their endeavours and risking their lives in the acquisition of less attractive lands elsewhere. When the Normans were able to gain possession of England this chapter in Viking history came to a close. Continued raids and conquests in the Northern Isles, Ireland, and in Iceland kept the Viking ethic flickering, but could not provide much stimulus for the achievement of a now superfluous political unity.

Of the three Scandinavian kingdoms, only Denmark was able to remain relatively stable and undivided; Norway and Sweden both spent much of this period in political confusion. In each case external pressure represented the main spur to unity, more or less consistently from Germany in the case of Denmark, very sporadically from Denmark in the case of the other two countries. Like Poland and Hungary these countries adopted Christianity in the first instance for political reasons to forestall conquest by their Christian neighbours; but only in Denmark did the Church become much of a support to the crown, since the basic facts of Nordic geography led to a fragmented regional society with few towns, mostly scattered along the seaboard, which could not function as centres of government. The familiar features of government are thus only fully recognizable in Denmark during this period; when a disputed succession occurred one or both parties might look to the German king or magnates in the manner of the competing Piasts, sometimes acknowledging German overlordship. At the same time there developed a feudal aristocracy not greatly different from that of Saxony. For their neighbours it was fortunate that the Danes no longer sent forth the warrior hosts which had ravaged most of the northern coasts of Europe, twice conquered much of England, and burnt Hamburg among many other cities; for the Danes it amounted to a relegation into a very marginal role in European history.

Casting an eye back over the ground surveyed, the most striking feature of the history of northern Europe during these three centuries is how little the political map of Europe had yet changed. The development of great lordships had been almost universal, so too had the arrival of a relative peace

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