To the writers of the time, who could not see the permanent results of Viking settlement, the Northmen were barbarian pirates, without piety or pity, “who wept neither for their sins nor for their dead,” and their expeditions were mere wanton pillage and destruction. Moreover, these writers were regularly monks or priests, and it was the church that suffered most severely. A walled town or castle might often successfully resist, but the monasteries, protected from Christian freebooters by their sacred character, were simply so many opportunities for plunder to the heathen of the north. Sometimes the monks perished with their monastery, often they escaped only with their lives and a few precious title-deeds, to find on their return merely a heap of blackened ruins and a desolate countryside. Many religious establishments utterly disappeared in the course of the invasions. In Normandy scarcely a church survives anterior to the tenth century. As the monasteries were at this time the chief centres of learning and culture throughout western Europe, their losses were the losses of civilization, and in this respect the verdict of the monastic chroniclers is justified. There is, however, another side to the story, which Scandinavian scholars have not been slow to emphasize. Heathen still and from one point of view barbarian, the Northmen had yet a culture of their own, well advanced on its material side, notable in its artistic skill, and rich in its treasures of poetry and story. Its material treasures have been in part recovered by the labors of northern archæologists, while its literary wealth is now in large measure accessible in English in the numerous translations of sagas and Eddic poems. After all barbarism, like culture, is a relative thing, and judged by contemporary standards, the Vikings were not barbarians. They rather show a strange combination of the primitive and the civilized--elemental passions expressing themselves with a high degree of literary art, barbaric adornment wrought with skilled craftsmanship, Berserker rage supplemented by clever strategy, pitiless savagery combined with a strong sense of public order, constant feuds and murders coexistent with a most elaborate system of law and legal procedure. Young from our point of view, the civilization of the Vikings had behind it a history of perhaps fifteen centuries.