Although the south-west coast was regularly attacked by Viking raiders, Wessex was the only Anglo-Saxon kingdom not to be defeated by the Vikings in the 9th century AD. After Alfred defeated the Danish leader Guthrum in 878, the Danes agreed to remain in the territory known as the ‘Danelaw’. This was roughly the area north and east of an imaginary line drawn from the River Tees to the River Thames. Scandinavian contact probably did continue as the treaty made provision for trade between the two areas.

In the reign of the weak king Ethelred ‘the Unready’ (reigned 979-1013 and 1014-1016), Danish attacks on Wessex began again – in 994 one of their armies wintered in Southampton. In 1003, there was an invasion led by the Danish king Swein. By 1016, Ethelred and his son Edmund Ironside were both dead and Swein’s son Cnut (reigned 1016-35) ruled England from its capital at Winchester. Cnut brought Danes into his administration, surrounding himself with his own household troops, and many Danes joined the English aristocracy.

After Cnut’s death a struggle for succession among English, Scandinavian and Norman claimants ended in the Norman Conquest at the Battle of Hastings in 1066. The Normans were themselves descendants of Vikings who had settled around Rouen in the 10th century.