CHAPTER V.

THE DANISH CONQUEST OF ENGLAND.[464]

975–1016.

[Illustration: THE ENGLISH EMPIRE in the TENTH AND ELEVENTH CENTURIES.]

FOR THE DELEGATES OF THE CLARENDON PRESS.

Æthelred the Second, the prince in whose reign England and Normandy

first began to have a direct bearing on each other’s affairs, is the

only ruler of the male line of Ecgberht whom we can unhesitatingly set

down as a bad man and a bad King. With singularly few exceptions,

[Sidenote: Character of Æthelred the Second; his degeneracy.] the

princes of that house form, as we have seen, one of the greatest lines

to be found in the annals of any kingly house. With regard to one or two

members of the family the evidence is so contradictory, they were cut

off so young or reigned so short a time, that we have no certain

knowledge what they really were. But Æthelred stands alone in giving us

the wretched sight of a long reign of utter misgovernment, unredeemed,

as far as we can see, by any of those personal virtues which have

sometimes caused public errors and crimes to be forgotten. Personal

beauty and a certain elegance of manners, qualities consistent with any

amount of vice and folly, are the highest merits attributed to a prince,

who, instead of the Unconquered, the Glorious, the Magnificent, or the

Peaceful, has received no nobler historical surname than that of the

Unready.[465] His actions display a certain amount of energy, perhaps

rather of mere restlessness. It was at any rate an energy utterly

unregulated and misapplied, an energy which began enterprises and never

ended them, which wasted itself on needless and distant expeditions

while no effective resistance was made to the enemy at the gates.

Æthelred’s reign of thirty-eight years displays little but the neglect

of every kingly duty, little but weakness, impolicy, cowardice, blind

trust in unworthy favourites and even in detected traitors. It is full

of acts of injustice and cruelty, some of which are laid to the charge

of the King himself, while others, if he did not himself order them, he

at least did nothing to hinder or to punish. In that age almost

everything in the history of a nation depended on the personal

[Sidenote: Importance of the personal character of rulers.] character of

its ruler. One great King could raise a kingdom to the highest point of

prosperity; one weak or wicked King could plunge it into the lowest

depths of degradation. So it was with England in the tenth century. The

fabric of glory and dominion which was built up by the labours of

Ælfred, Eadward, Æthelstan, Eadmund, and Eadred, the fabric which was

firmly welded together by the strong and peaceful rule of Eadgar, now

seems to fall to pieces at the first touch of a vigorous and determined

enemy. And yet it was not wholly so. The work of so many conquerors and

lawgivers from Ecgberht [Sidenote: The English needed only leaders

worthy of the people.] onwards was not wholly fruitless. England passed

into the hands of a foreign master; but England passed into his hands as

a single kingdom, retaining too her old dominion over her vassal

principalities. And it should not be forgotten how completely the whole

evil was due to incompetent, cowardly, or traitorous leaders. The heart

of the English people was still sound. Wherever a brave and honest man

was in local command, local resistance was as vigorous as it could have

been under Ælfred himself. And in the last agony, when valour and wisdom

seemed all too late, Eadmund, the glorious son of the wretched Æthelred,

stood forth like one of the old heroes of his house, to win back half

the land from the invader, and to lose the rest far more through guile

and treason than through open warfare. The thing which is utterly

inexplicable throughout the reigns both of Æthelred and of Eadmund is

the strange and incomprehensible treason of two or three Englishmen in

high command. It is equally strange how their treachery could repeatedly

paralyse the efforts of a whole nation, and how, after their repeated

treasons, the traitors were again taken into favour and confidence by

the princes whom they had betrayed. Our facts are minute and explicit;

but we often need some explanation of their causes which is not

forthcoming. A few of those private letters of which we have such

abundance two or three centuries later would give us the key to many

difficulties which chronicles, laws, and charters leave wholly

insoluble.

§ 1. _Reign of Eadward the Martyr._ 975–979.

[Sidenote: Death of Eadgar. 975.]

Eadgar was succeeded by his eldest son Eadward, whose treacherous

murder, though he did not die in any cause of religion or patriotism,

gained him the surname of the Martyr. But he did not succeed without an

interregnum, without a disputed election, or even without something

approaching to a civil war. It shows how thoroughly we are now standing

on the firm ground of contemporary history that we can recover a

distinct portraiture of many [Sidenote: Movement against the monks,

headed by Ælfhere of Mercia;] of the actors in these scenes. The moment

Eadgar was dead, a reaction took place against the monastic party, which

was met by as powerful a movement on their behalf. Ælfhere, the

Ealdorman of the Mercians and a kinsman of Eadgar,[466] headed the

movement against the monks, and drove them out of several churches into

which Eadgar’s favour had introduced them. But the monks found powerful

supporters in the eastern part of the kingdom, where their cause was

strongly supported, it would seem even in arms,[467] by two remarkable

men who then held the governments [Sidenote: and resisted by Æthelwine

of East-Anglia and Brihtnoth of Essex.] of East-Anglia and Essex.

Æthelwine of East-Anglia, one of the founders of Ramsey abbey, is

chiefly known for his bounty to monastic foundations, to whose gratitude

he doubtless owed his singular surname of the Friend of God.[468]

Alongside of him stood his maternal uncle Brihtnoth, Ealdorman of the

East-Saxons,[469] whose lavish gifts to Ely, Ramsey, and other

monasteries, won him well nigh the reputation of a saint, and whom we

shall soon find dying a hero’s death in the defence of his [Sidenote:

Disputed election to the crown.] country against heathen invaders. More

interesting however in a constitutional point of view than these

ecclesiastical disputes is the controversy as to the succession to the

crown. The election of a minor is in any case a thing to be noticed, and

a dispute between two minors is more remarkable still. Eadgar had left

two sons, Eadward, aged about thirteen, the child of his first wife

Æthelflæd, and Æthelred, aged seven years, the child of his second wife

Ælfthryth, the daughter of Ordgar and widow of Æthelwold, who, under the

Latinized name of Elfrida, has been [Sidenote: State of the succession;

a minority unavoidable.] made the subject of so much strange

romance.[470] Had Eadgar left a brother behind him, there can be no

doubt that he would, like Ælfred and Eadred, have been placed on the

throne by universal consent. But there was no son of Eadmund living;

indeed it is not clear that there was any male descendant of Ælfred

living. There were indeed men, like Æthelweard the historian,[471] who

were sprung in the male line from Æthelwulf and Ecgberht; but in such

distant kinsmen some unusual personal merit would probably have been

needed to bring their claims on the crown into any notice. At this

moment there was no grown man among the immediate members of the royal

family, and there was no one, either among strangers or among more

distant kinsmen, who possessed that predominant merit and predominant

influence which marked out Harold for the crown ninety years later. The

evils of a minority had therefore to be risked. Yet it seems strange

that, if a minor King was to be accepted, there could be any doubt as to

which minor was to be chosen. Eadward is said to have been distinctly

recommended by his father, and with good reason. He was the elder son,

and though primogeniture gave no positive right, yet it would surely be

enough to turn the scale, even in a doubtful case, and this case, one

would have thought, was not doubtful. The election of Eadward would have

the unspeakable gain of bringing the minority to an end six years sooner

than the election of his brother. Yet we read on good authority[472]

that there was a distinct division of sentiment among the electors, and

that a strong party supported the child Æthelred against the boy

Eadward. In this we can hardly fail to see the influence of the widowed

Lady[473] Ælfthryth, [Sidenote: Party of Ælfthryth and the monks.] in

alliance with one of the two parties in the state. And there is every

reason to believe that the party of Ælfthryth was the party of the

monks. She was, by her first marriage, the sister-in-law of Æthelwine,

and we find several signs that neither Dunstan nor the monks were so

powerful under Eadward as they had been under his [Sidenote: Patriotic

conduct of Dunstan,] father. It was therefore a distinct sacrifice of

their party to their country, when Dunstan and his fellow Archbishop

[Sidenote: and election of Eadward.] Oswald settled the controversy by a

vigorous appeal on behalf of Eadward, urging the will of the late King,

and no doubt enlarging also on the manifest expediency of the choice.

Eadward was accordingly elected, crowned, and anointed. But that his

short reign was not wholly favourable to the monastic party may be

inferred by the continuance of the controversy, and the holding of

several [Sidenote: Banishment of Earl Oslac.] synods to discuss the

points at issue.[474] We may see a similar influence at work in the

banishment of Earl Oslac, a special favourite of Eadgar, whose

punishment and its injustice are bitterly lamented by our best

authorities.[475] It will be remembered that, when the last Northumbrian

[Sidenote: 954.] King was overthrown by Eadred, the government of the

country was entrusted to an Earl of the King’s choice. [Sidenote: 966.]

Oswulf, thus appointed by Eadred, ruled over all Northumberland, till

Eadgar again divided the old kingdoms of Bernicia and Deira, giving the

northern province to Oswulf and the southern to Oslac.[476] On Oslac’s

banishment, the whole seems to have been again united under Waltheof,

who was probably of the family of Oswulf, and of whose own descendents

we shall often hear again.

§ 2. _From the election of Æthelred to the first dispute with Normandy._

979–1000.

[Sidenote: Murder of Eadward and election of Æthelred. 979.]

Eadward, after a four years’ reign, was cruelly murdered. There is

little doubt that this foul deed was done by the instigation, if not by

the personal order, of his step-mother Ælfthryth,[477] whose son

Æthelred was now elected at the age of ten years.[478] For thirty-seven

years England was governed [Sidenote: Death of Dunstan. 988.] by him or

in his name, and after Dunstan was gone, the reign of Æthelred meant

only the reign of his unworthy favourites. The world soon learned how

great was the change when the Imperial sceptre of Britain was no longer

grasped by the hand of Eadgar the Peaceful. Æthelred had not been two

years on the throne when the Danish invasions began again. The whole

interest of the history so completely gathers round this fearful scourge

that we may pass swiftly by the few, and mostly unlucky, events of

[Sidenote: London burned. 982. (Chron. and Flor. Wig.)] internal history

which are handed down to us. In one year London was burned, seemingly by

one of those accidental fires which, then and long after, were so common

and so destructive in cities where the buildings were mainly [Sidenote:

Siege of Rochester. 986.] of wood. In another year, owing to some

internal sedition the cause of which is not explained, Æthelred, then a

youth of seventeen, besieged the town of Rochester, and being unable to

take it, ravaged and alienated some of the [Sidenote: 987.] lands of the

bishopric.[479] In another year we hear of an epidemic fever, and of a

murrain among beasts, seemingly the forerunner of the modern

cattle-plague, which raged through the whole of England in a way unknown

to former times.[480] Besides these misfortunes of different kinds,

[Sidenote: Death of Ælfhere. 983.] Ælfhere of Mercia died, and was

succeeded in his ealdormanship by his son Ælfric, who was banished some

years afterwards, we are not told for what cause. The first marriage

[Sidenote: Banishment of Ælfric. 986.] of Æthelred to the daughter of

one of his nobles, whose name and parentage are uncertain, and the birth

of his sons Æthelstan and Eadmund, afterwards the renowned Ironside,

must also be placed within this period.[481]

[Sidenote: The Danish invasions renewed;]

From these obscure domestic events we turn to the terrible drama of the

Danish wars. This new series of invasions, which led in the end to the

submission of all England to a Danish King, form the third and last

period of Danish warfare. But the third period, after so long an

interval, is as it were ushered in by a kind of repetition of the two

earlier periods. Before the great attack on the [Sidenote: first, with

mere plundering incursions, [980–982];] kingdom of England by a King of

all Denmark, we find a short period of mere plunder and a short period

of attempted settlement. During the first years of Æthelred the Danish

invasions once more become mere piratical incursions. Then for a few

years they cease altogether. [Sidenote: then attempts at settlement,

[988–993].] Then they begin a second time, in a shape which seems to

imply intended settlement, and which presently grows into [Sidenote:

Characters of Swegen of Denmark and Olaf of Norway.] regular political

conquests. The leading spirit of all these invasions was Swegen,[482]

the son of Harold Blaatand, the Danish King who played so important a

part in the affairs of Normandy. And for a while there appears by his

side another rover of the North, whose career was, if possible, stranger

than his own, the famous Olaf Tryggvesson of Norway. But it is hard

indeed to force the entries in the English Chronicles, which hardly ever

touch upon the internal affairs of Scandinavia,[483] into agreement with

the half fabulous narratives in the Danish historians and in the

Norwegian sagas. Swegen, baptized in his infancy, and held at the font

by an Imperial godfather, had received the name of Otto, as Guthrum

received the name of Æthelstan.[484] But he cast away his new name and

his new faith, and waged war against his Christian father on behalf of

Thor and Odin.[485] The life of Olaf, as told in the sagas of his

country,[486] is one of the most amazing either in history or in

romance. The posthumous child of a murdered King and a fugitive Queen,

he is sold as a slave in Esthonia, he flourishes through court favour in

Russia, he wins principalities by marriage in Wendland and in England,

and is converted to Christianity by an abbot in the Scilly Islands. The

early life of Swegen is likewise connected by tradition with England; he

is said to have been driven from Denmark, to have sought for shelter in

England, and, when repelled by Æthelred, to have taken refuge for a time

at the more hospitable court of Kenneth of Scotland.[487] It is highly

probable that Swegen took a part as a private wiking in the first three

years of piracy, which chiefly laid waste the shores of Wessex and Kent.

