A man hight Tosti. He it was who broke the long peace. In those days the Danes lived mainly on their islands and in Scania. Only the northern fourth of Jutland paid scot to their king. However, more and more of them were moving in, as younger sons overflowed from olden farmsteads. For the most part this happened quietly. The Jutes thereabouts were not many and much land lay open for the taking. The newcomers cleared, built, plowed, and married daughters of the earlier dwellers. Thorps grew, some until they were towns; ships sailed in and out; overland trade waxed; households did well.

Otherwise the Dane-king held only a pale, some two miles long and wide, on the eastern shore across from Funen. Hadding’s father Gram had taken it with the sword, that he might have a sheriff there to keep watch on the Little Belt that sundered island and mainland.

Elsewhere the Jutes were in the hands of kings who were hardly more than quarrelsome chieftains. They did not have all the rest of the peninsula. The Anglians owned much of its western half and lands reaching on toward Frisia. The Saxons filled the eastern side of its lower neck though most of their country swept from the valley of the Elbe through the valley of the Ysel. Some of their kingdoms were strong.

Though Dane, Jute, Anglian, and Saxon thought of themselves as unlike each other, they were closely akin in blood, tongue, and lifeways. Many of them were going west overseas to harry the Franks and carve new homes out of England.

Tosti hailed from the backbone of mid-Jutland, the son of a poor yeoman who barely grubbed a living from a few gaunt acres. The father died while the boy was small, and Tosti did not get on with the man who took his mother in. Nor was he ever willing for such a lowly life Early on he ran about with other youths of his bent. Their wildness fed on itself. As they got their growth, they started to waylay men, whom they robbed and left beaten half to death.

Word went around and charges were brought at the Thing. The fathers could not pay weregild. The gang would not even come speak for themselves. Instead, they broke into lonely garths while the owners and carles were at the meeting. They raped, killed, and robbed. Thereafter they were named wolves in the halidom, whom any man could slay without having to answer to the law.

They took to the heath. First Tosti split the skull of his stepfather.