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HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE, VOLUME I
by
JOHN RICHARD GREEN, M.A.
Honorary Fellow of Jesus College, Oxford
EARLY ENGLAND, 449-1071
FOREIGN KINGS, 1071-1204
THE CHARTER, 1204-1216
_First Edition, Demy 8vo, November_ 1877;
_Reprinted December_ 1877, 1881, 1885, 1890.
_Eversley Edition,_ 1895.
London MacMillan and Co. and New York 1895
I Dedicate this Book
TO TWO DEAR FRIENDS
MY MASTERS IN THE STUDY OF ENGLISH HISTORY
EDWARD AUGUSTUS FREEMAN
AND
WILLIAM STUBBS
CONTENTS
Volume I
Book I--Early England--449-1071
Authorities for Book I
Chapter I--The English Conquest of Britain--449-577
Chapter II--The English Kingdoms--577-796
Chapter III--Wessex and the Northmen--796-947
Chapter IV--Feudalism and the Monarchy--954-1071
Book II--England under Foreign Kings--1071-1204
Authorities for Book II
Chapter I--The Conqueror--1071-1085
Chapter II--The Norman Kings--1085-1154
Chapter III--Henry the Second--1154-1189
Chapter IV--The Angevin Kings--1189-1204
Book III--The Charter--1204-1307
Authorities for Book III
Chapter I--John--1204-1216
LIST OF MAPS
Britain and the English Conquest (v1-map-1.png)
The English Kingdoms in A.D. 600 (v1-map-2.jpg)
England and the Danelaw (v1-map-3.jpg)
The Dominions of the Angevins (v1-map-4.jpg)
Ireland just before the English Invasion (v1-map-5.jpg)
VOLUME I
BOOK I
EARLY ENGLAND
449-1071
AUTHORITIES FOR BOOK I
449-1071
For the conquest of Britain by the English our authorities are scant and
imperfect. The only extant British account is the "Epistola" of Gildas, a
work written probably about A.D. 560. The style of Gildas is diffuse and
inflated, but his book is of great value in the light it throws on the
state of the island at that time, and above all as the one record of the
conquest which we have from the side of the conquered. The English
conquerors, on the other hand, have left jottings of their conquest of
Kent, Sussex, and Wessex in the curious annals which form the opening of
the compilation now known as the "English" or "Anglo-Saxon Chronicle,"
annals which are undoubtedly historic, though with a slight mythical
intermixture. For the history of the English conquest of mid-Britain or
the Eastern Coast we possess no written materials from either side; and a
fragment of the Annals of Northumbria embodied in the later compilation
("Historia Britonum") which bears the name of Nennius alone throws light
on the conquest of the North.
From these inadequate materials however Dr. Guest has succeeded by a
wonderful combination of historical and archæological knowledge in
constructing a narrative of the conquest of Southern and South-Western
Britain which must serve as the starting-point for all future enquirers.
This narrative, so far as it goes, has served as the basis of the account
given in my text; and I can only trust that it may soon be embodied in
some more accessible form than that of a series of papers in the
Transactions of the Archæological Institute. In a like way, though
Kemble's "Saxons in England" and Sir F. Palgrave's "History of the
English Commonwealth" (if read with caution) contain much that is worth
notice, our knowledge of the primitive constitution of the English people
and the changes introduced into it since their settlement in Britain must
be mainly drawn from the "Constitutional History" of Professor Stubbs.
Bæda's "Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum," a work of which I have
spoken in my text, is the primary authority for the history of the
Northumbrian overlordship which followed the Conquest. It is by copious
insertions from Bæda that the meagre regnal and episcopal annals of the
West Saxons have been brought to the shape in which they at present
appear in the part of the English Chronicle which concerns this period.
The life of Wilfrid by Eddi, with those of Cuthbert by an anonymous
contemporary and by Bæda himself, throws great light on the religious and
intellectual condition of the North at the time of its supremacy. But
with the fall of Northumbria we pass into a period of historical dearth.