The presence of Olaf in England may also be inferred from the statement

that Cheshire was ravaged by enemies who are distinctly pointed out as

Norwegians.[488] That Swegen indeed had a hand in the earlier incursions

is almost proved by an interval [Sidenote: Cessation of inroads.

982–988.] of peace succeeding them. This interval doubtless answers to

the time of Swegen’s parricidal war with his father, which is quite

enough to account for the cessation of [Sidenote: They begin again.] his

attacks upon England. After six years’ intermission, [Sidenote: Battle

at Watchet. 988.] the invasions began again with an attack on Watchet on

the western coast of Somerset, in which several English thegns were

killed, but the Danes were at last beaten off.[489] Three years later, a

much more serious attack was made on the east of England, seemingly with

the intention [Sidenote: Norwegian invasion. 991.] of making a

settlement. This seems to have been a Norwegian expedition; the leaders

were Justin and Guthmund, sons of Steitan, and there seems every reason

to believe that Olaf Tryggvesson himself was present also.[490]

[Sidenote: Plunder of Ipswich.] They plundered Ipswich and thence

advanced into Essex, where the brave Ealdorman Brihtnoth met them in

battle [Sidenote: Battle of Maldon and death of Brihtnoth.] at Maldon.

The hero of the monks was also the hero of the soldiers, and the

exploits and death of the valiant Ealdorman were sung in strains which

rank among the noblest efforts of Teutonic poetry.[491] It is a relief

to turn from the wretched picture of misgovernment and treachery which

the reign of Æthelred presents, and to hear the deeds of one of the few

righteous who were left told in our own ancient tongue in verses which

echo the true ring of the battle-pieces of Homer. The fight of Maldon is

the only battle of the days of Æthelred of which any minute details are

preserved, and every detail throws light on something in the manners or

the military tactics of the age. The battle took place near the town of

Maldon, on the banks of the tidal river Panta, now called the

Blackwater. The town lies on a hill; immediately at its base flows one

branch of the river, while another, still crossed by a mediæval bridge,

flows at a little distance to the north. The Danish ships seem to have

lain in the branch nearest to the town, and their crews must have held

the space between the two streams, while Brihtnoth came to the rescue

from the north. He seems to have halted on the spot now marked by the

church of Heybridge,[492] having both streams between him and the town.

He rode to the spot, but when he had drawn up his army in order, he

alighted from his horse and took his place among his own household

troops.[493] These were men bound to him by the traditional tie of

personal fidelity handed on from the earliest recorded days of the

Teutonic race. Like Harold at Senlac, Brihtnoth fought on foot; an

English King or Ealdorman used his horse only to carry him to and from

the field of battle; in the actual combat the first in rank was bound to

share every danger of his lowlier comrades.[494] The wikings now sent a

herald, offering to withdraw and go back to their ships, on payment of

money to be assessed at their own discretion. Brihtnoth of course

indignantly refused any such demand; steel and not gold was the only

metal that could judge between him and them. The two hosts now stood on

the two sides of the water, a deep and narrow channel, which, as the

tide was coming in, could not be at once crossed. The bridge, a still

older predecessor doubtless of that which still remains, was held, at

Brihtnoth’s order, by three champions whose exploit reminds us, like

some other incidents of the battle, of one of the most famous tales in

the poetical history of Rome. The dauntless three who kept the bridge at

Maldon were Wulfstan the son of Ceola, Ælfhere, and Maccus, the name of

which last champion may suggest some curious inquiries as to his

origin.[495] Till the tide turned, the two armies stood facing each

other, eager for battle, but unable to do more than exchange a few

flights of arrows. At last the turn of the tide made the ford passable;

the Northmen began to cross, and Brihtnoth, perhaps with a kind of

chivalrous feeling which was doubtless utterly thrown away upon such

enemies, allowed large numbers of them to pass unhindered.[496] And now

the fight began in earnest. The English stood, as at Senlac, in the

array common to them and their enemies, a strong line, or rather wedge,

of infantry, forming a wall with their shields. As in the old Roman

battles, the fight began with the hurling of the javelins, and was

carried on in close combat with the broadsword.[497] Brihtnoth was

wounded early in the battle, and his sister’s son Wulfmær was disabled.

But the brave old chief went on fighting, and, after slaying several

wikings with his own hand, he was cut down, and two gallant followers

who fought at his side were slain with him. One of these was another

Wulfmær, the young son of Wulfstan, who fought by his lord while his

father was guarding the bridge. After the death of the valiant

Ealdorman, the thoroughly Homeric character of the story comes out more

strongly than ever. The fight over the body of Brihtnoth sounds like the

fight over the body of Patroklos,[498] or like that later day when

“Fiercer grew the fighting

Around Valerius dead.”

Two caitiffs, the only faithless ones among the body-guard of the fallen

hero, two brothers whose names are handed down to infamy as Godric and

Godwig, the sons of Odda, forgot their duty to their lord who had shown

them such favours, and fled from the field, leaving his body in the

hands of his enemies. Godric even added the further treason of mounting

the horse on which Brihtnoth had ridden to the field, so that many

thought that it was the Ealdorman himself who had fled.[499] The English

were thus thrown into confusion; the fortress of shields was

broken.[500] The enemy had thus time to mangle the body of Brihtnoth,

[Sidenote: Faithfulness of the _comitatus_ of Brihtnoth.] and to carry

off his head as a trophy.[501] But the fight was renewed by Brihtnoth’s

special comrades, whose names and exploits are handed down to us in

verses which breathe the true fire of the warlike minstrelsy common to

Greek and Teuton. There fought Ælfwine the son of Ælfric, of a lordly

house among the Mercians;[502] there fought Æseferth the son of Ecglaf,

a Northumbrian hostage who had escaped from the enemy;[503] there fought

Brihtwold, old in years but valiant among the foremost; there fought

Eadward the Long, and Leofsunu, and others whose names live only in the

nameless poet’s verse, but among whom one must not be forgotten, one

whose tale shows that, deep as were the corruptions of English life

under this wretched reign, there was at least room left for lowly merit

to raise itself to honour. This was Dunnere, a churl by birth, but whose

rank is spoken of without the least shadow of contempt, and whose words

and deeds placed him on a level with the noblest of his comrades. In

short, the whole personal following of the East-Saxon Ealdorman seems to

have fought and fallen around his body.[504] The heathen had the

victory;[505] but the defeat of the English seems to have been by no

means decisive. We do not read that the Danes were able to spoil or burn

the town, according to their usual custom, and the body of Brihtnoth was

carried off in [Sidenote: His burial at Ely.] safety and found a worthy

resting-place. On an island in the great fen land between Mercia and

East-Anglia, on a height which in that part of Britain passes for a

considerable hill, the virgin Queen Æthelthryth (the Etheldreda of

hagiology) had, three centuries before, forsaken every duty of royal and

married life, to rule over a sisterhood which proved fruitful in saints

of royal birth.[506] Thus arose the great monastery of Ely; but, like

many other religious houses, it was utterly destroyed in the Danish

invasion of the ninth century. When the monks were in the height of

their power under Eadgar, Bishop Æthelwold, their great patron, chose

the forsaken site for a new foundation; a church was built, and a body

of monks took possession of the former home of sainted princesses. Among

the benefactors of the new house the Ealdorman of the East-Saxons was

one of the foremost. The first Abbot, whether from kindred or from

accident, bore the same name as his benefactor the Ealdorman. He,

according to the legend, died a martyr’s death, through the practice of

the Lady Ælfthryth, the unworthy niece of the pious chieftain.[507] The

second Abbot Ælfsige was bound to Brihtnoth by the tie of mutual

benefits. He now hastened to the place of slaughter, and carried off the

body of so great a benefactor of his house. The remains of Brihtnoth

were buried in the newly hallowed minster, the humble forerunner of the

most stately and varied of England’s cathedral churches. Under its

mighty lantern the brave and pious Ealdorman slept in peace, till, under

pretence of restoration, his bones were disturbed by the savages of the

[Sidenote: Gifts of his widow Æthelflæd; the Ely Tapestry.] eighteenth

century. His widow Æthelflæd shared his devotion to the house of Saint

Æthelthryth. She added to his gifts of lands; she offered a bracelet of

gold, perhaps part of the badges of his office; and she adorned the

minster with one gift, which, if it survived, would rank among the most

precious monuments of the history and art of the age. Ely once could

rival Bayeux; among the choicest treasures of Ely under her first

Bishop, a hundred and twenty years later, was the tapestry on which the

devotion of Æthelflæd had wrought the glorious deeds of the hero of

Maldon.[508]

At Maldon the invaders had gained a victory, but it was a victory which

showed what Englishmen could still do when they had men of the old stamp

to lead them. But the dastardly flight of the sons of Odda showed that

England also contained men of another temper. And unhappily the policy

of Æthelred was now guided by men of the stamp of Godric, not by men of

the stamp of Brihtnoth. The shameful payment of money, which the brave

old Ealdorman had so indignantly refused, was the only means of safety

which suggested itself to a King in the first vigour of youth and to his

chief counsellors in Church and State. [Sidenote: The Danes first bought

off. 991.] The year which beheld the fight of Maldon beheld also, for

the first time, the Lord of all Britain stoop to buy peace from a few

ship-crews of heathen pirates.[509] This was the beginning of that

senseless and fatal system of looking to gold to do the work of steel,

of trusting to barbarians who never kept their promises, and who of

course, as soon as they had spent one instalment of tribute, came back

again to seek for more. But this plain lesson was one which Æthelred and

his advisers seemed never able to learn. The spirit of the nation, which

under men like Brihtnoth was ready for vigorous resistance, was thus

[Sidenote: Advisers of the measure;] quenched, and its energy frittered

away. The evil counsellors who stand charged with the infamy of first

suggesting this unhappy measure were men of the highest rank in the

nation. The great Dunstan was dead; he was taken away from the evil to

come in the very year in which the invasions began again. After a

momentary occupation of [Sidenote: Sigeric, Archbishop of Canterbury,

[990–994];] the metropolitan throne by Æthelgar, Bishop of the

South-Saxons, who died the next year, the primacy fell to the lot of

Sigeric, Bishop of Wiltshire or Ramsbury. The first act of this prelate

was to drive out the secular priests from the metropolitan church, where

Dunstan himself had let them abide.[510] If Sigeric was at all versed in

the fitting lore of his office, the history of the Old Testament might

have supplied him with many precedents to show the fatal nature of his

policy. No Jewish King had ever gained anything by buying off the

Assyrian, and an English King was not likely to fare any better by

buying off the Dane. But Sigeric joined with the Ealdormen Æthelweard

and Ælfric in gaining the King’s leave to purchase peace for their own

districts at the hands of the invaders by the [Sidenote: Ealdorman

Æthelweard,] payment of ten thousand pounds.[511] Æthelweard, “Patricius

Consul Fabius Quæstor Æthelwerdus,”[512] was a man of royal descent, who

is memorable as our only lay historian of this age, but who would have

been more worthy of honour in his literary character, had he, like his

kinsman Ælfred, stooped to write in his native tongue, instead of

[Sidenote: and Ealdorman Ælfric.] clothing a most meagre record in most

inflated Latin. As for Ælfric, his identity and his actions form one of

the standing difficulties of this time. His doings, as favourite

[Sidenote: Peace purchased of the Northmen. 991.] and as traitor, are

spread over several years of the reign of Æthelred. Having bought a

respite for their own districts,[513] the Primate and the two Ealdormen

next persuaded the King and his Witan to buy a general peace for the

whole land.[514] The terms of the treaty show that, if the invaders were

not actually to settle in the land, they were at least not expected to

make a speedy departure. They engage to help King Æthelred against any

fleet which may come to invade England; neither party is to receive the

enemies of the other; and various provisions are made, which would be

quite out of place if the Northmen had been expected to sail away at

once. And the events of the next [Sidenote: Fleet assembled at London.

