THE RESISTANCE TO THE DANES.
In the long period of three and a-half centuries which had elapsed
between the Jutish conquest of Kent and the establishment of the West
Saxon over-lordship, the politics of Britain had been wholly insular.
The island had been brought back by Augustine and his successors into
ecclesiastical, commercial, and literary union with the continent: but
no foreign war or invasion had ever broken the monotony of murdering the
Welsh and harrying the surrounding English. The isolation of England was
complete. Ship-building was almost an obsolete art: and the small trade
which still centred in London seems to have been mainly carried on in
Frisian bottoms; for the Low Dutch of the continent still retained the
seafaring habits which those of England had forgotten. But a new enemy
was now beginning to appear in northern Europe–the Scandinavians. The
history of the great wicking movement forms the subject of a separate
volume in this series: but the manner in which the English met it will
demand a brief treatment here. Some outline of the bare facts, however,
must first be premised.
As early as 789, during the reign of Offa in Mercia, "three ships of
Northmen from Hæretha land" came on shore in Wessex. "Then the reeve
rode against them, and would have driven them to the king's town, for he
wist not what they were: and there men slew him. Those were the first
ships of Danish men that ever sought English kin's land." In 795, "the
harrying of heathen men wretchedly destroyed God's church at Lindisfarne
isle, through rapine and manslaughter." In the succeeding year, "the
heathen harried among the Northumbrians, and plundered Ecgberht's
monastery at Wearmouth." In 832, "heathen men ravaged Sheppey"; and a
year later, "King Ecgberht fought against the crews of thirty-five ships
at Charmouth, and there was muckle slaughter made, and the Danes held
the battle-field."[1] In 835, another host came to the West Welsh (now
almost reduced to the peninsula of Cornwall): and the Welsh readily
joined them against their West Saxon over-lord. Ecgberht met the united
hosts at Hengestesdun and put them both to flight. It was his last
success. In the succeeding year he died, and the kingdom descended to
his weak son, Æthelwulf. His second son, Æthelstan, was placed over
Kent, Essex, Surrey, and Sussex, as under-king.
[1] This entry in the Chronicle, however, is probably
erroneous, as an exactly similar one occurs under Æthelwulf,
seven years later.
Next spring, the flood of wickings began to pour in earnest over
England. Thirty-three piratical ships sailed up Southampton Water to
pillage Southampton, perhaps with an ultimate eye to the treasures of
royal Winchester, the capital and minster-town of the West Saxon
over-lord himself. This was a bold attempt, but the West Saxons met it
in full force. The ealdorman Wulfheard gathered together the levy of
fighting men, attacked the host, and put it to flight with great
slaughter. Shortly after a second Danish host landed near Portland,
doubtless to plunder Dorchester: and the local ealdorman Æthelhelm,
falling upon them with the levy of Dorset men, was defeated after a
sharp struggle, leaving the heathen in possession of the field. It was
not in Wessex, however, that the wickings were to make their great
success. The north had long suffered from terrible anarchy, and was a
ready prey for any invader. Out of fourteen kings who had reigned in
Northumbria during the eighth century, no less than seven were put to
death and six expelled by their rebellious subjects. Christian
Northumbria, which in Bæda's days had been the most flourishing part of
Britain, was now reduced to a mere agglomeration of petty princes and
clans, dependent on the West Saxon over-lord, and utterly unconnected
with one another in feeling or sympathy. Already we have seen how the
Danes harried Northumbria without opposition. The same was probably the
case with the whole Anglian coast on the east. In 840, the wickings fell
on the fen country. "The ealdorman Hereberht was slain by heathen men,
and many with him among the marsh-men." All down the east coast, the
piratical fleet proceeded, burning and slaughtering as it went. "In the
same year, in Lindsey, and in East Anglia, and among the Kent men, many
men were slain by the host." A year later, the wickings returned,
growing bolder as they found out the helplessness of the people. They
sailed up the Thames, and ravaged Rochester and London, with great
slaughter; after which they crossed the channel and fell upon Cwantawic,
or Étaples, a commercial port in the Saxon land of the Boulonnais. In
842, a Danish host defeated Æthelwulf himself at Charmouth in Dorset;
and in the succeeding summer "the ealdorman Eanulf, with the Somerset
levy, and Bishop Ealhstan and the ealdorman Osric, with the Dorset levy,
fought at Parretmouth with the host, and made a muckle slaughter, and
won the day."