A few incidents of Mercian history are preserved among the meagre annals
of Wessex in the English Chronicle: but for the most part we are thrown
upon later writers, especially Henry of Huntingdon and William of
Malmesbury, who, though authors of the twelfth century, had access to
older materials which are now lost. A little may be gleaned from
biographies such as that of Guthlac of Crowland; but the letters of
Boniface and Alcwine, which have been edited by Jaffé in his series of
"Monumenta Germanica," form the most valuable contemporary materials for
this period.
From the rise of Wessex our history rests mainly on the English
Chronicle. The earlier part of this work, as we have said, is a
compilation, and consists of (1) Annals of the Conquest of South Britain,
and (2) Short Notices of the Kings and Bishops of Wessex expanded by
copious insertions from Bæda, and after the end of his work by brief
additions from some northern sources. These materials may have been
thrown together into their present form in Ælfred's time as a preface to
the far fuller annals which begin with the reign of Æthelwulf, and which
widen into a great contemporary history when they reach that of Ælfred
himself. After Ælfred's day the Chronicle varies much in value. Through
the reign of Eadward the Elder it is copious, and a Mercian Chronicle is
imbedded in it: it then dies down into a series of scant and jejune
entries, broken however with grand battle-songs, till the reign of
Æthelred when its fulness returns.
Outside the Chronicle we encounter a great and valuable mass of
historical material for the age of Ælfred and his successors. The life of
Ælfred which bears the name of Asser, puzzling as it is in some ways, is
probably really Asser's work, and certainly of contemporary authority.
The Latin rendering of the English Chronicle which bears the name of
Æthelweard adds a little to our acquaintance with this time. The Laws,
which form the base of our constitutional knowledge of this period, fall,
as has been well pointed out by Mr. Freeman, into two classes. Those of
Eadward, Æthelstan, Eadmund, and Eadgar, are like the earlier laws of
Æthelberht and Ine, "mainly of the nature of amendments of custom." Those
of Ælfred, Æthelred, Cnut, with those which bear the name of Eadward the
Confessor, "aspire to the character of Codes." They are printed in Mr.
Thorpe's "Ancient Laws and Institutes of England," but the extracts given
by Professor Stubbs in his "Select Charters" contain all that directly
bears on our constitutional growth. A vast mass of Charters and other
documents belonging to this period has been collected by Kemble in his
"Codex Diplomaticus Ævi Saxonici," and some are added by Mr. Thorpe in
his "Diplomatarium Anglo-Saxonicum." Dunstan's biographies have been
collected and edited by Professor Stubbs in the series published by the
Master of the Rolls.
In the period which follows the accession of Æthelred we are still aided
by these collections of royal Laws and Charters, and the English
Chronicle becomes of great importance. Its various copies indeed differ
so much in tone and information from one another that they may to some
extent be looked upon as distinct works, and "Florence of Worcester" is
probably the translation of a valuable copy of the "Chronicle" which has
disappeared. The translation however was made in the twelfth century, and
it is coloured by the revival of national feeling which was
characteristic of the time. Of Eadward the Confessor himself we have a
contemporary biography (edited by Mr. Luard for the Master of the Rolls)
which throws great light on the personal history of the King and on his
relations to the house of Godwine.
