That the conversion of the English to Christianity had anything to do
with their slackening from the work of conquest it would be wrong to
assert. Though their wars with the Welsh were not conducted with such
ferocious cruelty as of old, and though (as the laws of Ine show) the
Celtic inhabitants of newly-won districts were no longer exterminated,
but received as the king's subjects, yet the hatred between Welsh and
English did not cease because both were now Christians. The westward
advance of the invaders would have continued, if only there had remained
to attract them lands as desirable as those they had already won. But
the mountains of Wales and the moors of Cornwall and Cumbria did not
greatly tempt the settler. Moreover, the English states, which had
seldom turned their swords against each other in the 5th or the 6th
centuries, were engaged during the 7th and the 8th in those endless
struggles for supremacy which seem so purposeless, because the hegemony
which a king of energy and genius won for his kingdom always disappeared
with his death. The "Bretwaldaship," as the English seem to have called
it, was the most ephemeral of dignities. This was but natural: conquest
can only be enforced by the extermination of the conquered, or by their
consent to amalgamate with the conquerors, or by the garrisoning of the
land that has been subdued by settlers or by military posts. None of
these courses were possible to a king of the 7th or 8th centuries: even
in their heathen days the English were not wont to massacre their beaten
kinsmen as they massacred the unfortunate Celt. After their conversion
to Christianity the idea of exterminating other English tribes grew even
more impossible. On the other hand, local particularism was so strong
that the conquered would not, at first, consent to give up their natural
independence and merge themselves in the victors. Such amalgamations
became possible after a time, when many of the local royal lines died
out, and unifying influences, of which a common Christianity was the
most powerful, sapped the strength of tribal pride. But it is not till
the 9th century that we find this phenomenon growing general. A kingdom
like Kent or East Anglia, even after long subjection to a powerful
overlord, rose and reasserted its independence immediately on hearing of
his death. His successor had to attempt a new conquest, if he felt
himself strong enough. To garrison a district that had been overrun was
impossible: the military force of an English king consisted of his
military household of _gesiths_, backed by the general levy of the
tribe. The strength of Mercia or Northumbria might be mustered for a
single battle, but could not supply a standing army to hold down the
vanquished. The victorious king had to be content with tribute and
obedience, which would cease when he died, or was beaten by a competitor
for the position of Bretwalda.
Supremacy of Northumbria.
Supremacy of Mercia.
In the ceaseless strife between the old English kingdoms, therefore, it
was the personality of the king which was the main factor in determining
the hegemony of one state over another. If in the 7th century the
successive great Northumbrians--Edwin, Oswald, Oswio and Ecgfrith--were
reckoned the chief monarchs of England, and exercised a widespread
influence over the southern realms, yet each had to win his supremacy by
his own sword; and when Edwin and Oswald fell before the savage heathen
Penda, and Ecgfrith was cut off by the Picts, there was a gap of anarchy
before another king asserted his superior power. The same phenomenon
was seen with regard to the Mercian kings of the 8th century; the long
reigns of the two conquerors AEthelbald and Offa covered eighty years
(716-796), and it might have been supposed that after such a term of
supremacy Mercia would have remained permanently at the head of the
English kingdoms. It was not so, AEthelbald in his old age lost his
hegemony at the battle of Burford (752), and was murdered a few years
after by his own people. Offa had to win back by long wars what his
kinsman had lost; he became so powerful that we find the pope calling
him _Rex Anglorum_, as if he were the only king in the island. He
annexed Kent and East Anglia, overawed Northumbria and Wessex, both
hopelessly faction-ridden at the time, was treated almost as an equal by
the emperor Charles the Great, and died still at the height of his
power. Yet the moment that he was dead all his vassals revolted; his
successors could never recover all that was lost. Kent once more became
a kingdom, and two successive Mercian sovereigns, Beornwulf and Ludica,
fell in battle while vainly trying to recover Offa's supremacy over East
Anglia and Wessex.
Supremacy of Wessex.
The ablest king in England in the generation that followed Offa was
Ecgbert of Wessex, who had long been an exile abroad, and served for
thirteen years as one of the captains of Charles the Great. He beat
Beornwulf of Mercia at Ellandune (A.D. 823), permanently annexed Kent,
to whose crown he had a claim by descent, in 829 received the homage of
all the other English kings, and was for the remainder of his life
reckoned as "Bretwalda." But it is wrong to call him, as some have done,
"the first monarch of all England." His power was no greater than that
of Oswio or Offa had been, and the supremacy might perhaps have tarried
with Wessex no longer than it had tarried with Northumbria or Mercia if
it had not chanced that the Danish raids were now beginning. For these
invasions, paradoxical as it may seem, were the greatest efficient cause
in the welding together of England. They seemed about to rend the land
in twain, but they really cured the English of their desperate
particularism, and drove all the tribes to take as their common rulers
the one great line of native kings which survived the Danish storm, and
maintained itself for four generations of desperate fighting against the
invaders. On the continent the main effect of the viking invasions was
to dash the empire of Charles the Great into fragments, and to aid in
producing the numberless petty states of feudal Europe. In this island
they did much to help the transformation of the mere Bretwaldaship of
Ecgbert into the monarchy of all England.
Danish invasions.
Already ere Ecgbert ascended the throne of Kent the new enemy had made
his first tentative appearance on the British shore. It was in the reign
of Beorhtric, Ecgbert's predecessor, that the pirates of the famous
"three ships from Heretheland" had appeared on the coast of Dorset, and
slain the sheriff "who would fain have known what manner of men they
might be." A few years later another band appeared, rising unexpectedly
from the sea to sack the famous Northumbrian monastery of Lindisfarne
(793). After that their visits came fast and furious on the shore-line
of every English kingdom, and by the end of Ecgbert's reign it was they,
and not his former Welsh and Mercian enemies, who were the old monarch's
main source of trouble. But he brought his Bretwaldaship to a good end
by inflicting a crushing defeat on them at Hingston Down, hard by the
Tamar, probably in 836, and died ere the year was out, leaving the
ever-growing problem to his son AEthelwulf.
