The difference is doubtless due in part to merely surface causes. East
Anglia had long lost her autonomy, and, while sometimes ruled by Mercia,
was sometimes broken up under several ealdormen. For her and for
Northumbria the conquest was but a change from a West Saxon to a Danish
master. The house of Ecgberht had broken down the national and tribal
organisation, and was incapable of substituting a central organisation
in its place. With no roads and no communications such a centralising
scheme is really impracticable. The disintegrated English kingdoms made
little show of fighting for their Saxon over-lord. They could accept a
Dane for master almost as readily as they could accept a Saxon.

But besides these surface causes, there was a deeper and more
fundamental cause underlying the difference. The Scandinavians were
nearer to the pure English in blood and speech than they were to the
Saxons. In their old home the two races had lived close together,–in
Sleswick, Jutland, and Scania,–while the Saxons had dwelt further
south, near the Frankish border, by the lowlands of the Elbe. To the
English of Northumbria, the Saxons of Wessex were almost foreigners.
Even at the present day, when the existence of a recognised literary
dialect has done so much to obliterate provincial varieties of speech in
England, a Dorsetshire peasant, speaking in a slightly altered form the
classical West Saxon of Ælfred, has great difficulty in understanding a
Yorkshire peasant, speaking in a slightly altered form the classical
Northumbrian of Bæda. But in the ninth century the differences between
the two dialects were probably far greater. On the other hand, though
Danish and Anglian have widely separated at the present day, and were
widely distinct even in the days of Cnut, it is probable that at this
earlier period they were still, to some extent, mutually comprehensible.
Thus, the heathen Scandinavian may have seemed to the Northumbrian and
the East Anglian almost like a fellow-countryman, while the West Saxon