220 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE ments and conquests. The Norwegians went to the Orkney M _*l and Shetland and Faroe Islands to the north of Northmen . 10111 in the Scotland, to Caithness and Sutherland on the British isles northem coast of Scotland itself, to the Hebrides and the west coast of Scotland, and to the eastern coast of Ireland. Meanwhile the Danes devoted their attention to England. Both these movements had started before 800, and the famous monastery of Iona on the west coast of Scotland was sacked in 795. In England, as on the Conti- nent, two stages of invasion are distinguished; the first, from about 787 to 855, a purely destructive one of plunder and rapine; the second, of occupation. The monastic cul- ture of the north was practically blotted out by the heathen Danes, and they brought to an end the Angle Kingdoms of Northumbria, Mercia, and East Anglia. They overran and occupied the entire north and east of England. But the Kingdom of Wessex in the southwest, which had already be- come the strongest Anglo-Saxon state under Egbert, was left to struggle successfully against the Danes under its gallant, learned, and truly Christian king, Alfred the Great. Alfred, who ruled from 871 to 901, united all the rest of England against the Danes, and reorganized the Saxon Alfred the army and revived the navy. He drove the Danes Great and out of Wessex and recovered London. A line drawn approximately from London to modern Liverpool was made the frontier between the West Saxon Kingdom and the Danelaw, as the territory where Dan- ish customs and institutions prevailed was called. Under Alfred's son and grandsons the Danelaw was gradually reconquered and all England united under one ruler. The Danes had done at least the one service of obliterating the petty kingdoms in the territory they had occupied; and Kent, Sussex, and a part of Mercia had forgotten their differences and accepted a West Saxon king in order to escape the Danes. The Danes also brought England into closer trade relations with the rest of Europe than before, and were more inclined to town life than the country-loving .Anglo-Saxons. Their armor was a military improvement;
