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becoming worm-twist, and animal forms becoming Scandinavian
dragons, and bearing the swastika and other
symbols not used by the Anglians. This series is
followed, late in the tenth century, by another of more
advanced skill in carving, such as we have seen must
have been developed in Northumbria under Mercian
influence after the fall of the independent Viking
monarchy—the round-shafted crosses of Northamptonshire
and Cheshire, imitated in Yorkshire and then
travelling north by the same great route to Penrith
and Gosforth, and turning into distinctly Norse forms
with illustrations from the Edda poems, such as we
have noticed (p. 201) on the Heysham "hogback."
This continuous development from the models
found at Carlisle is not likely to have been the work
of Halfdan’s Danes, who in 875 came there only to
plunder and destroy. Their successors, however, who
shared in the distribution of lands and settled in the
Anglicised parts of Cumberland may have become
converted under Guthred and so led to imitate the
monuments of the burnt priory, and no doubt the
natives, who would be employed as carvers, knew
them well. But as we go west from Carlisle we find
more and more Scandinavian and Irish elements in
the art of the period, so that a somewhat sharp distinction
can be drawn between the Anglo-Danish
stones of the Yorkshire type and those of West Cumberland ;
and we are led to conclude that the bulk of
the Cumbrian Vikings were of a different race from
the Danes of Northumbria, akin rather to the Norse
of Man, Galloway, Ireland and the Hebrides. And
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