With no roads and no communications such a centralising scheme is really impracticable.

The disintegrated English kingdoms made little show of fighting for their Saxon over-lord.

They could accept a Dane for master almost as readily as they could accept a Saxon.
But besides these surface causes, there was a deeper and more fundamental cause underlying the difference.

The Scandinavians were nearer to the pure English in blood and speech than they were to the Saxons.

In their old home the two races had lived close together,--in Sleswick, Jutland, and Scania,--while the Saxons had dwelt further south, near the Frankish border, by the lowlands of the Elbe.