THE SETTLEMENTS OF THE SEA-ROVERS
It is in the reign of King Egbert that we begin to hear of the Danes
coming as sea-rovers and raiding the coasts on both sides of the
English Channel. They came, they harried and stole, and went away
again.
[Sidenote: Alfred the Great]
That was bad. But it began to be worse when they did not go away
again, when they came in such numbers that they could actually dare
to establish themselves for the winter up some river. They had then
come to stay. Within thirty years after the death of Egbert they
became so strong that they took the towns of York and Nottingham.
The English kingdom was again, at this time, disunited. This was
partly owing to the custom--which proved fatal to the union, of the
continental empire also--for a king, at his death, to divide up his
kingdom, by will, and give portions to two or more of his sons. But
in a fortunate hour for England, Alfred, who won the name of "the
Great," came to the throne of Wessex in 871.
He fought the Danes on land, uniting the people of Kent and Essex
with his own Wessex men. He fought them with varying success, on the
whole getting the better of them. He also (and you might make a note
of this as the beginning of Britain's naval power) defeated some of
their ships with his own fleet.
Whereupon came many more Danes with many more ships; and English and
Danes had to meet in many a battle and skirmish until a decisive
victory at {119} length enabled Alfred to come to a settlement with
them. Even so, the settlement was far from establishing him as
sovereign over all England. An arrangement was made by which the
Danes were to occupy, undisturbed, the eastern side, and were to
leave the English in peaceable possession of the west. We have
spoken before of that old Roman road called Watling Street, which ran
from London to Chester: you may take that line as about the boundary
line between the two peoples who now held England.
Alfred, besides this peaceful settlement with the Danes, owes his
claim to the title of "great" to the wisdom with which he settled the
affairs of his own kingdom and for the favour that he showed to
literature and culture of all kinds. He was a Christian, and had
insisted, when he made his treaty with the Danes, that they should
profess themselves Christians and be baptised. He did all that he
could to help in educating his people. He himself made translations
into the Anglo-Saxon of books written in Latin giving the description
and history of parts of Germany from which some of the Gothic tribes
had come. He also caused books on religion to be translated, so that
the people who were educated sufficiently to be able to read their
own language might study them, and while he rebuilt monasteries and
other buildings belonging to the Church, which had been ruined in the
perpetual wars, he expected the priests and the Churchmen (the
clerics, or clerks) to undertake the education of the people.
Probably Alfred was far too wise to suppose that peace would be kept
for long between his Anglo-Saxons on the west of the Watling Street
and the Danes on the east. The Danes were of a race akin to the
Anglo-Saxons and to the Franks--they were German or Gothic. The
Romans and Anglo-Saxons themselves had both come into Britain as
quite a different race {120} from the inhabitants whom they
conquered; but the Danes were of nearly the same stock as those whom
they found, and harassed, in England. Both were of that race called
Nordic, of which it was characteristic for the men to be tall and
large, with fair hair and blue eyes. We have seen how the English
were gradually losing their freedom under their earls or thanes. The
Danes came in with their freedom little if any less than it ever had
been. They were hardy and independent; and even to this day we find
these qualities to be characteristic of the dwellers in those lands
east of the Watling Street in which most of the Danes settled. The
southern and western men are of a tamer character.
[Illustration: A VIKING SHIP.]
It would take far too long to tell how the Danes broke the peace
arranged by Alfred, and all about the continual fighting, with the
many changes of fortune which came to pass between them and the
English all through the tenth century. Towards the end of that
century we find the English kings bribing the commanders of combined
fleets of Danes and of allied Northmen, from Norway, to retire and
leave the English coasts. Of course that only meant that these
pirates came again the next year, so that it became necessary to levy
a special tax, which was called the Danegeld, to buy them off.
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An English king, Ethelred, in the hope, as we are told, of making the
Northmen his friends instead of his persecutors and pirates, married
the daughter of the Duke of Normandy. This Normandy is the Normandy
that you will see on the maps of to-day and lies just across the
English Channel. The Duke and his Normans (or Northmen) were of the
same kin as the ravagers of the English coast. Therefore Ethelred
seemed to be likely to gain peace for his kingdom when he married a
daughter of this race. What did happen is that about sixty years
later (he was married to the Duke's daughter in 1002) another Duke of
Normandy, William, established himself as King of England. It is
with this marriage of Ethelred's that the influence of Normandy in
England begins. The Normans did not come upon England all of a
sudden in 1066, the year of their conquest. There had been some
preparation leading to it.