992.] year clearly show that they did not sail away, and they seem also

to imply that the peace was broken. For in that year Æthelred and his

Witan[515] gathered together a fleet at London, which was placed under

the command of two Bishops, Æscwig of Dorchester and Ælfric[516] of

Wiltshire, and of two lay chiefs, Thored the Earl, of whom we have

already heard, and who, according to one account, was the King’s

father-in-law,[517] and, unluckily for the enterprise, Ælfric the

Ealdorman. We have now reached the first of that long series of utterly

inexplicable treasons, which were, in a way no less utterly

inexplicable, always forgiven by those against whom they were wrought.

One can understand the wretched policy which buys off an enemy or the

sheer cowardice which flees from an enemy. Contemptible as both of them

are, neither of them implies any deliberate treachery or any positive

perversion of heart. But what human motive could induce an English

Ealdorman deliberately to betray his country to the heathen invaders?

Yet so to do now becomes the regular course on the part of the royal

favourites, a class who form a strange contrast to the brave men, chiefs

and people alike, whose patriotic efforts [Sidenote: Treason of Ælfric.]

were so often thwarted by them. Ælfric now first sent word to the

Northmen to beware lest they should be surrounded by the English fleet,

and then actually joined them [Sidenote: Naval victory of the English.

992.] with his own contingent. The English, among whom the East-Angles

and the citizens of London were the foremost, pursued and gave battle;

the Danes were defeated with great slaughter; the traitor’s ship was

taken with all [Sidenote: Ælfgar blinded. 993.] that was in it, but he

himself narrowly escaped. Æthelred took a base and cowardly revenge by

blinding Ælfric’s son Ælfgar, against whom there is nothing whatever to

show that he had any share in his father’s crime. Yet, strange to say,

within a few years Ælfric himself was again in favour, and again in a

position to command and to betray English armies.

[Sidenote: Military and commercial importance of London.]

The storm was thus turned away from London. The importance of that great

city was daily growing throughout these times. We cannot as yet call it

the capital of the kingdom; but its geographical position made it one of

the chief bulwarks of the land, and there was no part of the realm whose

people could outdo the patriotism and [Sidenote: Comparison with Paris.]

courage of its valiant citizens. London at this time fills much the same

place in England which Paris filled in Northern Gaul a century earlier.

The two cities, in their several lands, were the two great fortresses,

placed on the two great rivers of the country, the special objects of

attack on the part of the invaders and the special defence of the

country against them. Each was, as it were, marked out by great public

services to become the capital of the whole kingdom. But Paris became a

national capital only because its local Count grew into a national King;

London, amidst all changes within and without, has always kept more or

less of her ancient character as a free city. Paris was merely a

military bulwark, the dwelling-place of a ducal or a royal sovereign;

London, no less important as a military post, had also a greatness which

rested on a surer foundation. London, like a few other of our great

cities, is one of the ties which connect our Teutonic England with the

Celtic and Roman Britain of earlier times. Her British name still lives

on, unchanged by the Teutonic conquerors. Before we first hear of London

as an English city, she had cast away her Roman and Imperial title; she

was no longer Augusta;[518] she had again taken her ancient name, and

through all changes she clave to her ancient character. The commercial

fame of London dates from the early days of Roman dominion.[519] The

English Conquest may have caused an interruption for a while, but it was

only for a while. As early as the days of Æthelberht the commerce of

London was again renowned.[520] Ælfred had rescued the city from the

Dane; he had built a citadel for her defence,[521] the germ of that

Tower which was to be first the dwelling-place of Kings, and then the

scene of the martyrdom of their victims. Among the Laws of Æthelstan

none are more remarkable than those which deal with the internal affairs

of London and with the regulation [Sidenote: Commerce of London.] of her

earliest commercial corporations.[522] During the reign of Æthelred the

merchant city again became the object of special and favourable

legislation.[523] Her Institutes speak of a commerce spread over all the

lands that bordered on the Western Ocean. Flemings and Frenchmen, men of

Ponthieu, of Brabant, and of Lüttich, filled her markets with their

wares and enriched the civic coffers with their tolls. Thither too came

the men of Rouen, whose descendants were, at no distant day, to form no

[Sidenote: Privileges enjoyed by the “Men of the Emperor.”] small

element among her own citizens. And, worthy and favoured above all, came

the sea-faring men of the Old-Saxon brother-land, the pioneers of the

mighty Hansa of the North, which was in days to come to knit together

London and Novgorod in one bond of commerce, and to dictate laws and

distribute crowns among the nations by whom London was now threatened.

The demand for toll and tribute fell lightly on those whom English

legislation distinguished as the men of the Emperor.[524] The manifest

advantages of their trade, perhaps some feeling or memory of their

common blood and speech, gained privileges for them to which the Gaul

and the Norman had no claim, privileges which did not extend to the

kindred Fleming, vassal as he was of the Parisian King, or to the

Lorrainer, still a vassal of Cæsar, but already exposed to the contagion

of foreign influence and language. The chief seat of their enterprise

was indeed as yet not open to them, and the chief seat of their dominion

was as yet not in being. Queenly Lübeck had not yet begun to cover her

peninsula with her stately spires, her soaring gateways, the rich and

varied dwellings of her merchant-princes, and the proud pile of that

council-house which was to become the centre of the commerce and policy

of Northern Europe. The Baltic, one day to be an Hanseatic lake, was

still surrounded throughout its coasts by savage or piratical tribes to

whom all Christendom alike was hostile. But, if the Trave was not yet

reached, the Elbe and the Weser were already occupied. The fame of

Hamburg and of Bremen was as yet ecclesiastical rather than commercial;

still we may well believe that, among the continental brethren whom

London welcomed, there were some who had ventured forth from their

infant havens. And the Rhine at least was still open; the ancient Colony

of Agrippina was already a chief mart of Teutonic commerce; as early as

the days of Charles and Offa, commerce between England and the Empire

was a matter of special interest on both sides;[525] and now, in the

days of Æthelred, the men of the Emperor, alone among the natives of

foreign lands, were emphatically spoken of as “worthy of good laws, even

as we ourselves.”[526]

[Sidenote: Ravages in the North of England. 993.]

The great merchant city was thus saved, mainly, as we shall often find

it in these wars, by the valour of her own citizens. The Northmen,

baffled in their attack on London, turned their course northward; they

stormed King Ida’s fortress of Bamburgh, the earliest seat of

Northumbrian kingship; they then turned back to the mouth of the Humber,

and ravaged the country on both sides of that river. The men of Lindesey

and Deira were no less ready to defend their country than the men of

London and East-Anglia; but they had less worthy leaders. [Sidenote:

Treason of Fræna, Frithegist, and Godwine.] Just as the battle was

beginning, the English commanders set the example of flight. Their names

were Fræna, Frithegist, and Godwine, two of them at least old servants

of Eadgar, and it is distinctly implied that the cause of their

cowardice and treachery was that they were themselves of Danish descent,

and that they therefore sympathized with the invaders rather than with

those whom it was their duty to defend.[527]

[Sidenote: Affairs of Wales.]

Our narrative is thus far, on the whole, straightforward and

intelligible; but two difficult questions now present themselves. Were

these Scandinavian invasions accompanied by any efforts on the part of

the Celtic inhabitants of Britain to shake off the English supremacy?

Was Æthelred, while thus attacked by foreign invaders, himself engaged

in foreign disputes and wars, perhaps in [Sidenote: Border warfare with

the Welsh.] actual invasion of a foreign land? As far as the Welsh are

concerned, it would be alike impossible and unprofitable to try to trace

out every detail of the border warfare which was always going on along

the Mercian frontier. The English Chronicles scarcely ever condescend to

speak of the ups and downs of these endless skirmishes, while [Sidenote:

Scandinavian incursions in Wales.] the Welsh Chronicles are full of

them. They tell us of a good many incursions of the “Saxons,” but they

are far fuller of the ravages of the “Black Pagans,” who were probably

much oftener Northmen from Ireland and the Western Islands than actual

Danes from Denmark. And it is small honour to the Emperor of all Britain

that his plan of buying off the heathen ravagers had perhaps been

[Sidenote: 988.] forestalled by a vassal prince of Wales.[528] This

prince, Meredydd, son of Owen, seems to have spread his dominion over

the greater part of the modern principality,[529] and in the year of the

battle of Maldon we distinctly find him, not only at war with the

English, but in league with the Northmen. A prince of Gwent and

Morganwg,[530] [Sidenote: War with Meredydd. 991.] in company with an

English commander whose name appears to have been Æthelsige, ravaged the

kingdom of Meredydd as far as Saint David’s. In return for this,

Meredydd, with an army of heathen mercenaries,[531] ravaged Morganwg,

the dominion of the Welsh ally of England. One would be more anxious to

know what was the position of Scotland at this time. The reception of

Swegen by Kenneth, if it be historical, might seem to point to an

unfriendly feeling towards England; but we have no notices of Scottish

affairs till some years later.

[Sidenote: Æthelred’s relations with Normandy.]

A more important question still now presents itself. As far as we can

gather from most imperfect and contradictory accounts, it seems that it

was during these years that the first direct intercourse between England

and Normandy took place, and that that intercourse was [Sidenote:

Disputes arising from the shelter given in Normandy to Danish vessels.]

of an unfriendly, if not a directly hostile, kind.[532] The quarrel

seems to have arisen out of the hospitable reception which was given in

the Norman ports to the piratical fleets which were engaged in the

plunder of England. The old connexion with Denmark, the good services

which had been rendered by King Harold, were not forgotten in Normandy.

The kind reception thus due to the Danes in general may have extended

itself even to those who were in fact Harold’s rebellious subjects,

warring against the champion of the faith common to Normandy and

England. The Norman havens lay most conveniently open for the sale of

the plunder of Wessex; it is even possible that some of the inhabitants

of those parts of Normandy where the old Danish spirit still lingered

may have joined their heathen kinsmen in incursions on the opposite

coast.[533] Considering the chronology, it seems most [Sidenote: 988.]

likely that the invasion of Somerset which took place in the year of

Dunstan’s death was aided and abetted by Richard’s subjects in one or

other of these ways. A dispute thus arose between Æthelred and the Duke;

whether it led to open war is uncertain. At any rate it assumed

importance enough to call for the intervention of the [Sidenote:

Reconciliation brought about by Pope John the Fifteenth. 991.] common

father of Christendom. The reigning Pope, John the Fifteenth, stepped in

to reconcile two Christian princes who were weakening one another in the

presence of threatening, if not triumphant, heathendom. A prelate named

Leo, described as Bishop of Trier, was sent by the Pontiff to the court

of Æthelred on a message of peace. He thence went to Duke Richard at

Rouen, accompanied by an English embassy, consisting of Æthelsige,

Bishop of Sherborne, and two thegns named Leofstan and Æthelnoth, who

are not otherwise distinguished, but whose names are attached to many of

the charters of the time. Peace was concluded on the terms that neither

party should receive the enemies of the other, nor even each other’s

subjects, unless they were provided with passports from their own

sovereign.[534]

[Sidenote: Increasing connexion between England and Normandy]

There can be no doubt that in these transactions we may see the germs of

much that came to pass in later years. The first recorded intercourse

between the courts of Rouen and Winchester paved the way for that chain

[Sidenote: from this time.] of events which was at last to establish a

descendant of Richard in the royal city of Æthelred. Each country now

began to feel the importance of the other, whether as a friend or as an

enemy. As we go on in the reign of Æthelred, we shall find intercourse

of all kinds with Normandy growing more frequent at every step. And for

the first and the last time in the common history of the two countries,

the Roman Bishop appears in his fitting character of a common peacemaker

and father. The next Pontiff who mingles in a strife between a King of

the English and a Duke of the Normans shows himself in quite another

light.

