Britons. Nothing permanent was achieved by these devastations, but they have some importance in church history, because they led Bishop Eardulf, who had charge of the shrines of St Aidan and St Cuthbert, to abandon his see at Lindisfarne, so long the spiritual capital of the North, and to set out on an eight years' pilgrimage through the moors of Cumberland and the coasts of Solway in search of a more secure asylum.
And now at last we reach the stage of real colonisation. In 876 Halfdene returned to York and "dealt out" Deira to his followers, "who thenceforward continued ploughing and tilling it." No Danish Domesday Book tells how the allotment of estates was carried out, or what proportion of the English owners preserved their lands, but it must in the main have been a process of imposing Danish warriors on English cultivators, very similar to the settlement of Normans, carried out 200 years later by William the Conqueror, except that the Danish armies contained a large class of freedmen, the so-called liesings or "men loosened from bondage," to whom no exact counterpart can be found in the later invasion. This half-free class had to be accommodated with land as well as the fully-free classes, the holds and bonde who formed the upper and middle grades of Viking society[1], but they were not of sufficient social standing to become independent landowners, being often of alien race and descended from prisoners of war, slaves and bankrupts. How exactly they were dealt with can only be guessed, but it seems not unlikely that they received holdings in the villages similar to those of the English ceorls, only that they held them by a distinctly freer tenure as members of the conquering armies. Nor is it fanciful to recognise their descendants later on in the peasant class known as sochemanni, who held a position in the society of the eleventh century just above the villani or ordinary cultivators, and who are found in very considerable numbers in just those parts of England where the Danes are known to have settled, but not at all or only in trifling numbers elsewhere.
A year later portions of Mercia were similarly colonised. "After harvest," so runs a laconic entry in the Wessex Chronicle, "the 'army' went into Mercia, and some part of it they apportioned, and some they delivered to Ceolwulf." No clue is vouchsafed as to the identity of the army concerned, and no names are mentioned either of the leaders or the districts implicated. It is clear, however, from subsequent events that the districts left to Ceolwulf comprised all western Mercia from the Mersey to the Thames, and that the boundary fixed upon ran north and south from near the Peak in Derbyshire to a point just east of Tamworth on the Watling Street, and then along that high-way south-eastwards to the headwaters of the Worcestershire Avon and the Welland and perhaps even further, past Towcester to Stony Stratford on the Ouse. To the east of this boundary Danish customs and law were imposed upon the
- ↑ Cf. Seebohm, Tribal Custom, pp. 240-276.
