"Impatient of a bleak climate and narrow limits, they started from the
banquet, grasped their arms, sounded their horn, ascended their ships, and
explored every coast that promised either spoil or settlement."[3] To
England they came as Danes; to France, as Northmen or Normans. They took
advantage of the Saxon wars with the British, of Saxon national feuds, and
of that enervation which luxurious living had induced in the Saxon kings
of the octarchy, and succeeded in occupying a large portion of the north
and east of England; and they have exerted in language, in physical type,
and in manners a far greater influence than has been usually conceded.
Indeed, the Danish chapter in English history has not yet been fairly
written. They were men of a singularly bold and adventurous spirit, as is
evinced by their voyages to Iceland, Greenland, and thence to the Atlantic
coast of North America, as early as the tenth and eleventh centuries. It
is more directly to our purpose to observe their character as it is
displayed in their conquest of the Frankish kingdom of Neustria, in their
facile reception and ready assimilation of the Roman language and arts
which they found in Gaul, and in their forcible occupancy, under William
the Conqueror, of Saxon England, in 1066.
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