Page:The Heimskringla; or, Chronicle of the Kings of Norway Vol 1.djvu/18

most ferocious and ignorant of barbarians, and without any tincture of civilisation. Our historians and their readers are apt to forget altogether that, pagan and barbarian as these Danes or Northmen of the 9th and 10th centuries undoubtedly were, they were the same people, only in a different stage of civilisation, as the Anglo-Saxons themselves, and were in the 10th century, in their social state, institutions, laws, religion, and language, what the Anglo-Saxons had been in the 5th century, when they first landed on the Isle of Thanet. They forget, too, that the introduction of Christianity, and with it of the Latin language, and of the learning which had a reference only to the church, and the introduction of social arrangements, establishments, and ideas of polity and government, cast in one mould for all countries of Christendom by the Romish church, had during these five centuries altered, exhausted, and rendered almost effete, the original spirit and character of Anglo-Saxon social institutions. They do not sufficiently consider the powerful moral influence of this fresh infusion, in the 10th century, of the same spirit, from the same original source, upon the character, ideas, and even forms of government and social arrangements of the whole English population in the subsequent generations, and through them upon the whole of modern society. They do not sufficiently appreciate the social effects of the settlements of these Northmen in England immediately previous to the Norman conquest, when for four generations of kings, viz. Swein, Canute, Harald, and Hardicanute, they had been sole masters of the country, and had possessed and held under their own Danish laws, for many previous generations, what was reckoned equal to one third of all England. The renovation of Anglo-Saxon institutions, the revival of principles and social spirit which were exhausted in the old Anglo-Saxon race, may be