thumb|right|The [[England Runestones#U 241|runestone U 241 in Lingsberg, Uppland, Sweden, was raised by the grandchildren of Ulfríkr circa 1050 in commemoration of his twice receiving Danegeld in England.]]
Danegeld (; literally "Dane yield") was a tax raised to pay tribute or protection money to the Viking raiders to save a land from being ravaged. It was called the geld or gafol in eleventh-century sources. It was characteristic of royal policy in both England and Francia during the ninth through eleventh centuries, collected both as tributary, to buy off the attackers, and as stipendiary, to pay the defensive forces. The term Danegeld did not appear until the late eleventh century. In Anglo-Saxon England tribute payments to the Danes was known as gafol and the levy raised to support the standing army, for the defence of the realm, was known as heregeld (army-tax).
England
In England, a hide was notionally an area of land sufficient to support one family, but their true size and economic value varied enormously. The hide's purpose was as a unit of assessment and was the basis for the land-tax that became known as Danegeld. Initially it was levied as a tribute to buy off Viking invaders but after the Danish Conquest of 1016 it was retained as a permanent land-tax to pay for the realm's defence.
The Viking expeditions to England were usually led by the Danish kings, but they were composed of warriors from all over Scandinavia, and they eventually brought home more than 100 tonnes of silver.
thumb|upright|left|The [[England Runestones#U 344|runestone U 344 in Orkesta, Uppland, Sweden, raised in memory of the Viking Ulf of Borresta, says that three times he had taken Danegeld in England. The first one was with Skagul Toste, the second one with Thorkell the Tall and the last one with Canute the Great.]]
Although the tribute payments made to the Vikings, prior to the Norman Conquest, are commonly known as Danegeld, the payments were at the time actually called gafol, meaning "tax" or "tribute". In 1012 Æthelred the Unready introduced an annual land tax to pay for a force of Scandinavian mercenaries, led by Thorkell the Tall, to help defend the realm. Following Æthelred the kings of England used the same tax collection method to fund their own standing armies; this was known as heregeld (army-tax). Heregeld was abolished by Edward the Confessor in 1051. It was the Norman administration who called the tax Danegeld.
Anglo-Saxon era
An English payment of 10,000 Roman pounds (3,300 kg) of silver was first made in 991 following the Viking victory at the Battle of Maldon in Essex, when Æthelred was advised by Sigeric, Archbishop of Canterbury, and the aldermen of the south-western provinces to buy off the Vikings rather than continue the armed struggle. One manuscript of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle said Olav Tryggvason led the Viking forces.
In 994 the Danes, under King Sweyn Forkbeard and Olav Tryggvason, returned and laid siege to London. They were once more bought off, and the amount of silver paid impressed the Danes with the idea that it was more profitable to extort payments from the English than to take whatever booty they could plunder.
Further payments were made in 1002, and in 1007 Æthelred bought two years peace with the Danes for 36,000 troy pounds<!--troy pounds were used for this conversion, not sure if that identification isn't an anachronism as well--> (13,400 kg) of silver. In 1012, following the capture and murder of the Archbishop of Canterbury, and the sack of Canterbury, the Danes were bought off with another 48,000 troy pounds (17,900 kg) of silver.
In 1016 Sweyn Forkbeard's son, Canute, became King of England. After two years he felt sufficiently in control of his new kingdom to the extent of being able to pay off all but 40 ships of his invasion fleet, which were retained as a personal bodyguard, with a huge Danegeld of 72,000 troy pounds (26,900 kg) of silver collected nationally, plus a further 10,500 pounds (3,900 kg) of silver collected from London.
thumb|upright|The [[England runestones#U 194|runestone U 194, in a grove near Väsby, Uppland, Sweden, was raised by a Viking in commemoration of his receiving one Danegeld in England.]]
This kind of extorted tribute was not unique to England: according to Snorri Sturluson and Rimbert, Finland, Estonia and Latvia (see also Grobin, now Grobiņa) paid the same kind of tribute to the Swedes. In fact, the Primary Chronicle relates that the regions paying protection money extended east towards Moscow, until the Finnic and Slavic tribes rebelled and drove the Varangians overseas. Similarly, the Sami peoples were frequently forced to pay tribute in the form of pelts. A similar procedure also existed in Iberia, where the contemporary Christian states were largely supported on tribute gold from the taifa kingdoms.
It is estimated that the total amount of money paid by the Anglo-Saxons amounted to some sixty million pence, and at the farm where the runestone Sö 260 talks of a voyage in the West, a hoard of several hundred English coins was found. According to David Bates, it was "a national tax of a kind unknown in western Europe"; indeed, asserts that the national system of land taxation developed to raise the Danegeld was the first to reappear in Western Europe since the collapse of the Western Roman Empire. It was used by William the Conqueror as the principal tool for underwriting continental wars, as well as providing for royal appetites and the costs of conquest, rather than for buying-off the Viking menace. He and his successors levied the geld more frequently than the Anglo-Saxon kings, and at higher rates; the six-shilling geld of 1084 is infamous, and the geld in Ely of 1096, for example, was double its normal rate. Judith Green states that from 1110, war and the White Ship calamity led to further increases in taxation efforts. By 1130 Henry I was taxing the Danegeld annually, at two shillings on the hide. That year, according to the chronicle of John of Worcester the king promised to suspend the Danegeld for seven years, a promise renewed by Stephen at his coronation but which was afterwards broken. Henry II revived the Danegeld in 1155–1156, but 1161–1162 marks the last year the Danegeld was recorded on a pipe roll, and the tax fell into disuse.
The importance of the Danegeld to the Exchequer may be assessed by its return of about £2400 in 1129–1130, which was about ten per cent of the total (about £23,000) paid that year.
Judged by an absolute rather than a contemporary standard, there is much to criticise in the collection of the Danegeld by the early 12th century: it was based on ancient assessments of land productivity, and there were numerous privileged reductions or exemptions, granted as marks of favour that served to cast those left paying it in an "unfavoured" light: "Exemptions were very much a matter of royal favour, and were adjusted to meet changing circumstances ... in this way Danegeld was a more flexible instrument of taxation than most historians have been prepared to allow." Henry I granted tax liberties to London in 1133, and exempted the city from taxes such as scot, Danegeld, and murdrum.
From the late twelfth century, a levy on moveables, which required the consent of parliament, replaced the geld. The principle of "no consent, but exemption", gave way to that of "consent, but no exemption".
Francia
Brittany
That a country-wide Danegeld was ever collected in the Duchy of Brittany is uncertain. Certainly they were paid off on more than one occasion, and such payouts may have included money (besides other valuables), but the imposition of a tax on the people to pay either a stipend or a tribute is not recorded in the sources, although it is possible that some monies were raised this way. It is more likely that purely local Danegeld were raised in times of emergency. In 847 the Breton leader Nominoe was defeated three times by some Danish Vikings before finally opening negotiations with their leaders and enticing them to leave by offering them gifts, as recorded in the contemporary Annales Bertiniani: