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of every part of the British isles in the civilised West, through the
Viking earldoms in Caithness, in the Orkneys and the Shetlands, in Man
and the Hebrides, and on the coast of Ireland, where the Ostman colonies
grew into kingdoms. From about 840, when the first of these settlements
was fairly and permanently started, to the eleventh century, when a
series of great defeats,--by Brian Boru at Clontarf in 1014, by Godwine
and Harold in England from 1042 to 1066, and by the Norman and Scottish
kings in the next generation,--practically destroyed the Norse dominion
outside the Orkneys,--for those two hundred years, Danes and Northmen
not only pillaged and colonised, but ruled and reorganised a good half
of the British isles.

By the time of Alfred the Viking principalities were scattered up and
down the northern and western coasts of the greater of our two islands,
and were fringing three sides of the lesser. About A.D. 900 the pioneer
of the Norse kings, Harold Fair-hair, pursued his traitors, first to
Shetlands and Orkneys, then to Caithness, the Hebrides, and Man. His son
Eric, who followed him, ranged the Northern seas from Archangel to
Bordeaux, and so Hakon the Good in 936 and other Norse princes in 946,
961, 965, above all, the two great Kings Olaf in 985-9 and 1009-14,
fought and triumphed through most of the world as known to the Northmen.
Thus, Frankland, England, Ireland, Scotland were brought into a closer
unity through the common danger, while as the sea-kings founded settled
states, and these grew by alliance, first with one another and then with
their older Christian victims, as the Norse kingdoms themselves became
parts of Latin Christendom, after Latin Christendom had itself been
revived and re-awakened by their attacks, the full value of the time of
trial came out on both sides, to conquered and to conquerors.

For the effects--formative, invigorative, provocative,--of the Northern
invasions had a most direct bearing on the expansion that was to come in
the next age even for those staid and sober Western countries, England
and France and Italy, which had long passed through their time of
migration, and where the Vikings could not, as in the far north-east and
north-west, extend the area of civilisation or geographical knowledge.

Lastly, the new start made by England in exploration, and trade, and
even in pilgrimage, is plainly the result--in action and reaction--of
the Norse and Danish at