he Danes settled with the arrival in England of the Great Army in the late 9th century (Cheshire would have been very much frontier country).
In 813AD, in the wake of their defeat at Buttington, a Danish army occupied and wintered in Chester before being driven out (by hunger rather than by English arms) and escaping to Essex.
The Norse colony on the Wirral was part of a seperate migration, the importance of which (for north-western England at least) is all to often ignored. They came - if Irish anals are reliable - under a Norse chieftain named Ingimund, following their expulsion by Irish forces from Dublin and defeat in Wales in 902AD.
They were granted the Wirral by Eolderman Aethelred and Lady Aethelflaed of Mercia. The Norse repaid this generosity by attacking Chester in around 907AD - an assault which the chronicle reports the English repulsed by pouring boiling beer onto their assailents!
Cheshire, at this point, was still on the borderlands of the English kingdom as English fortresses built at Eddisbury (915AD) and Manchester (919AD) indicate. In 924AD Chester was the scene of a revolt against West Saxon rule in Mercia.