[Sidenote: Massacre of the Danes]
Unfortunately for Ethelred's hope of peace, he formed, or was led to
agree to, a design of exterminating the Danes in England by a
wholesale massacre. It was a design in which the English were the
more ready to take a hand because of their hatred of the Danish
troops which several of the kings had been keeping in their pay.
These mercenaries were very insolent and high-handed in their
dealings with the civil inhabitants, and on the signal given the
inhabitants readily rose against them.
Thus a general massacre took place; but then followed that which,
with a people of the fierce and resolute character of the Danes and
Northmen, was sure to follow. A great force came over the sea, and,
though twice bought off by payment of the Danegeld, they came again
in 1013, and yet again, and finally, two years later, under Canute
they came to stay. Canute, victorious, was first acknowledged king
of the old Danish possessions in the {122} east of England and a few
weeks later of the entire country.
Within a year he too married that sister of the Duke of Normandy who
had been married to Ethelred and was now a widow. And so, once more,
the Norman influence came in.
Canute, who reigned close on twenty years, was followed by two kings
of Danish race whose reigns only covered seven years together, and
then followed the last of our Saxon kings, the first Edward. He was
Saxon on the father's side; for his father was that Ethelred who
married the Duke of Normandy's sister. On the mother's side,
therefore, he was Norman.
The right of this Edward, called the Confessor, to the kingdom was
not undisputed, but he had the support of a certain Earl Godwine,
who, with his sons, had become so great a power that he claimed, and
was able to maintain, lordship over half the realm of England. This
great earl consolidated his power by marrying his daughter to King
Edward, and one of the sons of Earl Godwine was that Harold who
became king after Edward, and who was defeated and killed by William
the Conqueror at the Battle of Hastings.
It is my wish, in telling this story, to trouble you with as few
names as possible, in order to avoid confusion, but I want you to
bear these names in mind and to be clear as to how the people were
related lo each other, because it is this relationship that explains
how it was that William the Conqueror came to lay claim to the throne
of England. He did not merely come as a conqueror to take, by force,
what was not his. He came to enforce what was, or what he claimed to
be, his right.
Harold, then, succeeded Edward, on Edward's death, as king. But
before his death Edward had tried to arrange for a successor. We
have to remember {123} that the principle that the eldest son of the
king should follow his father on the throne was not established in
those days. But Edward had no son. He had a great-nephew, who was
no more than a child. And he seems to have had no wish that the
kingdom should go back to the Danes, although he had married a sister
of Harold, the Dane. So he approached William, Duke of Normandy,
with a proposal to appoint him as successor.
So the story is told; but its truth is not clearly proved. It has
also been said that he sent Harold himself as his ambassador in this
delicate matter, to the Norman court. That does not sound probable.
What does appear to be established is that Harold, by some means or
other--possibly by having to run his ship on the coast of Normandy in
a storm--came into William's power, and that, while so held, waiting
till a ransom should be paid for him and he should be released,
William made him take a very solemn oath that on Edward's death he
would do his best to support William's claim to the throne of England.
That being done, Edward dies, and Harold, far from keeping that most
solemn oath, claims the kingdom of England for himself, and actually
accedes to the throne, apparently without any serious opposition from
the people.
[Sidenote: William the Conqueror]
But then comes William of Normandy, mightily indignant, with his
fleet. He lands at Hastings, encounters Harold and his forces,
defeats them heavily, Harold is killed in the battle, and William
becomes King of England. He is accepted with a readiness, and with a
slight opposition after the first battle, which we may suppose to be
due to two causes, one, that our country had been so long vexed by
fighting that it was weary and was willing to receive any peace at
any price, and, two, that the Norman influence had spread through the
country far and wide {124} before the actual coming of the conqueror,
so that the means for establishing his conquest were already prepared.
[Illustration: NORMAN GATEWAY, COLLEGE GREEN, BRISTOL.]
[Sidenote: The Northmen in France]
But it is very likely that this coming of the Northmen, the Normans,
out of France will have caused you to ask a question or two in your
minds. You may be wondering how it should be that Normans, Northmen,
{125} should be coming to England from Normandy, that is to say from
the south. You may be wondering how it is that there are Northmen
established there, as Dukes, that is as great rulers. When last we
considered the Continent of Europe this Normandy was part of the
great Empire of Charlemagne. In order to see how the Northmen came
to be there we may go back to the Empire of Charlemagne in the ninth
century. We have seen how that Empire was brought about and
compacted. It is now a most important thing for the understanding of
the great story that we should see how quickly that splendid Empire
fell to pieces after Charlemagne's death. The understanding of that
will make quite clear how the Normans were able to settle themselves
as independent rulers of the part of France which is still, after
them, called Normandy.
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