The enactment of the treaty between Alfred and Guthrum in c.880, while a victory in the sense that the very existence of Wessex had not been snuffed out, was ultimately a compromise. The Viking ‘Great Heathen Army’ had sailed over from Scandinavia seeking new land to settle and treasure to plunder, and in both respects, they had succeeded – to a degree. When the dust settled, East Anglia, Mercia and Northumbria were destroyed as political units, leaving Wessex as essentially the only Anglo-Saxon kingdom with an intact administrative and governmental system.
Although Alfred can be seen as partially responsible in his efforts to bind together the disparate Anglo-Saxon kingdoms as one nation, it is interesting to consider what might have happened had the Scandinavians not invaded or been repulsed early on – would ‘England’ even come to exist? If Alfred is the mortar binding together the earliest bricks of the English state, the invading Danes were the means by which its predecessors were demolished, allowing it to be rebuilt from the ground up.
WHAT IS ‘DANELAW’?
The term ‘Danelaw’ is not a 9th-century one, only appearing in documentary evidence from the early-11th century onwards as reference to a specific geographic area. From our modern perspective, it refers to the areas of eastern and northern England that were under Danish law, rather than Anglo-Saxon. These areas, according to the Encyclopaedia of Anglo-Saxon England, broadly included the shires (administrative areas) of Bedford, Middlesex, Buckingham, Huntingdon, Hertford, Cambridge, Essex, Suffolk, Norfolk, Northampton, Leicester, Nottingham, Derby, Lincoln and Northumbria – with focus in the last centred on the city of Jorvik (York). The legacy of this self-ruling area is indirectly preserved today in a swathe of Scandinavian place names; settlement names like Grimsby, Lowestoft and Scunthorpe all have Old Norse suffixes as opposed to Anglo-Saxon ones.
Although the initial policy of Alfred and his successors would be to allow the Scandinavians a sort of living space, this changed by the early-10th century. Although the Danelaw would exist broadly from c.880–954,
