DECLINE OF THE SAXON OCTARCHY.
"Let us sit upon the ground,
And tell sad stories of the death of kings:--
How some have been deposed, some slain in war;
Some haunted by the ghosts they have deposed;
Some poisoned by their wives, some sleeping killed;
All murdered:--For within the hollow crown
That rounds the mortal temples of a king,
Keeps Death his court."--SHAKSPERE.
The remainder of our journey through the kingdoms which anciently
formed the Saxon Octarchy now lies in a more direct road, where there
are fewer of those perplexing paths and winding ways, such as we have
hitherto been compelled to thread, in our difficult course through this
dimly-discovered country of the Past. We are now on the sun-bright
borders of those dark old forest fastnesses, amid which we could
scarcely see what flowers were at our feet, or catch a clear glimpse
of the outstretched sky that hung above our heads; a few steps from
this, and we leave this land of twilight and uncertain shadows behind.
After the death of Ecgfrid, Alfred, who is already distinguished as
having fought in the battle in which Penda fell, and afterwards, as
having married his daughter, ascended the throne of Northumbria. We
have before shown how, on account of his birth, his succession was
disputed by the nobles; against their decision he offered neither
defence nor resistance, but betaking himself to study, he so enriched
his mind, under the instruction of the famous Bishop Wilfrid, that
Bede classes him as first amongst the kings of Anglo-Saxons for his
literary acquirements. He "waded not through slaughter to a throne,"
but calmly abided his time, and when it came, quitted his study to sway
the sceptre. His court was the resort of literary men and enlightened
travellers, and Aldhelm, the celebrated scholar of that day, stood
high in his favour. There was a firmness about his character worthy
of the name which afterwards becomes so endeared to us, for when he
could not conscientiously agree in certain matters with his old tutor,
Wilfrid, he allowed the bishop to quit his dominions, nor had a letter
from the Pope influence enough to alter his resolution. Nothing of
note appears to have occurred in Northumbria during his reign, for the
expulsion of Eadwulf, and the ascension of Osred, were accomplished
without difficulty. Ceolwulf came next, to whom Bede dedicated his
Ecclesiastical History; but we must not step too suddenly into the
familiar light which seems all at once about to break upon us.
Ceadwalla, a descendant of the renowned Cerdric's, after the death of
Ecgfrid, made a stand against the nobles of Wessex, who had banished
him from that kingdom. He first attacked the king of Sussex, slew
him, and desolated his dominions. He then, accompanied by his brother
Mollo, made an inroad into Kent, where they ravaged and destroyed the
towns and villages for miles around. While Mollo, with several of his
soldiers, were busied in plundering a house, they were surrounded by
the enraged men of Kent, who, preventing the escape of the marauders,
set fire to the building on every side, and burnt all within alive. The
king of Wessex revenged his brother's death, and, far and wide, around
the scene of this terrible sacrifice, he made "a land of mourning."
After this he went on a pilgrimage to Rome, was baptized by the Pope,
and died the week after.
Ina then ascended the throne of Wessex; his celebrated laws are still
in existence, and as they throw considerable light upon the manners
of this remote period, we will take a hasty glance at them before
proceeding further. If a child was not baptized within thirty days
after its birth, a penalty of thirty shillings was demanded; if that
period elapsed and the ceremony was still neglected, the priest or the
parents must forfeit all they possessed. If a slave or theow worked on
Sunday by his master's commands, he became free; if a freeman worked on
that day, by his own consent, he forfeited his freedom. If any one sold
his servant, whether a slave or a freeman, he must pay his full value.
