SOURCE PROBLEMS IN ENGLISH HISTORY
Alfred and the Danes
I.THE HISTORICAL SETTING OF THE PROBLEM
IT is important to understand at the outset that this first source study centers in the most critical period of a movement which affected not England only, but the whole of Europe. The invasions and settlements from the Scandinavian north spread “from Iceland to Constantinople, from Russia to Spain.” These tremendous outpourings, which were progressing during the ninth century in a veritable geometrical ratio, were the last in that vast series of “wanderings of the peoples” which had brought the Roman Empire to an end and created a new Europe. In the earlier movements the northern peninsulas had had no share. Britain had been invaded and settled in the fifth and sixth centuries by the Anglo-Saxons at the same time that the continental portions of the Empire were overrun by less distant Teutonic tribes; but the extreme north remained then and for long after-
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