum to come to terms. The treaty
separated England into two halves, with the dividing line running roughly north-west from London
to the coast near Liverpool. East of the line was the Danelaw, to the west was Alfred’s Saxon
England. Schoolchildren learn that Alfred the Great saved England from the Danes. He clearly did
not, as the Danes won control of half the country. Unsurprisingly, the peace did not last. Another
army landed in 893, but restricted its campaign to the Danelaw and left Alfred’s kingdom
undisturbed.
From the genetic point of view I could see it was going to be hard to distinguish between Saxon
and Dane. They both came from roughly the same place, their cultures were very similar, built
around the Great Hall ideals of Beowulf. It was beginning to look, from the genetic point of view,
like just another layer of north Germans and Scandinavians.
The next century saw the gradual reconquest of the Danelaw by the Saxon kings of Wessex.
There were the inevitable setbacks. Norse armies recaptured York in 939 and 947, on the latter
occasion under the command of the colourfully named Eric Bloodaxe. Another Danish army, under
the equally chromatic Harold Bluetooth, had to be bought off after defeating an English militia in
Essex. That only encouraged more raids, and by the turn of the first millennium huge amounts of
cash had been paid to the Danes as what amounted to protection money.
The Vikings also used the same methods on the other side of the Channel. In 911 Hrolfe of
Norway, or Rollo as he is more commonly known, sailed up the Seine and blockaded the river. In
exchange for lifting the siege and withdrawing the threat to attack Paris, Rollo demanded, and got,
a grant of land on the north-west coast from the French king. He became the first Duke of
Normandy. He, his followers and descendants soon immersed themselves in French language and
culture, though never forgetting their Viking roots.
Meanwhile, in England, the endless wars between Saxon and Dane continued. King Aethelred
ordered a massacre of all Danes in England in 1002 – an impossible task, but serving to spread
more hysteria and violence. Danes in Oxford took refuge in a church, but the citizens burned it
down with the Danes still inside. The attempted ethnic cleansing forced Sweyn, the King of
Denmark, to intervene, which he did on two unsuccessful campaigns until, in 1013, he launched a
full-scale invasion. Aethelred fled to Normandy and thus began the fateful alliance that was to lead
directly to the Norman Conquest. On Sweyn’s death the following year his son Cnut, or Canute,
inherited the Danish throne. By 1016 he had crushed Saxon resistance and become King of England
as well. Notoriously he is the monarch who sat on the beach commanding the tide to retreat as a
show of strength, but it was actually done to demonstrate his limitations in the face of nature. He
was, in fact, a surprisingly good king, even though he divided his time between England and
Denmark. But the fortunes of Wessex, whose regal supremacy Cnut had terminated, revived as
Godwine, the Earl of Wessex, rose to prominence, even though he was not of the royal house.
Cnut died in 1035 and was succeeded by his son Harold. When Harold passed away five years
later, his brother Harthacnut reigned for two brief years before he too died in 1042. That was the
end of three decades of direct Danish rule and the kingdom was once more under a Saxon king,
Edward (the Confessor), the son of Aethelred. Edward had grown up in Normandy at the court of
his father-in-law, Richard, Duke of Normandy, after Aethelred had fled to France to escape the
Danes in 1013. Already the Saxon royal family owed a debt to the Normans, a debt which only
increased when the Earl of Wessex, Godwine, defied the king and threatened to seize control. To