The utter weakness of the first English resistance is well shown in
these facts. A terrible flood of heathen savagery was let loose upon the
country, and the people were wholly unable to cope with it. There was
absolutely no central organisation, no army, no commissariat, no ships.
The heathen host landed suddenly wherever it found the people
unprepared, and fell upon the larger towns for plunder. The local
authority, the ealdorman or the under-king, hastily gathered together
the local levy in arms, and fell upon the pirates tumultuously with the
men of the shire as best he might. But he had no provisions for a long
campaign: and when the levy had fought once, it melted away immediately,
every man going back again of necessity to his own home. If it won the
battle, it went home to drink over its success: if it lost, it
dissolved, demoralized, and left the burghers to fight for their own
walls, or to buy off the heathen with their own money. But every shire
and every kingdom fought for itself alone. If the Dorset men could only
drive away the host from Charmouth and Portland, they cared little
whether it sailed away to harry Sussex and Hants. If the Northumbrians
could only drive it away from the Humber, they cared little whether it
set sail for the Thames and the Solent. The North Folk of East Anglia
were equally happy to send it off toward the South Folk. While there was
so little cohesion between the parts of the same kingdoms, there was no
cohesion at all between the different kingdoms over which Æthelwulf
exercised a nominal over-lordship. The West Saxon kings fought for
Dorset and for Kent, but there is no trace of their ever fighting for
East Anglia or for Northumbria. They left their northern vassals to take
care of themselves. "It was never a war between the Danes and the
national army," says Prof. Pearson, "but between the Danes and a local
militia." It would have been impossible, indeed, to resist the wickings
effectually without a strong central system, which could move large
armies rapidly from point to point: and such a system was quite undreamt
of in the half-consolidated England of the ninth century. Only war with
a foreign invader could bring it about even in a faint degree: and that
was exactly what the Danish invasion did for Wessex.
The year 851 marks an important epoch in the English resistance. The
annual horde of wickings had now become as regular in its recurrence as
summer itself; and even the inert West Saxon kings began to feel that
permanent measures must be taken against them. They had built ships,
and tried to tackle the invaders in the only way in which so partially
civilised a race could tackle such tactics as those of the Danes–upon
the sea. A host of wickings came round to Sandwich in Kent. The
under-king Æthelstan fell upon them with his new navy, and took nine of
their ships, putting the rest to flight with great slaughter. But in the
same year another great host of 250 sail, by far the largest fleet of
which we have yet heard, came to the mouth of the Thames, and there
landed, a step which marks a fresh departure in the wicking tactics.
They took Canterbury by assault, and then marched on to London. There
they stormed the busy merchant town, and put to flight Beorhtwulf, the
under-king of the Mercians, with his local levy. Thence they proceeded
southward into Surrey, doubtless on their way to Winchester. King
Æthelwulf met them at Ockley, with the West-Saxon levy, "and there made
the greatest slaughter among the heathen host that we have yet heard,
and gained the day." In spite of these two great successes, however,
both of which show an increasing statesmanship on the part of the West
Saxons, this year was memorable in another way, for "the heathen men for
the first time sat over winter in Thanet." The loose predatory
excursions were beginning to take the complexion of regular conquest and
permanent settlement.
Yet so little did the English still realise the terrible danger of the
heathen invasion, that next year Æthelwulf was fighting the Welsh of
Wales; and two years after he went on a pilgrimage to Rome, "with great
pomp, and dwelt there twelve months, and then fared homeward." In that
same year, "heathen men sat over winter in Sheppey."
After Æthelwulf's death the English resistance grew fainter and fainter.
