Danelaw

The Danelaw was the part of England in which Danish law prevailed between the late ninth century and the Norman Conquest. Its origin lay in the Great Heathen Army that landed in 865 and conquered Northumbria, East Anglia and eastern Mercia; the Danes made York, Jorvik, the centre of a Scandinavian kingdom. After Guthrum's defeat at Edington in 878, the Treaty of Wedmore and the later treaty between Alfred the Great and Guthrum fixed a boundary running roughly from London to the Dee, within which Danish settlers kept their own law and customs while acknowledging English overlordship. The region covered Yorkshire, the central and eastern Midlands and East Anglia, and its towns of Derby, Leicester, Lincoln, Nottingham and Stamford formed the Five Boroughs. Viking rule in York ended when Eric Bloodaxe was expelled and killed in 954, but the legal customs of the Danelaw persisted long after the English reconquest, and the term itself is first recorded in the early eleventh century. Norse-influenced dialects and place-names survived for centuries. The Norman Conquest of 1066 brought the whole of England under a single Norman legal order.