EDWARD THE MARTYR--OLD AGE OF DUNSTAN--NORMANS AND NORTHMEN.
Of the two sons left by Edgar, one, EDWARD, son of “Ethelfled the
Duck,” was about thirteen years old, and the other, Elfrida’s son,
Ethelred, was but seven at the death of their father. This being so, it
is surprising that there should have been any debate as to which son
should succeed to the vacant throne. Possibly the kinsfolk of Elfrida,
a powerful clan, may have raised doubts as to the regularity of Edgar’s
marriage to Ethelfled, or they may have insisted on the superior
position of the child Ethelred as the son of a queen, for Elfrida,
first of all royal consorts since Judith, wife of Ethelwulf, had been
permitted to bear that envied name.[186] The debate was, however,
decided, apparently by the united influence of the two archbishops,
Dunstan and Oswald, in favour of Edward, upon whose head the crown of
England was placed by the kindly hands of the Archbishop of Canterbury.
The politics of the short reign of Edward, which lasted barely four
years, are as obscure and difficult to trace as the cause of its
premature close. It is clear, however, that immediately on the death of
Edgar there was a certain reaction against that king’s monastic policy.
It was in Mercia that this reaction was most powerful, and the leader
in the movement was the ealdorman Elfhere, “enemy of the monks,” as the
Chronicle calls him; “most wicked of consuls,” as he is styled by the
classically minded Henry of Huntingdon. There was a certain Oslac, earl
of Northumbria, who was driven into banishment by Elfhere, and from
the way in which his name is mentioned we are led to conjecture that he
was a partisan of the monks.
Then was in Mercia’s land, as I have heard,
Widely and everywhere the Maker’s praise
Laid low on earth; then many were out-driven,
God’s learned ministers. Then much must mourn
The man who in his breast bore burning love
To God who made him. Then the Glorious King,
The Lord of Victories, Who the heavens doth rule,
Was too much scorned, and shattered were His rights,
Then forth was driven the hero bold of mood,
Oslac, the hoary-headed veteran,
The wise, the eloquent. He forth must fare,
Forth from the land, over the billow’s roll,
Over the gannet’s bath, the whale’s domain.
Yea, o’er the water’s throng, bereft of home.
Then too was seen, high in the firmament,
That star appearing, which brave men of old,
Men wise of soul and skilled interpreters,
Widely denoted by the comet’s name;
Thus through the nations was the Ruler’s wrath
Broadly proclaimed and Famine marked its path.
Thus sings the monk of Winchester. He of Peterborough, after also
deviating into verse, adds in quiet prose: “In this year (975) there
were great disturbances throughout England; and Elfhere the ealdorman
ordered the demolition of many monasteries which king Edgar had
erewhile ordered the holy bishop Ethelwold to establish. And at the
same time the great earl Oslac was banished from England.”
There are hints, especially in the life of St. Oswald of York, that
Elfhere’s anti-monastic policy was connected with a certain amount of
spoliation of the abbey lands, which were probably in some measure
distributed among his followers. On the other hand, we hear that
Ethelwin, Ealdorman of East Anglia, son of “half-king” Athelstan and
brother-in-law of Elfrida, zealously opposed Elfhere’s policy and
championed the cause of the monks. A yet more strenuous defender of
the order was his brother, Alfwold, who slew a certain man accused by
him of fraudulently obtaining some of the abbey lands of Peterborough.
Desiring to obtain absolution for the deed he went to Winchester to beg
it of bishop Ethelwold. In his penitence and remorse, Alfwold in his
hostel unloosed his shoes and went, humble and barefooted, to meet the
great bishop. But Ethelwold, knowing in whose cause he had stricken
the blow, would have none of such needless humiliation. He went forth
clad in full vestments, with holy water, cross and thurible to meet
“the general and defender of the Church”. Prayers were offered, the
acolytes replaced the shoes on the feet of the Church’s champion,
and the rest of the day was spent in rejoicings. “Thus did the pious
chieftain of the East Angles defend all the possessions of the
monasteries with great honour, wherefore he was called the Friend of
God.”
Concerning the actual cause of the struggle we are very imperfectly
informed. The East Anglian chiefs were joined by Brihtnoth, ealdorman
of Essex, brother-in-law of “the half-king,” and for some time it
seemed as if the dispute would have to be settled by force of arms.