Influence of viking sea-power.
The cause of the sudden outpouring of the Scandinavian deluge upon the
lands of Christendom at this particular date is one of the puzzles of
history. So far as memory ran, the peoples beyond the North Sea had been
seafaring races addicted to piracy. Even Tacitus mentions their fleets.
Yet since the 5th century they had been restricting their operations to
their own shores, and are barely heard of in the chronicles of their
southern neighbours. It seems most probable that the actual cause of
their sudden activity was the conquest of the Saxons by Charles the
Great, and his subsequent advance into the peninsula of Denmark. The
emperor seemed to be threatening the independence of the North, and in
terror and resentment the Scandinavian peoples turned first to strike at
the encroaching Frank, and soon after to assail the other Christian
kingdoms which lay behind, or on the flank of, the Empire. But their
offensive action proved so successful and so profitable that, after a
short time, the whole manhood of Denmark and Norway took to the pirate
life. Never since history first began to be recorded was there such a
supreme example of the potentialities of sea-power. Civilized Europe had
been caught at a moment when it was completely destitute of a war-navy;
the Franks had never been maritime in their tastes, the English seemed
to have forgotten their ancient seafaring habits. Though their ancestors
had been pirates as fierce as the vikings of the 9th century, and though
some of their later kings had led naval armaments--Edwin had annexed for
a moment Man and Anglesea, and Ecgfrith had cruelly ravaged part of
Ireland--yet by the year 800 they appear to have ceased to be a
seafaring race. Perhaps the long predominance of Mercia, an essentially
inland state, had something to do with the fact. At any rate England was
as helpless as the Empire when first the Danish and Norwegian galleys
began to cross the North Sea, and to beat down both sides of Britain
seeking for prey. The number of the invaders was not at first very
great; their fleets were not national armaments gathered by great kings,
but squadrons of a few vessels collected by some active and enterprising
adventurer. Their original tactics were merely to land suddenly near
some thriving seaport, or rich monastery, to sack it, and to take to the
water again before the local militia could turn out in force against
them. But such raids proved so profitable that the vikings soon began to
take greater things in hand; they began to ally themselves in
confederacies: two, six or a dozen "sea-kings" would join their forces
for something more than a desultory raid. With fifty or a hundred ships
they would fall upon some unhappy region, harry it for many miles
inland, and offer battle to the landsfolk unless the latter came out in
overpowering force. And as their crews were trained warriors chosen for
their high spirit, contending with a raw militia fresh from the plough,
they were generally successful. If the odds were too great they could
always retire to their ships, put to sea, and resume their predatory
operations on some other coast three hundred miles away. As long as
their enemies were unprovided with a navy they were safe from pursuit
and annihilation. The only chance against them was that, if caught too
far from the base-fort where they had run their galleys ashore, they
might find their communication with the sea cut off, and be forced to
fight for their lives surrounded by an infuriated countryside. But in
the earlier years of their struggles with Christendom the vikings seldom
suffered a complete disaster; they were often beaten but seldom
annihilated. Ere long they grew so bold that they would stay ashore for
months, braving the forces of a whole kingdom, and sheltering themselves
in great palisaded camps on peninsulas or islands when the enemy pressed
them too hard. On well-guarded strongholds like Thanet or Sheppey in
England, Noirmoutier at the Loire mouth, or the Isle of Walcheren, they
defied the local magnates to evict them. Finally they took to wintering
on the coast of England or the Empire, a preliminary to actual
settlement and conquest. (See VIKING.)
Progress of Danish conquest.
King Ecgbert died long ere the invaders had reached this stage of
insolence. AEthelwulf, his weak and kindly son, would undoubtedly have
lost the titular supremacy of Wessex over the other English kingdoms if
there had been in Mercia or Northumbria a strong king with leisure to
concentrate his thoughts on domestic wars. But the vikings were now
showering such blows on the northern states that their unhappy monarchs
could think of nothing but self-defence. They slew Redulf--king of
Northumbria--in 844, took London in 851, despite all the efforts of
Burgred of Mercia, and forced that sovereign to make repeated appeals
for help to AEthelwulf as his overlord. For though Wessex had its full
share of Danish attacks it met them with a vigour that was not seen in
the other realms. The defence was often, if not always, successful; and
once at least (at Aclea in 851) AEthelwulf exterminated a whole Danish
army with "the greatest slaughter among the heathen host that had been
heard of down to that day," as the Anglo-Saxon chronicler is careful to
record. But though he might ward off blows from his own realm, he was
helpless to aid Mercia or East Anglia, and still more the distant
Northumbria.
It was not, however, till after AEthelwulf's death that the attack of the
vikings developed its full strength. The fifteen years (856-871) that
were covered by the reigns of his three short-lived sons, AEthelbald,
AEthelbert and AEthelred, were the most miserable that England was to see.
Assembling in greater and ever greater confederacies, the Danes fell
upon the northern kingdoms, no longer merely to harry but to conquer and
occupy them. A league of many sea-kings which called itself the "great
army" slew the last two sovereigns of Northumbria and stormed York in
867. Some of the victors settled down there to lord it over the
half-exterminated English population. The rest continued their advance
southward. East Anglia was conquered in 870; its last king, Edmund,
having been defeated and taken prisoner, the vikings shot him to death
with arrows because he would not worship their gods. His realm was
annexed and partly settled by the conquerors. The fate of Mercia was
hardly better: its king, Burgred, by constant payment of tribute, bought
off the invaders for a space, but the eastern half of his realm was
reduced to a wilderness.
