4 NORTH SEA FISHERS AND FIGHTERS 



includes England's two greatest and bloodiest battlefields 

 Towton Field and Marston Moor. 



The Jutland wolves who came to England were 

 followed by marauding Danes, and again England was 

 conquered, though only for the time, by sons of the 

 North Sea. The Danes swept over England, and 

 the tide of battle ebbed and flowed, until they were 

 massacred and their power was crushed. These Danes 

 were the Vikings or Norsemen of song and story. 

 They were plunderers and pirates, of the same stock as 

 the English, by whom at last, under Alfred, they were 

 beaten and driven out of the country, but not before 

 they had made a lasting impression on the race. They 

 launched their fine long open boats on the North Sea, 

 and with oars or a squaresail, or both, swept across 

 it towards our own coasts. We know exactly from 

 remains which have been found what those craft were 

 like, and can realise what the Norsemen were, for on 

 the North Sea shores of England there survive many of 

 the Vikings' words, and there are amongst the fishers of 

 the coast not a few fair-haired men and maids whose 

 ancestors came over to us more than a thousand years 

 ago. Some of the craft, too, are almost unaltered since 

 the Norsemen's days, and in the famous cobles of the 

 Yorkshire coast we may see something closely resembling 

 their smaller vessels, whilst from the fishers of the 

 north-east coast we may hear expressions or words 

 that have come unaltered down the centuries. There is 

 still at Flamborough Head, on the Yorkshire coast, the 

 ravine named Dane's Dyke, a region which is even yet 

 sometimes called " Little Denmark." 



So far the North Sea had played a leading part in 