Happily this was averted, and in three meetings of the _witan_, held
probably in three successive years, 977, 978 and 979 (the last after
the death of Edward), it was perhaps arranged that the two parties
should compromise on the basis of _uti possidetis_, the monasteries
in East Anglia and Essex not being disturbed, but those in Mercia not
being restored to the monks, at any rate during the lifetime of Elfhere.
At the first of these Witenagemots, which was held at Kirtlington,
in Oxfordshire, Sideman, the aged Bishop of Crediton, who had been
the young King Edward’s teacher and guide, suddenly expired. At the
second, which was held in an upper chamber at Calne, in Wiltshire,
the floor suddenly gave way and “all the chief witan of the English
race” were precipitated into the room below. Some were killed and
many suffered grievous bodily harm. Apparently almost the only one
who escaped quite unhurt was the Archbishop Dunstan, “who stood up
upon a beam”. Naturally, so remarkable an escape brightened the halo
which shone round the archbishop’s name. In later legends the accident
was magnified into a kind of heavenly judgment between the monks and
their opponents; while some modern historians, remembering Dunstan’s
great mechanical skill, have seen in it a cunning device for ridding
himself of his enemies. Happily we are not constrained to adopt either
hypothesis, and the last suggestion is certainly inadmissible. It would
probably tax the ingenuity of the ablest engineer of modern times to
contrive such an apparent accident so as to kill part of the assembly.
Miracle and fraud may therefore both disappear from the discussion. The
event, which undoubtedly happened, is only one of several indications
of the unsoundness of Anglo-Saxon building. There seems reason to
suspect that in the tenth century the political and the domestic
architecture of England were both equally insecure, and that the
apparent glory of the reign of Edgar the Peaceful rested on many rotten
timbers which made easy the collapse of the kingdom under Ethelred the
Unready. Perhaps, also, we may conjecture that the deaths of so many
of England’s chief men and wisest counsellors left the field open for
meaner, weaker, more treacherous statesmen.
In the same year (978) Edward’s short reign came to a bloody end.
The circumstances of his death are somewhat obscure, though there
can be no doubt that he was foully murdered on March 18 at Corfe in
Dorsetshire. We have no contemporary evidence directly connecting his
step-mother with the crime, but this silence, as all chroniclers for
the next thirty years would be somewhat in fear of Elfrida and her
son, cannot be counted strong evidence in her favour. On the other
hand, there is some evidence that Corfe, the scene of the murder, was
the place where Elfrida was at the time dwelling with her boy, and
all the later historians speak unhesitatingly as to the quarter from
which the blow came, though, unfortunately (as we so often find to be
the case), the further removed they are from the date of the event,
the more they profess to know about its details. Thus the biographer
of St. Oswald, who wrote about thirty years after the murder, tells us
that a conspiracy was formed against the king by Ethelred’s thegns,
and carried into effect when the young king, “desiring the consolation
of fraternal love,” paid an evening visit to the house where his
brother was residing with the queen. The partisans of Ethelred gathered
round Edward, who was alone and unguarded. The butler came forward
“ready to serve in his lowly office”; one of the thegns seized the
king’s right hand as if to kiss it; another grasped his left hand and
inflicted on him a mortal wound. The king called out in a loud voice:
“What are you doing, breaking my hand,” and then fell dead from his
horse, which was also mortally wounded by the conspirators. “No chant
was raised; no proper rites of burial performed; the renowned king
of the whole country lay covered with a cheap garment, awaiting the
resurrection day. After the lapse of a twelvemonth, the glorious duke
Elfhere [of Mercia] came to Wareham, found the body lying there naked
but incorrupt, and transferred it to Shaftesbury, where it received
honourable burial.” This account looks a little more like a political
conspiracy and less like a mere private assassination than the story
told in the twelfth century by William of Malmesbury, according to
which the kingly boy returning from the chase, tired and thirsty,
called at his step-mother’s abode, asked for wine, and while drinking
the stirrup-cup was treacherously stabbed by one of Elfrida’s henchmen;
fell from his horse, and with one foot in the stirrup was dragged along
by the frightened steed, a long track through the forest being marked
by the blood of the dying king. This, which is in some respects the
more romantic version of the story, is that which has found its way
into the received text of English history. The feelings of the people
concerning this tragedy may be gathered from the ballad which was
embodied in the Chronicle.