§ 3. _From the first dispute with Normandy to the Massacre of Saint

Brice._ 991–1002.

[Sidenote: Great combined expedition of Olaf and Swegen. 994.]

We must now again come back to the consecutive narrative of the Danish

wars. In the year after the sack of Bamburgh and the ignominious flight

of the thegns of Lindesey, the invasions began again on a more terrible

scale. They were no longer the plundering expeditions of private

wikings, or of the sons of Kings spending their hot youth in this wild

warfare against their neighbours. They were no longer the expeditions of

adventurous chieftains seeking to better their fortunes by winning

themselves new homes at the point of the sword. The two mightiest powers

of the North were now joined together in a momentary league to compass

the utter subjugation of England. Instead of the sea-rovers of a few

years back, the invaders are now two powerful Kings with royal fleets

and armies at their disposal. Olaf, King of the Norwegians, and Swegen,

King of the Danes, joined their forces in a greater expedition than any

that Brihtnoth had ever met with steel or Æthelred with gold. The

pretext for war on the part of Olaf is not clear; Swegen gave out that

he came to revenge the inhospitable treatment which he had received from

the King of the English in the days of his adversity.[535] At the head

of a fleet of ninety-four [Sidenote: Attack on London defeated by the

citizens. 994.] ships, the two Kings of the North sailed up the Thames

and laid siege to London—the first, but not the last, siege which the

great city was to undergo in this fearful warfare. For the first, but

not for the last time, the valiant burghers, who had already learned to

grapple with the Dane on his own element, beat back the invaders from

their walls. The fire of twelve years back had doubtless been a mere

passing blow; it could have done little to lessen the strength of the

Roman rampart and of the tower of Ælfred. But it was not only to such

worldly bulwarks that the defenders of London trusted; on that day the

Mother of God, of her mild-heartedness, rescued the Christian city from

its foes.[536] An assault on the wall, coupled with an attempt to burn

the town, was defeated with great slaughter of the besiegers, and the

two Kings sailed away the same day in wrath and sorrow.[537] Here was

another triumph of English valour; but in this reign valour and counsel

were always local; cowardice and utter incapacity reigned at

head-quarters. Under Ælfred or Æthelstan, such a check as the invaders

had met with before London would have been followed up by some crushing

defeat, and the slain of Maldon would have been avenged in the glories

of another Brunanburh. Under the wretched Æthelred the very valour of

the Londoners only led to the more fearful desolation of other parts of

[Sidenote: Ravages in the South-East of England.] the kingdom. The enemy

were allowed to ravage the coast at pleasure; at last, meeting with no

resistance, they seized on horses, and rode through the eastern and

southern shires, pillaging, burning, murdering, without regard to age or

sex.[538] These horrors were carried on without interruption throughout

the whole range of Essex, Kent, and Sussex; at last the invaders crossed

the West-Saxon frontier, and by their presence in Hampshire threatened

the royal city and the royal person. London and Essex might have been

forgotten, but it was now clearly time to do something. But what was to

be done? Æthelred and his Witan could think of nothing but their

[Sidenote: Æthelred again buys peace.] old wretched expedient. The

invaders were again bought off; they were allowed to winter at

Southampton; a special tax was levied on Wessex to supply the crews with

food and pay, and a general tax was levied on all England to raise the

sum of sixteen thousand pounds as a payment to the two Kings.[539] For

once this policy, favoured [Sidenote: Embassy of Ælfheah and Æthelward

to Olaf.] by special circumstances, was partly successful. The union of

Denmark and Norway was broken, and one of the invading Kings was won

over to lasting peace and neutrality. Both the leaders of the heathen

fleet were baptized men. Swegen indeed, the godson of Cæsar, had denied

his faith, and had waged war against his own father on behalf of

heathendom. But the baptism of Olaf was more recent and more voluntary.

His later history sets him before us as a zealous Christian, who

evangelized his kingdom at the point of the sword, and who, in the name

of the religion of mercy, paid back upon the heathen all that Christian

confessors and martyrs had suffered at their hands. A faith which shows

itself in such works as these may indeed be far removed from the true

spirit of the Gospel; but such fiery zeal at least implies the firmest

belief in the dogmas which it is ready to force upon all men at all

hazards. We can then well understand that Olaf, already a Christian,

might easily be led to repent of the wrongs which he was dealing out on

a Christian land, whose sovereign and people had never wronged him. He

willingly listened to an English embassy which came to win him over more

completely to the side of his brethren in the faith. One of the

ambassadors sent was Ælfheah—the Alphege of hagiology—then the Bishop of

the diocese in which Olaf was wintering, but who was some years later to

ascend the metropolitan throne and to win the crown of martyrdom at the

hands of the still heathen Danes. His colleague was the literary

Ealdorman, Patricius Consul Fabius Quæstor Ethelwerdus, again more

vigorous in negotiation than in warfare. The Norwegian King exchanged

hostages with Æthelred; he was led “with mickle worship” to the court at

Andover; he was received with every honour and enriched with royal

gifts. [Sidenote: Olaf’s confirmation and adoption.] Already baptized,

he received the rite of confirmation[540] from Bishop Ælfheah, and was

adopted by Æthelred as [Sidenote: He departs for Norway. 995.] his son.

The royal neophyte promised never again to invade England; and, as soon

as summer appeared, he sailed away to his own country and faithfully

kept his [Sidenote: His later days and death. 1000.] promise. The later

days of this prince, who fills so large a space both in the history and

in the romance of his country, were spent in the forcible introduction

of Christianity into his own kingdom, and in a war with his momentary

ally of Denmark, in a sea-fight against whom he at last perished.

[Sidenote: Inaction of Swegen. 994–1003.]

One enemy was thus changed, if not into a friend, at least into a

neutral; and the other, perhaps weakened by the conversion of his ally,

seems to have remained comparatively inactive for several years. Of

Swegen himself we hear nothing in English history for nine years, and

when he did come again, he had a terrible reason for coming. The Danish

fleet however stayed on the English coast, but for a while we hear of no

further ravages. It would seem that the interval was partly employed in

attacks both on the vassals and on the continental kinsmen of England.

In the year of Olaf’s departure, Swegen is said to have ravaged the Isle

of Man,[541] and there is no doubt that these years were a time in which

both Danes and Swedes were busily employed in attacks on the land of the

continental Saxons.[542] In England this short respite was largely

devoted to the work of legislation, and to the carrying on of the

ordinary business of [Sidenote: Meetings of the Witenagemót. 995.]

government. Meetings of the Witan were frequent. More than one such took

place during the year of Olaf’s departure,[543] a year of some

importance in ecclesiastical history. [Sidenote: Ælfric elected

Archbishop by the Witan.] Archbishop Sigeric died, and the vacant office

was given, by the election of the Witan assembled at Amesbury in

Wiltshire,[544] to the Bishop of the diocese in which they were met,

Ælfric of Ramsbury, a prelate whose name is still remembered as the

author of various contributions to our early theological literature. In

the same year also one of [Sidenote: Bishopric of Lindisfarn. 635–883.]

the greatest and most famous of English bishoprics found its permanent

resting-place. The bishopric of Bernicia or Northern Northumberland, one

originally planted by Scottish missionaries, had its first seat in the

Holy Island of Lindisfarn, where, for a short time during the later part

of the seventh century, the lonely see was made illustrious by the

monastic virtues of its sixth Bishop [Sidenote: Saint Cuthberht.

685–687.] Saint Cuthberht.[545] He became the patron of the see, and his

body was looked on as its choicest possession. In the great Danish

invasion of the ninth century, the Bishop and his clerks fled from their

island, and carried the body of the saint hither and thither, till it

found a resting-place [Sidenote: The See removed to Chester-le-Street;

883;] at Cunegaceaster or Chester-le-Street.[546] Here the bishopric

remained for more than a century, till, in the year which we have now

reached, Ealdhun, the reigning prelate, removed [Sidenote: thence to

Durham, 995.] it once more to the site which his successors have kept

ever since. This translation was not exactly a forestalling of that

general removal of bishoprics from smaller to more considerable towns,

which we shall find carried out systematically soon after the Norman

Conquest. Ealdhun removed his see to a spot which he was the first to

make into a dwelling-place of men. As in after days the Wiltshire

bishopric was translated from the hill of the elder Salisbury to the

plain which has been covered by the younger, so, by an opposite process,

Ealdhun now moved his chair from Cunegaceaster to a site nobler than

that occupied by any other minster in England. The body of Saint

Cuthberht and the episcopal throne of his successors were placed by the

happy choice of Ealdhun on that height whence the abbey and castle of

Durham still look down upon the river winding at their feet. He found

the spot a wilderness;[547] but a town soon grew up around the church;

Cunegaceaster was before long outstripped by Durham, and we shall in a

few years see the new city acting as an important military post. And as

the city grew, its prelates grew [Sidenote: Greatness and temporal

authority of the See of Durham.] also. In process of time the successors

of Ealdhun came to surpass all their episcopal brethren in wealth and in

temporal authority. The prelate of Durham became one, and the more

important, of the only two English prelates whose worldly franchises

invested them with some faint shadow of the sovereign powers enjoyed by

the princely churchmen of the Empire. The Bishop of Ely in his island,

the Bishop of Durham in his hill-fortress, held powers which no other

English ecclesiastic was allowed to share. Aidan and Cuthberht had lived

almost a hermit’s life among their monks on their lonely island; their

successors grew into the lords of a palatinate, in which it was not the

peace of the King but the peace of the Bishop which the wrong-doer was,

in legal language, held to have broken. The outward look of the city at

once suggests its peculiar character. Durham alone among English cities,

with its highest point crowned, not only by the minster, but by the vast

castle of the Prince-Bishop, recalls to mind those cities of the Empire,

Lausanne or Chur or Sitten, where the priest who bore alike the sword

and the pastoral staff looked down from his fortified height on a flock

which he had to guard no less against worldly than against ghostly

foes.[548] Such a change could never have taken place if the see of

Saint Cuthberht had still lingered in its hermit-island; it could hardly

have taken place if his body had ended its wanderings on a spot less

clearly marked out by nature for dominion. The translation of the see to

Durham by Ealdhun is the turning-point in the history of that great

bishopric. And it is something more; it is worthy of notice in the

general history of England as laying the foundation of a state of things

which in England remained exceptional, but which, had it gained a wider

field, would have made a lasting change in the condition of the country.

The spiritual Palatine of Durham and the temporal Palatine of Chester

stood alone in the possession of their extraordinary franchises. The

unity of the kingdom was therefore not seriously endangered by the

existence of these isolated principalities, especially as the temporal

palatinate so early became an apanage of the heir to the Crown. But had

all bishoprics possessed the same rights as Durham, had all earldoms

possessed the same rights as Chester, England could never have remained

an united monarchy. It must have fallen in pieces in exactly the same

way in which the Empire did, and from essentially the same cause.

[Sidenote: Witenagemót at Cealchyth, [996]; at Calne and Wantage.]

