A strange 11th-century will and Scandinavians in Hertfordshire in the Reign of Cnut and after

Hertfordshire in south-east England is not an area normally associated with Scandinavian settlement in the period between 850 and 1050, though it was one of the eight shires south and west of Watling Street said to be subject to Danish law in the twelfth-century Leges Edwardi Confessoris. Scandinavian settlement names are absent in Hertfordshire, but a body of Scandinavian personal names preserved in eleventh-century Anglo-Saxon records from the Benedictine abbey of St Albans and in Domesday Book points to the establishment of Scandinavians in the landowning classes of the county in the wake of the Cnutian settlement of the period 1016–1042.