part 2 question 13

13) What is the Danelaw? How did it come to be? When (Ma, Chloe)

The body of law established by the Danish invaders and settlers in northeast England in the ninth and tenth centuries. The code of laws established in E and N England by Danish invaders and settlers in the 9th and 10th cent. Danelaw, also spelled Danelagh or Danelaga , the northern, central, and eastern region of Anglo-Saxon England colonized by invading Danish armies in the late 9th century. Danelaw , originally the body of law that prevailed in the part of England occupied by the Danes after the treaty of King Alfred with Guthrum in 886. It soon came to mean also the area in which Danish law obtained; according to the treaty, the boundary between England and Danelaw. In the 11th and 12th centuries, it was recognized that all of eastern England between the Rivers Tees and Thames formed a region in which a distinctive form of customary law prevailed in the local courts, differing from West Saxon law to the south and Mercian law to the west. The region derived its name from the Old English Dena lagu (“Danes’ law”) under the assumption that its unique legal practices were of Danish origin, an assumption borne out by modern scholarship.
The Danes did not settle the whole of this wide area intensively, but their powerful military aristocracy dominated for a sufficient period to leave its imprint on local custom. The area of the Danelaw is marked by the survival of Danish personal names and place-names; DNA evidence also has confirmed the link between Denmark and the modern inhabitants of Derbyshire. In local administration the hundred was generally called a wapentake, and the hide was generally replaced by the plowland. Its law was distinguished by procedural differences, severe fines for breach of peace, and the existence of an aristocratic jury of presentment to initiate the prosecution of criminal suspects. In the areas of intensive Danish settlement, there were an unusually high number of sokemen, a class of personally free peasants attached to a lord rather than to the land.










Place-name elements
Most English place-names are made up of two elements (though some are three or more). In a two-element name, we call the first part the 'prefix' and the second part the 'suffix'. In The Danelaw, the prefix is often the name of the person who held that settlement. Experts in the history of names can tell us which Viking names were, so when we come across one, we can be sure that this was a settlement which came into Scandinavian possession.
Prefix and suffix
The suffix is usually a sort of description of the place - whether it was a village, a new 'daughter' settlement hacked out of the woodland, a solitary farm and so on. We know that certain suffixes are Scandinavian in origin. Though the spelling may vary from country to country, these suffixes and their same meanings are found all over the Viking world.
Scandinavian suffixes
-BY The commonest Scandinavian suffix found in The Danelaw is -by. Many -by names are to be found in Yorkshire (especially in the east), around the Mersey and the Lancashire coast, and in the central Midlands. But perhaps the greatest concentration of -by names is in Lincolnshire. One of the best known must be the already mentioned GRIMSBY, but there are many hundreds more.
The -by suffix originally meant a farmstead, but many of these grew into villages, towns or even cities, taking the -by suffix with them in their names.
-THORPE Another common Scandinavian suffix in The Danelaw is -thorpe. This can appear in various form, such as -thorp, -throp or -trop. This originally meant a secondary settlement, that is, an additional small hamlet and land established as a sort of 'overflow' from a village as it became overpopulated. It is interesting to note that most Danelaw -thorpes are still tiny settlements.
HOLME In Scandinavia, the place-name element -holm is usually associated with an island. Not very far from this in meaning is the -holm or -holme found in The Danelaw, where we consider the name to indicate farmland reclaimed from marshy waste. The meanings remain quite close, for such a reclaimed area would, of course, be an 'island' in an otherwise wet area.
WICK The place-name element -wick or -wich is found in many English place-names. We have to be careful how we interpret this. Some -wicks no doubt have the Scandinavian -vik (creek or bay) as their root, especially if they are found on the coast of The Danelaw. Others, though, have their origin in the Anglo-Saxon word for a port, or any other place with a specific trading or manufacturing purpose.
-NESS As skilled seafarers, it is little wonder that the Vikings paid attention to coastal features, especially promontories and headlands which would be important navigation markers or sometimes hazards. Where settlements grew up at such places in The Danelaw, we often find the Scandinavian place-name element -ness.
People or language? School history books sometimes give the impression that all the places in The Danelaw with Scandinavian names were populated by Viking settlers. The Old Norse naming customs were, we now believe, quickly adopted by everyone, so a village with a Viking lord but a mainly English population might soon find itself with Scandinavian or hybrid re-naming. This re-naming would sometimes be done by people who were resident outside that particular settlement, as a way of identifying it. So, we cannot be sure that the people giving the name were always Scandinavian. All we can be certain of is that they were users of Scandinavian words in their speech. We also know that the influence of Old Norse on naming practices was felt for a long time. Many -by,
-thorpe and other names were created decades (or even centuries) after the Scandinavians became 'invisible' in the general population.

What is the Danelaw? How did it come to be? When?
First of all, Danelaw is not a ‘law’ as we have seen before with Grimm’s law and Verner’s law. It is a PLACE.
Where is it?
http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fichier:Britain_886.jpg

The name of this place (Danelaw) comes from the fact that the laws of the Danes were dominating those of the Anglo-Saxons.
Deux milles ans de Langue Anglaise, André Crépin
p.163
Les vikings (Danois et Norvégiens) ont envahi l’Angleterre au 9e siècle. Le roi Alfred (871-899) arrêta leur avancé mais dut reconnaître leur domination sur la moitié est et nord de l’Angleterre, à l’est d’une ligne allant de Chester à Londres, région appelé par la suite Danelaw. On y parle un anglais fortement influencé par le scandinave.

The story of English, Robert McCrum, Robert MacNeil, William Cran.
p.68
After their defeat by Alfred the Great, the Danes withdrew north of a line agreed by treaty (known later as the ‘Danelaw’), where they settled alongside the Saxon communities.
Wiki: Danelaw is also used to describe the set of legal terms and definitions created in the treaties between the English king, Alfred the Great, and the Danish warlord, Guthrum, written following Guthrum's defeat at the Battle of Ethandun in 878