Viking Invasions of England

The Viking invasions of England were a series of raids, campaigns and settlement efforts by Scandinavian seafarers that began with the raid on the monastery of Lindisfarne in 793 AD and continued intermittently for nearly three centuries, reshaping the political map of Anglo-Saxon England. Danish and Norwegian forces progressed from coastal raiding to sustained conquest, and by the late ninth century the "Great Heathen Army" had overrun the kingdoms of Northumbria, East Anglia and Mercia, leaving Wessex under Alfred the Great as the sole surviving Anglo-Saxon kingdom; Alfred's victory at the Battle of Edington in 878 secured a division of England along the boundary of the Danelaw, the Viking-controlled northeast. Renewed Danish invasions under Sweyn Forkbeard and his son Cnut the Great culminated in Cnut's conquest of the whole of England in 1016. The era of large-scale Scandinavian invasion effectively closed with the defeat of the Norwegian king Harald Hardrada at the Battle of Stamford Bridge in September 1066, weeks before William of Normandy's own invasion at Hastings.