Another meeting of the Witan was held the next year at Cealchyth,[549]

and a more important one the year after at Calne, which after a few days

transferred its sittings to Wantage.[550] Here, besides the usual

business of confirming the King’s grants of lands or privileges to

churches or to [Sidenote: [997].] private men, a code of laws was drawn

up. At an earlier Gemót, held at Woodstock in an uncertain year, a code

had been published,[551] designed mainly for the purely English parts of

the kingdom; the labours of the Witan at Wantage, remarkable as it seems

in a spot so purely Saxon, seem to have had a special reference to the

country which had been occupied by the Danes.[552] These laws, like so

many other of our ancient codes, are chiefly devoted to the

administration of justice and to the preservation of the peace. Neither

in them nor in the earlier laws of Woodstock can we discern any distinct

allusion to the special circumstances [Sidenote: Renewed ravages of the

Danes, 997–998.] of the times. But in the very year of the Gemót of

Wantage the Danish ravages began again. For two years they were confined

to the coasts of Wessex and its immediate dependencies. In the first

year the invaders set out, seemingly from their old quarters near

Southampton, they doubled the Land’s End and ravaged Cornwall,

Devonshire, Somerset, and South Wales,[553] plundering, burning, and

slaying everywhere, and, what is specially noticed, burning the

monastery at Tavistock. The next year they cruelly ravaged Dorset and

Wight, and at last took up their quarters in that island, whence they

wrung [Sidenote: Witenagemót of London. 998.] contributions from

Hampshire and Sussex. During this last year a Gemót was held at

London.[554] Whether any measures were taken to resist the Danes does

not appear; but it seems that Wulfsige, Bishop of the Dorsætas, took

measures to substitute monks for canons in his cathedral church at

Sherborne,[555] and the King restored to the church [Sidenote: Ravages

of the Danes in Kent. 999.] of Rochester the lands of which he had

robbed it in his youth.[556] The gift, however valuable to the

bishopric, did little towards protecting the citizens of Rochester. The

next year the Danes sailed up the Thames and the Medway, and besieged

the town. The men of Kent went forth to battle, but they were defeated

after a hard struggle, and the Danes horsed themselves and ravaged the

whole western [Sidenote: The Witenagemót collects a fleet and army.]

part of the shire. The Wise Men then met again, this time to devise

means for carrying on the war. They voted, and actually got together, a

fleet and army; but nothing came of it. Both in this year and in the

former year everything went wrong. Armies were often gathered together;

but time was wasted in all manner of delays, and meanwhile the soldiers

who were assembled did nearly as much damage as the enemy. If things

ever got on so far that they met the enemy in battle, either ill luck or

treachery always [Sidenote: Their inefficiency, and general misery of

the country.] gave the victory to the heathen. And when the ships were

gathered together, there was only delay from day to day; the crews were

harassed grievously; when things should have been forward, they were

only the more backward; they let the enemy’s army ever increase; and

ever they went away from the sea, and the enemy followed them; and in

the end there was nothing for either the land-force or the sea-force,

but grieving of the folk and spending of money and emboldening of their

foes.[557]

[Sidenote: Causes of the inefficient resistance to the Danes.]

Such is the picture of the times which is given us by our best

authorities. And it is clear that, to bring about such a state of

things, there must have been causes which lay deeper than the mere

incapacity or carelessness of Æthelred or than the treachery of a few

chiefs of Danish descent.[558] On the other hand, it is perfectly clear

that there was no lack of zeal or courage on the part of the people in

any part of the country where the invaders landed. This is shown by the

valiant resistance which the invaders always met with whenever local

power was in worthy hands. It is not unlikely that the forms of the

English constitution of that day were partly in fault. The power of

resistance was perhaps weakened by the very amount of freedom, general

and local, which the English already enjoyed; it was certainly weakened

by the still very imperfect nature of the union which existed between

the different parts of [Sidenote: General question of the action of

constitutional states.] the kingdom. We have in our own times often

heard the complaint that a free government is less able than a despotism

to carry on a war with vigour. This charge is refuted, if by nothing

else, by the result of the great civil [Sidenote: 1861–5.] war in

America. But the experiences of that civil war, and many experiences of

our own, combine to show that a free country has greater difficulty than

a despotism in the mere setting about of a war. No free state could

expect to rival the readiness, vigour, and daring with [Sidenote: 1866.]

which Prussia opened the wonderful campaign which made her the head of

Germany. The very institutions which secure national, local, and

personal freedom, sometimes form a temporary, though most certainly only

a temporary, hindrance, especially in the case of civil war or of sudden

invasion. The old free institutions of England threw difficulties in the

way of national resistance, difficulties which the genius of Ælfred, his

son, or his grandson, would have overcome, but which were utterly

overwhelming to Æthelred [Sidenote: Imperfect union of the parts of the

kingdom.] and his advisers. Most likely too, while the kingdom was still

so imperfectly united, one part of the country did not greatly care for

the misfortunes of another. The devastation of Kent and Wessex would not

cause any very deep sorrow or alarm to the Danish people of

Northumberland. Local resistance was always possible. A valiant

Ealdorman might, with comparative ease, get together his own personal

following and the able-bodied men of his shire. But even this process

took time. While the English were arming, the Danes were plundering; and

when a battle took place, the Danish force, which a general national

movement would have crushed at once, commonly proved [Sidenote:

Difficulties caused by English constitutional forms.] too strong for the

array of any one district. A general national resistance was of course

still more necessarily a work of time. The King had no standing army; he

could at all times demand the services of his personal following, but

even they could not be assembled in a moment; and no real national step

could be taken, no national army or fleet could be brought together, no

money could be gathered or expended, without the consent of the Witan.

And when the Witan met, we can well understand that personal jealousies

and still more local jealousies, to say nothing of the causes which

always affect all assemblies, would often hinder, or at least delay, the

adoption of any vigorous resolution. And when the Witan had passed their

vote, they had to go back to their shires and hundreds to announce the

determinations of the national council,[559] and to gather together the

forces of their several districts. One shire would be ready perhaps

months before another, while all the while there was the most pressing

need for immediate action. Such an army would become dispirited and

demoralized before it had really come together. The difficulty of

subsistence too, when it was not likely that regular pay could be given,

would often drive the defenders of the country to become almost as

destructive as its invaders. [Sidenote: Effect of the personal character

of the King.] Even when there was no actual treason or cowardice, all

these things would be difficulties in the way of the greatest of

princes; under such a prince as Æthelred they were found to be simply

unsurmountable. Ælfred had carried England through dangers as great as

those which threatened her now; but it needed an Ælfred to do such a

work. Under Æthelred nothing was done; or, more truly, throughout his

whole reign he left undone those things which he ought to have done, and

he did those things which he ought not to have done.

[Sidenote: Character of Æthelred; vigorous always in the wrong place.]

For the fault of Æthelred, after all, was not mere weakness.[560] The

Unready King showed occasional glimpses of vigour which might for a

moment remind men that he came of the same stock as Eadward the

Unconquered and as Æthelstan the Glorious. But it was a vigour which

came only by fits and starts, and which acted only at unfitting times

and for unfitting objects. As far as we can judge by his actions, the

character of Æthelred was not one of mere abject incapacity like Edward

of Caernarvon. He was rather like Richard of Bourdeaux, idle, careless,

governed by worthless favourites, but showing ever and anon, though

always in the wrong place, signs of a strong will and a capacity for

vigorous action. So now it was at this memorable crisis of his kingdom.

He had at last got together a fleet and an army, and, having got them

[Sidenote: The Danes sail to Normandy. 1000.] together, he would do

something with them. But the Danes were gone; they had got together

their plunder, and had sailed away, as before, to sell it in the Norman

havens.[561] Æthelred took advantage of their absence to plunge into a

needless war with one of his own vassals. [Sidenote: Æthelred ravages

Cumberland in person, and his fleet ravages Man. 1000.] It does not seem

that, up to this time, he had ever once thought of going forth in person

to battle against the Danes; but the Emperor of Britain could trust no

one but himself to lead an army against the Under-king of Cumberland. He

ravaged nearly the whole of the principality by land, and he would have

ravaged it by sea also, only the fleet which set out from Chester was

hindered by contrary winds from meeting him at the appointed spot.[562]

It did however reach Man, and harried the island. The cause of all this

untimely activity is not stated by our best English authorities. Man

especially, which had been harried by Swegen only a few years

before,[563] must have been singularly unlucky if it contrived thus to

provoke the wrath of both the contending Kings. Nor is it at all clear

why Malcolm was attacked in his under-kingdom of [Sidenote: Malcolm’s

refusal to pay Danegeld.] Cumberland. A Scottish writer tells us that

Æthelred had called on Malcolm to contribute to some of the payments

made to the Danes, probably to the great sum paid to Olaf and Swegen six

years before. In short he wished to make the dependent kingdom of

Cumberland liable, like an English shire, to the impost of Danegeld.

Malcolm, we are told, answered with proper spirit. If King Æthelred went

forth to battle, he was ready, as in duty bound, to follow his over-lord

with his own forces; but he had never covenanted to pay money, and no

money would he pay. The authority for this story is not of the first

order; but it falls in so exactly with the relations between the two

princes that it has strong internal likelihood in its favour. Malcolm

was not an English Ealdorman, ruling an integral part of the English

realm; he was a vassal prince reigning over a dependent kingdom, a

kingdom which formed a part of the English Empire, but which had never

been under the direct rule of the English crown. That kingdom Malcolm

held on the terms on which it had been originally granted to his

predecessor, those of military service by land and sea.[564] A money

tribute had indeed been levied on some of the Welsh princes; but

military service was clearly the only contribution which a King of

Cumberland owed to the Emperor of Britain. But Æthelred was enraged at

his refusal, which, he alleged, could proceed from nothing but good will

to the enemy. He accordingly ravaged the country, but afterwards

concluded peace with Malcolm. If this story be true, Malcolm was fully

justified in his refusal, and the conduct of Æthelred was a gross breach

of the mutual duty of lord and vassal.

[Sidenote: Second quarrel with Normandy, 1000.]

It is also likely that this untimely activity on the part of Æthelred

led him also to match himself against an enemy of a very different kind

from the vassal King of Cumberland. As far as probable conjecture can

guide us through mazes where difficulties and contradictions meet us at

every step, it was during this burst of misapplied energy that Æthelred

became again involved in a dispute, most likely in an open war, with the

Duke of the Normans.[565] [Sidenote: [996.]] Richard the Fearless, his

former antagonist, was now dead, and the reigning prince was his son

Richard the Second, surnamed the Good. Of the dealings between the two

countries we have no account from any English authority, and the version

which we find in the Norman writers, though doubtless containing some

germs [Sidenote: Æthelred’s invasion of Normandy, as described by Norman

writers.] of truth, is evidently exaggerated in detail. According to

them Æthelred sent a fleet into Normandy, with orders to burn and

destroy throughout the land, and to spare nothing except the Mount of

Saint Michael with its revered sanctuary. As for the reigning Duke, he

was to be taken prisoner, and to be brought into the presence of his

conqueror with his hands tied behind his back. The English fleet crossed

the Channel, and its crews landed in the peninsula of Coutances and

began to carry out the [Sidenote: Defeat of the English.] royal orders.

But Neal, the valiant Viscount of the district, gathered the men of the

country, and smote the invaders with such a slaughter that of those who

actually landed one man only escaped to the ships. The fleet sailed home

with the news of its discomfiture. Æthelred is pictured as waiting for

the triumphant return of his fleet with the news of the conquest of

Normandy. His first inquiry is for the captive Duke. But instead of

seeing Richard with his hands tied behind him, he only hears that his

men have not so much as seen the Duke, that the men of one county had

been enough to destroy all their host, that the very women had joined in

the strife, striking down the choicest warriors of England with the

staves on which they bore their waterpots. These details are of course

pure romance; but the existence of such a story seems to show that some

hostilities really did take place. Æthelred’s fleet may have pursued the

Danish fleet when it sailed to Normandy, and in so doing it may in

[Sidenote: Probable explanation of the story.] some way have violated

the neutrality of the Norman coast. Or Æthelred, in his present fit of

energy, may have been so indignant at the reception of the Danes in the

Norman havens as to send out an expedition by way of reprisal. But the

grotesque pride and folly implied in the Norman story is incredible even

in Æthelred. The details are valuable only as showing the kind of tales

which, as we shall see more fully as we go on, the Norman writers

thought good to pass off as the English history of the time.

[Sidenote: Marriage of Æthelred and Emma; its evil results.]

Whatever was the exact nature of the mutual wrongs now done to each

other by Normans and Englishmen, the quarrel did not last long. Æthelred

seems now to have been a widower;[566] the peace between the two

countries was therefore confirmed by a marriage between him and the

Duke’s sister Emma, one of the legitimated children of Richard the

Fearless and Gunnor.[567] Her beauty and accomplishments are highly

extolled, but her long connexion [Sidenote: 1002–1051.] with England, as

the wife of two Kings and the mother of two others, brought with it

nothing but present evil, and led to the future overthrow of the English

kingdom [Sidenote: The marriage of Emma opened the way for the Norman

Conquest.] and nation. The marriage of Æthelred and Emma led directly to

the Norman Conquest of England.[568] With that marriage began the

settlement of Normans in England, their admission to English offices and

estates, their general influence in English affairs, everything, in

short, that paved the way for the actual Conquest. Through Emma came

that fatal kindred and friendship between her English son and her Norman

great-nephew, which suggested and rendered possible the enterprise which

seated her great-nephew on the throne of England. From the moment of

this marriage, English and Norman history are inextricably connected,

and Norman ingenuity was ever ready to take any advantage that offered

itself for strengthening the foreign influence in England. The former

dispute between Æthelred and the elder Richard was a mere prologue; we

have now reached the first act of the drama. If an English fleet really

did sail to Normandy and ravage the Constantine peninsula, those ships

were like the ships which Athens sent across the Ægæan at the bidding of

Aristagoras—they were indeed the beginning of evils.[569]

[Sidenote: Emma comes to England. 1002.]