Practically masters of all that lay north of Thames, the "great army"
next moved against Wessex, the only quarter where a vigorous resistance
was still maintained against them, though its capital, Winchester, had
been sacked in 864. Under two kings named Halfdan and Bacsceg, and six
earls, they seized Reading and began to harry Berkshire, Surrey and
Hampshire. King AEthelred, the third son of AEthelwulf, came out against
them, with his young brother Alfred and all the levies of Wessex. In the
year 871 these two gallant kinsmen fought no less than six pitched
battles against the invaders. Some were victories--notably the fight of
Ashdown, where Alfred first won his name as a soldier--but the English
failed to capture the fortified camps of the vikings at Reading, and
were finally beaten at Marten ("Maeretun") near Bedwyn, where AEthelred
was mortally wounded.
Alfred the Great.
He left young sons, but the men of Wessex crowned Alfred king, because
they needed a grown man to lead them in their desperate campaigning. Yet
his reign opened inauspiciously: defeated near Wilton, he offered in
despair to pay the vikings to depart. He must have known, from the
experience of Mercian, Northumbrian and Frankish kings, that such
blackmail only bought a short respite, but the condition of his realm
was such that even a moderate time for reorganization might prove
valuable. The enemy had suffered so much in the "year of the six
battles" that they held off for some space from Wessex, seeking easier
prey on the continent and in northern England. In 874 they harried
Mercia so cruelly that King Burgred fled in despair to Rome; the victors
divided up his realm, taking the eastern half for themselves, and
establishing in it a confederacy, whose jarls occupied the "five
boroughs" of Stamford, Lincoln, Derby, Nottingham and Leicester. But the
western half they handed over to "an unwise thegn named Ceolwulf," who
bought for a short space the precarious title of king by paying great
tribute.
Alfred employed the four years of peace, which he had bought in 871, in
the endeavour to strengthen his realm against the inevitable return of
the raiders. His wisdom was shown by the fact that he concentrated his
attention on the one device which must evidently prove effective for
defence, if only he were given time to perfect it--the building of a
national navy. He began to lay down galleys and "long ships," and hired
"pirates"--renegade vikings no doubt--to train crews for him and to
teach his men seamanship. The scheme, however, was only partly completed
when in 876 three Danish kings entered Wessex and resumed the war. But
Alfred blockaded them first in Wareham and then in Exeter. The fleet
which was coming to carry them off, or to bring them reinforcements,
fought an indecisive engagement with the English ships, and was wrecked
immediately after on the cliffs of the Isle of Purbeck, where more than
100 galleys and all their crews perished. On hearing of this disaster
the vikings in Exeter surrendered the place on being granted a free
departure.
[Illustration: Map--England, 886, after Alfred & Guthrum's Peace.]
Yet within a few months of this successful campaign Alfred was attacked
at midwinter by the main Danish army under King Guthrum. He was
apparently taken by surprise by an assault at such an unusual time of
the year, and was forced to escape with his military household to the
isle of Athelney among the marshes of the Parrett. The invaders harried
Wiltshire and Hampshire at their leisure, and vainly thought that Wessex
was at last subdued. But with the spring the English rallied: a Danish
force was cut to pieces before Easter by the men of Devonshire. A few
weeks later Alfred had issued from Athelney, had collected a large army
in Selwood, and went out to meet the enemy in the open field. He beat
them at Edington in Wiltshire, blockaded them in their great camp at
Chippenham, and in fourteen days starved them into surrender. The terms
were that they should give hostages, that they should depart for ever
from Wessex, and that their king Guthrum should do homage to Alfred as
overlord, and submit to be baptized, with thirty of his chiefs. Not only
were all these conditions punctually fulfilled, but (what is more
astonishing) the Danes had been so thoroughly cured of any desire to try
their luck against the great king that they left him practically
unmolested for fourteen years (878-892). King Guthrum settled down as a
Christian sovereign in East Anglia, with the bulk of the host that had
capitulated at Chippenham. Of the rest of the invaders one section
established a petty kingdom in Yorkshire, but those in the Midlands were
subject to no common sovereign but lived in a loose confederacy under
the jarls of the "Five Boroughs" already named above. The boundary
between English and Danes established by the peace of 878 is not
perfectly ascertainable, but a document of a few years later, called
"Alfred and Guthrum's frith," gives the border as lying from Thames
northward up the Lea to its source, then across to Bedford, and then
along the Ouse to Watling Street, the old Roman road from London to
Chester. This gave King Alfred London and Middlesex, most of
Hertfordshire and Bedfordshire, and the larger half of Mercia--lands
that had never before been an integral part of Wessex, though they had
some time been tributary to her kings. They were now taken inside the
realm and governed by the ealdorman AEthelred, the king's son-in-law. The
Mercians gladly mingled with the West Saxons, and abandoned all memories
of ancient independence. Twenty years of schooling under the hand of the
Dane had taught them to forget old particularism.
Alfred's enlarged kingdom was far more powerful than any one of the
three new Danish states which lay beyond the Lea and Watling Street: it
was to be seen, ere another generation was out, that it was stronger
than all three together. But Alfred was not to see the happy day when
York and Lincoln, Colchester and Leicester, were to become mere
shire-capitals in the realm of United England.
Alfred's reforms.
The fourteen years of comparative peace which he now enjoyed were
devoted to perfecting the military organization of his enlarged kingdom.
His fleet was reconstructed: in 882 he went out with it in person and
destroyed a small piratical squadron: in 885 we hear of it coasting all
along Danish East Anglia. But his navy was not yet strong enough to hold
off all raids: it was not till the very end of his reign that he
perfected it by building "long ships that were nigh twice as large as
those of the heathen; some had 60 oars, some more; and they were both
steadier and swifter and lighter than the others, and were shaped
neither after the Frisian nor after the Danish fashion, but as it seemed
to himself that they would be most handy." This great war fleet he left
as a legacy to his son, but he himself in his later campaigns had only
its first beginnings at his disposal.
