The eastern and northern England settled and ruled by Scandinavians after the Great Heathen Army's conquests: a patchwork of Viking kingdoms and armies, reconquered by the West Saxon kings between 917 and 954, whose name survived as a region of distinct law.
The Danelaw is the name later given to the part of England in which Scandinavian settlers and rulers held power after the conquests of the Great Heathen Army in the 860s and 870s: roughly the land north and east of a line running from the Thames estuary along the River Lea and Watling Street toward Chester. It was never a single realm. It contained the Viking kingdom of York in the north, the Danish kingdom of East Anglia, and between them the armies settled around the Five Boroughs of the east midlands.
The name is later than the settlements. Dena lagu, 'the law of the Danes', first appears in the law codes of Æthelred the Unready and the writings of Archbishop Wulfstan of York in the early eleventh century, when the region was ruled by English kings but kept customs of its own. Its lasting legacy was not a state but a society: Scandinavian place-names, words and legal habits, and a population of mixed descent across half of England.
The Danelaw was made by conquest. The Great Heathen Army that landed in East Anglia in 865 took York in 866, killed King Edmund of East Anglia in 869 and drove King Burgred of Mercia into exile in 874. Then it began to settle. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle records that in 876 Halfdan shared out the land of the Northumbrians, 'and they were ploughing and providing for themselves'; in 877 part of the army took eastern Mercia; and in 880 Guthrum's army went from Cirencester into East Anglia, settled there and shared out the land.
In the south-west the conquest met its limit. Guthrum's defeat at the Battle of Edington in 878 ended his attempt on Wessex; he was baptised with Alfred the Great as his godfather, and in the 880s the two kings agreed a treaty, whose text survives, fixing the boundary up the Thames, up the Lea to its source, then in a straight line to Bedford and up the Ouse to Watling Street. The treaty also set the same legal value on the life of a free Dane and a free Englishman, eight half-marks of refined gold.
Power in the Danelaw lay with kings in the north and east and with armies in between. York had Scandinavian kings from Halfdan in the 870s: Guthfrith, a Christian king buried in York Minster in 895; Siefred and Cnut, known from their coins; and from 919 kings of the Norse-Irish Uí Ímair dynasty of Dublin, among them Ragnall, Sihtric Cáech and Olaf Guthfrithson. East Anglia was ruled by Guthrum, under his baptismal name Æthelstan, until 890, and then by Eohric, who was killed fighting the English at the Holme in 902.
The east midlands had no king. Their fortified towns were held by Danish armies, each with a jarl and a territory of its own, the most important of them the Five Boroughs of Derby, Leicester, Lincoln, Nottingham and Stamford. The northern and eastern armies fought as allies, bargained separately with the West Saxon kings, and in the end submitted one at a time.
English kings recognised Scandinavian custom rather than erase it. King Edgar's law code of the 960s allowed the Danes to keep 'such good laws as they best may choose', and Æthelred the Unready's code issued at Wantage in 997 set out procedure for the Five Boroughs, including twelve leading thegns in each wapentake sworn to accuse wrongdoers, an early form of the English presentment jury.
The wapentake, from Old Norse vápnatak, the brandishing of weapons that confirmed an assembly's decision, replaced the hundred as the unit of local government across much of the region, and the English word 'law' itself came from Norse. Domesday Book in 1086 records unusually large numbers of free peasants, sokemen and freemen, in Lincolnshire, Norfolk and Suffolk, which historians have long connected with the Scandinavian settlement, though the link is argued over.
The impact on language and landscape is clearer. Hundreds of place-names in northern and eastern England end in -by, 'farm' or 'village', or -thorpe, 'outlying settlement', among them Grimsby, Derby, Whitby and Scunthorpe, and everyday English words such as sky, egg, window, take and they entered the language from Old Norse speakers living beside the English.
The settlers brought a silver economy. The hoard buried at Cuerdale in Lancashire around 905, more than 8,500 coins, ingots and pieces of cut silver, shows wealth measured by weight, and York grew into a trading town whose excavated workshops on Coppergate made combs, leatherwork and amber and jet jewellery for markets from Dublin to the Baltic.
Viking rulers struck coins almost as soon as they settled. The Danish rulers of East Anglia issued pennies in memory of St Edmund, the king their army had killed, and the kingdom of York struck pennies in the name of St Peter, the patron of its cathedral, adding a sword to the design in the 920s. The coins show converts adopting the saints of the people they had conquered within a generation.
Alfred's children took the Danelaw back. After a combined West Saxon and Mercian army destroyed a Northumbrian raiding force at Tettenhall in 910, Edward the Elder and his sister Æthelflæd, Lady of the Mercians, advanced behind lines of new fortified burhs. Æthelflæd took Derby in 917 and Leicester in 918, Edward received the submission of the East Anglian and midland armies in 917, and by 920 every Danish army south of the Humber had accepted him as lord.
York held out longer. Æthelstan annexed it in 927 and broke the northern coalition at the Battle of Brunanburh in 937, but after his death Olaf Guthfrithson retook York and the Five Boroughs in 939. Edmund I of England recovered the Five Boroughs in 942, and Eadred of England ended the kingdom of York in 954, when its last king, Eric Bloodaxe, was driven out and killed at Stainmore.