quered Celtic Picts from the sixth to the ninth century. They had brought with them the Christian faith, which had been preached in Ireland by St. Patrick in the fifth century. These Scots and Picts continually raided Northumbria just as the Picts had raided Roman Britain; and Canute had bought off their raids by giving to them all the land as far south as the Tweed, which thus became the ‘border’, as we have it to-day, between England and Scotland. Cumberland and Lancashire seem to have remained an independent Celtic country till the end of the eleventh century, just as Wales did till the thirteenth.
Flanders.3. Flanders, that is, roughly speaking, the modern Holland and Belgium; a land already famous both for pirates and traders; it lies right opposite the mouth of the Thames, and was just the place where the pirates could sell the gold candlesticks which they stole out of English churches.
Normandy and the Normans.4. Normandy, the great province on the north coast of France, of which the river Seine is the centre. This land the great Danish pirate, Rollo, had harried early in the tenth century, until the wearied King of France gave it him to keep, on condition that he would become a Christian. The ‘Normans’, that is North-men, married French wives, and became the cleverest, the fiercest, and, according to the ideas of the day, the most pious of Frenchmen. They did not cease to be adventurers, and we find their young men seeking their fortunes all over Europe. They thought their Saxon neighbours very slow and stupid fellows, who were somehow in possession of a very desirable island which they managed very badly, and which it was the Normans’ duty to take if possible.
