The _Here_,[116] the great Danish armament which appears and reappears so often in the pages of the Chronicle--one imagines the studious monk in his _scriptorium_ trembling as he writes the very word--seems to have been generally composed of foot soldiers hewing with swords or wielding their great two-handed battle-axes, armed with strong round shields and with byrnies or coats-of-mail, and beginning the fight by sending a cloud of javelins at their foes. Gradually, however, they learned the advantage of possessing a force of cavalry; and one of their first exploits on landing was to scour the country for horses, by means of which they could ravage the land far and wide where their ships could not carry them. They were, however, in strictness mounted infantry rather than cavalry. Their horses bore them swiftly to the battle-field. When they had reached it they dismounted and fought on foot. Not even the Icelandic Sagas with all their poetic fire can win us to unmixed admiration of the lives of these freebooters. They had some noble qualities, but notwithstanding these they were still barbarians. They were ancestors of the most chivalrous nations of Europe, and they possessed some of the qualities inherent in chivalry, such as courage, endurance, loyalty, honour to the women of their tribe. But on the other hand--if any reliance is to be placed on the statements of the Chronicle--they would often swear most solemnly to a treaty and then ride away and break it. They often tortured their captives; their hands were heavy on the weak, on little children and on women. This is the less to be wondered at, since owing to the poverty of their country they often left their own new-born children to perish. Their blows fell with especial ferocity on the churches and monasteries of Britain: a fact which may probably be accounted for by the fact that these were the chief treasure-houses of the invaded lands. The assaults of the Danes upon the Saxons, like those of the Saxons upon the Romanised Britons, fall naturally into three periods,[117] the first of robbery, the second of settlement, and the third of conquest. The chronological limits of these three periods may be approximately fixed as follows: pillage, from 790 to 851; settlement, from 851 to 897; conquest (after a pause of nearly a century), from 980 to 1016.