The Collaborative International Dictionary
Danegeld \Dane"geld`\, Danegelt \Dane"gelt`\, n. [AS. danegeld.
See Dane, and Geld, n.] (Eng. Hist.)
An annual tax formerly laid on the English nation to buy off
the ravages of Danish invaders, or to maintain forces to
oppose them. It afterward became a permanent tax, raised by
an assessment, at first of one shilling, afterward of two
shillings, upon every hide of land throughout the realm.
--Wharton's Law Dict. Tomlins.
Wikipedia
The Danegeld (; "Danish tax", literally "Dane tribute") was a tax raised to pay tribute to the Viking raiders to save a land from being ravaged. It was called the geld or gafol in eleventh-century sources. The term Danegeld did not appear until the early twelfth century. 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.
Usage examples of "danegeld".
If you have ken or a lord who would pay Danegeld for your release, name him now, and I will send word to him.
He had depleted the royal coffers enough times to meet the exorbitant Danegeld prices demanded of him to get the Danes out of Wessex in the past.
But the Vulcans knew from their own bitter experience with one another that once one paid Danegeld, one never got rid of the Dane.
Franks, and not least Charles the Bald, sought other methods than the payment of danegeld to keep the Vikings out.
First he again paid danegeld in return for renewed promises from the Vikings to leave the country and, secondly, he allowed them to pass the two bridges blocking their further progress up the Seine, and spread over the whole land.
In 867 it invaded Mercia and took Nottingham, after which the Mercians paid danegeld and the Vikings retired to comfortable positions behind the Roman walls of York, where they spent the winter.
England, for then began the fatal method of buying-off the Vikings by payments of danegeld -- thousands of pounds of silver year by year which brought no more than temporary respite.
He dismissed the great fleet and sent it back to Denmark, paying off its men with the biggest danegeld ever levied in England -10,500 pounds of silver from London itself and 72,000 pounds from the rest of the country.
Not until the large payments of danegeld by England at the end of the tenth century and the first half of the eleventh did Anglo-Saxon coins become plentiful.
In the end, Aethelred bought their allegiance with a danegeld of sixteen thousand pounds.
They are intent on the kingdom of Mercia right now, even though those fools have paid them Danegeld each year to keep the Vikings at bay.
As for your offer of Danegeld, one of my travel-mates was a Granger nobleman, something of a distant cousin.