{"id":16090,"date":"2014-11-16T14:11:21","date_gmt":"2014-11-16T13:11:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/?p=16090"},"modified":"2014-11-16T14:11:21","modified_gmt":"2014-11-16T13:11:21","slug":"the-danish-conquest-of-england-in-the-9th-11th-centuries","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/?p=16090","title":{"rendered":"The Danish conquest of England in the 9th-11th centuries"},"content":{"rendered":"

I have signed up for a number of short courses this autumn and next spring in an effort to keep my brain active and dementia at bay. I always learn new things and enjoy sharing some of my learnings on the web.<\/p>\n

So this weekend I was back at the City Lit <\/a>in Central London to attend a one-day course on the Danish invasion of England<\/a> given by a very knowledgeable lecturer called Vanessa King<\/a>. I found it quite heavy with lots of complicated names and confusing relationships, but I took away some learnings, including the following:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. It really was a Danish invasion of England between 875-1042. The Danes hardly touched Scotland, Wales or Cornwall. To this day, those parts of the UK are still different and there are nationalist movements in each of them<\/li>\n
  2. The Danish conquest of England means that for a time we were part of a a mini empire embracing all England, Denmark and Norway and a bit of Sweden and most of the ‘English’ originate from the Danish peninsular.<\/li>\n
  3. The one thing most British people know about the Danish\/English King Cnut, who reigned from 1017-1035, is that he was so egotistical that he thought he could command the waves. But the true message of this (possibly apocryphal) anecdote<\/a> is the exact opposite: Cnut was modestly demonstrating the limits of his earthy power compared to that of divine power.<\/li>\n
  4. Cnut’s second wife was Emma of Normandy<\/a> who had been previously marred to King AEthelred II (better known as the Ethelred the Unready) and she seems to have been a rermararkable woman. Two of her sons, one by each husband, and two stepsons, also by each husband, became kings of England, as did her great-nephew, William the Conqueror, Duke of Normandy who used his kinship with Emma as the basis of his claim to the English throne in 1066.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    I have signed up for a number of short courses this autumn and next spring in an effort to keep my brain active and dementia at bay. I always learn new things and enjoy sharing some of my learnings on the web. So this weekend I was back at the City Lit in Central London […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-16090","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-history"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16090","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=16090"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16090\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16102,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16090\/revisions\/16102"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=16090"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=16090"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=16090"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}