In 860, under his second son, Æthelberht, a Danish host took Winchester
itself by storm. Five years later, a heathen army settled in Thanet, and
the men of Kent agreed to buy peace of them–the first sign of that evil
habit of buying off the Dane, which grew gradually into a fixed custom.
But the host stole away during the truce for collecting the money, and
harried all Kent unawares.
Meanwhile, we hear little of the North. The almost utter destruction of
its records during the heathen domination restricts us for information
to the West Saxon chronicles; and they have little to tell us about any
but their own affairs. In 866, however, we learn that there came a great
heathen host to East Anglia–an organised expedition under two
chieftains–"and took winter quarters there, and were horsed; and the
East Anglians made peace with them." Next year, this permanent host
sailed northward to Humber, and attacked York. The Northumbrians, as
usual, were at strife among themselves, two rival kings fighting for the
supremacy. The burghers of York admitted the heathen host within the
walls. Then the rival kings fell upon the town, broke the slender
fortifications, and rushed into the city. The Danes attacked them both,
and defeated them with great slaughter. Northumbria passed at once into
the power of the heathen. Their chiefs, Ingvar and Ubba, erected Deira
into a new Danish kingdom, leaving Bernicia to an English puppet; and
Northumbria ceases to exist for the present as a factor in Anglo-Saxon
history. We must hand it over for sixty years to the Scandinavian
division of this series.
In 868, Ingvar and Ubba advanced again into Mercia and beset Nottingham.
Then the under-king Burhred called in the aid of his over-lord, Æthelred
of Wessex, who came to his assistance with a levy. "But there was no
hard fight there, and the Mercians made peace with the host." In 870,
the heathen overran East Anglia, and destroyed the great monastery of
Peterborough, probably the richest religious house in all England.
Eadmund, the under-king, came against them with the levy, but they slew
him; and the people held him for a martyr, whose shrine at Bury St.
Edmunds grew in after days into the holiest spot in East Anglia. The
Danes harried the whole country, burnt the monasteries, and annexed
Norfolk and Suffolk as a second Danish kingdom. East Anglia, too,
disappears for a while from our English annals.
Lastly, the Danes turned against Mercia and Wessex. In 871, a host under
Bagsecg and Halfdene came to Reading, which belonged to the latter
territory, when the local ealdorman engaged them and won a slight
victory. Shortly afterward the West Saxon king Æthelred, with his
brother Ælfred, came up, and engaged them a second time with worse
success. Three other bloody battles followed, in all of which the Danes
were beaten with heavy loss; but the West Saxons also suffered severely.
For three years the host moved up and down through Mercia and Wessex;
and the Mercians stood by, aiding neither side, but "making peace with
the host" from time to time. At last, however, in 874, the heathens
finally annexed the greater part of Mercia itself. "The host fared from
Lindsey to Repton, and there sat for the winter, and drove King Burhred
over sea, two and twenty years after he came to the kingdom; and they
subdued all the land. And Burhred went to Rome, and there settled; and
his body lies in St. Mary's Church, in the school of the English kin.
And in the same year they gave the kingdom of Mercia in ward to
Ceolwulf, an unwise thegn; and he swore oaths to them, and gave hostages
that it should be ready for them on whatso day they willed; and that he
would be ready with his own body, and with all who would follow him, for
the behoof of the host." Thus Mercia, too, fades for a short while out
of our history, and Wessex alone of all the English kingdoms remains.
This brief but inevitable record of wars and battles is necessarily
tedious, yet it cannot be omitted without slurring over some highly
important and interesting facts. It is impossible not to be struck with
the extraordinarily rapid way in which a body of fierce heathen invaders
overran two great Christian and comparatively civilised states. We
cannot but contrast the inertness of Northumbria and the lukewarmness
of Mercia with the stubborn resistance finally made by Ælfred in Wessex.
The contrast may be partly due, it is true, to the absence of native
Northumbrian and Mercian accounts. We might, perhaps, find, had we
fuller details, that the men of Bernicia and Deira made a harder fight
for their lands and their churches than the West Saxon annals would lead
us to suppose. Still, after making all allowance for the meagreness of
our authorities, there remains the indubitable fact that a heathen
kingdom was established in the pure English land of Bæda and Cuthberht,
while the Christian faith and the Saxon nationality held their own for
ever in peninsular and half-Celtic Wessex.