The earlier Norman traditions are preserved by Dudo of St. Quentin, a
verbose and confused writer, whose work was abridged and continued by
William of Jumièges, a contemporary of the Conqueror. William's work in
turn served as the basis of the "Roman de Rou" composed by Wace in the
time of Henry the Second. The primary authority for the Conqueror himself
is the "Gesta Willelmi" of his chaplain and violent partizan, William of
Poitiers. For the period of the invasion, in which the English
authorities are meagre, we have besides these the contemporary "Carmen de
Bello Hastingensi," by Guy, Bishop of Amiens, and the pictures in the
Bayeux Tapestry. Orderic, a writer of the twelfth century, gossipy and
confused but honest and well-informed, tells us much of the religious
movement in Normandy, and is particularly valuable and detailed in his
account of the period after the battle of Senlac. Among secondary
authorities for the Norman Conquest, Simeon of Durham is useful for
northern matters, and William of Malmesbury worthy of note for his
remarkable combination of Norman and English feeling. Domesday Book is of
course invaluable for the Norman settlement. The chief documents for the
early history of Anjou have been collected in the "Chroniques d'Anjou"
published by the Historical Society of France. Those which are authentic
are little more than a few scant annals of religious houses; but light is
thrown on them by the contemporary French chronicles. The "Gesta
Consulum" is nothing but a compilation of the twelfth century, in which a
mass of Angevin romance as to the early story of the Counts is dressed
into historical shape by copious quotations from these French historians.
It is possible that fresh light may be thrown on our earlier history when
historical criticism has done more than has yet been done for the
materials given us by Ireland and Wales. For Welsh history the "Brut y
Tywysogion" and the "Annales Cambriæ" are now accessible in the series
published by the Master of the Rolls; the "Chronicle of Caradoc of
Lancarvan" is translated by Powel; the Mabinogion, or Romantic Tales,
have been published by Lady Charlotte Guest; and the Welsh Laws collected
by the Record Commission. The importance of these, as embodying a
customary code of very early date, will probably be better appreciated
when we possess the whole of the Brehon Laws, the customary laws of
Ireland, which are now being issued by the Irish Laws Commission, and to
which attention has justly been drawn by Sir Henry Maine ("Early History
of Institutions") as preserving Aryan usages of the remotest antiquity.
The enormous mass of materials which exists for the early history of
Ireland, various as they are in critical value, may be seen in Mr.
O'Curry's "Lectures on the Materials of Ancient Irish History"; and they
may be conveniently studied by the general reader in the "Annals of the
Four Masters," edited by Dr. O'Donovan. But this is a mere compilation
(though generally a faithful one) made about the middle of the
seventeenth century from earlier sources, two of which have been
published in the Rolls series. One, the "Wars of the Gaedhil with the
Gaill," is an account of the Danish wars which may have been written in
the eleventh century; the other, the "Annals of Loch Cé," is a chronicle
of Irish affairs from the end of the Danish wars to 1590. The "Chronicon
Scotorum" (in the same series) extends to the year 1150, and though
composed in the seventeenth century is valuable from the learning of its
author, Duald Mac-Firbis. The works of Colgan are to Irish church affairs
what the "Annals of the Four Masters" are to Irish civil history. They
contain a vast collection of translations and transcriptions of early
saints' lives, from those of Patrick downwards. Adamnan's "Life of
Columba" (admirably edited by Dr. Beeves) supplies some details to the
story of the Northumbrian kingdom. Among more miscellaneous works we find
the "Book of Rights," a summary of the dues and rights of the several
over-kings and under-kings, of much earlier date probably than the Norman
invasion; and Cormac's "Glossary," attributed to the tenth century and
certainly an early work, from which much may be gleaned of legal and
social details, and something of the pagan religion of Ireland.
CHAPTER I
THE ENGLISH CONQUEST OF BRITAIN
449-577
[Sidenote: Old England]
For the fatherland of the English race we must look far away from England
itself. In the fifth century after the birth of Christ the one country
which we know to have borne the name of Angeln or the Engleland lay
within the district which is now called Sleswick, a district in the heart
of the peninsula that parts the Baltic from the northern seas. Its
pleasant pastures, its black-timbered homesteads, its prim little
townships looking down on inlets of purple water, were then but a wild
waste of heather and sand, girt along the coast with a sunless woodland
broken here and there by meadows that crept down to the marshes and the
sea. The dwellers in this district, however, seem to have been merely an
outlying fragment of what was called the Engle or English folk, the bulk
of whom lay probably in what is now Lower Hanover and Oldenburg. On one
side of them the Saxons of Westphalia held the land from the Weser to the
Rhine; on the other the Eastphalian Saxons stretched away to the Elbe.
