The details of the doings of the Danish army, during the reign of Ethelred the Redeless (979-1016), are recorded at great length in the Chronicle. They show the old tactics, familiar for two hundred years: the long ships are brought to the nearest point convenient for a campaign of pillage; there the “army is a-horsed,” and they ride at their will inland, lighting their “war-beacons,” the blazing villages of the country-side, as they go. Year after year records its tale of disaster, until the partition of England in 1016 between Cnut and Edmund Ironside. The whole story of river and land warfare, of plundering and burning, of the paying of Danegeld as a temporary sop to the army, is in no way different from the record of the Danish operations in France during the ninth century. In France the Danish conquest was quicker, because the invaders had to deal from the beginning with a worn-out civilisation: the partition of France, owing to the superiority of the Danes to their opponents, was effected within seventy years of their first settlement. The power of Normandy, however, was checked by the rise of the Capetian dynasty in the later part of the tenth century: the Northmen were kept strictly to their Danelaw, and their subsequent expansion took place, not in France, but in England. On the other hand, in England, the Danish invaders of the ninth century had to contend with the rising power of Wessex and a race younger and more vigorous than the contemporary Gauls of Neustria. Their inroads were therefore checked and their conquest was delayed until the house of Wessex had run its natural course, and Englishmen and Danes had had time to be practically amalgamated into one nation. The glory of Wessex ceases with Edmund Ironside, the glory of the Danes with Cnut. Before Cnut died, the child William already had succeeded to his father’s duchy of Normandy, and thirty-one years after the death of Cnut, William was king of England, and, for all practical purposes, the inroads of the Northmen from Scandinavia were over. CHAPTER III THE ENGLISH CASTLE AFTER THE CONQUEST