If a poor man died, and left his wife with a child, six shillings
a-year was to be paid for its maintenance, together with a cow in the
summer, and an ox in winter--its kindred was to take charge of the
house until the child became of age. If a man was killed, his life was
valued according to what he was worth, and the slayer had to pay a
fixed price for his death. Crude as these laws are, and barbarous as
they prove the people to have been for which they were made, still they
are the first landmarks, reared in a wild and uncivilized country,
which point out to man the extent of his possessions and his power;
the first attempt to draw an even line between might and right; for
here the poor theow, the slave of the soil, he who was sold, like the
cattle upon the estate, to the next purchaser, felt secure within his
allotted mark. The day of holy rest was his own; if his lord compelled
him to labour, the laws of Ina, next day, made him a free man. Ina,
like his predecessors, was compelled to fight his way to peace, and
amid his hostilities, he became involved in a war with Ceolred, king of
Mercia. His queen appears to have been as courageous as himself, and is
said to have besieged one of her husband's enemies at Taunton, and to
have levelled the castle in which he was sheltered to the ground. Ina
rebuilt the abbey of Glastonbury, and endowed it with rich gifts. It
seems to have grown a custom amongst the Saxon kings at this period,
to go on pilgrimage to Rome, resign their crowns, and become monks.
Ina's queen had long tried, but in vain, to induce her husband to
follow what she considered such worthy examples; but her entreaties had
hitherto proved useless. She at last hit upon the following device.
A feast had been held in one of Ina's castles; and the morning after
the banquet they went out together to ride; when they returned, she
conducted Ina into the banqueting hall, which was now covered with
filth, and occupied by a herd of swine, a litter of which was resting
upon the very couch he had before occupied. Well might so sudden a
change astonish him, and we can readily imagine the dark spot that
gathered upon his angry brow. Such a mode of conversion would have
startled either Augustin or Paulinus, and made even cunning Coifi pause
before he changed his opinion. The queen pleaded guilty to the fault,
and reasoned upon the matter as follows: "My lord," said she, "this is
very different from the noise and hilarity of yesterday; there are no
brilliant hangings now; no table weighed down with silver vessels, no
delicacies to delight the palate, neither flatterers nor parasites--all
these have vanished like the smoke before the wind--have all passed
away into nothingness. Ought we not, then, to feel alarmed, who covet
them so much, yet are everyway as transient? Are not all such things
so? and are we not ourselves like a river, that hurries headlong and
heedlessly along to the dark and illimitable ocean of time? Unhappy
must we ever be if we let such things occupy our minds. Think, I
entreat you, how disgusting those things become of which we are so
enamoured; and see what filthy objects we have become attached to; for
in those filthy relics we may see what our pampered bodies will at last
become. Oh! let us reflect, that the greater we have been, and the more
powerful we now are, the more alarmed we ought to be, for the greater
will be the punishment of our misconduct."
Ina listened, sighed, resigned his crown, and set off for Rome, where
he founded a school, and imposed a tax of a penny upon every family
in his kingdom, which was called Romescot, and which went to support
the institution he had raised. As a proof of his sincerity, he wore
a common dress, lived meanly, cut his hair, laboured hard, and dwelt
in retirement with his queen, until he died "a good old man." His
brother, Inigils, had died a few years before him, a name that falls
silent as snow upon the pages of History; yet like the snow, doing its
silent work, for he must have been a man of some note in his day and
generation, to have been the father of Egbert and the grandfather of
Alfred the Great, from whom descended a long line of kings.
The Mercian nobles rose up and put to death Ostrida, the wife of
Ethelred their king, for what cause history is altogether silent;
neither the why nor the wherefore is given--the sentence reads in the
Saxon Chronicle like an epitaph upon a gravestone, yet she was the
daughter of the once powerful Oswy of Northumbria, and when destroyed,
queen of the Mercians. The very mystery which hangs around her fate
interests us, and we want to know something about what she had done
to draw down such dreadful punishment, but all our inquiries are
vain; beyond the mere entry of her violent death, not even a doubt is
registered, for us to pause over. The deed was done, and is recorded
in one brief, terrible sentence, and we know no more. Her husband,
Ethelred, abandoned the crown of Mercia to his nephew Cenred, and
entered the monastery of Bardney, as a monk, going through all the
routine of common duties, like a humble brother, until at last he rose
to the rank of abbot in the monastery which he himself had founded.
Ethelbald is the next king of Mercia who commands our attention.
