et upon Roman
Britain, Roman Britain had disappeared, and a new people of conquerors
stood alone on the conquered land. The Northern storm on the other hand
left land, people, government unchanged. England remained a country of
Englishmen. The conquerors sank into the mass of the conquered, and Woden
yielded without a struggle to Christ. The strife between Briton and
Englishman was in fact a strife between men of different races, while the
strife between northman and Englishman was a strife between men whose
race was the same. The followers of Hengest or of Ida were men utterly
alien from the life of Britain, strange to its arts, its culture, its
wealth, as they were strange to the social degradation which Rome had
brought on its province. But the northman was little more than an
Englishman bringing back to an England which had drifted far from its
origin the barbaric life of its earliest forefathers. Nowhere throughout
Europe was the fight so fierce, because nowhere else were the fighters
men of one blood and one speech. But just for this reason the union of
the combatants was nowhere so peaceful or so complete. The victory of the
house of AElfred only hastened a process of fusion which was already going
on. From the first moment of his settlement in the Danelaw the northman
had been passing into an Englishman. The settlers were few; they were
scattered among a large population; in tongue, in manner, in institutions
there was little to distinguish them from the men among whom they dwelt.
Moreover their national temper helped on the process of assimilation.
Even in France, where difference of language and difference of custom
seemed to interpose an impassable barrier between the northman settled in
Normandy and his neighbours, he was fast becoming a Frenchman. In
England, where no such barriers existed, the assimilation was even
quicker. The two peoples soon became confounded. In a few years a
northman in blood was Archbishop of Canterbury and another northman in
blood was Archbishop of York.

[Sidenote: The three Northern Kingdoms]

The fusion might have been delayed if not wholly averted by continued
descents from the Scandinavian homeland. But with Eadred's reign the long
attack which the northman had directed against western Christendom came,
for a while at least, to an end. On the world which it assailed its
results had been immense. It had utterly changed the face of the west.
The empire of Ecgberht, the empire o