Never was worse deed done by Englishmen
Than this, since first they sought the British land.
Men murdered him, but God him magnified.
In life Eadward was an earthly king;
Now after death he is a saint in heaven.
His earthly kinsmen durst not him avenge,
But grievous vengeance wrought his Heavenly Sire.
On earth his foes his memory would efface,
But the Supreme Avenger spread abroad
In earth and heaven remembrance of that crime.
They who in life refused him reverence,
Now bow on bended knee before his bones.
Thus may we see how wisdom of mankind,
Their clever counsels, their persuasive words,
Are but as nothing ’gainst the thought of God.
Here we can perceive, deep in the heart of the writer, a smouldering
fire of indignation against some persons highly placed and beyond the
reach of man’s revenge, by whom the deed of wickedness was wrought.
The misery which fell upon the nation in the long and dreary reign of
Elfrida’s son is heaven’s answer to the cry of the innocent blood.
Without the Church’s sanction, without any strict warrant for the
epithet, the instinct of the people gave to the victim of Corfe the
name which he has ever since borne in history, “Edward the Martyr”.
The new king, ETHELRED, a boy of ten years old, was crowned at
Kingston-on-Thames a fortnight after Easter, the two archbishops and
ten bishops taking part in the ceremony. Dunstan addressed to him, as
he had done to his father before him, a sermon on the duties of his
kingship, and is said, but on somewhat doubtful authority, to have
uttered at the same time foreboding words as to the calamities coming
upon the kingdom, in punishment for the crime which had given Ethelred
the crown. It seems clear that he withdrew more and more from a share
in the civil, perhaps even in the ecclesiastical, government of the
realm, and spent the ten years of life which yet remained to him
chiefly in religious retirement; in preaching to the crowd of unlearned
persons, lay and clerical, male and female, who gathered round him “to
be fortified day and night with the heavenly salt”; in practising those
mechanical arts which he had loved from boyhood; and in sitting on a
bench in the _scriptorium_ correcting some of the manuscripts which
formed part of the treasure of Canterbury.
In the year 986, however, Dunstan was roused from his meditations by
the extraordinary conduct of young Ethelred, who “on account of certain
dissensions besieged Rochester, and being unable to take it, invaded
and laid waste the patrimony of St. Andrew”. Some light is thrown on
this remarkable entry by a document[187] issued twelve years later, in
which Ethelred laments that his youthful simplicity was imposed upon
by a certain Ethelsin, an enemy of God and man, and that by his advice
he violently abstracted from the church of Rochester a rural property
at Bromley, which he now restores. Dunstan, we are told, warned the
king of the punishment which waited on such crimes, and eventually
induced him by a ransom of 100 pounds of silver to raise the siege of
Rochester. Hereupon he prophesied that “such a king who preferred money
to God, silver to the apostle, the gratification of his avarice to the
earnestly expressed desire of his spiritual father, would draw down on
himself and on his kingdom such calamities as the English nation had
never yet experienced. But he himself, as he had been told by the mouth
of the Lord, should not live to see this righteous retribution.” And so
it proved. Two years later, on May 19, 988, Dunstan expired, probably
in the sixty-fourth year of his age.
That Dunstan was a great saint and a great statesman cannot be doubted.
No small man could have produced the impression which he produced
on his own and on later generations. But what were his own actual
achievements in Church and State it is not easy to discover through
the veil of turgid obscurity woven by his biographers, who are more
intent on recording childish miracles than on painting for us a
truthful and vivid portraiture of the great archbishop. Doubtless the
alleged miracles of the saint were not all the accumulation of later
ages. Partly on account of his mechanical skill and partly from the
peculiarities of his own temperament, a certain thaumaturgic atmosphere
seems to have surrounded Dunstan even in his lifetime. With this we
can now dispense; but while we closely study his life, some of the old
misconceptions as to his character fall away. He was evidently not
the grim and crafty ecclesiastic whom in our childish days we used to
fancy him. On the contrary, with all his enthusiasm for monkhood, his
influence was in fact a moderating one on the party of monastic reform.