The marriage however did not take place for two years. According to one

story Æthelred went over to Normandy to bring home his bride in

person.[570] The evidence is distinctly the other way; but to go on such

an errand, when the miseries of war were at their height, was perhaps in

character with a prince so apt to be enterprising at the wrong moment. A

like piece of vigorous courtship is the one act of energy recorded of

one of Æthelred’s descendants, [Sidenote: 1589] James, Sixth of Scotland

and First of England. If Æthelred really did go over to Normandy, he was

the first English King, since Ælfred in his childhood, who set foot on

the continent, as his son Eadmund was the last English King for several

centuries who did not.[571] And [Sidenote: A foreign Lady most unusual

in England.] for an English King to espouse a foreign wife was something

yet more strange to Englishmen than for an English King to visit foreign

lands. The marriage of the daughters of English Kings with foreign

princes had been common from the days of Ælfred onwards; but a foreign

Lady by the side of an English King had not been seen [Sidenote: 855.]

since Æthelwulf brought home the young daughter of Charles the

Bald.[572] And the marriage of Æthelwulf and Judith was most likely the

first instance since the Frankish [Sidenote: 561–597.] princess whom

Augustine found as the queen of the Kentish Bretwalda.[573] And the

stranger wives alike of Æthelberht and of Æthelred came as the

forerunners of mighty changes. The foreign marriage of Æthelberht paved

the way for the admission of the Teutonic and heathen island into the

common fold of the Christian commonwealth. The foreign marriage of

Æthelred paved the way for the more thorough fusion of England into the

general European system, by giving her a foreign King, a foreign

nobility, and, for many purposes, a foreign [Sidenote: Emma changes her

name to Ælfgifu.] tongue. It shows the strong insular feeling of the

nation, and it curiously illustrates the history of English personal

nomenclature, that the foreign Lady had to take an English name. The

English stock of personal names, though made out of the same elements as

the names used by other Teutonic nations, contained but few which were

common to England and to the continent.[574] This Old-English

nomenclature, with the exception of a few specially royal and saintly

names, has gone so utterly out of use that it sounds strange to us to

read that the Lady, to make herself acceptable to the English people,

had to lay aside the foreign name of Emma, and to make herself into an

Englishwoman as Ælfgifu.[575] So, by the opposite process, [Sidenote:

1100.] a hundred years later, when an English Eadgyth married a Norman

King, she had to change herself into a Norman Matilda. And it is well to

mark that the royal bride, like other Teutonic brides, had her

morning-gift, a gift which took the form of cities and governments, and

a gift which brought no good to England.[576] And according to some

accounts, the marriage brought with it as little of domestic happiness

as of public advantage. Emma bore to [Sidenote: Her children. Ælfred.

1036.] Æthelred two sons, Ælfred, who perished miserably in an attempt

on the English crown, and Eadward, who lived to be at once King and

saint, and to be, perhaps through his own grovelling superstition, the

last male descendant of Cerdic and Ecgberht by whom that crown was

actually worn.[577] But we are told that the royal parents did not

agree. We can well believe that Emma showed the imperious spirit of her

race, and scandal adds that Æthelred forsook her for rivals, no doubt of

his own nation.[578] Of the truth of these reports nothing can be said,

and the public crimes and misfortunes of Æthelred are so great as to

leave little time or inclination to search into his possible private

vices.

I have spoken of the marriage of Emma slightly out of place, in order to

bring it into its natural connexion with other Norman affairs. We must

now go back two [Sidenote: 1000.] years. The dealings of Æthelred with

Normandy and Cumberland fell in the last year of the first millennium of

the Christian æra. It was no uncommon belief at the [Sidenote: Expected

end of the world.] time that the end of that period of a thousand years

was the fated moment for the destruction of the world. And certainly at

no time were the promised signs of wars and rumours of wars, of distress

of nations and perplexity, more rife throughout the world than when the

second millennium [Sidenote: Condition of Europe and Asia.] opened. In

the East of Europe, Basil the Second, the mightiest name in the long

roll of the Byzantine Cæsars, was engaged in his fearful struggle for

life and death with the Bulgarian invader. In the further East, the

Turkish dynasty of Ghazni was laying the foundations of that power

which, in the hands of other dynasties of the same race, was to

overwhelm alike Constantinople and Bulgaria and all other realms from

the Indus to the Hadriatic. In Southern Europe, Otto the Wonder of the

World was running that short and marvellous career which, for a moment,

seemed to promise that Rome should again become, in deed as well as in

name, the seat of universal Empire. The prospects of England seemed

darker than those of any other corner of Europe. In the East and in the

South, if old systems were falling, new ones were rising, but our island

seemed given up to simple desolation and havoc. It would appear that,

though the mass of the Danish fleet had sailed to Normandy, some of the

ships must have stayed in their old quarters in the [Sidenote: Danes in

the English Service; Pallig.] Solent. Some at least among the Danes had

taken service under the English King. Such was the case with Pallig, a

Danish Earl, evidently of the highest distinction, as he was married to

Gunhild, a sister of King Swegen himself.[579] His wife, and probably

himself, had embraced Christianity, and he had received large gifts from

the King, both in [Sidenote: Invasion of Sussex and Hampshire. 1001.]

money and in land. The Danes who had stayed in England now burst into

Sussex, and ravaged as far as a place called Æthelingadene.[580] They

then pressed on into Hampshire, and, as so often happened, they were met

by the men of the shire, and by the men of that shire only. The details

of the battle are unusually minute; eighty-one of the English were

killed and a much greater number of the Danes; but the Danes kept

possession of the place of slaughter. Among the English dead were

several men of rank,[581] among them two “high-reeves” of the

King—probably the Sheriffs of Hampshire and Sussex—Æthelweard and

Leofwine.[582] The Danes then went westward, seemingly in concert with

the fleet which was coming back [Sidenote: Treason of Pallig.] from

Normandy. But they were first met by Pallig, who had already forsaken

the service of Æthelred, and who now joined them with such ships as he

could bring with him. They sailed up the Teign, and burned King’s

Teignton[583] and other places. After this, peace—no doubt the usual

kind of peace—was made with them. But by this [Sidenote: Return of the

Danes from Normandy.] time they had fallen in with their comrades. The

Danes who had sailed to Normandy now came back, no doubt still further

embittered at Æthelred’s doings in that country, whatever may have been

their exact nature. Their fleet seems to have sailed straight from

Normandy to the mouth of the Exe; they were there met by the other

Danes, Pallig and the rest, and their united forces sailed [Sidenote:

Importance of Exeter; early history of the city.] up the river.[584]

About ten miles from its mouth lay a city[585] which held nearly the

same position in the West of England which York held in the North and

London in the South-east. The Roman city of Isca had not fallen into the

power of the Teutonic invaders till after their conversion to

Christianity; it therefore had not shared the fate which befell Anderida

at the hands of Ælle and Uriconium at the hands of Ceawlin. Under the

slightly changed name of Exanceaster or Exeter, the capital and bulwark

of the Western shires had long formed one of the choicest possessions of

the West-Saxon Kings. The city [Sidenote: 877.] had been warmly striven

for between Ælfred and his Danish enemies, and, among the ups and downs

of his earlier struggle with the invaders, it had been more than

[Sidenote: Exeter, hitherto half Welsh, becomes purely English under

Æthelstan, and is strongly fortified. 926.] once taken and lost again.

Up to the time of Æthelstan Exeter had remained, as many towns in Wales

and Ireland remained for ages afterwards, a joint possession of Teutonic

and Celtic inhabitants.[586] No doubt there was an English and a Welsh

town, an Englishry and a Welshry,[587] and we may be equally sure that

the English inhabitants formed a dominant class or patriciate among

their fellow-burghers. But Æthelstan, in the course of his Western wars,

thought it good that so important a post should be left in no hands but

such as he could wholly rely on. The Welsh inhabitants were accordingly

removed; the city became altogether English; a [Sidenote: Witenagemót

and Laws of Exeter.] solemn assembly of the Witan was held to

commemorate and to confirm the new acquisition, and one series of the

laws of Æthelstan were put forth in the now purely English city of

Exeter.[588] The town was now strongly fortified; it was surrounded with

a wall of squared stones,[589] a fact worthy of the attention of those

who seem to think that our forefathers before the Norman Conquest were

incapable of using the commonest tools, or of putting stone and mortar

together in any way. The chief architectural ornament of the city had

indeed no existence. [Sidenote: Exeter not yet a Bishop’s See.] The

cathedral church, so strange in its outline, so commanding in its

position, did not yet crown the height which, alone among the episcopal

seats of Southern England, makes some pretensions to rival the temples

built on high at Lincoln and at Durham, at Geneva and at Lausanne.

Indeed, like Lincoln and Durham, it had not even a predecessor. Exeter

was not yet a Bishop’s see; the episcopal care of West-Wales was still

divided between the Bishop of Devonshire at Crediton and the [Sidenote:

Municipal condition of the city.] Bishop of Cornwall at Bodmin. The

history of the city at a somewhat later time seems to show that it

enjoyed a large share of municipal freedom; still, as an integral part

of the West-Saxon realm, it was a royal possession, and the royal

authority was represented [Sidenote: Its commercial and military

importance.] by a reeve of the King’s choice. Both the commercial and

the military importance of the city were of the first rank. In our days

the trade of Exeter has long been of small moment; commerce has long

been carried on in vessels which need a deeper stream; as early as the

thirteenth century the trade of the city itself began to be interfered

with by the foundation of the port of Topsham nearer the mouth of the

river. But the small craft of the tenth century could sail straight up

to the city for [Sidenote: The Danes attack the city, but are driven off

by the citizens.] purposes either of commerce or of war. The Danes now

attacked Exeter, just as they had attacked London; but the citizens of

the Western capital fought with as good a will, and with as thorough

success, as their brethren of the East.[590] King Æthelstan’s wall stood

them in good stead,[591] and the attack of the barbarians was altogether

fruitless. But the result of the resistance of Exeter was much the same

as the result of the resistance of London. The city was saved, but, for

that very reason,[592] the ravages of the invaders fell with redoubled

violence upon the surrounding country. Æthelred was as unready as ever;

the host which had been prompt to ravage Cumberland and perhaps

[Sidenote: Devonshire ravaged and the Defnsætas and Sumorsætas defeated

at Pinhoe.] Normandy, was not at hand to aid any local efforts. The

Danes spread themselves over the country, harrying, burning, killing, in

their accustomed manner. The men of Somerset and Devonshire gathered

their forces, and met the enemy at Pinhoe,[593] not far from the rescued

city. But the force of two shires was not enough for the purpose. The

Danes had the advantage of numbers,[594] and put the irregular English

levies to flight. They then, as usual, took to themselves horses, and

ravaged the country still more thoroughly and unsparingly than before.

At last they went back to their ships with a vast booty, and sailed to

their old quarters in the Isle of Wight. Thence they carried on their

usual harryings, both in the island and on the coasts of Hampshire and

Dorset, no man now daring to withstand them.

[Sidenote: Witenagemót of 1001.]

The Witan met in the course of this year in an assembly which confirmed

a grant of the King to the abbey of Shaftesbury, a grant which is

remarkable on two grounds. It distinctly sets forth the wretchedness of

the times in a way rather unusual in such documents, and it shows that

the King’s brother Eadward was already looked on as [Sidenote: First

Gemót of 1002.] a saint.[595] Another meeting was held early the next

year, [Sidenote: Charters granted at it.] in which the King granted to

Archbishop Ælfric the estate of a lady which she had forfeited to the

crown by her unchastity.[596] Possibly at the same meeting, or at

another in the same year, Æthelingadene, the scene of one of the late

battles, along with some other property, was granted by Æthelred to the

monastery of Wherwell, his mother’s foundation, for the good of her soul

and of that of his father.[597] It may be that in all this we hear the

voice of his brother’s blood crying from the ground.[598] But the state

of the nation was not altogether neglected; still the Assembly of the

Wise could think of nothing better than the old wretched remedy which

had so often [Sidenote: Payment again made to the Danes.] failed them.

