EARLY DANISH INVASIONS--EGBERT AND ETHELWULF.
Two entries which strictly belong to the eighth century have been
reserved for this place, because they are rather foreshadowings of
what was to befal in the years after 800, than characteristic of what
was happening in the years preceding it. At some unnamed date in the
reign of Beorhtric, King of Wessex, but probably about the year 790,
the Chronicle tells us that “first came three ships of Northmen.[114]
And then the reeve rode thereto and would fain drive them to the king’s
vill, for he knew not what [manner of men] they were and there they
slew him. These were the first ships of Danish men that sought the land
of the English race.” This short but ominous entry is a tocsin ringing
in 300 years of strife. The words of the Chronicle and of its copyist
Ethelweard seem to suggest that the ships’ crews came with peaceful
intent; that the king’s reeve--a man whose office was something like
that of steward or bailiff--tried to exact some payment from them, and
for that purpose to force them to enter some royal settlement, but
found to his cost that these were no sheep that would stand quiet for
his shearing, but fierce war-wolves, capable of turning upon him with
hungry teeth and rending him in pieces.
This first affray with the Danes evidently took place in Wessex; and,
if we may believe the historian Ethelweard, the royal vill where the
reeve resided was Dorchester. But the Scandinavians having seen, as the
Saxons did before them, “the nothingness of the natives,” of course
came again, and this time (793) to Northumbria. Dire presentiments had
already cowed the hearts of the people; hurricanes blew and lightnings
flashed, and (if we like to trust the chronicler) fiery flying serpents
hurtled through the air. Then came a great famine, and then (June
8) “the heathen men” [Danes] “miserably destroyed God’s church at
Lindisfarne with rapine and slaughter”. The desecration of so holy
a place shed horror through western Christendom. “It is now,” wrote
Alcuin to the Northumbrian King Ethelred, “about 350 years that we and
our fathers have dwelt in this most beautiful country, and never before
has such a terrible thing befallen Britain as that which we have now
suffered from the pagans. Nor was it, in fact, thought possible that a
voyage of that kind could ever have been made”--a strange illustration
of the lost seamanship of the Anglo-Saxons. “Lo now the church of
St. Cuthbert is stained with the blood of the priests of God. It is
despoiled of all its ornaments. The most venerable place in Britain has
been given to pagan nations for a prey.”
The ninth century, upon which we now enter, too truly verified the
forebodings of the prophets of evil. It began indeed in glory, with
Charles the Frank acclaimed at Rome as Augustus, and meditating the
revival of the old Roman empire in all its splendour, the protection
of the widow and the fatherless, the humbling of all lawless power,
the foundation of St. Augustine’s City of God. But the new empire had
scarcely been founded when it began to crumble; all through the middle
years of the century it sank lower and lower into the morass. With the
deposition of Charles the Fat in 887 and his death in 888 the last
Carolingian emperor vanished from the scene. Saracen pirates ravaged
the shores of the Mediterranean, besieged Rome (846), rifled the tombs
of the apostles and hurled their lances at the mosaic picture of Christ
in the apse of St. Peter’s. Ere the century was ended, Hungarian Arpad
was renewing in Central Europe the ravages of Attila. Everywhere there
was “distress of nations with perplexity”--perplexity made all the more
terrible by the fact that the popes themselves, the men to whom Europe
looked for counsel and for cheer, were throughout this century for the
most part men of poor and feeble character. It was the age which saw
the posthumous condemnation of Pope Formosus, the age in which the
malevolent credulity of a later generation placed the fable of Pope
Joan.
