Burned cakes and Vikings

After Patrick and Columbus,came the Vikings. According to my history teacher, wild savage men who did terrible things to the people of Britain. Somehow they came to Lindisfarne out of the mists of the North Sea. What mystified me was that they should be lucky enough to land on an isolated island full of treasure. It turns out that these Vikings were originally merchants trading in amber, fur and walrus ivory, and it was most likely that the traders went back to Viking land and told them the Brits stored their gold and silver in churches with only men in frocks to guard them and that brought the soldiers. Have we any of our own empire building to confirm this kind of thing? There is the East India Company. It started as a few trading posts and, within a hundred years had become a private army that controlled a sub-continent. The Brits just did it on a massive scale. The story goes on that Alfred the Great and his sons had chased the Vikings out of Britain about a hundred and fifty years later. Can you imagine what effect the Americans who came here during WW2 would have had on the population if they had stayed for a hundred years? Mixed race wouldn’t look at it! Not only that but the Vikings who came in the first lot would not be over keen to share what they had fought to get with the late-comers, so the whole history book story seems a bit dubious. If you’ve ever argued with a sea-side boarding house landlady, you’ll know what I mean and can sympathise with Alfred when his landlady spoke to him about burning the cakes and understand why the epic tale has survived for so many years.