The Danes were again to be bought off at their own terms, and Leofsige

Ealdorman of the East-Saxons was sent to find out what those terms

were.[599] They now, fairly enough, raised their price; twenty-four

thousand pounds was asked and was paid as the condition of their ceasing

from their ravages. But, while the negotiation was going on, the

negotiator, on what ground or in what quarrel we are not told, killed

the King’s high-reeve Æfic in his own house.[600] The Witan were still

in session; [Sidenote: Leofsige outlawed.] they took cognizance of the

murder, and Leofsige was outlawed and driven out of the land for his

crime.[601] All this [Sidenote: Emma comes over.] must have happened

early in the year, as it was after these events, though still in

Lent,[602] that the Norman Lady came [Sidenote: Second or Third Gemót of

1002.] over. Before the year was out, another Witenagemót was held,[603]

at which Æthelred and his counsellors contrived to do what otherwise

might have seemed impossible, to [Sidenote: Massacre of the Danes.

November 13, 1002.] put the heathen invaders in the right. This winter,

on the mass-day of Saint Brice, took place that famous massacre of the

Danes which has given a wide field for the exaggerated and romantic

details of later writers, but which stands out in bloody colours enough

on the page [Sidenote: Plot of the Danes to kill the King and his

Witan.] of authentic history.[604] According to our best authorities,

tidings were brought to the King that the Danes who were in England were

plotting with one consent to kill him and his Witan and to seize upon

the kingdom. Except that other means of destruction must have been

intended, this sounds very like a forestalling of the Gunpowder Plot.

The Danes were indeed thoroughly faithless, but an intended general

massacre of the whole Witenagemót when in full session, which the words

seem to imply, is hardly credible. Another attack on London or Exeter,

or a harrying of some district which was as yet untouched, would be much

more likely. One cannot help suspecting that we have here a good deal of

exaggeration, exaggeration, I mean, not in the Chroniclers but in the

reports spread abroad at the time by Æthelred and his advisers. However

this may be, the King, no doubt with the consent of the second (or

third) Gemót of the year, ordered a general massacre of all the Danes in

England, an order which could never have been carried into execution if

it had not been supported by the general hatred of the whole nation. It

is said that letters were secretly sent to all parts of the kingdom,

ordering the bloody work to be done [Sidenote: Probable extent of the

massacre.] throughout the whole land on one day. The persons slain were

most likely such among those Danes who had served in the late invasions

as had stayed in England on the faith of the treaty concluded in the

spring. A general massacre of all persons of Danish descent throughout

England is not to be thought of; such a massacre would have amounted to

the slaughter of a large part of the inhabitants of Northumberland and

East-Anglia. There is nothing in the earliest account to imply that any

but men were slaughtered, and, among the Danes, every man was a soldier,

or rather a pirate. That such men were not slaughtered without

resistance is not wonderful. One instance is incidentally recorded, how

such Danes as were at Oxford, flying from their English destroyers,

sought shelter in the minster of Saint Frithswyth, and how they defended

themselves against all the people of the borough, until their assailants

betook themselves to fire and burned the Danes along with the church and

its records. This one piece of detail seems to be trustworthy;[605] but

the tale began very early to get improved by all kinds of romantic

additions. The slaughter of actual enemies was not enough. We first hear

of a massacre of Danish women; then, among an infinite variety of

horrors of all sorts, we come to a massacre of English women who had

become wives or mistresses of Danes, and of the children who were the

fruit of such unions. It is not likely that there were many Danish women

to massacre, and the notion of a general massacre of women most

[Sidenote: Murder of Gunhild.] likely arose out of one particular case.

That Gunhild, the wife of Pallig and sister of Swegen, was put to death

is too probable, especially if it be true that she had given herself as

a hostage for the good faith of her countrymen. The prince who blinded

the son of Ælfric to avenge his father’s treason,[606] and who

afterwards took the father himself again into favour, was capable even

of so cowardly and foolish a vengeance as this. The traitor Pallig, if

he was caught, would doubtless be put to death, and that with perfect

justice, unless he was personally included in the last treaty. And it

may be that Gunhild had to behold the slaughter of her husband and her

son, and that with her dying voice she foretold the woes which her death

would bring upon England. Such a prediction needed no special prophetic

inspiration.

§ 4. _From the Massacre of Saint Brice to Swegen’s Conquest of England._

1002–1013.

[Sidenote: Results of the massacre.]

The vespers of Saint Brice were not only a crime but a blunder. From

this time forth the Danish invasions become far more constant, far more

systematic, and they [Sidenote: Invasion by Swegen in person. 1003.]

affect a far larger portion of the kingdom. The next year King Swegen

came again in person.[607] He now had a real injury; the blood of his

sister and his countrymen might have called for vengeance at the hands

of a gentler and more forgiving prince. He did not land in any of those

parts of the island where we should have most naturally looked for the

opening of a campaign; he began his attack in the region which had been

the chief seat of warfare for years before. Most likely he knew well

where the [Sidenote: Exeter betrayed to Swegen by Hugh the Frenchman.]

weakness of England lay. The Danish King sailed to Exeter, the city

whose burghers had so gallantly repelled the former attack. But the

state of things within the walls of the western capital was now sadly

changed for the worse. The royal rights over Exeter had been granted to

the Norman Lady as part of her morning-gift. Hugh, a Frenchman, whether

earl or churl[608] matters not, was now the royal reeve in Exeter, the

first of a long line of foreigners who, under Emma, her son, and her

great-nephew, were to fatten on English estates and honours. Hugh was

either a coward or a traitor, most likely both. Exeter was stormed and

plundered; the noble walls of King Æthelstan were broken down from the

east gate to the [Sidenote: Swegen ravages Wiltshire.] west, and the

city was left defenceless.[609] Swegen returned to his ships with a vast

plunder, and then went on to the [Sidenote: A battle hindered by Ælfric,

again in command of the English.] harrying of Wiltshire. The men of that

shire and their neighbours of Hampshire were gathered together, ready

and eager to meet the enemy in battle. The people were as sound at heart

as they had been three years before, but they had no longer the same

valiant leaders. The battle of Æthelingadene seems to have fallen with

special severity on the chief men, and we now find the force of these

two shires in the last hands in which we should have looked to find

them. The old traitor Ælfric,[610] who had done his best, eleven years

before,[611] to betray London to the enemy, who had himself been driven

from the land, and whose innocent son had paid a cruel penalty for his

offence, was now, through some unrecorded and inexplicable intrigue,

again in royal favour, again in command of an English army, again

trusted to oppose the very enemy with whom he had before traitorously

leagued himself. But, as our Chronicles tell us with a vigorous

simplicity, he was again at his old tricks; as soon as the armies were

so near that they could look on one another, the English commander

pretended to be taken suddenly ill;[612] retchings and spittings

followed as a proof of his sickness; in such a case a battle could not

possibly be thought of. One wonders that some brave man, however

unauthorized, did not seize the command by common consent;[613] but the

paltry trick was successful; the spirits of the English were broken, and

they went away in [Sidenote: Fluctuation of spirits among

non-professional soldiers.] sadness without a battle.[614] In all this

history, just as in old Greek history,[615] we are often surprised at

the mere accidents on which the fate of battles depends, how much one

man’s valour or cowardice or treason can bring about, how much turns on

the mood in which the soldiers find themselves at the moment of action.

In this case the English are described as having come together with the

utmost good will, and as being thoroughly eager to do their duty. Yet a

transparent artifice at once paralyses them, and they become wholly

incapable of action. We must remember that here, just as in Greece, we

are dealing, not with professional soldiers, but with citizen soldiers;

we are dealing with times when every man was sometimes a soldier, and

when none but professed pirates were soldiers always. Such soldiers are

not mere machines in the hand of a master of the game; they do not

simply do their professional duty in blind obedience; they have a real

part and interest in what is going on; they are therefore liable to be

affected by the ordinary feelings of men in a way in which professional

soldiers are much less strongly affected. Such men are specially liable

to fluctuations of the spirits; they are easily encouraged and easily

disheartened; men who fight like heroes one day may be overcome by a

sudden panic the next. Hence the extraordinary importance which, with

troops of this kind, attaches to the personal exhortation and personal

example of the general; a chief who simply stands aloof and gives orders

can never win a victory. The particular speech put into the mouth of a

general before battle is no doubt commonly the invention of the

historian; but that generals found it needful to make such speeches, and

that such speeches had a most important effect on the spirit and conduct

of their armies, is clear in every history of this kind of warfare. No

doubt even professional soldiers still remain men, and are liable to be

in some degree affected in the same way; still habit and discipline make

a great change; an army in which each man is really fighting for his

hearth and home is liable to these influences in a tenfold degree.

Before long we shall see England possessed of an army combining the

merits of both systems, an army uniting discipline and patriotism; but

as yet the country had no standing force, and had to depend solely on

the enthusiasm and the sense of duty of the general levies of each

particular district. In this case, the spirit of the men of Wiltshire

and Hampshire was all that a leader could wish for; if some brave man

had stepped forward, had cut down the traitor Ælfric, and had called on

the English to follow him against the enemy, a battle would have been

certain and a victory probable. But no man had the energy to do this;

therefore the base trick thoroughly succeeded, the spirit of the troops

was damped, and the English host went away without striking a blow. But

even in retreat it must have been formidable, as it seems to have been

left quite unmolested by the enemy. Still the whole shire was left

defenceless. The town of Wilton was sacked and burned. [Sidenote: Swegen

sacks and burns Wilton and Salisbury.] Swegen then marched to Salisbury.

The Salisbury of [Sidenote: Old Sarum.] those days was not the modern

city in the plain, which circles, with but little of beauty or interest

in itself, around the most graceful of West-Saxon minsters. The object

of Swegen’s march was still the old hill-fortress,[616] where the Briton

and the Roman had entrenched [Sidenote: 552.] themselves, and at whose

foot Cynric had won one of those great battles which mark the western

stages of the Teutonic invasion. After the days of Swegen a Norman

castle and a Norman minster rose and fell on that historic spot, and the

chosen stronghold of so many races lived to become one of the bye-words

of modern political discussion. Like Exeter, Salisbury was not yet a

Bishop’s see; the prelate of Wiltshire had his lowly cathedral church in

the obscure Ramsbury; but the choice of Salisbury at the end of the

century as the seat of the united sees of Wiltshire and Dorset shows

that it must already have been a place of importance according to the

standard of the time. Yet one would think that its importance must

always have been mainly that of a military post; one can hardly conceive

Old Sarum being at any time a place of trade or the home of any

considerable population. Whatever the place consisted of at this time,

Swegen sacked and burned it, and returned to his ships with great

spoil.[617]

[Sidenote: Exploits of Ulfcytel of East-Anglia. 1004.]

The events of the next year form the exact converse of the tale which I

have just told. We have seen the spirit of a gallant army foully damped

by the malice of a single traitor. We shall now see the efforts of a

single hero, boldly struggling against every difficulty, feebly backed

by those who should have supported him, and winning, in a succession of

defeats, a glory as pure as that of the most triumphant of conquerors.

This man was Ulfcytel, who is said to have been a son-in-law of the

King, and who was at this time Earl, or at least military commander, of

the East-Angles.[618] His name proclaims his Danish origin, but it was

in him that England now found her stoutest champion in her hour of need.