He had been nursed in the stern school of privation; like Edwin of
Northumbria, he had been persecuted in his youth, and owed his life
to Guthlac, the hermit of Croyland. Picture the warrior monk and the
young king in those wild marshes--where no monastery was as yet built
up, and where, upon that swamp, which was afterwards crowned with a
splendid abbey, only a humble hut, and a rude cross of wood, were then
to be seen. The stormy old warrior, Guthlac, who had done battle in
many a hard-fought field, was at last weary of a soldier's life, and
hearing that there was an island surrounded by a lake in a corner of
Mercia, he got one of the rude Lincolnshire fishermen to row him to
the spot, where for some time he remained alone; here he was visited
by Ethelbald, a man elegant in form, with a frame of iron, and a bold,
undaunted spirit. There must have been some strange charm in the
society of the soldier-monk, thus to have won over the young king to
share with him such a solitude, for the marshes of Croyland must in
those days have worn a most forbidding appearance, and even now, as
they wave in summer, with their dark, coarse patches of goose-grass,
and in some places, no stir of life is seen, excepting where the
gosherd drives before him his noisy flock, an air of melancholy reigns
over the scenery, and the mind unconsciously wanders back among the
shadows of the dead. Nor did Ethelbald, when he ascended the throne of
Mercia, forget his exile, or his companion Guthlac, but gave the island
of Croyland to the monks who had accompanied his friend, and preserved
their piety amid all the privations which surrounded that solitude,
and over the monument which the Mercian king erected to the monk, was
afterwards built the monastery of Croyland.
Ethelbald conquered Northumbria, and, aided by Cuthred, king of Wessex,
obtained a victory over the Welsh; but although they had thus fought
side by side, a spirit of jealousy lurked within each bosom, and the
Wessex king only waited for the first favourable opportunity to throw
off the mask, and free himself from the power of the Mercian monarch.
Unforeseen circumstances, for some time, prevented Cuthred from openly
taking the field against Ethelbald; his son rose up in rebellion, and
no sooner was he put down, than one of his nobles, named Edelhun, took
up arms, and would have conquered Cuthred, had he not been wounded
at the very time when the battle had turned in his favour. These
rebellions Ethelbald is accused of having fomented. The rival kings
at last met near Burford in Oxfordshire; Ethelbald had under his
command the combined forces of Essex, Kent, East Anglia, and Mercia;
Cuthred, the soldiers of Wessex alone, and the powerful arm of the
former rebel, Edeldun, who was now his friend. From Roger de Wendover,
we, with a few slight alterations, copy the following description of
the battle, as being one of the most picturesque accounts which we
have met with in the pages of the early historians: "The attack on
each side was headed by the standard-bearers of the opposing king;
Edeldun bore the banner of Wessex, on which was emblazoned a golden
dragon, and rushing forward with the ensign in his hand, he struck
down the Mercian standard-bearer, a daring deed which called forth a
loud shout from the army of Cuthred. A moment after, and the noise was
drowned by the clashing of weapons, the mingled din, and roaring, and
shouting, which swelled into the prolonged thunder of battle, amid
which, if a brief pause intervened, it was filled up by the shrieks and
groans of the wounded and the dying, or the falling of some dreaded
instrument which terminated the agony of death. Havoc spread like
the destroying flames, into the midst of which the maddened masses
plunged. Death and danger were disregarded; they fought as if the fate
of a kingdom rested upon the blows dealt by each single arm. For a
moment the sunlight fell upon a mass of dazzling armour, gilding the
plumed helmet, the pointed spear, the uplifted sword, and broad-edged
battle-axe, and the rich banner, which, as it was borne onward amid
the hurried charge, fluttered in gaudy colours, high over the heads
of the eager combatants; a few moments more, and all this brave array
was broken; another moving mass rushed onward in the thickest of the
strife, the banner rocked and swayed, then went down; point after point
the uplifted spears rose and sank, the helmets seemed as if crowded
together; then the space which they occupied was filled up by others
who passed onward, the moving waves heaved and fell, and passed along,
while over all rolled that terrible sea of death which had swallowed
up horse, rider, banner, sword, and battle-axe. Foremost in the ranks,
