It is not strange, then, that we should owe some knowledge of early Anglo-Saxon custom to the Norman Conquest and the necessity after such an event to collect in a more connected and intelligible form what had formerly to some extent been matters of custom and tradition. And so it may be that our next chance of learning more may be found in the study of the documents and fragments belonging to the period of the Danish invasion of England, and especially the moment of transition from the English rule of Ethelred II. to the Danish rule of Cnut. [Sidenote: Danes and English live under their own laws. Danish law assumed to be well known.] The founding of the Danish kingdom of Cnut was an epoch in English history, and indeed in the history of Europe. It was followed _inter alia_ by the legalisation in England of Scandinavian monetary reckoning in marks and ores which had already for some time been in use side by side with the English reckoning in scillings and pounds. And this was typical of the general position of things. In full coincidence with the working of tribal feeling in other countries, into the idea of conquest the amalgamation of the two peoples into one did not enter. Danes continued to live under their laws and the English under theirs, as Franks and Gallo-Romans did under Frankish rule. Certain things were enjoined upon both, but with a difference. It often happens that in documents of this period the ‘law of the English’ is specially explained while the Danish law is referred to as already known, thus revealing a Danish point of view. In the Laws of Ethelred II. (s. 37) it is enacted that if anyone should be charged with plotting against the king, he must ‘clear himself with the threefold ordeal by the law of the English, and by the law of the Danes according as their law may be.’ And so in the Laws of Cnut penalties are stated as so many scillings by English law and by Danish law ‘as it formerly stood.’[215] So that, from the Danish point of view, it was sometimes a matter of inquiry and record what the English law had been, while knowledge of Danish law was mostly taken for granted. * * * * * [Sidenote: London under Cnut a port of the ‘greater Scandinavia.’] With regard to the coinage this was only partly the case. Not that Anglo-Saxon reckoning in pounds and scillings was abolished or that Danish currency was thenceforth the only one allowed. But, Cnut having styled himself ‘King of all England and King of the Danes and Norwegians,’ London had become in one sense a Scandinavian port. The large sums paid to ‘the army’ by Ethelred for respite and peace had flooded Scandinavia with English silver money of his coinage.