But greater than all the other calamities which befel Europe during
this period was unquestionably the misery caused by the raids of
Scandinavian free-booters. A well-known story describes how Charles the
Great saw the ships of the Northmen approaching the city in Provence
where he then dwelt. As soon as the pirates perceived that they would
have to deal with the great emperor himself, they sheered off in
well-advised caution, but Charles stood at the eastern window of his
palace gazing at their departing sails, and as he gazed he wept. None
of his courtiers durst ask him the reason of his tears, but he himself
deigned thus to explain them: “I weep for sorrow that they should have
dared in my lifetime to approach this coast, and because I foresee how
much misery they will cause to those who come after me”. Whatever may
be the truth of this story, there is no doubt that Charles’s alleged
prophecy was fatally verified. Engrossed as we generally are by the
story of Danish ravages in England, we are apt to forget that, at least
in the ninth century, France and Germany suffered nearly as much from
the same calamity. All round the coast from Denmark to Spain, wherever
a broad estuary invited their presence, there the Danish pirates
entered and ravaged. The Elbe, the Rhine, the Seine, the Loire and
the Garonne were all furrowed by their keels. Hamburg, Paris, Rouen,
Bordeaux, Marseilles and countless other cities were sacked by them;
some, especially Paris, more than once.
A student of Scandinavian history may well inquire, not why the raids
of the Northmen were terrible in the ninth and two following centuries,
but why they had not begun long before. Here was a poor and hardy
population, inhabiting a country so deeply indented by the sea that it
was impossible for its sons to be mere landsmen; in fact a population
which for more than a thousand years has been more enthusiastically
seafaring than any other in the world. Within a few days’ sail of their
homes were the shores of Britain and of Gaul, countries peopled by
races which had lost their old love of the sea, and were for the most
part sunk in swinish pleasures; rich countries, too, according to the
estimate of that day, everywhere studded with convents in which pious
women or unwarlike men were hoarding up gold and silver and jewels for
the glory of the White Christ. There was yet no settled order in any
of the Northmen’s own lands. The history of Denmark, Sweden and Norway
in the seventh and eighth centuries is mere chaos. The title of king
was easily earned and easily lost. In the sagas of the _Heimskringla_
piracy is treated as the normal occupation of every young Northman
of noble birth. “Eric’s sons warred much in the eastern lands, but
sometimes they harried in Norway.” “There harried Olaf and slew many
men, and burned some out of house and home, and took much wealth.”
Entries such as these (though of a rather later date than we have yet
reached) occur on almost every other page of the great Icelandic epic,
and give us the impression that the young Scandinavian gathered ships
together and “harried” the Baltic lands or the shores of the German or
Atlantic Ocean, in the same way in which the young Englishman went the
grand tour in the eighteenth century, or in the nineteenth became owner
of a ranch.
The ships of the vikings, if we may judge from the few specimens
preserved in the museums of Denmark and Norway, though well built of
their kind, were not much better than large open boats, undecked,
averaging about seventy feet long, and drawing not more than four feet
of water. They had only one mast with a square sail, and they trusted
rather to rowing than to sailing for their progress. Except on the
largest ships, about fifteen or sixteen men at a time, with a like
number relieving them, and sixty or seventy fighting men, or a hundred
in all, may have been the complement of a viking ship. There was no
difference between prow and stern, and the vessel could be worked in
either direction, the steering being managed by an oar at the side. The
high-pointed prow at either end was often fashioned into the likeness
of some animal, generally a dragon or a serpent. It is evident that
such a craft as these, however well adapted for navigation in the long
sheltered fiords of Norway, would not be very safe in an Atlantic
storm.[115] It is probable, therefore, that the Northmen would be
careful observers of the weather, and would generally choose a season
of calm weather for slipping across the German Ocean. Once arrived at
the English or Irish coast, they would choose some island near to the
mainland and make it their lair, from whence they might issue forth
to plunder and destroy. Especially convenient for their purpose, as
for that of their Saxon predecessors, were such islands as Sheppey and
Thanet, separated from fertile Kent only by narrow channels in which
the dragon-ships could lie sheltered from winds and waves. Dear also to
the heart of the Northman buccaneer were the estuaries of great rivers,
Humber, Severn, Thames, Seine and Loire. Here they could collect their
ships, scattered perchance in the course of their passage over the
ocean, could watch the movements of the militia gathering for the
defence of the country, and then at the right moment could row rapidly
up the broad stream, capture and sack some unsuspecting city, and
gather great store of gold and jewels from some rich cathedral. This,
the collection of treasures from the more civilised lands of the south,
was, after all, the chief incentive to the early vikings in their wild
sea-rovings. Herein they were like the first generation of Elizabethan
adventurers in the Spanish main, to whom the plunder of the Plate-fleet
seemed the supreme object of desire, though with the viking, as with
the buccaneer, thoughts of settlement and of conquest came later, and
they who had come to ravage remained to rule.