His military reforms were no less important. Warned by the failures of
the English against Danish entrenched camps, he introduced the
long-neglected art of fortification, and built many "burhs"--stockaded
fortresses on mounds by the waterside--wherein dwelt permanent garrisons
of military settlers. It would seem that the system by which he
maintained them was that he assigned to each a region of which the
inhabitants were responsible for its manning and its sustentation. The
landowners had either to build a house within it for their own
inhabiting, or to provide that a competent substitute dwelt there to
represent them. These "burh-ware," or garrison-men, are repeatedly
mentioned in Alfred's later years. The old national levy of the "fyrd"
was made somewhat more serviceable by an ordinance which divided it into
two halves, one of which must take the field when the other was
dismissed. But it would seem that the king paid even more attention to
another military reform--the increase of the number of the professional
fighting class, the thegnhood as it was now called. All the wealthier
men, both in the countryside and in the towns, were required to take up
the duties as well as the privileges of membership of the military
household of the king. They became "of thegn-right worthy" by receiving,
really or nominally, a place in the royal hall, with the obligation to
take the field whenever their master raised his banner. The document
which defines their duties and privileges sets forth that "every ceorl
who throve so that he had fully five hides of land, and a helm, and a
mail-shirt, and a sword ornamented with gold, was to be reckoned
gesithcund." A second draft allowed the man who had the military
equipment complete, but not fully the five hides of land, to slip into
the list, and also "the merchant who has fared thrice over the high seas
at his own expense." How far the details of the scheme are Alfred's own,
how far they were developed by his son Edward the Elder, it is
unfortunately impossible to say. But there is small doubt that the
system was working to some extent in the later wars of the great king,
and that his successes were largely due to the fact that his army
contained a larger nucleus of fully armed warriors than those of his
predecessors.
Military reforms were only one section of the work of King Alfred during
the central years of his reign. It was then that he set afoot his
numerous schemes for the restoration of the learning and culture of
England which had sunk so low during the long years of disaster which
had preceded his accession. How he gathered scholars from the continent,
Wales and Ireland; how he collected the old heroic poems of the nation,
how he himself translated books from the Latin tongue, started schools,
and set his scribes to write up the _Anglo-Saxon Chronicle_, is told
elsewhere, as are his mechanical inventions, his buildings, and his
dealings with missionaries and explorers (see ALFRED).
The test of the efficiency of his work was that it held firm when, in
his later years, the Danish storm once more began to beat against the
shores of Wessex. In the years 892-896 Alfred was assailed from many
sides at once by viking fleets, of which the most important was that led
by the great freebooter Hasting. Moreover, the settled Danes of eastern
England broke their oaths and gave the invaders assistance. Yet the king
held his own, with perfect success if not with ease. The enemy was
checked, beaten off, followed up rapidly whenever he changed his base of
operation, and hunted repeatedly all across England. The campaigning
ranged from Appledore in Kent to Exeter, from Chester to Shoeburyness;
but wherever the invaders transferred themselves, either the king, or
his son Edward, or his son-in-law Ethelred, the ealdorman of Mercia, was
promptly at hand with a competent army. The camps of the Danes were
stormed, their fleet was destroyed in the river Lea in 895, and at last
the remnant broke up and dispersed, some to seek easier plunder in
France, others to settle down among their kinsmen in Northumbria or East
Anglia.
Alfred survived for four years after his final triumph in 896, to
complete the organization of his fleet and to repair the damages done by
the last four years of constant fighting. He died on the 26th of October
900, leaving Wessex well armed for the continuance of the struggle, and
the inhabitants of the "Danelagh" much broken in spirit. They saw that
it would never be in their power to subdue all England. Within a few
years they were to realize that it was more probable that the English
kings would subdue them.
Edward the Elder.
The house of Wessex continued to supply a race of hard-fighting and
capable monarchs, who went on with Alfred's work. His son, Edward the
Elder, and his three grandsons, AEthelstan, Edmund and Edred, devoted
themselves for fifty-five years (A.D. 900-955) to the task of conquering
the Danelagh, and ended by making England into a single unified kingdom,
not by admitting the conquered to homage and tribute, in the old style
of the 7th century, but by their complete absorption. The process was
not so hard as might be thought; when once the Danes had settled down,
had brought over wives from their native land or taken them from among
their English vassals, had built themselves farmsteads and accumulated
flocks and herds, they lost their old advantage in contending with the
English. Their strength had been their mobility and their undisputed
command of the sea. But now they had possessions of their own to defend,
and could not raid at large in Wessex or Mercia without exposing their
homes to similar molestation. Moreover, the fleet which Alfred had
built, and which his successors kept up, disputed their mastery of the
sea, and ended by achieving a clear superiority over them. Unity of plan
and unity of command was also on the side of the English. The
inhabitants of the three sections of the Danelagh were at best leagued
in a many-headed confederacy. Their opponents were led by kings whose
orders were punctually obeyed from Shrewsbury to Dover and from London
to Exeter. It must also be remembered that in the greater part of the
land which they possessed the Danes were but a small minority of the
population. After their first fury was spent they no longer exterminated
the conquered, but had been content to make the Mercians and Deirans
their subjects, to take the best of the land, and exact tribute for the
rest. Only in Lincolnshire, East Yorkshire and parts of Nottinghamshire
and Leicestershire do they seem to have settled thickly and formed a
preponderating element in the countryside. In the rest of the Midlands
and in East Anglia they were only a governing oligarchy of scanty
numbers. Everywhere there was an English lower class which welcomed the
advent of the conquering kings of Wessex and the fall of the Danish
jarls.
Edward the Elder spent twenty-five laborious years first in repelling
and repaying Danish raids, then in setting to work to subdue the
raiders. He worked forward into the Danelagh, building _burhs_ as he
advanced, to hold down each district that he won. He was helped by his
brother-in-law, the Mercian ealdorman AEthelred, and, after the death of
that magnate, by his warlike sister AEthelflaed, the ealdorman's widow,
who was continued in her husband's place. While Edward, with London as
his base, pushed forward into the eastern counties, his sister, starting
from Warwick and Stafford, encroached on the Danelagh along the line of
the Trent. The last Danish king of East Anglia was slain in battle in
918, and his realm annexed. AEthelflaed won Derby and Leicester, while her
brother reduced Stamford and Nottingham. Finally, in 921, not only was
the whole land south of the Humber subdued, but the Yorkshire Danes, the
Welsh, and even--it is said--the remote Scots of the North, did homage
to Edward and became his men.
