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had done, and all folk fled into Scotland and the
island was left unpeopled: all goods that might be
were shifted and flitted away. So when Harald’s men
landed there they took no booty."—(Heimskringla,
Harald Fairhair, xxii.) Now after Halfdan’s invasion
Cumberland ceased to be Northumbrian.
Early in the tenth century we find it, under native
Welsh kings, as part of Strathclyde, a kingdom
closely connected with Scotland and ultimately, if not
at first, held by the tanist to the Scottish crown. On
this occasion the fugitives from Man could not have
fled in the direction from which their enemy was
coming, and the conclusion is that they emigrated
in mass to the fjords of Solway and Duddon,
and to the hills visible to them from their home in
Man.
The notice in the chronicles that Hástein, after
leaving Chester (895), ravaged the North Welsh, or
North British, applies to what we still call North
Wales. There was no need for him to go to Cumbria,
in his starving condition, to find food; and the
suggestion that his Danes colonised Cumbria at that
time need not be considered. But less than twenty
years later, if there is any truth in the stories told
by the Historia de S. Cuthberto (see p. 128), Vikings
were pressing the Angles of Cumberland, and making
them take refuge eastward, over the fells. In 918 Ottar
and Ragnvald marched through to Corbridge ; indeed,
Ragnvald was known as "Dux Galwalensium," though
this was hardly a territorial title ; he was not the jarl of
Galloway, but the leader of the Gallgael. In 924, not
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