So there remained land, the basic source of wealth in the European economy at all times up to very nearly the present. But this must have presented its problems, too. As previously noted, a large part of the Ragnarssons’ army decided they had done enough, and the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle entry for 877 (really 876) records flatly, ‘Halfdan [Ragnarsson] shared out the land of Northumbria, and they were ploughing and providing for themselves.’36 But the question that needs to be asked (but rarely is, for it can only be answered speculatively) is: who had previously owned the land they were ploughing? Dispossessing individual small farmers would be easy enough initially – obviously a small Yorkshire village, with maybe a dozen or twenty able-bodied men in it, could offer little resistance to a Viking army, or even a well-armed ship’s crew. But permanently dispossessing ‘peasant proprietors’, as they are called in academic language, would be a risky business. Peasant proprietors are deeply attached to their land – naturally enough, since it is their sole livelihood. Even if the previous owner of a farmstead was killed, there would be relatives, neighbours, runaways hiding out in the woods likely to retaliate. An ex-Viking living on his own in a farmstead could not expect to sleep easy – and living on his own, ploughing his own land as a bóndi or independent farmer, must have been the ambition of many Vikings. But after all the battles, there must have been many casualties among the Anglo-Saxon ‘thegnage’, the military aristocracy. Replacing them would be an easier business. A successful Viking might take over the land of a dead Anglo-Saxon thegn, perhaps retain the ‘home farm’, and then tell the ‘churl’ tenants of the former thegn that they were now his tenants, sharecroppers as they perhaps always had been. A wise Viking might even ensure that they got better terms from him than from their previous lord. An even safer target would be Church land, worked by tenants of a monastery or a cathedral. The monks were no longer there, nor the bishops – lists of Northumbrian bishops cease for a century or more. Their previous tenants might readily accept a mere change of masters, especially when they realized church tithes were no longer payable. Another factor is that dead thegns must have left many widows, as happened after the Norman Conquest of 1066, and daughters with no means of support. Military conquests are carried out by men, who in most cases do not have wives with them (apart from top men like Hastein). A natural solution is to marry into the relics of the native aristocracy.