The names of persons in the convent, and of places about it, here cited are all, perhaps, or at most with a single exception, of undoubted Danish or Scandinavian origin. They not only prove that, even long before the treaty between Alfred the Great and the Viking King Gudrum or Gorm, which in the year 879 secured to the Danes their conquests on the south-east coast of England, and therefore, more than one hundred and fifty years before Canute the Great’s time, the Danes really had such a footing round the Wash that they could give their villages Danish names, and were governed by their own chiefs; but they likewise indicate the remarkable fact, that at least a great number of these Danes must have been already Christians, since they had villages with churches (Kyrkeby) and gave landed property to a convent, in which we find both Danish monks (Eskil and Thurstan), and a Danish abbot (Sivard.) It was about the same time that the Jutland king, Harald Klag, was baptized, together with his whole suite, during a sojourn with the Emperor Ludvig, at Ingelheim, near Mayence, in the year 826. This christening of Danish men abroad, in Germany and England, was the beginning of the subsequent introduction of Christianity into the Scandinavian North. The genuineness of the above-mentioned Scandinavian names is placed beyond all doubt by the circumstance that similar names appear in other documents connected with the history of Croyland at the same period, or the ninth century. In the year 867, swarms of Danish-Norwegian Vikings landed on the east coast of England, and the Christians who then lived there, whether Danes or Anglo-Saxons, as well as their churches and convents, suffered from the ferocity of these heathens. After a great battle in Lincolnshire, in which, however, the heathens lost three of their kings, whom they buried in a place afterwards called “Trekyngham” (the three kings’ home), they marched against Croyland. In vain did the Christians seek to arrest their progress. In a battle near the convent many of the Christians fell, and amongst them “Toli” or “Tule,” who had previously been a knight, but who had now entered the cloisters of Croyland. The Vikings stormed the convent, and committed a terrible massacre. Their king, “Oskytyl,” cut down the abbot before the altar; after which the convent was plundered and destroyed. The Danish Viking Jarl Sidroc, or Sigtryg, saved a boy called Turgar (Thorgeir) from this massacre, who afterwards escaped to the neighbouring convent of Ely, and gave an account, which is still preserved, of this terrible devastation. Meanwhile, however, the convent of Ely, as well as that of Medehamstede (Peterborough), was plundered and destroyed by the Vikings.