AEthelstan.
In 925 Edward was succeeded by his eldest, son AEthelstan, who completed
the reduction of the Danelagh by driving out Guthfrith, the Danish king
of York, and annexing his realm. But this first conquest of the region
beyond Humber had to be repeated over and over again; time after time
the Danes rebelled and proclaimed a new king, aided sometimes by bands
of their kinsmen from Ireland or Norway, sometimes by the Scots and
Strathclyde Welsh. AEthelstan's greatest and best-remembered achievement
was his decisive victory in 937 at Brunanburh--an unknown spot, probably
by the Solway Firth or the Ribble--over a great confederacy of rebel
Danes of Yorkshire, Irish Danes from Dublin, the Scottish king,
Constantine, and Eugenius, king of Strathclyde. Yet even after such a
triumph AEthelstan had to set up a Danish under-king in Yorkshire,
apparently despairing of holding it down as a shire governed by a mere
ealdorman. But its overlordship he never lost, and since he also
maintained the supremacy which his father had won over the Welsh and
Scots, it was not without reason that he called himself on his coins and
in his charters _Rex totius Britanniae_. Occasionally he even used the
title _Basileus_, as if he claimed a quasi-imperial position.
Edmund: Edred.
The trampling out of the last embers of Danish particularism in the
North was reserved for AEthelstan's brothers and successors, Edmund and
Edred (940-955), who put down several risings of the Yorkshiremen, one
of which was aided by a rebellion of the Midland Danes of the Five
Boroughs. But the untiring perseverance of the house of Alfred was at
last rewarded by success. After the expulsion of the last rebel king of
York, Eric Haraldson, by Edred in 948, we cease to hear of trouble in
the North. When next there was rebellion in that quarter it was in
favour of a Wessex prince, not of a Danish adventurer, and had no
sinister national significance. The descendants of the vikings were
easily incorporated in the English race, all the more so because of the
wise policy of the conquering kings, who readily employed and often
promoted to high station men of Danish descent who showed themselves
loyal--and this not only in the secular but in spiritual offices. In 942
Oda, a full-blooded Dane, was made archbishop of Canterbury. The
Danelagh became a group of earldoms, ruled by officials who were as
often of Danish as of English descent.
It is notable that when, after Edred's death, there was civil strife,
owing to the quarrel of his nephew Edwy with some of his kinsmen,
ministers and bishops, the rebels, who included the majority of the
Mercians and Northumbrians, set up as their pretender to the throne not
a Dane but Edwy's younger brother Edgar, who ruled for a short time
north of Thames, and became sole monarch on the death of his unfortunate
kinsman.
Edgar.
The reign of Edgar (959-975) saw the culmination of the power of the
house of Alfred. It was untroubled by rebellion or by foreign
invasions, so that the king won the honourable title of _Rex Pacificus_.
The minor sovereigns of Britain owned him as overlord, as they had owned
his grandfather Edward and his uncle AEthelstan. It was long remembered
"how all the kings of this island, both the Welsh and the Scots, eight
kings, came to him once upon a time on one day and all bowed to his
governance." The eight were Kenneth of Scotland, Malcolm of Strathclyde,
Maccus of Man, and five Welsh kings. There is fair authority for the
well-known legend that, after this meeting at Chester, he was rowed in
his barge down the Dee by these potentates, such a crew as never was
seen before or after, and afterwards exclaimed that those who followed
him might now truly boast that they were kings of all Britain.
Edgar's chief counsellor was the famous archbishop Dunstan, to whom no
small part of the glory of his reign has been ascribed. This great
prelate was an ecclesiastical reformer--a leader in a movement for the
general purification of morals, and especially for the repressing of
simony and evil-living among the clergy--a great builder of churches,
and a stringent enforcer of the rules of the monastic life. But he was
also a busy statesman; he probably had a share in the considerable body
of legislation which was enacted in Edgar's reign, and is said to have
encouraged him in his policy of treating Dane and Englishman with exact
equality, and of investing the one no less than the other with the
highest offices in church and state.
Edgar's life was too short for the welfare of his people--he was only in
his thirty-third year when he died in 975, and his sons were young boys.
The hand of a strong man was still needed to keep the peace in the
newly-constituted realm of all England, and the evils of a minority were
not long in showing themselves. One section of the magnates had
possession of the thirteen-year-old king Edward, and used his name to
cover their ambitions. The other was led by his step-mother AElfthryth,
who was set on pushing the claims of her son, the child AEthelred. After
much factious strife, and many stormy meetings of the Witan, Edward was
murdered at Corfe in 978 by some thegns of the party of the
queen-dowager. The crime provoked universal indignation, but since there
was no other prince of the house of Alfred available, the magnates were
forced to place AEthelred on the throne: he was only in his eleventh
year, and was at least personally innocent of complicity in his
brother's death.
AEthelred the Unready.
Danish invasions.
With the accession of AEthelred, the "Redeless," as he was afterwards
called from his inability to discern good counsel from evil, and the
consistent incapacity of his policy, an evil time began. The retirement
from public life of Edgar's old minister Dunstan was the first event of
the new reign, and no man of capacity came forward to take his place.
