Welcome to the History of English Podcast, a podcast about the history of the English language.

This is episode 60, Danes, Death and Taxes.

In this episode, we're going to look at the conquest of England by Scandinavian kings

in the 11th century.

In many ways, this was a prelude to the Norman conquest which took place about a half century

later.

A couple of the underlying themes of this episode are death and taxes, so we'll also explore

the etymology of certain words associated with those inevitabilities of life.

But before we begin, let me remind you that the website for the podcast is historyofenglishpodcast.com

and you can always reach me directly at kevinathistoryofenglishpodcast.com.

So one quick correction from the last episode, I discussed the coronation of king edger.

And in discussing that coronation, I said that edger was coronated, and several of you

contacted me to point out that coronated is not actually a word.

The verb form is actually crowned.

Of course, as we saw, coronation and crown both come from the same flattened root, but

I just wanted to make that note.

And trust me, that's probably not the biggest grammatical mistake in the podcast.

Also, I began the last episode with some breaking news about a DNA study which showed some links

between ancient germans and the people who are thought to be the first Indo-Europeans

in the Eurasian Step Region.

Well, since that last episode, the findings of another big DNA study have been released.

And this study concerns DNA in the British Isles.

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