INTRODUCTION. xlix

both as a warrior and a skald, at the court of the Anglo-Saxon King Athelstane, whose
relations with the mighty King Harold Fair-hair, the founder of the Norwegian
monarchy, was such that he fostered his son Hacon the Good, who thenceforth was
known in the history of the North as Hacon Athelstane's foster-child. But where
such mighty men as Egil came we may be sure that many others of lesser mark
followed, and that when Eric Bloodyaxe held the North of England as a fief from
Athelstane, he had many Icelanders in his train. As time wore on, and the Danish
invasions under Sweyn and Canute followed, there was a still further infusion of
Northern life into the North of England, until, as we have seen before, the Dane-
lagh, or that portion of England in which the Northmen lived, as they lived at
home, under their own laws and customs, stretched itself over half the kingdom.
We have already seen something of the effect which these had on the laws of England,
and how trial by jury first rose in the Danelagh, and then spread over the whole land;
but the presence of the Northern element in the country shewed itself in other ways
besides those of law. The language of the North of England, and especially the dialect
called Lowland Scotch, was full, and to this day is full, of words and expressions
which can only be explained by the help of the Icelandic as the representative of
the old Northern language spoken by the Scandinavian settlers in England. When
the Streoneskalch of the Anglo-Saxons was called Whitby by the Danish invaders,
and when Northivorthige- became Dcoraby, our Derby, the new names were full of
meaning to the Danes and meaningless to the old possessors. ' The town on the
white cliff' was a name that spoke at once to Scandinavian sea-rovers as they neared
that part of the Yorkshire coast to which they gave the name of Kliflönd or Cleve-
land ; and in the case of Derby, ' the town of deer,' the town near the w^rooded hills full
of beasts and game, spoke more forcibly to the feelings of a race that equalled the Anglo-
Saxons in their love of vert and venison than the old name; derived from the position
of the town towards the North. It is scarcely necessary to repeat the fact, now so
well known, that this final by of names of places in England is the invariable sign of
Scandinavian settlement and possession. It was a local termination unknown to the
Anglo-Saxons, but so common among one of the Northern races, that the towns and
places to which they gave it may be traced by hundreds on the map of England.
Rugby is about the farthest south that we find it; but Tenby in South Wales shews
that when the Northmen settled on the remotest parts of the sea-coast they left their
mark there as well as in the very heart of the country.

Besides these names of places, very many modern English words shew early
Northern influence; and even in Anglo-Saxon times the language was so blended
with Scandinavian words that there were often double expressions for the same thing.
One of the most common of these is egg, not originally an Anglo-Saxon, but a pure
Scandinavian form, which, existing at first side by side with its old English equivalent,
has at last thrown it entirely out, much in the same way as in certain counties the
English rat has been eradicated by its Norwegian cousin. The story told by Caxton in
his Eneydos throws light on the gradual progress of this word south. A traveller was