The difference is doubtless due in part to merely surface causes. East
Anglia had long lost her autonomy, and, while sometimes ruled by Mercia,
was sometimes broken up under several ealdormen. For her and for
Northumbria the conquest was but a change from a West Saxon to a Danish
master. The house of Ecgberht had broken down the national and tribal
organisation, and was incapable of substituting a central organisation
in its place. With no roads and no communications such a centralising
scheme is really impracticable. The disintegrated English kingdoms made
little show of fighting for their Saxon over-lord. They could accept a
Dane for master almost as readily as they could accept a Saxon.
But besides these surface causes, there was a deeper and more
fundamental cause underlying the difference. The Scandinavians were
nearer to the pure English in blood and speech than they were to the
Saxons. In their old home the two races had lived close together,–in
Sleswick, Jutland, and Scania,–while the Saxons had dwelt further
south, near the Frankish border, by the lowlands of the Elbe. To the
English of Northumbria, the Saxons of Wessex were almost foreigners.
Even at the present day, when the existence of a recognised literary
dialect has done so much to obliterate provincial varieties of speech in
England, a Dorsetshire peasant, speaking in a slightly altered form the
classical West Saxon of Ælfred, has great difficulty in understanding a
Yorkshire peasant, speaking in a slightly altered form the classical
Northumbrian of Bæda. But in the ninth century the differences between
the two dialects were probably far greater. On the other hand, though
Danish and Anglian have widely separated at the present day, and were
widely distinct even in the days of Cnut, it is probable that at this
earlier period they were still, to some extent, mutually comprehensible.
Thus, the heathen Scandinavian may have seemed to the Northumbrian and
the East Anglian almost like a fellow-countryman, while the West Saxon
seemed in part like an enemy and an intruder. At any rate, the
similarity of blood and language enabled the two races rapidly to
coalesce; and when the cloud rises again from the North half a century
later, the distinction of Dane and Englishman has almost ceased in the
conquered provinces. It is worthy of note in this connection that the
part of Mercia afterwards given over by Ælfred to Guthrum, was the
Anglian half, while the part retained by Wessex was mostly the Saxon
half–the land conquered by Penda from the West Saxons two hundred years
before.
Nor must we suppose that this first wave of Scandinavian conquest in any
way swamped or destroyed the underlying English population of the North.
The conquerors came merely as a "host," or army of occupation, not as a
body of rural colonists. They left the conquered English in possession
of their homes, though they seized upon the manors for themselves, and
kept the higher dignities of the vanquished provinces in their own
hands. Being rapidly converted to Christianity, they amalgamated readily
with the native people. Few women came over with them, and intermarriage
with the English soon broke down the wall of separation. The
archbishopric of York continued its succession uninterruptedly
throughout the Danish occupation. The Bishops of Elmham lived through
the stormy period; those of Leicester transferred their see to
Dorchester-on-the-Thames; those of Lichfield apparently kept up an
unbroken series. We may gather that beneath the surface the North
remained just as steadily English under the Danish princes as the whole
country afterwards remained steadily English under the Norman kings.
There was, however, one section of the true English race which kept
itself largely free from the Scandinavian host. North of the Tyne the
Danes apparently spread but sparsely; English ealdormen continued to
rule at Bamborough over the land between Forth and Tyne. Hence
Northumberland and the Lothians remained more purely English than any
other part of Britain. The people of the South are Saxons: the people of
the West are half Celts; the people of the North and the Midlands are
largely intermixed with Danes; but the people of the Scottish lowlands,
from Forth to Tweed, are almost purely English; and the dialect which we
always describe as Scotch is the strongest, the tersest, and the most
native modern form of the original Anglo-Saxon tongue. If we wish to
find the truest existing representative of the genuine pure-blooded
English race, we must look for him, not in Mercia or in Wessex, but
amongst the sturdy and hard-headed farmers of Tweedside and Lammermoor.