Far from being of a cruel nature, he seems, from such indications as
are furnished us, to have been a man of genial and lovable disposition.
He is now generally regarded as a great administrator, and a man of
wide and statesmanlike views; though, as was before remarked, strict
proof of this has hardly yet been adduced. But he seems also to have
been through life a man of nervous, perhaps even of hysterical,
temperament, renowned and envied for his power of shedding copious
floods of tears; a man who saw visions and dreamed dreams; and, above
all, a man who believed himself to be engaged in a perpetual personal
encounter with the Prince of Darkness, who was to him as real and
familiar a presence as the ealdorman of Mercia or the _canonici_ of
Glastonbury.
* * * * *
Before entering on that dreary period of Danish desolation which now
lies before us it will be well to say something as to certain events
which had been happening in France, Denmark and Norway, and which
were about to exercise an enormous influence on the next stages of
development of the English nation. The dukes of Normandy, the French
kings of the race of Capet, the Angevin ancestors of our Plantagenet
monarchs, all date their origin, or at least their greatness, from
the tenth century, from the period between the death of Alfred and
the accession of Ethelred. It is necessary also to take note of
the immediate ancestors of the Danish kings who were about to make
themselves actual sovereigns of England.
The Scandinavian invasions, which tended indirectly towards the
consolidation of England, wrought powerfully towards the disintegration
of the Frankish empire. The ignominious treaty which the last emperor
of the direct line of Charlemagne, his great grandson Charles the Fat,
made with the Danes to induce them to desist from the siege of Paris,
and which had to be paid for by a large ransom, was one of the causes
which led to his deposition from the imperial throne (887). A younger
branch of the Carolingian house continued for just a century longer to
wear the title of Kings of Francia, but their personal domain became
gradually restricted to a little tract of territory surrounding the
city of Laon, and they were ever more overshadowed by the greatness of
the family of Robert, rightly called the Strong, who, though himself a
Saxon alien of somewhat obscure origin, had shown conspicuous valour
in the Danish wars, and whose two sons, Odo and Robert, both crowned
as Kings of France, were the heroes of the mighty siege of Paris. For
thirty-three years (923–56) Hugh the Great, son of this second Robert
and grandson of the first, was far the most powerful man in France:
Duke of Francia, Burgundy and Aquitaine, Count of Paris and Orleans,
Lay Abbot of St. Martin of Tours. But though a kingmaker, son and
nephew of kings, he always refused to be king himself. His son, Hugh
Capet, more ambitious or less scrupulous, in 987 pushed aside the
last powerless descendant of Charlemagne, and ascended that glorious
throne which was uninterruptedly occupied by his descendants, Valois,
Plantagenet, Bourbon, till the awful day of August, 1792, when the
Swiss Guards fell fighting in front of the Tuilleries.
The Norman dukes, who also in this tenth century climbed up into
all but regal state, bore an important part in this revolution. The
hitherto received story of the settlement of the Northmen under their
leader Rolf or Rollo in the fair province to which they gave their
name has been subjected of late to much adverse criticism,[188] and
has been so seriously shaken that hardly anything but the bare fact
survives indubitable, that there was such a settlement in the early
part of the tenth century; that either in 911 or, as is rather more
probable, in 921, Rolf “commended” himself to the French king Charles
the Simple; and that he became his “man” in return for the cession of
a large district on the Lower Seine. This transaction resembled in
some respects the arrangement made a generation before, between Alfred
and Guthrum. It was the surrender of part of the kingdom to ensure the
safety of the remainder, the change of a pertinacious enemy into a
fairly faithful friend. The cession of Normandy to Rolf was, however,
in some ways a more signal success than Alfred’s cession of East Anglia
to Guthrum. Though the Frankish historians persisted for generations in
calling Rolf’s people pirates, the new-comers soon assimilated all and
more than all the civilisation of their Frankish neighbours; and Norman
literature, Norman chivalry, Norman architecture became the envy of
Europe.