This next summer Swegen took his course towards a part of England which

was largely peopled by men of his own race, to the old kingdom of

[Sidenote: Swegen surprises and burns Norwich.] Guthrum. His coming was

sudden; he sailed to the mouth of the Yare; he pushed his way up the

stream, and stormed and burned the town which had arisen near the point

of its junction with the Wensum, and which, at least in later times, has

spread itself on both sides of the smaller [Sidenote: History of the

city.] river. Norwich was in East-Anglia what Exeter was in the Western

shires. But the city itself could not boast of the same antiquity as the

Damnonian Isca. The changes of the waters in that region had caused the

British and Roman site to be forsaken; the Icenian Venta survived only

in the vague description of Caistor, a description common to it with

many other Roman towns whose distinctive names have been forgotten. At

some distance from the Roman site, where the hills slope down to the

right bank of the Wensum, the East-Anglian Kings had reared one of those

vast mounds which form so marked a feature in the Old-English system of

defence, and had crowned it doubtless with a fortified dwelling. This

home of native kingship was to be the forerunner of one of the

[Sidenote: Norwich Castle.] stateliest of Norman castles, one which

immediately suggests a name than which few in our history are more

illustrious. The castle of Norwich became the stronghold of the earls of

the house of Bigod, one of whom lived to [Sidenote: 1297.] wrest the

final confirmation of the liberties of England from the hands of the

great Edward himself. As at Exeter, as at Salisbury, the Norman castle

had already a rude forerunner, [Sidenote: Norwich not yet a Bishop’s

See.] but the Norman minster had none. The Bishop of the East-Angles

still had his seat at Elmham. A twofold translation of the see towards

the end of the century, first to Thetford and then to Norwich, points

out those two towns as being at this time the most considerable in the

district, and we accordingly find them the principal objects [Sidenote:

Importance of the town.] of hostile attack. Norwich was now one of the

greatest seats of commerce in England; the city had been greatly

favoured by several successive Kings, and it [Sidenote: Norwich burned

by Swegen.] enjoyed the privilege of a mint. A place thus rich and

flourishing was naturally marked as a prey by the invaders, who harried

and burned it, seemingly without resistance. The blow was so sudden that

even a guardian [Sidenote: Ulfcytel and the Witan of East-Anglia make

peace with the Danes.] like Ulfcytel was unprepared. He now gathered

together the provincial council, the Witan of East-Anglia,[619] whose

mention shows how much of independence the ancient kingdom still

retained. Peace was patched up with the invaders, who seemingly returned

to their ships. But, [Sidenote: The Danes break the peace and march on

Thetford.] three weeks afterwards, the Danes broke the peace, and

marched secretly to Thetford, the town in the district next in

importance to Norwich. This march seems to have led them to a greater

distance from the coast than any Danish army had ventured since the old

invasions in Ælfred’s time. Their movement did not escape the watchful

eye [Sidenote: Plans of Ulfcytel.] of Ulfcytel,[620] and the plan which

he formed, though not wholly successful, seems to vouch for his

generalship. He at once gathered his forces together as secretly as he

could, and sent a detachment to the coast to destroy the ships of the

invaders. In this latter part of his scheme he wholly failed; those whom

he sent on that errand proved [Sidenote: Thetford plundered and burned.]

either cowardly or unfaithful. And, even with the force under his own

command, he was unable to save Thetford. The town was entered by the

Danes, who plundered it, stayed there one night, and in the morning set

fire to it [Sidenote: Drawn battle between Swegen and Ulfcytel.] and

marched away towards their ships. But they were hardly clear of the

burning town when Ulfcytel came upon them with his army. That army was

comparatively small; had the whole force of East-Anglia been there, so

our authors tell us, never would the heathen men have got back to their

ships. As it was, the Danes themselves said that they never met in all

England with worse handplay than Ulfcytel brought upon them.[621] It

seems to have been a drawn battle. The Danes so far succeeded that they

were able to accomplish their object of reaching their ships; but the

fighting was hard, and the slaughter great on both sides, and we do not

hear of either side [Sidenote: Severe loss among the English leaders.]

keeping the field. As at Maldon, as at Æthelingadene, the slaughter on

the English side fell most heavily on those who were high in rank or

command.[622] No doubt, in all these battles, just as in the battles of

Homer, the chief stress of the fight fell on the thegns of the King or

Earl in command, especially on the high-born youths who were personally

attached to him and his service. We have seen that it was so at Maldon,

where we know the details; it is equally clear that it was so at

Thetford, where we [Sidenote: Illustrations supplied by Ulfcytel’s

campaign.] know only the general result. This East-Anglian campaign is

also a good illustration of the general conditions of warfare at the

time. It shows the difficulty with which the force either of the whole

kingdom or of a single earldom could be got together, and how much was

lost through mere slowness of operations. Even with a vigorous chief at

the head, the two chief towns of the earldom were surprised and burned.

But the story shows no less plainly how much a single faithful and

valiant leader could do to struggle with these difficulties. A shire

under the government of Ulfcytel was in a very different case from a

shire under the government of Ælfric. Nay, could Ulfcytel, instead of

holding a mere local command, have changed places with the boastful

Emperor of all Britain, we can well believe that the whole story of the

Danish wars would have had a very different ending.

[Sidenote: Year of respite and of famine. 1005.]

The resistance of Ulfcytel, though not wholly successful, seems to have

had at least a share in winning for England a momentary respite. We hear

of no further ravages after the battle of Thetford, and in the next year

King Swegen, instead of attacking any part of England, sailed home again

to Denmark. A famine, the most fearful ever remembered in England, was

most likely the result of his ravages, but it no doubt also helped to

send him away for a while from the wasted land. The Witan met in the

course of the year, but we have no record of any proceedings more

important than the usual grants to monasteries [Sidenote: Events of the

year 1006.] and to the King’s thegns.[623] But the next year is crowded

with events of all kinds. We now come to the rise of a man who was to be

even more completely the evil genius of the later years of this unhappy

reign than Ælfric had [Sidenote: Rise and character of Eadric.] been the

evil genius of its earlier years. This was Eadric, the son of

Æthelric,[624] surnamed Streona, who is described as a man of low birth,

of a shrewd intellect—which he used only to devise selfish and baleful

schemes—of an eloquent tongue—which he used only to persuade men to

mischief—as proud, cruel, envious, and faithless. From elaborate

pictures of this sort we instinctively make some deductions; still the

character of Eadric is written plainly enough in his recorded crimes.

That such a man should rise to power was the greatest of evils for the

nation; still his rise illustrates one good side of English society at

the time. [Sidenote: Illustrations supplied by his advancement.] In

England the poor and ignoble still could rise; on the continent they had

nearly lost all chance. Eadric rose to rank and wealth by his personal

talents, talents which no writer denies, though they all paint in strong

colours the evil use which he made of them. And he really rose; he did

not merely, like many low-born favourites of other princes, exercise a

secret influence over a weak master. He was advanced to the highest

dignities of the realm; he stood forth in the great council of the

nation among the foremost of its chiefs; he commanded the armies of his

sovereign; and, what would most of all shock modern prejudices, he was

allowed to mingle his blood with that of kings. Now, if a bad man could

thus rise by evil arts, it clearly was not impossible that a good man

might also rise in a worthier way. Instances of either kind were

doubtless unusual; the general feeling of the time was strongly

aristocratic; still there was no legal or even social hindrance to keep

a man from rising out of utter obscurity to the highest places short of

kingship. Eadric, like most favourites, seems to have made his way to

power through the ruin of an earlier favourite. A man named Wulfgeat had

been for some years the chief adviser of Æthelred. It [Sidenote: Fall of

Wulfgeat.] is not clear whether he had ever risen above thegn’s rank.

But he clearly exercised some functions which clothed him with a good

deal of power, for, among his other offences, unjust judgements are

spoken of.[625] Wulfgeat was now, doubtless through the influence of

Eadric, deprived of all his offices, and his property was confiscated, a

sentence which would seem to imply the authority of a Witenagemót. The

sentence may have been a righteous one; but at all events the

degradation of Wulfgeat opened the way for the elevation of a worse man

than himself. Wulfgeat is at least not described as an open traitor and

murderer. [Sidenote: Eadric the chief favourite.] Eadric, who had

probably been rising in position for some years, now appears as the

reigning favourite and as the [Sidenote: Earl Ælfhelm murdered at

Shrewsbury.] director of all the crimes and treasons of the court. A

monstrous crime was now committed. Ælfhelm, a nobleman who had been for

some years Earl of a part of Northumberland, probably of Deira,[626] was

present, seemingly at the court or at some Gemót, at Shrewsbury. There

Eadric received him as a familiar friend, entertained him for some days,

and on the third or fourth day took him out to a hunting-party. While

others were intent on the sport, the executioner of the town, one

Godwine, surnamed Porthund,[627] whom Eadric had won over by large gifts

and promises, started forth from an ambush at a favourable moment and

put the Earl to death.[628] The sons of Ælfhelm, Wulfheah and Ufegeat,

were soon after blinded by the King’s order at Cookham, a royal seat in

Buckinghamshire. [Sidenote: Ælfheah Archbishop of Canterbury. 1006.]

Amidst all these crimes, Archbishop Ælfric died, and Ælfheah of

Winchester, who was before long to take his place beside Dunstan as a

canonized saint, succeeded to the metropolitan throne.

[Sidenote: Scottish inroad. 1006.]

These events seem to have taken up the earlier part of the year. In the

summer a new Danish invasion began, and there seems reason to believe

that it took place at the same time as a Scottish inroad, which was

perhaps planned in concert.[629] It is now a long time since we have

heard [Sidenote: Death of Kenneth. 994.] of any disturbances on the part

of Scotland proper. King Kenneth, the faithful vassal of Eadgar, had

died in [Sidenote: Accession of Malcolm. 1004.] the year of the great

invasion of Olaf and Swegen. But his son Malcolm did not obtain quiet

possession of the Scottish crown till ten years later. He was now, it

would seem, determined to revenge the wrong which he had [Sidenote:

[1000.]] suffered at the hands of Æthelred in the devastation of

[Sidenote: Malcolm besieges Durham.] Cumberland. He is said to have

invaded Northumberland and to have laid siege to Durham. The new seat of

the Bernician bishopric[630] was growing into an important city, and it

had already become an important military post. But the government of the

country was in feeble hands. [Sidenote: Cowardice of Earl Waltheof.]

Waltheof,[631] the reigning Earl, was old and dispirited, and, instead

of meeting the invaders, he shut himself up in [Sidenote: Victory of his

son Uhtred.] King Ida’s castle at Bamburgh. But he had a son, Uhtred,

whose name we shall often meet in the history of the time, and whose

career is a strangely chequered one. When his father failed in his duty,

he supplied his place, he gathered an army, rescued Durham, and gained a

signal victory over the Scots.[632] Towards the city which he thus saved

Uhtred stood in a relation which we should have looked for rather in the

eighteenth than in the tenth century. He was married to a daughter of

Ealdhun, the Bishop who had just removed his see to Durham, and in the

character of episcopal son-in-law he held large grants of episcopal

[Sidenote: He unites both the Northumbrian Earldoms.] lands. Uhtred’s

behaviour gained him the special favour of Æthelred, who—doubtless by

the authority of one of the Gemóts of this year—deposed Waltheof from

his earldom, bestowed it on his son, and also added the earldom of

Deira, now vacant by the murder of Ælfhelm.[633] [Sidenote: His

marriages.] Uhtred, thus exalted, seems to have had no further need of

episcopal leases; for he sent the Bishop’s daughter back to her father,

honestly returning the estates which he had received with her. He then

married the daughter of a rich citizen, whom he held by quite another

tenure, that of killing her father’s bitter enemy Thurbrand. This he,

unluckily for himself, failed to do, and this failure would seem to have

set aside the second marriage also, as we presently find him receiving

the hand of King Æthelred’s daughter Ælfgifu.[634] If all this is

true—and the genealogical and local detail with which it is given seems

to stamp it as true—the ties of marriage must have sat quite as lightly

on a Northumbrian Earl as ever they did on a Norman Duke. The tale

indeed suggests that even the daughters of Bishops, a class whom we

should hardly have expected to find so familiarly spoken of after

Dunstan’s reforms, may have been sometimes married Danish fashion. But

the fact that an Earl did not disdain the daughter of a rich citizen at

once shows the importance which some even of the northern English

cities—for either York or Durham must be meant—had already reached, and

it also shows that no very broad line as yet separated the different

classes of society in such matters. The story again marks the ferocious

habits of the Danish parts of England. It seems the most natural thing

in the world for a man on his marriage to undertake to kill his

father-in-law’s enemy. We shall find that this engagement of Uhtred to

kill Thurbrand was the beginning of a long series of crimes, of an

hereditary deadly feud, which went on till after the Norman Conquest.