As long as the Norman expeditions lasted, and on the whole as long as the Scandinavian supremacy at sea sufficed to protect the Scandinavian merchants and their ships, they continued to make voyages on their own account to the countries colonized by the Northmen. Thus the Anglo-Saxon coins dug up in the island of Gothland indicate a brisk and uninterrupted commerce between Scandinavia and England from the time of the Anglo-Saxon king Edgar (959-975) down to the death of Edward the Confessor and the Norman conquest (1066). But from that time, and particularly after the year 1100, there is a remarkable decrease in the Anglo-Saxon coins found in Gothland; which is a natural result of the interruption of the previous connection, through the hostile relations that ensued between the descendants of William the Conqueror and the Scandinavian kings, who steadily continued to claim the crown of England. Later in the middle ages the countries of Scandinavia fell more and more under the commercial yoke of the German Hanse Towns; whilst in England, on the contrary, a freer and healthier state of commerce was continually developing itself. The Danish king, Canute the Great, made it a point of the utmost importance to conclude commercial treaties with various foreign nations; and the Scandinavian merchants settled in England essentially contributed to make these leagues profitable. Old authors expressly notice the influence of these merchants on British trade. We also find evidence of it not only in their great number, and the weight they possessed in several English towns,—especially London, where they had their own churches, markets, and courts of law, and where, as before stated, they even at times decided the election of a king, as in the case of Harald Harefoot,—but also in the names of money afterwards retained in the English language, as “March” and “Ora,” from the Scandinavian “Mark” and “Ore.” It was a natural consequence that commerce should at the same time make great progress, as the numerous Scandinavian settlers in England, and the Danish conquest, had infused a new and hitherto unknown life into everything relating to navigation, without which no animated trade could have flourished in the British Islands.