On Rolf’s death or abdication in 927 his son, William Longsword, became
duke and reigned for fifteen years. He was a man of keen and polished
intellect, with many noble, even with some holy, aspirations, but with
a strange duality in his nature, perhaps the result of the mingled
strain of Viking and Romanised Frank that was in his blood, for his
mother is said to have been a Frankish lady of noble birth. A conflict
had begun between two sections of his subjects, between the men of
Rouen and its neighbourhood, who were fast becoming Frenchmen, and
the men of the district round Bayeux, who remained obstinate Danes;
and in this conflict William veered first to one side, then to the
other. Moreover in the confused welter of French politics he played
an eminently inconsistent and unwise part, showing that amidst the
intriguing, grasping but adroit counts of Northern Gaul he never felt
himself completely at home, but was uneasily conscious that he was
still looked upon by them as _dux piratarum_. He would fain have been
faithful to the royal line, to which his father owed his legalised
position in the country; and in 936 he heartily co-operated with Hugh
the Great in bringing back Athelstan’s nephew, Louis IV. d’Outremer,
from his English exile and crowning him king; but, changeable as
a weather-cock, he was almost as often found among the enemies
of Louis IV. as in the ranks of his friends. Unfaithfulness begat
unfaithfulness; the man who had been on each side in every quarrel
made himself enemies all round, and in 942, having been treacherously
invited to a conference on an island in the Somme, he was there foully
murdered by a band of noble conspirators, among whom we regret to find
Arnulf of Flanders, grandson of our own Alfred, first and foremost.
On the death of William Longsword, his little son Richard, though
not born in lawful wedlock--this was almost the rule in the Norman
line--was unanimously accepted as his successor. The boy, only ten
years old, was soon plunged into a whirlpool of troubles, from
which even his father’s old and faithful counsellors could hardly
have extricated him, had he not himself shown that cool, patient,
self-sustained courage which earned for him his historical surname,
“the Fearless”. Though the Norman historians may have somewhat
embroidered the romantic history of his captivity and escape, there can
be little doubt that two dangerous neighbours, King Louis IV. and Count
Hugh the Great, coveted the orphan boy’s inheritance; nor that, but for
the loyalty of the Norman warriors to the son of their dead chieftain,
and the astute management of two or three of his father’s old friends,
they would have succeeded in making it their own. Soon after the death
of William Longsword King Louis came to Rouen, ostensibly as the
friend and protector of the little duke. He seems, however, to have
practically taken the government of the country into his own hands,
while the boy Richard, who was transferred to the court of Laon “that
he might be there educated as beseemed a Christian prince,” found the
school of knighthood every day becoming more like a prison. However,
Richard’s faithful guardian, Osmund, succeeded in smuggling him out
of the castle, according to the legend, “in a truss of hay”. The
Normans, tired of the financial exactions of the ministers of Louis,
rose in open revolt and gathered round their just recovered prince; the
invasion of Louis with a formidable army was neutralised by that of
Harold, a chieftain from Scandinavia, who, in 945, on the urgent appeal
of Richard came to the help of his brother-Northmen. A battle followed,
the battle of the Dive, in which Louis was utterly defeated, and he was
soon after taken prisoner. Thus were the tables now turned, Louis who
was of late the jailer being now the captive; nor did he regain his
liberty till he had surrendered the rock fortress of Laon, almost his
last remaining possession, to the omnivorous Count Hugh the Great, and
had--so say the Norman writers--formally released Duke Richard from all
ties of feudal dependence. Whether this be literally true or not, there
is no doubt that Richard “commended” himself to the count of Paris.
Thus even before Hugh Capet became King of France, the duke of Normandy
was already his most powerful vassal. This fact, coupled with the
steady and effectual help which Richard gave to the younger Hugh in his
patient upward progress to the throne, deserves to be remembered when
in later ages we have to deal with the relations, more often hostile
than friendly, between the Norman-English vassal and the French lord
paramount.
At the period which we have reached in English history, the date of
the death of Dunstan (988), Richard the Fearless was a middle-aged man
of fifty-five years. He had been reigning for forty-five years, and
was the father of a numerous progeny--not born in wedlock--by a Danish
woman named Gunnor, whom he married after the death of his lawful wife
Emma, sister of Hugh Capet. His marriage with Emma was childless. In
the year 996 he died and was succeeded by his son Richard the Good.
