from Flanders right round the coast to the Bordelais. The broader political results are less clear. The Carolingian Empire would no doubt have fallen apart, and the power of Carolingian kings waned, above all in West Francia, even if the Vikings had not appeared. But the inability of successive kings to deal with the problem quickly enough must have weakened their credibility, and the successes that some of their counts did have against the Vikings must have strengthened their local power. Eastern Francia, made up of ethnic duchies such as Saxony, Franconia, Swabia, Bavaria, was hardly affected by the Vikings and continued at least until 911, and the arrival of a nonCarolingian on the throne, to preserve its Carolingian political structure. But western Francia began effectively to fragment into several dozen separate political entities, and some of those entities were ruled by men who rivalled the king in power. Some owed their origins very directly to the Vikings. One of the great political powers of the tenth century, the count of Flanders, succeeded because he could move into an area whose traditional structure had been shattered by the Vikings. And the two ancestors of the dynasty that was to replace the Carolingians in France, the Capetians, both Robert and his son Odo, made their names in the wars against the Vikings.

In England the effects were different again. Scandinavian settlement was probably more extensive than anywhere else in Europe. There are hundreds of place-names of Scandinavian origin, and standard English even today has a large Scandinavian element, while local dialects have an even heavier input. But it is very difficult to date these linguistic elements, and impossible to know the scale of immigration required to produce them. Does one place-name ending in -by indicate that the place was acquired by one Viking landowner, or settled by a whole Viking community? Does a wholly Scandinavian place-name element mean that the people living in the vicinity, who gave that place its name, were largely Scandinavian-speaking? On the whole linguists favour the idea of large-scale settlement; historians are more sceptical. There is no doubt about the political impact of the Viking period, however. In 800 England was split into a number of separate kingdoms, dominated by

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