Alfred, that first great Englishman, who, if not the only good English king, has been approached neither in ability nor worth by any of his successors to this day, is generally thought of as having conquered the Danes and extinguished their power in England; but erroneously. The Danes were worsted by him; but the Danish settlers in England were not ousted, nor could they be, for they had become a part of the people; the Danish influence upon English life was not much minished. It was within the quarter of a century following Alfred’s death that the Danish king Sweyne levied an annual tribute of £36,000 upon England, and that Danes were called Lord Danes. Forty-two years after Alfred, the Danish Canute, son of Sweyne, was crowned king of England; and the Danish pretensions to the rule of England were not wholly abandoned until the occurrence of an event which had little less influence upon the language of England than upon its fortunes. Edward the Confessor, the last of the royal line of ancient England, was little more than king in name and state. The country was really ruled by a council of six great earls, Danes and English, who partitioned the control of the country among themselves. The Anglo-Saxons had invaded Britain, and had conquered the Celtic Britons and removed them from the soil; the Scandinavian Danes had invaded England, and partly conquered the Anglo-Saxons (now called Englishmen), but had not destroyed their near kinsmen, and the two people had mingled. And now, in the eleventh century (1066), the Normans invaded England and conquered its Dano-Anglo-Saxon people in their turn. Harold, who claimed and obtained the throne, on the death of Edward the Confessor, as his heir, but not as his descendant or lineal successor, was himself half Dane, his father having been Earl of Kent, his mother Gytha, a Danish noblewoman. The influence of the Scandinavian element on the character and the language of modern England was very great, and until of late has been underrated.
The conquest of England by the Normans, and the division of it into sixty thousand knight’s fees, distributed mostly among the followers of the Norman duke, who were thus with their families and followers scattered widely over the country, was the cause of one of the most remarkable phenomena in the history of language—the introduction of Norman-French as an element of English speech. Some French or Romance words had come into England before, because of neighborhood and of affectation of foreign refinement, and a few Latin words had crept in under favor of the clergy; but now Norman-French was distributed all through the island as the speech not only of the holders of the sixty thousand knight’s fees, but of all their followers, and a considerable number of their tenants, to say nothing of their adulatory imitators, or of the Norman clergy who accompanied them to bless and to share their conquest.