FIRST PERIOD OF THEIR HISTORY. 15 



was in a low condition. Its laborers were inured to the hardest fare, 

 and the rudest of homes. The invading Danes were not better in 

 their own homes than were the subdued Saxons of Northumbria in 

 theirs, and between them both, we may imagine that with the alternate 

 struggles of invasion on one side, and defense or submission on the 

 other, agriculture held but a meager opportunity for improvement. 



Concurrent with their forays on Northumbria, the Danes extended 

 their raids southward, taking possession for a time of Holstein, Utrecht, 

 and the northerly portion of Holland. These countries they held, 

 as they did north-eastern England, for purposes of plunder, trade 

 and political advantage. As all these outlying provinces enjoyed a 

 milder climate and a more productive soil than their own, the sea 

 and land rovers profited largely in their conquests, and extended 

 their commerce, not only with the peoples whose homes they had 

 usurped, but with distant countries as well. Hence they waxed rich 

 and powerful, as riches and power were then considered. Among 

 the prominent articles of their traffic and interchange between Den- 

 mark and the provinces over which they held their fitful sway, was 

 that of domestic animals, and the chief of these were neat cattle. 



In north-western Europe, and all along the coast through Sweden, 

 Denmark, and southwardly through the 'subjugated countries towards 

 Holland, the cattle were a large, raw-boned race, of which we now 

 know little beyond what the ancient chronicles say of them, and as 

 they have been more lately known, only that they were useful beasts, 

 strong for labor, yielding largely of milk, coarse in flesh, peculiar in 

 color, and short in the horn. Such cattle, or those near akin to them, 

 exist in those countries now. It may well be supposed that the 

 continental cattle were frequently carried across the narrow sea sep- 

 arating England from the land of the Danes and their contiguous 

 southern neighbors, and that they became a permanent stock of the 

 country, as a cognate race existed in the Northumbrian counties, 

 when the first dawnings of agricultural advancement opened upon 

 the landholders and cultivators of that region some centuries after 

 the victorious Norman had firmly established himself on the English 

 throne, and driven the Danes from the possession of its soil. 



For many years after their invasion and conquest, the Normans 

 encountered much hostility before the stubborn Saxons and Danes 

 (the latter which had settled among them now become incorporated 

 with the others in a common nationality) peacefully submitted to the 

 rigorous yoke which, from the moment he had secured his footing on 

 English ground, the Conqueror had fastened on the necks of the 