stood Edeldun; wherever he moved, the spot was marked by the rapid
circles which his ponderous battle-axe made around his head. At every
stroke, death descended; wherever that terrible edge alighted, the
hollow earth groaned, as it made room for another grave; no armour
was proof against the blows which he dealt, for the fall of his arm
was like that of a dreaded thunderbolt that rives asunder whatever it
strikes. Like two consuming fires, each having set in from opposite
quarters and destroyed all that lay in their path, so did Edeldun
and Ethelbald at last meet, flame hurrying to flame, nothing left
between to consume; behind each lay a dead, desolated, and blackened
pathway." Here we are compelled to halt; the sternest image we could
gather from the pages of Homer, would still leave the idea of their
meeting imperfect. Ethelbald fled, having first exchanged a few blows
with his dreaded adversary. Wessex shook off the Mercian yoke, and
Ethelbald never again raised his head so high as it had before been,
when he looked proudly above those of the surrounding kings. Cuthred
died, and the king of Mercia was soon after slain in a civil war in
his own dominions. After his death, our attention is riveted upon the
events which took place between these rival kingdoms, for the rest of
the Saxon states, with scarcely an exception, were soon swallowed up in
that great vortex, which at last bore the immortal name of England.
After the death of Cuthred, the throne of Wessex was occupied by
Sigebyhrt, whose reign was brief and unpopular; he paid no regard
to the laws which had been established by Ina; he took no heed of
the remonstrances of his subjects, but when Cumbra, one of the most
renowned of their nobles, boldly proclaimed the grievances of the
people, he was put to death. This was the signal for a revolt--the
nobles assembled, the people were summoned to the council, and
Sigebyhrt was deposed. Fearful of the vengeance of his subjects,
the exiled king fled into the wild forest of Andredswold, where he
concealed himself amid its gloomy thickets. Here it is probable that
for a time the rude peasantry supplied him with food, and that the
wild man of the wood was the whole talk and wonder of the neighbouring
foresters. One day, however, he was met by a swineherd named Ansiam,
who had doubtless seen him beforetime when he visited his murdered
master Cumbra--the swineherd knew him at the first glance, and although
he did not kill the king on the spot, yet he waited his time, and
revenged his master's death by stabbing Sigebyhrt to the heart. He
appears to have watched him to his hiding-place, and when the fallen
king lay stretched upon his couch of leaves, under the shade of gloomy
and overhanging boughs, the savage swineherd stole silently through
the thicket, and with one blow sent the unhappy sovereign to sleep his
last sleep. As in the death of queen Ostrida, we find but a brief entry
of his terrible ending in the old chronicles; he suited them not, was
slain, cast aside, and so made room for another, and Cynewulf, in
whose veins the blood of Woden was believed to flow, reigned in his
stead.
We will now hasten on and make a brief survey of the state of
Northumbria. Ceolwulf, the patron of Bede, resigned his crown for the
quietude of the cloister. Eadbert succeeded to the vacant throne.
Whilst he was warring with the Picts, his dominions were invaded by
the Mercians; he reigned for twenty-three years, then retired to a
monastery, making the eighth Saxon king who had voluntarily laid aside
the crown for the cowl. It is said that the fate of Sigebyrht and the
fall of Ethelbald caused him to contrast their turbulent ending with
the peaceful death-bed of Ceolwulf--a strange change was thus wrought
in the minds of these old Saxon kings--the glory of Woden had departed;
no eager guests now rushed to the banquetting-halls of Valhalla;
they looked for other glories beyond the grave. Osulf succeeded his
father to the throne of Northumbria, scarcely reigned a year, and was
treacherously slain. Taking no warning by his fate, Edelwold was bold
enough to accept the crown; as usual, the path from the throne to the
tomb was but a brief step, and he perished. Another and another still
succeeded. Alred, a descendant of Ida, stepped into the empty seat,
just looked around, and was driven out of the kingdom. Then Ethelred
came, put two of his generals to death on the evidence of two others,
when, a few months after, the accusers turned round upon him, conquered
him, and drove him from the throne. He fled like Alred. Alfwold was
the next king that came to be killed; he just reigned long enough to
leave his name behind before he bade the world "good night." Osred
next mounted, made his bow, was asked to sit down, then driven out.
