209 
the crosses found during the course of the demolition of the 
old parish church at Leeds. Having had the opportunity, 
since I last called the attention of the Society to this subject, 
of studying the history of the Danish kings of Northumbria 
to greater advantage, by the aid of the Irish annals, I now 
subjoin a series of notices, derived from those annals and our 
own English Chronicle, of the Onlafs or the Olafs who were 
connected with the history of Northumbria in the ninth and 
tenth centuries, that my readers may be able to judge for 
themselves to which of these kings the inscription in ques- 
tion may with most probability be supposed to refer. 
I. Olaf, son of a king of Denmark, with his brothers, 
Sitric and Ivar, came to Ireland in the j^ear 853, and was 
accepted as king by all the foreigners there, and he is notijed 
in the years 859, 861, 863, 869. In 863, he and Ivar and 
Uisli are named together as the three chieftains of the 
foreigners in Ireland. In 866, "Amlaiph and Auisle went 
to Fortren, with all the foreigners of Ireland and Scotland, 
and spoiled all the Picts, and brought all the hostages with 
them." Immediately before the notice of the death of ^Ue, at 
York, in 867, the Annals of Ulster record the death of Uisli 
by the hands of his brethren ; and, as this is omitted in the 
Annals of the Four Masters, (which seldom mention events 
that occurred out of Ireland), it is probable that Olaf was 
in England at the time, as Ivar certainly was. In 869, he 
was in Ireland, and burned Armagh. In 870, the Annals of 
Inisfallen tell us that Amhlaoimh and lomhair " were gone 
with a fleet of 200 ships to assist the Danes of Britain, 
with their Danish leaders, Hingar and Hubba;" and this, 
doubtless, was the "great summer army" which came to 
Reading, as the English Chronicle records, to reinforce the 
Danes after the battle of Merton. In the same year Olaf and 
Ivar besieged Alcluid (Dumbarton), for four months, and 
destroyed it. This was after the conclusion of the war in 
