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of money "to keep hunger, and heathen men if need
be, from the Abbey." Meredith of Wales (989) paid
a penny a head for his subjects to ransom them from
the Black Army. The new Danegeld was the old
payment on a larger scale and in a more business-like
style. The sums exacted were increased to an extent
which seems almost fabulous, considering the rateable
value of land, and they could only have been raised
by recourse to the treasures of monasteries, churches
and the wealthy, in days when hoards of gold and
silver made up into valuable shrines, book-covers,
furniture and personal ornaments were the chief and
most available form of riches. The work of the
Saxon gold- and silver-smiths, to judge from its
remains, was highly artistic and intrinsically valuable.
It must have been weighed out by the pound,
perhaps melted down or broken up, for the Vikings ;
for all the hoards of English coins found in Scandinavia,
with all that may be imagined as lost and still
to seek, or spent and again circulated, would be
only as a drop in the bucket to the sums they are
said to have received. After £10,000 in 991,
£16,000 was paid in 994, £24,000 in 1002, £30,000
in 1007, and in 1009 East Kent paid £3,000. In
1014 the sum of £21,000 was paid; in 1018 Knút,
when newly crowned, took £72,000, beside £11,000
paid by the Londoners alone. In 1040 Hördaknút
took £21,099, beside £11,048 paid for thirty-two
ships. With a Dane upon the throne the Danegeld
seems to have become an occasional war-tax, but it
was levied more than once by the Confessor, who is
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