The factions which had prevailed during the reign of Edward "the Martyr"
seem to have continued to rage during his brother's minority, yet
AEthelred's earliest years were his least disastrous. It was hoped that
when he came to man's estate things would improve, but the reverse was
the case. The first personal action recorded of him is an unjust
harrying of the goods of his own subjects, when he besieged Rochester
because he had quarrelled with its bishop over certain lands, and was
bribed to depart with 100 pounds of silver. Yet from 978 to 991 no
irreparable harm came to England; the machinery for government and
defence which his ancestors had established seemed fairly competent to
defend the realm even under a wayward and incapable king. Two or three
small descents of vikings are recorded, but the ravaging was purely
local, and the invader soon departed. No trouble occurred in the
Danelagh, where the old tendency of the inhabitants to take sides with
their pagan kinsmen from over the sea appears to have completely
vanished. But the vikings had apparently learnt by small experiments
that England was no longer guarded as she had been in the days of Alfred
or AEthelstan, and in 991 the first serious invasion of AEthelred's reign
took place. A large fleet came ashore in Essex, and, after a hard fight
with the ealdorman Brihtnoth at Maldon, slew him and began to ravage the
district north of the Thames. Instead of making a desperate attempt to
drive them off, the king bribed them to depart with 10,000 pounds of
silver, accepting it is said this cowardly advice from archbishop
Sigeric. The fatal precedent soon bore fruit: the invaders came back in
larger numbers, headed by Olaf Tryggveson, the celebrated adventurer who
afterwards made himself king of Norway, and who was already a pretender
to its throne. He was helped by Sweyn, king of Denmark, and the two
together laid siege to London in 994, but were beaten off by the
citizens. Nevertheless AEthelred for a second time stooped to pay
tribute, and bought the departure of Dane and Norwegian with 16,000
pounds of silver. There was a precarious interval of peace for three
years after, but in 997 began a series of invasions led by Sweyn which
lasted for seventeen years, and at last ended in the complete subjection
of England and the flight of AEthelred to Normandy. It should be noted
that the invader during this period was no mere adventurer, but king of
all Denmark, and, after Olaf Tryggveson's death in 1000, king of Norway
also. His power was something far greater than that of the Guthrums and
Anlafs of an earlier generation, and--in the end of his life at
least--he was aiming at political conquest, and not either at mere
plunder or at finding new settlements for his followers. But if the
strength of the invader was greater than that of his predecessors,
AEthelred also was far better equipped for war than his ancestors of the
9th century. He owned, and he sometimes used--but always to little
profit--a large fleet, while all England instead of the mere realm of
Wessex was at his back. Any one of the great princes of the house of
Egbert who had reigned from 871 to 975, would have fought a winning
fight with such resources, and it took nearly twenty years of AEthelred's
tried incapacity to lose the game. He did, however, succeed in undoing
all the work of his ancestors, partly by his own slackness and sloth,
partly by his choice of corrupt and treacherous ministers. For the two
ealdormen whom he delighted to honour and placed at the head of his
armies, AElfric and Eadric Streona, are accused, the one of persistent
cowardice, the other of underhand intrigue with the Danes. Some of the
local magnates made a desperate defence of their own regions, especially
Ulfkytel of East Anglia, a Dane by descent; but the central government
was at fault. AEthelred's army was always at the wrong place--"if the
enemy were east then was the _fyrd_ held west, and if they were north
then was our force held south." When AEthelred did appear it was more
often to pay a bribe to the invaders than to fight. Indeed the
_Danegeld_, the tax which he raised to furnish tribute to the invaders,
became a regular institution: on six occasions at least AEthelred bought
a few months of peace by sums ranging from 10,000 to 48,000 pounds of
silver.
Canute.
At last in the winter of 1013-1014, more as it would seem from sheer
disgust at their king's cowardice and incompetence than because further
resistance was impossible, the English gave up the struggle and
acknowledged Sweyn as king. First Northumbria, then Wessex, then London
yielded, and AEthelred was forced to fly over seas to Richard, duke of
Normandy, whose sister he had married as his second wife. But Sweyn
survived his triumph little over a month; he died suddenly at
Gainsborough on the 3rd of February 1014. The Danes hailed his son
Canute, a lad of eighteen, as king, but many of the English, though they
had submitted to a hard-handed conqueror like Sweyn, were not prepared
to be handed over like slaves to his untried successor. There was a
general rising, the old king was brought over from Normandy, and Canute
was driven out for a moment by force of arms. He returned next year with
a greater army to hear soon after of AEthelred's death (1016). The witan
chose Edmund "Ironside," the late king's eldest son, to succeed him, and
as he was a hard-fighting prince of that normal type of his house to
which his father had been such a disgraceful exception, it seemed
probable that the Danes might be beaten off. But AEthelred's favourite
Eadric Streona adhered to Canute, fearing to lose the office and power
that he had enjoyed for so long under AEthelred, and prevailed on the
magnates of part of Wessex and Mercia to follow his example. For a
moment the curious phenomenon was seen of Canute reigning in Wessex,
while Edmund was making head against him with the aid of the Anglo-Danes
of the "Five Boroughs" and Northumbria. There followed a year of
desperate struggle: the two young kings fought five pitched battles,
fortune seemed to favour Edmund, and the traitor Eadric submitted to him
with all Wessex. But the last engagement, at Assandun (Ashingdon) in
Essex went against the English, mainly because Eadric again betrayed the
national cause and deserted to the enemy.
Edmund was so hard hit by this last disaster that he offered to divide
the realm with Canute; they met on the isle of Alney near Gloucester,
and agreed that the son of AEthelred should keep Wessex and all the
South, London and East Anglia, while the Dane should have Northumbria,
the "five boroughs" and Eadric's Mercian earldom. But ere the year was
out Edmund died: secretly murdered, according to some authorities, by
the infamous Eadric. The witan of Wessex made no attempt to set on the
throne either one of the younger sons of AEthelred by his Norman wife, or
the infant heir of Edmund, but chose Canute as king, preferring to
reunite England by submission to the stranger rather than to continue
the disastrous war.
They were wise in so doing, though their motive may have been despair
rather than long-sighted policy. Canute became more of an Englishman
than a Dane: he spent more of his time in his island realm than in his
native Denmark. He paid off and sent home the great army with whose aid
he had won the English crown, retaining only a small bodyguard of
"house-carls" and trusting to the loyalty of his new subjects. There was
no confiscation of lands for the benefit of intrusive Danish settlers.
