Page 125 - Four Thousand Years Ago by Geoffrey Bibby

not have been entirely unknown to the villagers, while the itin­

erant traders occasionally had opportunity on their way south to
pick up a necklace or two of Scandinavian amber.
It is not unusual, in fact, for the traders to make a detour on
their way south, first visiting tire agricultural settlements of York­

shire, and then paralleling the east coast until they reached East
Anglia. For there, among tribes of their own people, they could
meet groups of newcomers from beyond the North Sea.

There has always been considerable traffic across the North
Sea between Scandinavia and England. Of course the great ships
of the passage-grave builders, coming from the Mediterranean,
had for many generations been making their voyages once or

twice a year, sailing around the north of Scotland to a landfall
on the Danish coast. But in addition the “native” fishers on

both sides of the water frequently cross over in their large and
seaworthy skin boats, rowing and sailing the distance in two
or three days, and keeping alive a contact which (though they
did not know it) was older than the North Sea itself.

But of late the traffic has been all one way. And the boats
which reach the English east coast from Denmark and Sweden
are deep laden with women and children and household goods.

The crews of these boats are refugees, settlers in search of a
new home. And where they arrive they tell, in their almost in­
comprehensible dialect, of the havoc spread through their home­

land by new waves of battle-ax-wielding herdsmen.
The battle-ax people had first appeared in Jutland from the
southeast in the time of their great-grandfathers. But they had

come in small numbers, and had not interfered appreciably with
the life of the original inhabitants. Now they are flooding in,
invading Jutland from Germany and passing on to the Danish
islands, where they meet others of their own race coming by

way of Sweden. The newcomers to Britain tell graphically how
the settled farmers of Denmark and south Sweden, with their

acres cleared and burnt out of the forest, their timber villages
and stone passage-graves, are gradually being overwhelmed by
the incoming herdsmen, with no means of escape because they
have no boats. They tell how they themselves, seafarers from time

immemorial and accustomed to long voyages on sealing and