The _Here_,[116] the great Danish armament which appears and reappears
so often in the pages of the Chronicle--one imagines the studious monk
in his _scriptorium_ trembling as he writes the very word--seems to
have been generally composed of foot soldiers hewing with swords or
wielding their great two-handed battle-axes, armed with strong round
shields and with byrnies or coats-of-mail, and beginning the fight by
sending a cloud of javelins at their foes. Gradually, however, they
learned the advantage of possessing a force of cavalry; and one of
their first exploits on landing was to scour the country for horses,
by means of which they could ravage the land far and wide where their
ships could not carry them. They were, however, in strictness mounted
infantry rather than cavalry. Their horses bore them swiftly to the
battle-field. When they had reached it they dismounted and fought on
foot.
Not even the Icelandic Sagas with all their poetic fire can win us to
unmixed admiration of the lives of these freebooters. They had some
noble qualities, but notwithstanding these they were still barbarians.
They were ancestors of the most chivalrous nations of Europe, and they
possessed some of the qualities inherent in chivalry, such as courage,
endurance, loyalty, honour to the women of their tribe. But on the
other hand--if any reliance is to be placed on the statements of the
Chronicle--they would often swear most solemnly to a treaty and then
ride away and break it. They often tortured their captives; their hands
were heavy on the weak, on little children and on women. This is the
less to be wondered at, since owing to the poverty of their country
they often left their own new-born children to perish. Their blows fell
with especial ferocity on the churches and monasteries of Britain: a
fact which may probably be accounted for by the fact that these were
the chief treasure-houses of the invaded lands.
The assaults of the Danes upon the Saxons, like those of the Saxons
upon the Romanised Britons, fall naturally into three periods,[117] the
first of robbery, the second of settlement, and the third of conquest.
The chronological limits of these three periods may be approximately
fixed as follows: pillage, from 790 to 851; settlement, from 851 to
897; conquest (after a pause of nearly a century), from 980 to 1016.
Terrible as were the ravages of the Scandinavian invaders, it is
generally admitted that on the whole the benefit which resulted
therefrom was greater than the suffering. That benefit was the
consolidation of Anglo-Saxon England into one kingdom. In the
thirty-seven years of the reign of Egbert of Wessex he attained, by
steps which we are about to trace, to a supremacy which was probably
wider than that of any of the Bretwaldas who had preceded him, and
which in some degree justifies the popular conception of his position
as founder of the English monarchy, though the unity of England was
not in truth realised till a century later. But other Bretwaldas had
been nearly as powerful as Egbert, and their overlordship in the hands
of feeble descendants had melted away, while the “particularism” of
the several lesser kingdoms had again successfully asserted itself.
It may be doubted whether Egbert’s supremacy would not have gone the
way of all the previous supremacies, but for that terrible series of
Scandinavian invasions which seemed at the time to threaten not merely
the prosperity but the very life of Anglo-Saxon peoples. For a century
the terrible struggle continued and then ended for a time, to be
renewed indeed with almost equal fury after an interval of rest; but
the effect of that first fierce discipline was greatly to weaken if not
altogether to destroy the spirit of particularism in the Anglo-Saxon
states. After Athelstan’s death in 940 there was scarcely any serious
thought of reestablishing Mercia or Northumbria as a separate kingdom
from Wessex. Hard and cruel were the blows stricken by the hammer of
Thor, but they had the effect of welding Angles, Saxons and Jutes into
one people.
