Looking back to the year 1000, the mid-twelfth-century historian Henry of Huntingdon characterized the coming of the Danes and the Normans as a divine punishment for the English comparable with the Britons' fate after the invasions by the Angles, Saxons and Jutes:

This retrospective view by the bilingual married archdeacon, son of a Norman clerk and an English mother, whose job required him to travel around in the Danelaw, is a valuable starting point for the present chapter. Between 900 and 1200 England experienced repeated foreign invasion, culminating in three periods of extended rule. While the first resulted in settlement and occupation of much of northeast England in the late ninth and early tenth century, the latter were political takeovers by a military elite which turned the eleventh century into an era of unprecedented trauma in the history of the English people. In this chapter the elite small-scale immigration will take centre stage with subsidiary roles for the various groups of immigrants that entered the country as they have done throughout English history (mercenaries and merchants, artisans and craftsmen as well as clerks and clergy).