hergende weron and heora tiligende wæron.’[1] In the next year, the outlandish host ‘gefor on Myrcena land, and hit gedældon sum.’ In 880, ‘for se here on Eastængle and geset þat land and gedælde.’ Here we find many English shires, once thriving and civilised, parcelled out within four years among the Norsemen. The Angles were now under the yoke of those who four hundred years earlier had been their neighbours on the mainland. Essex seems to have been the only Saxon shire that Alfred had to yield to the foreigner. Now it was that the Orms, Grims, Spils, Osgods, and Thors, who have left such abiding traces of themselves in Eastern Mercia and Northumbrian settled among us. They gave their own names of Whitby and Derby to older English towns, and changed the name of Roman Eboracum from Eoforwic to Iorvik or York.
The endings by, thwaite, ness, drop, haugh, and garth, are the sure tokens of the great Danish settlement in England; fifteen hundred of such names are still to be found in our North Eastern shires. The six counties to the North of Mercia have among them 246 places that end in by; Lincolnshire, the great Norse stronghold, has 212; Leicestershire has 66; Northamptonshire 26; Norfolk and Notts have rather fewer.
The Danes were even strong enough to force their preposition amell (inter) upon Northumberland, where
- ↑ At the head of the Yarrow is a mountain, called of old by the Celtic name Ben Yair. To this the Romans prefixed their Mont, and the Danes long afterwards added their word Law. The hill is now called Mountbenjerlaw; in it hill comes three times over. — Garnett's Essays, p. 70.