The upward career of EGBERT of Wessex (802–839) must now be briefly
described. As has been said, he returned from exile on the death of his
foe, Beorhtric, and apparently without a contest was raised to the West
Saxon throne. On the very day of his accession there was a great fight
between the Mercians, commanded by the Ealdorman of the Hwiccas and
the West Saxons under the generalship of the Ealdorman of Wilts. Both
Ealdormen were slain, but victory is said to have rested with the men
of Wiltshire. With this exception, the first thirteen years of Egbert’s
reign passed in peace. Cenwulf of Mercia, whose dominions, including,
as they did, Kent, Sussex, Surrey and Essex, wrapped Wessex all round
to the east, was too powerful to be lightly assailed. When Egbert’s old
patron, Charlemagne, died in 814, there was nothing to betoken that the
exile whom he had befriended would achieve anything more than a petty
and precarious West Saxon royalty. In the following year, however,
the long-interrupted movement westward was once more resumed. Egbert
“harried West Wales from east to west”; in other words, he overran
Cornwall from the Tamar to the Land’s End. Though the process of
subjugation was not yet complete, this was the beginning of the end of
Cornish independence.
In 821 Cenwulf, the powerful King of Mercia, died, and there were
troubles in the palace at Lichfield. After the murder of his son,
a child of seven years old, and the deposition of his brother, an
usurper named Beornwulf obtained the crown. The discords thus caused
gave Egbert the opportunity for which he had probably long waited. He
declared war on Beornwulf, met him in battle at Ellandune, probably
in the north of Wiltshire, and after a most bloody fight completely
defeated him. Intent on gathering at once the most important fruits of
victory, Egbert sent his son Ethelwulf to the region of Kent, where
his own father had once held sway. Baldred, King of Kent, the vassal
of Mercia, was expelled; the three south-eastern counties and Essex,
which included the city of London, gladly accepted the rule of Egbert,
who was represented by his son Ethelwulf as under-king, and the long
struggle between Mercia and Wessex for the possession of that corner
of England was at an end. East Anglia, with her bitter memories of
Mercian perfidy, to which her King Ethelbert had fallen a victim thirty
years before, now rose in rebellion, relying on the protection of
Egbert, and succeeded in defeating and slaying the Mercian king (826?).
After Beornwulf’s death Mercia could no longer offer any effectual
resistance. Egbert was soon acknowledged as overlord, and thus by about
the year 829 he had brought under his supremacy, though not under his
personal rule, the whole of England south of the Humber, and acquired
the mysterious title of Bretwalda, which (if the Saxon Chronicle may be
trusted) had been borne by no other sovereign since the death of Oswy,
a century and a half before.
The conqueror next moved against Northumbria, whose king Eanred did not
dare to accept the offer of battle. At Dore, among the hills of North
Derbyshire, not far from Sheffield, “the Northumbrians met him and
offered him obedience and peace, and with that they separated the one
from the other”. This transaction undoubtedly meant the acceptance of
Egbert as overlord, and his supremacy was thus at last assured over the
whole English portion of the island. Nor did he rest content herewith,
for in the next year “he led an army against the men of North Wales and
reduced them to humble” (though not permanent) “obedience”.
The last four years of Egbert’s life were disturbed by the raids of
the Danish invaders. For forty-one years after the raids in which the
Northumbrian sanctuaries were pillaged, the Northmen seem to have left
England unmolested, but during this time they had been sailing round
the north of Scotland, occupying the Hebrides and grievously harrying,
all but conquering, Ireland. Now in 835 Egbert, already a man advanced
in years, heard the grievous tidings that “heathen men were ravaging
the Isle of Sheppey”. Thus the Danes, like the Jutes four centuries
earlier, began their hostile operations with one of those curious
semi-islands which clustered round the coast of Kent. Sheppey, however,
was higher up the estuary of the Thames than Hengest’s Isle of Thanet.
Next year the Danes appeared on the coast of West Dorset. The crews
of thirty-five ships appeared off Charmouth, not far from Lyme Regis.
Egbert himself led his men to battle; there was a terrible slaughter,
in which two bishops and two ealdormen fell, and--ominous confession
of the West Saxon chronicler--“the Danes held the place of slaughter”.
Still, however, we have no hint of permanent occupation.
Two years later, in 838, there was a perilous combination of Northman
and Celt. “A mighty fleet” [evidently Danish] “came to West Wales and
they” [Danes and Cornishmen] “made an alliance to fight against Egbert.
When he heard that, he went forth and fought with them at Hengestdune,
and there he put to flight both Welshmen [Cornishmen] and Danes.”
