[Sidenote: =Danish rule in England.=] The Danish rule in North-Eastern England was made comparatively light to the old inhabitants of the land when Guthrum and his men embraced Christianity. Instead of killing the people off or reducing them to slavery, the Danes now were content to take tribute from them, and to occupy a certain portion of their lands. The limit and extent of the Danish settlement can be well traced by studying the names of places in the northern counties. Wherever the invaders established themselves we find the Danish termination _by_ in greater or less abundance. We find such names strewn thick about Yorkshire, Lincolnshire, Nottinghamshire, and Leicestershire, less freely in Derbyshire, Northamptonshire, and the eastern counties. Rugby, close to the line of Watling Street, is the Danish settlement that lies furthest into the heart of Mercia. The Viking blood, therefore, is largely mixed with the English in the valleys of the Trent and Ouse, and close to the eastern coast, and grows proportionately less as Watling Street is approached. The Danes took very easily to English manners; they had all turned Christians within a very few years, and their language was so like Old English that their speech soon became assimilated to that of their subjects, and could only be told from that of South England by differences of dialect that gradually grew less. In the end England gained rather than suffered by their invasion, for they brought much hardy blood into the land, and came to be good Englishmen within a very few generations. [Illustration: ENGLAND IN THE YEAR 900.] [Sidenote: =Effects of the Danish wars.=]