Ethelred was beckoned back again; he came, stabbed Eardulf, who had
aspired to the crown, and left him bleeding at the gate of a monastery;
dragged the children of Alfwold from York, and slaughtered them; put
to death Osred, who, like himself, had been deposed, and just when he
thought he had cleared away every obstacle, and was about to sit down
upon the throne which he had stuffed with the dead to make it more
easy, his subjects rewarded him for what he had done by slaying him.
He was followed by Osbald, who sat trembling with the crown upon his
head for twenty-seven days, but not having reigned long enough to merit
death, he was permitted to retire into a cloister. Eardulf, whom we
left bleeding at the gates of the monastery, was taken in and cured
by the monks, fled to Rome, was received by Charlemagne, and at last
placed upon the throne of Northumbria, where he had not sat long before
his subjects revolted. The crown and sceptre of Northumberland were
then thrown aside--men shunned them as they would have done a plague;
the curse of death was upon them, no man could take them up and live.
"Death kept his court" within the one, and when he wielded the other,
the gold had ever pointed either to the grave or the cloister. From
such a murderous court numbers of the nobles and bishops fled--the
throne stood vacant for several years; no man was found bold enough to
occupy it. The sword which ever hung there had fallen too often--not
another Damocles could be found to ascend and survey the surrounding
splendour from such a perilous position.
In looking over this long list of natural deaths, murders, and escapes
which took place in one kingdom after the abdication of Eadbert,
we have but recorded the events which occurred within forty short
years, from seven hundred and fifty-seven to about seven hundred and
ninety. From the landing of Hengist and Horsa, about three centuries
before, nearly one hundred and fifty kings had sat upon the different
thrones of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms. The bulk of these are unknown to
us excepting by name; we can with difficulty just make out the petty
states they reigned over, and that is nearly all. Some died in the
full belief of their heathen creed, with a firm faith that from a
death-bed in the field of battle to the brutal immortality which their
bloody deeds had merited was but a step, and that their happiness
hereafter would consist in feasting and holiday murders in the halls
of Woden. Others calmly breathed their last with their dying eyes
fixed upon the cross of Christ, while the anchor of their faith sunk
noiselessly into the deep sea of death, and their weary barques were
safely moored in that tranquil harbour where neither waves beat nor
tempest roared, and where, at last, the "storm-beat vessel safely
rode." What a fearful history would those three centuries present if it
could but be truly written--if we could but have the everyday life of
those all but unknown kings! forgotten as their very graves are, and
scattered their ashes into dust, which ages ago mingled imperceptibly
with the breeze, and was blown onward, unseen and unfelt. Yet there
was a time when even the meanest and the most unknown marched in pomp
to the Pagan temple, or lowly Christian church, when before them the
noisy heralds went, and the applauding mob swelled behind, and rude
as the crown and sceptre might be, and all the barbaric pearl and
gold, still the holy oil was poured forth, and solemn prayers offered
up, and the whole witena-gemot, with the neighbouring nobles, were
assembled together, and the little world around them for days after
talked only of the coronation of the king. Thousands at their command
had mustered in battle, high nobles had bowed their heads before them;
on a word from their lips life or death frequently hung; valour and
beauty were gathered around their thrones, and, when they rode forth
in grand procession, the wondering crowd rushed out to gaze,--even as
it does now. Edwin, with his banner borne before him, and Offa, with
his trumpets sounding in the streets, were as much a marvel above a
thousand years ago, as her present Majesty is in the provinces in our
own time. Yet there are many in the present day who think it a waste of
time to dwell for a few hours upon the fates of those ancient kings,
who, forsooth! because they have been so long dead, are considered as
undeserving of notice by those who seem to measure the events of the
past by their own present insignificance, who, conscious that they
themselves will be forgotten for ever as soon as the grave has closed
over them, look begrudgingly upon almost every name that Time has not
wholly obliterated.