At Hingston Down, a high moorland overlooking the Tamar, about four
miles north of the place where the great Saltash bridge now spans the
creek, this important victory was won. It was the last piece of work
that the old warrior accomplished. In 839 he “fared forth,” surely not
without some dark forebodings of the hard struggle that lay before his
descendants; and ETHELWULF his son reigned in his stead. The new king
seems to have ruled in person only over the ancestral Wessex, forming
the recently acquired kingdoms in the south-east of the island into a
dependency, of which his brother Athelstan was made under-king.
The teacher to whom the education of Ethelwulf when a boy had been
entrusted by his father, and who retained considerable influence over
him in manhood, was an ecclesiastic of noble birth named Swithun, who
is chiefly now remembered on account of the meteorological phenomena
connected with the day devoted to him in the calendar (July 15,
971).[118] The gentle and devout character of Ethelwulf seems to have
retained through life the impress of the teaching of the unworldly
St. Swithun, but he had also another counsellor by whom he was often
braced to the performance of the difficult work of reigning. This was
Ealhstan, a stirring warrior-prelate, who in 848 won a great and bloody
victory over the Danes, at the mouth of the Parret, in Bridgwater
Bay, fighting side by side with the ealdormen of Somerset and Dorset.
Ealhstan was bishop of the great diocese of Sherborne (including the
counties of Somerset and Devon), while Swithun in 852, towards the
end of Ethelwulf’s reign, was enthroned in the more dignified see of
Winchester.
The influence, in some respects the diverging influence, of these two
counsellors of the king is probably described with truth by the twelfth
century historian, William of Malmesbury. “These two eminent bishops,
seeing the king to be of somewhat dull and lethargic temperament,
stirred him up by frequent admonitions to the performance of his kingly
duties. Swithun, who looked on worldly things with disgust, moulded
the mind of his lord to the love of things heavenly. Ealhstan, who
thought that secular matters also should not be neglected, animated
him to the war against the Danes, himself often furnishing money to
the royal treasury, himself setting the battle in array. Any one who
reads our annals will find that many such affairs were resolutely begun
and gloriously ended by him.” The historian, however, remarks that he
cannot give Ealhstan the unmingled praise which he would willingly
offer, because of his unjust encroachments on the rights of the
monastery of Malmesbury.
Almost every year of Ethelwulf’s reign has its annal in the Chronicle,
telling of Danish ravages. The storm beat most persistently on Wessex.
Southampton (840), Portland (840), Charmouth (843), the mouth of the
Parret (848), Wembury (?) (854), were all scenes of battle with the
Danes, generally, but not always, disastrous for the English. The other
parts of the country did not escape unharmed. In 841 Lindsey, East
Anglia and Kent saw widespread slaughter. In 844 Redwulf, King of
Northumbria, met his death at the hands of the invaders. In 851, three
hundred and fifty ships came to the mouth of the Thames; their crews
took Canterbury and London by storm, and put to flight the king of the
Mercians who had advanced to meet them. There, however, their success
ended. Crossing the Thames into Surrey, they were met by Ethelwulf
and his eldest son Ethelbald leading the West Saxon _fyrd_. Battle
was joined at Ockley, on the edge of the chalk downs which look into
the adjoining county of Sussex, and there the West Saxon king in the
words of the Chronicle, “made the greatest slaughter among the heathen
army that we have heard of till this present day, and there gained the
victory”.
However complete the victory of Ockley might be, its importance is
much diminished by the entry which precedes it in the Chronicle:
“And the heathen men for the first time took up their quarters over
winter in Thanet”. We thus enter on the second of the above-mentioned
periods--the stage of settlement, that in which the Danes came to
England, not merely to plunder and then depart, but to fix their abode
permanently in the country. This choice of Thanet as their winter
quarters must, to the men of Kent who knew anything of the history of
their ancestors, have seemed an ominous recurrence to the strategy of
Hengest and Horsa four centuries previously. There was trouble also
from an older enemy. The men of Wales were now governed by one of
the greatest of their early kings, Rhodri Mawr (Roderick the Great,
844–77); and it seems that the distress of the Saxons under the Danish
attacks gave the Welsh courage to rise against the traditional enemies
of their race. In 853 Burhred, King of Mercia, acting by the advice of
his _witan_, made formal application to Ethelwulf for help against “the
men of North Wales”. The very fact that such an application was needed,
and that it came from the king and council of the Mercian realm,
shows how far England was from having yet attained to that complete
unity which has been incorrectly associated with the name of Egbert.