On the contrary Canute had more English than Danish courtiers and
ministers about his person, and sent many Englishmen as bishops and some
even as royal officers to Denmark. It is strange to find that--whether
from policy or from affection--he married King AEthelred's young widow
Emma of Normandy, though she was somewhat older than himself--so that
his son King Harthacnut and that son's successor Edward the Confessor,
the heir of the line of Wessex, were half-brothers. It might have been
thought likely that the son of the pagan Sweyn would have turned out a
mere hard-fighting viking. But Canute developed into a great
administrator and a friend of learning and culture. Occasionally he
committed a harsh and tyrannical act. Though he need not be blamed for
making a prompt end of the traitor Eadric Streona and of Uhtred, the
turbulent earl of Northumbria, at the commencement of his reign, there
are other and less justifiable deeds of blood to be laid to his account.
But they were but few; for the most part his administration was just and
wise as well as strong and intelligent.
As long as he lived England was the centre of a great Northern empire,
for Canute reconquered Norway, which had lapsed into independence after
his father's death, and extended his power into the Baltic. Moreover,
all the so-called Scandinavian colonists in the Northern Isles and
Ireland owned him as overlord. So did the Scottish king Malcolm, and the
princes of Wales and Strathclyde. The one weak point in his policy that
can be detected is that he left in the hands of Malcolm the Bernician
district of Lothian, which the Scot had conquered during the anarchy
that followed the death of AEthelred. The battle of Carham (1018) had
given this land to the Scots, and Canute consented to draw the border
line of England at the Tweed instead of at the Firth of Forth, when
Malcolm did him homage. Strangely enough it was this cession of a
Northumbrian earldom to the Northern king that ultimately made Scotland
an English-speaking country. For the Scottish kings, deserting their
native Highlands, took to dwelling at Edinburgh among their new
subjects, and first the court and afterwards the whole of their Lowland
subjects were gradually assimilated to the Northumbrian nucleus which
formed both the most fertile and the most civilized portion of their
enlarged realm.
The fact, that England recovered with marvellous rapidity from the evil
effects of AEthelred's disastrous reign, and achieved great wealth and
prosperity under Canute, would seem to show that the ravages of Sweyn,
widespread and ruthless though they had been, had yet fallen short of
the devastating completeness of those of the earlier vikings. He had
been more set on exacting tribute than on perpetrating wanton massacres.
A few years of peace and wise administration seem to have restored the
realm to a satisfactory condition. A considerable mass of his
legislation has survived to show Canute's care for law and order.
Canute died in 1035, aged not more than forty or forty-one. The crown
was disputed between his two sons, the half-brothers Harold and
Harthacnut; it was doubtful whether the birth of the elder prince was
legitimate, and Queen Emma strove to get her own son Harthacnut
preferred to him. In Denmark the younger claimant was acknowledged by
the whole people, but in England the Mercian and Northumbrian earls
chose Harold as king, and Wessex only fell to Harthacnut. Both the young
kings were cruel, dissolute and wayward, most unworthy sons of a wise
father. It was to the great profit of England that they died within two
years of each other, the elder in 1040, the younger in 1042.
Edward the Confessor.
Harold.
On Harthacnut's death he was succeeded not by any Danish prince but by
his half-brother Edward, the elder son of AEthelred and Emma, whom he had
entertained at his court, and had apparently designated as his heir, for
he had no offspring. There was an end of the empire of Canute, for
Denmark fell to the great king's nephew, Sweyn Estrithson, and Norway
had thrown off the Danish yoke. Engaged in wars with each other, Dane
and Norseman had no leisure to think of reconquering England. Hence
Edward's accession took place without any friction. He reigned, but did
not rule, for twenty-four years, though he was well on in middle age
before he was crowned. Of all the descendants of Alfred he was the only
one who lived to see his sixtieth birthday--the house of Wessex were a
short-lived race. In character he differed from all his ancestors--he
had Alfred's piety without his capacity, and AEthelred's weakness without
his vices. The mildest of men, a crowned monk, who let slip the reins of
government from his hands while he busied himself in prayer and church
building, he lowered the kingly power to a depth to which it had never
sunk before in England. His sole positive quality, over and above his
piety, was a love for his mother's kin, the Normans. He had spent his
whole life from 1013 to 1040 as an exile at the court of Rouen, and was
far more of a Norman than an Englishman. It was but natural, therefore,
that he should invite his continental relatives and the friends of his
youth to share in his late-coming prosperity. But when he filled his
court with them, made them earls and bishops, and appointed one of them,
Robert of Jumieges, to the archbishopric of Canterbury, his undisguised
preference for strangers gave no small offence to his English subjects.
In the main, however, the king's personal likes and dislikes mattered
little to the realm, since he had a comparatively small share in its
governance. He was habitually overruled and dominated by his earls, of
whom three, Leofric, Godwine and Siward--all old servants of Canute--had
far more power than their master. Holding respectively the great
earldoms of West Mercia, Wessex and Northumbria, they reigned almost
like petty sovereigns in their domains, and there seemed some chance
that England might fall apart into semi-independent feudal states, just
as France had done in the preceding century. The rivalries and intrigues
of these three magnates constitute the main part of the domestic
politics of Edward's reign. Godwine, whose daughter had wedded the king,
was the most forcible and ambitious of the three, but his pre-eminence
provoked a general league against him and in 1051 he was cast out of the
kingdom with his sons. In the next year he returned in arms, raised
Wessex in revolt, and compelled the king to in-law him again, to restore
his earldom, and to dismiss with ignominy the Norman favourites who were
hunted over seas. The old earl died in 1053, but was succeeded in power
by his son Harold, who for thirteen years maintained an unbroken mastery
over the king, and ruled England almost with the power of a regent.
There seems little doubt that he aspired to be Edward's successor: there
was no direct heir to the crown, and the nearest of kin was ah infant,
Edgar, the great-nephew of the reigning sovereign and grandson of
Edmund Ironside. England's experience of minors on the throne had been
unhappy--Edwy and AEthelred the Redeless were warnings rather than
examples. Moreover, Harold had before his eye as a precedent the
displacement of the effete Carolingian line in France, by the new house
of Robert the Strong and Hugh Capet, seventy years before. He prepared
for the crisis that must come at the death of Edward the Confessor by
bestowing the governance of several earldoms upon his brothers.