* * * * *
The origin of the house, which in after ages bore the name of
Plantagenet and which held in the tenth century the countship of Anjou,
is hidden in clouds of legend; but the legend itself does not dare to
say that their forebears were always noble, nor to assign to them, as
to so many of their princely contemporaries, a descent from the great
Emperor Charles. The legendary ancestor of the Counts of Anjou is a
certain Tortulf or Tertullus, a Breton forester to whom a doubtful
Carolingian king, probably Charles the Bald, is said to have assigned
a woodland district known as the Blackbird’s Nest (Nid de Merle), on
condition of repelling the Danish attacks on the valley of the Loire.
The special interest attaching to the history of the Angevin counts,
in addition to the fact that they were the ancestors of so many of
our English sovereigns, lies in the tenacity of purpose with which
they pursued their policy of aggrandisement, gradually converting
their little marchland on the east of Brittany, a small and precarious
possession, into an extensive and powerful state in one of the fairest
regions of France. With their Breton neighbours on the west, with Maine
and Normandy on the north, they were frequently at war, but their
most bitter and enduring conflicts were with the Counts of Blois on
the east, and it was at their expense that the most important of the
Angevin conquests was effected. This is a fact which it will be well to
bear in mind when we find Henry of Anjou and Stephen of Blois, heirs of
a feud which had already lasted in France for two centuries, contending
on English soil for the crown of England.
* * * * *
The history of Denmark during the first century and a half of the
Viking raids is involved in great obscurity; but about the time when
Edward the Elder was reigning in England we emerge into clearer light,
and find a king named Gorm the Old reigning over a united Denmark,
with, however, some obligations of vassalage towards the German king,
Henry the Saxon. On his death or abdication towards the middle of the
tenth century began the long and prosperous reign of Harold Blaatand
(Blue-Tooth), which lasted for about fifty years and was the great
period of consolidation for the Danish kingdom. In 977 Harold, in
conjunction with two Norwegian allies, made an expedition to Norway by
which he obtained possession of a considerable part of that country and
acquired a sort of feudal supremacy over the whole. In his relations
with the German emperors Harold was less fortunate. He was apparently
compelled to submit to Otto I., and as one of the conditions of peace,
he and his son Sweyn were forced to receive Christian baptism. The
conversion of the son at any rate was not sincere, and dissensions
broke out between him and his father. The old king was defeated and
fled the country. He was restored for a short time, again attacked by
Sweyn, and died of his wounds received in battle.
Thus, in the fourteenth year of Ethelred’s reign, the throne of Denmark
was occupied by the stern pagan Swegen or Sweyn. No tenderness will
he show to Christian churches or monasteries in any land that he may
invade; and any king or people that shall do him wrong may expect to
receive terrible retribution.
The early, doubtless in large measure legendary, history of Norway,
as told in the _Heimskringla Saga_, is full of romantic interest, but
is beside our present purpose. The great unifier of the Norwegian
kingdom was Harold Fair-hair, whose long reign ended before the
middle of the tenth century. In the eleventh year of his age he found
himself lord of a small kingdom between Lake Wener and the Dovrefield
Mountains. When he came to manhood he wooed the fair Gytha for his
wife, but the damsel declared that she would marry no man who did
not rule the whole of Norway, as Gorm ruled all Denmark and Eric
the whole of Sweden. Hereupon Harold, having vowed not to cut his
hair till he had accomplished the prescribed task, began a series of
expeditions northwards, which did in the course of years make him
master of the whole of what we now call Norway. He married Gytha,
but she was only one of many wives and concubines by whom he begat
countless children, whose wars and alliances, whose rivalries and
reconciliations, fill Norwegian history in the tenth century as English
history in the fifteenth is filled by the broils of the Plantagenets.
This is that Harold who sent the infant Hakon to be educated at the
court of Athelstan; and Hakon, as has been said, having been educated
by his great foster-father in the Christian religion and trained in
all arts that became a Saxon Etheling, went back to his fatherland,
reigned there after his father’s death as Hakon the Good, and vainly
endeavoured to Christianise his people. Another Harold and another
Hakon followed in quick succession, sometimes owning, sometimes
rejecting, the over-lordship of Denmark. At the period which we have
now reached, the rising star is that of Olaf Tryggvason, great-grandson
of Fair-hair, not yet king of Norway but a great and popular Viking,
whose name will be heard with terror in Essex and in Kent, in Sussex
and in Hampshire.