However, the expedition which Ethelwulf now undertook against the
Cymri, in alliance with Mercia, seems to have been successful, and the
marriage of Burhred to Ethelwulf’s daughter, celebrated at Easter-tide,
doubtless cemented the alliance and may have been a step towards
federation.
Again in this year 853 there was fighting both by land and sea against
the heathen in Thanet. Many men on both sides were slain and drowned.
The two ealdormen who led the forces of Kent and Surrey were at first
victorious, but--as often happened--let victory slip from their
unskilful hands, and both fell on the field of battle. This and many
similar entries bring vividly before us the typical Saxon ealdorman,
leading the _fyrd_ or militia of his shire to battle, displaying plenty
of courage and risking his life freely in the service of his country,
but showing little skill in organising a campaign or even in grasping
its fruits when they fell into his lap. On the other side we see the
men of the Scandinavian islands and long fiords, children of the
sea, equally ready to fight on it or on the land--artful, ruthless,
courageous, and with a splendid ignorance of defeat. Such were the
ravens who were now fixing their talons deep in our exhausted England.
Our next entry is: “In this year” [855] “heathen men first remained
over winter in Sheppey”.
It might have been supposed that the West Saxon king would need all
his energies to put his kingdom in an adequate state of defence and
to organise all round the coast an efficient system of resistance
to the all-penetrating Northmen. Instead of this we find him, with
some surprise, in this very year 855, “going to Rome with much pomp,”
remaining there for a twelve-month, visiting the Frankish court on his
way back, and returning, elderly widower that he was, with a bride
thirteen years old. This strange episode of the pilgrimage was the
fulfilment of a long-cherished design, and may have been partly due to
the pious counsels of St. Swithun, but certainly does not raise our
opinion of the king’s wisdom, while the marriage adventure looks like
mere fatuity. Before Ethelwulf’s departure he made that celebrated
donation to the Church which used to be considered as the introduction
of the tithe-system into England, but which was really “the devotion of
a tenth part of his private property to ecclesiastical purposes”.[119]
He took with him his youngest and favourite son Alfred, who though
still but a little child had already, two years before, made the same
pilgrimage. Travelling through France he was received with royal
honours by Charles the Bald, king of that country, and escorted by
him to the boundary of his kingdom. He perhaps arrived in Rome in time
to see the pontiff Leo IV., who on Alfred’s previous visit had laid
his hands in benediction on the head of the child. On July 17, however
(855), the old pope died, and Ethelwulf and his boy must have witnessed
the tumultuous proceedings which followed, and the state of practical
civil war between the Lateran and St. Peter’s which filled the streets
of Rome with clamour, till at last about the end of September the
iconoclast anti-pope Anastasius was finally overthrown and Benedict
III. took his seat on the chair of St. Peter. It is a curious fact,
but probably a mere coincidence, that precisely at this point of papal
history the romancing chroniclers of the Middle Ages have inserted the
fable of “Pope Joan,” the learned and eloquent Englishwoman who, as
they averred, came to Rome in male attire, habited as an ecclesiastic,
was unanimously chosen pope and wore the tiara for some months or even
years, till her sex was unfortunately disclosed in the midst of a
public procession. If any further proof were needed of the absurdity of
this story (which is no Protestant invention but passed current through
many medieval centuries), it might be furnished by the absolute silence
of the English chroniclers, some of whom may well have conversed with
members of the retinue of the West Saxon king.
