There were two distinct approaches to Britain from Scandinavia. The more northerly led from the western fjords of Norway to Shetland and Ireland. The vikings who followed this route were mainly Norwegians. The more southerly route which was followed mainly Danes, led from southern Jutland along the Frisian coast to the Rhine mouths and thence down Channel to the opposing shores of England and France. For some fifty years form c. 800 the raiders came across the North Sea with the easterly winds of spring and returned home with their loot before the westerly gales of autumn. Soon after the middle of the ninth century some of them began to pass the winter at convenient coastal bases such as Sheppey or Thanet. The nature of Scandinavian Invasion and settlements varied from region to region in Anglo-Saxon England, especially in Danelaw. In the actual campaigns there was devastation and destruction. But when it came to settlement, one general feature of a distinctly unexpected nature stands out. There were apparently no major displacement of existing population. Where the Dane or Norwegian settled, he supplemented rather than superseded the existing community. There was still at this stage room for clearings to be made and good arable to be found in England. The Scandinavians, ultimately of the same stock as the Anglo-Saxon, with the same agrarian needs, and probably with the same basic equipment, settled relatively quickly and smoothly into the agrarian and social pattern of English life. Without idealizing overmuch this Scandinavian conquest one can say that their powers of assimilation, and power to be assimilated, were much in evidence, such as evidence of place names, language elements, personal names and the structures of agrarian and legal institutions, in later Anglo-Saxon England. The Scandinavian settlements were agrarian migrations. Scandinavians had sought and found in Anglo-Saxon England a social pattern similar to that which they desired. The nature of Scandinavian settlement was premimarily agrarian. To assuage land-hunger was their object.