Unfortunately for him, however, the eldest of them, Tostig, proved the
greatest hindrance to his plans, provoking wrath and opposition wherever
he went by his high-handedness and cruelty.
Harold's governance of the realm seems to have been on the whole
successful. He put down the Scottish usurper Macbeth with the swords of
a Northumbrian army, and restored Malcolm III. to the throne of that
kingdom (1055-1058). He led an army into the heart of Wales to punish
the raids of King Griffith ap Llewelyn, and harried the Welsh so
bitterly that they put their leader to death, and renewed their homage
to the English crown (1063). He won enthusiastic devotion from the men
of Wessex and the South, but in Northumbria and Mercia he was less
liked. His experiment in taking the rule of these earldoms out of the
hands of the descendants of Siward and Leofric proved so unsuccessful
that he had to resign himself to undoing it. Ultimately one of Leofric's
grandsons, Edwin, was left as earl of Mercia, and the other, Morcar,
became earl of Northumbria instead of Harold's unpopular brother Tostig.
It was on this fact that the fortune of England was to turn, for in the
hour of crisis Harold was to be betrayed by the lords of the Midlands
and the North.
Origin of the Norman Conquest.
Somewhere about the end of his period of ascendancy, perhaps in 1064,
Harold was sailing in the Channel when his ship was driven ashore by a
tempest near the mouth of the Somme. He fell into the hands of William
the Bastard, duke of Normandy, King Edward's cousin and best-loved
relative. The duke brought him to Rouen, and kept him in a kind of
honourable captivity till he had extorted a strange pledge from him.
William alleged that his cousin had promised to make him his heir, and
to recommend him to the witan as king of England. He demanded that
Harold should swear to aid him in the project. Fearing for his personal
safety, the earl gave the required oath, and sailed home a perjured man,
for he had assuredly no intention of keeping the promise that had been
extorted from him. Within two years King Edward expired (Jan. 5, 1066)
after having recommended Harold as his successor to the thegns and
bishops who stood about his death-bed. The witan chose the earl as king
without any show of doubt, though the assent of the Mercian and
Northumbrian earls must have been half-hearted. Not a word was said in
favour of the claim of the child Edgar, the heir of the house of Alfred,
nothing (of course) for the preposterous claim of William of Normandy.
Harold accepted the crown without a moment's hesitation, and at once
prepared to defend it, for he was aware that the Norman would fight to
gain his purpose. He endeavoured to conciliate Edwin and Morcar by
marrying their sister Ealdgyth, and trusted that he had bought their
loyal support. When the spring came round it was known that William had
begun to collect a great fleet and army. Aware that the resources of his
own duchy were inadequate to the conquest of England, he sent all over
Europe to hire mercenaries, promising every knight who would join him
broad lands beyond the Channel in the event of victory. He gathered
beneath his banner thousands of adventurers not only from France,
Brittany and Flanders, but even from distant regions such as Aragon,
Apulia and Germany. The native Normans were but a third part of his
host, and he himself commanded rather as director of a great joint-stock
venture than as the feudal chief of his own duchy. He also obtained the
blessing of Pope Alexander II. for his enterprise, partly on the plea
that Harold was a perjurer, partly because Stigand, the archbishop of
Canterbury, had acknowledged the late anti-pope Benedict.
All through the summer Harold held a fleet concentrated under the lee
of the Isle of Wight, waiting to intercept William's armament, while the
fyrd of Wessex was ready to support him if the enemy should succeed in
making a landing. By September the provisions were spent, and the ships
were growing unseaworthy. Very reluctantly the king bade them go round
to London to refit and revictual themselves. William meanwhile had been
unable to sail, because for many weeks the wind had been unfavourable.
If it had set from the south the fortune of England would have been
settled by a sea-fight. At this moment came a sudden and incalculable
diversion; Harold's turbulent brother Tostig, banished for his crimes in
1065, was seeking revenge. He had persuaded Harold Hardrada, king of
Norway, almost the last of the great viking adventurers, to take him as
guide for a raid on England. They ran into the Humber with a great
fleet, beat the earls Edwin and Morcar in battle, and captured York.
Abandoning his watch on the south coast Harold of England flew northward
to meet the invaders; he surprised them at Stamford Bridge, slew both
the Norse king and the rebel earl, and almost exterminated their army
(Sept. 25? 1066). But while he was absent from the Channel the wind
turned, and William of Normandy put to sea. The English fleet and the
English army were both absent, and the Normans came safely to shore on
the 28th of September. Harold had to turn hastily southward to meet
them. On the 13th of October his host was arrayed on the hill of Senlac,
7 miles from the duke's camp at Hastings. The ranks of his thegnhood and
house-carles had been thinned by the slaughter of Stamford Bridge, and
their place was but indifferently supplied by the hasty levies of
London, Wessex and the Home Counties. Edwin and Morcar, who should have
been at his side with their Mercians and Northumbrians, were still far
away--probably from treachery, slackness and jealousy.
Next morning (October 14) William marched out from Hastings and attacked
the English host, which stood at bay in a solid mass of spear and axemen
behind a slight breastwork on the hillside. After six hours of desperate
fighting the victory fell to the duke, who skilfully alternated the use
of archers and cavalry against the unwieldy English phalanx. (See
HASTINGS: _Battle of_.) The disaster was complete, Harold himself was
slain, his two brothers had fallen with him, not even the wreck of an
army escaped. There was no one to rally the English in the name of the
house of Godwine. The witan met and hastily saluted the child Edgar
AEtheling as king. But the earls Edwin and Morcar refused to fight for
him, and when William appeared in front of the gates of London they were
opened almost without resistance. He was elected king in the old English
fashion by the surviving magnates, and crowned on Christmas Day 1066.