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and the Norwegian incursions. The Danes came
chiefly for plunder, and returned to their own sunny
and fertile country to enjoy the fruits of their industry;
while the Norse, living in a ruder climate, more
straitened for the means of life in their narrow fields
along the fjord-sides, and less spoiled by commerce
with the rich south, came to find new homes in
milder and more spacious regions. To them the
North of Britain, and still more the coasts of the Irish
Sea, were southern lands: they could never have
found in the bee-hive huts and rude oratories of the
Orkneys and the northern Hebrides that wealth of
plunder which attracted the first Vikings to Lindisfarne
and Iona; but they found ready-made houses
and cultivated fields, or the space they needed for
expansion. Even the Færoes were colonised by the
Norse fifty years before any settlement was effected
by the Danes in England; and if the methods of the
two classes of Vikings were hardly distinguishable by
the natives who resented their presence, their aims
were not the same. It might be said, as a rough
summing-up of the earlier Viking period, that the
Danes showed the way westward to the Norse,
but the Norse set the example of conquest and
colonisation to the Danes. We shall see (p. 182
onward) that the most permanent foreign settlements
on British soil were chiefly Norse in origin and
character.
It was perhaps owing to the rivalry created by the
earlier Norse invasions that the Danish attacks began
again in 820 or 822. They had the same object, gold
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