Ethelwulf’s devout liberality is recorded by the contemporary papal
biographer, though his Italian ear has failed to catch or to retain his
barbarous name: “At this time a king of the Saxons named ... leaving
his goods and his own kingdom, came for prayer with a multitude of
followers to the thresholds of the Apostles Peter and Paul in Rome. And
he gave to St. Peter a crown of pure gold weighing four pounds; vessels
of pure gold weighing two pounds; a sword bound with pure gold; two
smaller images of pure gold; a paten of silver gilt, Saxon work, four
pounds; a vestment of purple with a golden border; a white surplice
all of silk, embroidered and gold bordered; two large curtains of gold
tapestry.[120] Then the Saxon king, on Pope Benedict’s request that he
would employ the gold and silver [which he had brought with him] in
giving largesse to the people in St. Peter’s church, dispensed gold
to the bishops, presbyters, deacons and all the rest of the clergy
and chief men of Rome, but he gave small silver coins to the common
people.”[121]
A more obviously useful exercise of Ethelwulf’s liberality was
connected with the Schola Saxonum, which is said to have been founded
by his predecessor, Ine, or by the Mercian Offa. In this schola
(something probably between a convent and an academic hostel) young
Anglo-Saxons destined for the ecclesiastical profession probably dwelt
for months or years, learning the Latin of the missal and the tones
of Gregorian plain-song. Its memory even yet lingers in Rome, for the
Church of the Holy Spirit in “the Leonine city” having been placed
near the school of the Saxons still bears the name of “San Spirito _in
Sassia_”. The schola had, however, been unfortunately destroyed by fire
in the year before Ethelwulf’s visit, and patriotism as well as piety
prompted him to spend on its restoration some part of the treasure
which he had brought from England.[122]
After a year’s residence in Rome, Ethelwulf returned to England,
visiting on the way the court of his much younger contemporary, Charles
the Bald,[123] whose daughter Judith, a young girl of thirteen, he
brought home with him as his wife, much to the astonishment, doubtless,
of his subjects and to the annoyance of his sons by his first marriage.
Though it is nowhere distinctly so stated, it seems probable that this
extraordinary second marriage of Ethelwulf had some connexion with
an event which clouded the last years of his life, the rebellion of
his eldest son Ethelbald. This young man had probably exercised some
of the functions of a regent during his father’s absence, and now
stood arrayed in arms to repel him from his kingdom. The fact that he
was abetted by the energetic Bishop Ealhstan and by the ealdorman of
Somerset, who had helped Ealhstan to win his great victory over the
Danes in Bridgwater Bay, suggests the possibility that this rebellion
may not have been due merely to the ambition of an undutiful son, but
may have been prompted by a patriotic desire to wrest the helm of the
state from the hands of an inefficient pilot. Happily, though Ethelwulf
had many partisans, shocked by what they deemed the unnatural conduct
of Ethelbald, civil war was avoided. The gentle old man agreed without
much difficulty to an arrangement whereby the western portion of the
kingdom, the richer and fairer part, was handed over to his son, he
himself retaining the eastern portion. The young Queen Judith, who had
been crowned before her departure from France, now took her place on
the royal throne side by side with her husband, notwithstanding the
“infamous custom” of Wessex which, as has been said, on account of the
evil example of the daughter of Offa, forbade the consorts of West
Saxon kings to sit on the throne or to bear the name of queen.
Less than two years after his return from Rome, on January 13, 858,
Ethelwulf died. His will was much talked of and was considered by his
biographers a model for all future generations. After directing how
his kingdom and his property should be divided between his sons, he
ordained that throughout his dominions one man in ten, whether a native
or a foreigner, should be supplied with meat, drink and clothing by
his successors until the Day of Judgment, always supposing “that there
should still be men and cattle in the land and that the country should
not have become quite desolate,” a striking evidence of the anxieties
caused by the Danish invasions. True to the last to his affection for
Rome, he left a hundred mancuses (twelve and a half pounds of silver)
to buy oil for the lights of St. Peter’s, the same sum for the lights
of St. Paul’s (outside the city), and another hundred for the apostolic
pontiff’s own private use. It does not seem possible to accept the
theories of some recent writers who would fain represent Ethelwulf as a
wise and capable statesman, the deviser of large continental alliances
for defence against the Northmen. On the contrary, he was probably a
man of slender intellect and feeble will, but devout, unworldly and
affectionate, by no means the least lovable of Anglo-Saxon sovereigns.