North again of the fragment of the English folk in Sleswick lay another
kindred tribe, the Jutes, whose name is still preserved in their district
of Jutland. Engle, Saxon, and Jute all belonged to the same Low-German
branch of the Teutonic family; and at the moment when history discovers
them they were being drawn together by the ties of a common blood, common
speech, common social and political institutions. There is little ground
indeed for believing that the three tribes looked on themselves as one
people, or that we can as yet apply to them, save by anticipation, the
common name of Englishmen. But each of them was destined to share in the
conquest of the land in which we live; and it is from the union of all of
them when its conquest was complete that the English people has sprung.
[Sidenote: The English Village]
Of the temper and life of the folk in this older England we know little.
But from the glimpses that we catch of it when conquest had brought them
to the shores of Britain their political and social organization must
have been that of the German race to which they belonged. In their
villages lay ready formed the social and political life which is round us
in the England of to-day. A belt of forest or waste parted each from its
fellow villages, and within this boundary or mark the "township," as the
village was then called from the "tun" or rough fence and trench that
served as its simple fortification, formed a complete and independent
body, though linked by ties which were strengthening every day to the
townships about it and the tribe of which it formed a part. Its social
centre was the homestead where the ætheling or eorl, a descendant of the
first English settlers in the waste, still handed down the blood and
traditions of his fathers. Around this homestead or æthel, each in its
little croft, stood the lowlier dwellings of freelings or ceorls, men
sprung, it may be, from descendants of the earliest settler who had in
various ways forfeited their claim to a share in the original homestead,
or more probably from incomers into the village who had since settled
round it and been admitted to a share in the land and freedom of the
community. The eorl was distinguished from his fellow villagers by his
wealth and his nobler blood; he was held by them in an hereditary
reverence; and it was from him and his fellow æthelings that
host-leaders, whether of the village or the tribe, were chosen in times of
war. But this claim to precedence rested simply on the free recognition
of his fellow villagers. Within the township every freeman or ceorl was
equal. It was the freeman who was the base of village society. He was the
"free-necked man" whose long hair floated over a neck which had never
bowed to a lord. He was the "weaponed man" who alone bore spear and
sword, and who alone preserved that right of self-redress or private war
which in such a state of society formed the main check upon lawless
outrage.
[Sidenote: Justice]
Among the English, as among all the races of mankind, justice had
originally sprung from each man's personal action. There had been a time
when every freeman was his own avenger. But even in the earliest forms of
English society of which we find traces this right of self-defence was
being modified and restricted by a growing sense of public justice. The
"blood-wite" or compensation in money for personal wrong was the first
effort of the tribe as a whole to regulate private revenge. The freeman's
life and the freeman's limb had each on this system its legal price. "Eye
for eye," ran the rough code, and "life for life," or for each fair
damages. We see a further step towards the modern recognition of a wrong
as done not to the individual man but to the people at large in another
custom of early date. The price of life or limb was paid, not by the
wrong-doer to the man he wronged, but by the family or house of the
wrong-doer to the family or house of the wronged. Order and law were thus
made to rest in each little group of people upon the blood-bond which
knit its families together; every outrage was held to have been done by
all who were linked in blood to the doer of it, every crime to have been
done against all who were linked in blood to the sufferer from it. From
this sense of the value of the family bond as a means of restraining the
wrong-doer by forces which the tribe as a whole did not as yet possess
sprang the first rude forms of English justice. Each kinsman was his
kinsman's keeper, bound to protect him from wrong, to hinder him from
wrong-doing, and to suffer with him and pay for him if wrong were done.
So fully was this principle recognized that even if any man was charged
before his fellow-tribesmen with crime his kinsfolk still remained in
fact his sole judges; for it was by their solemn oath of his innocence or
his guilt that he had to stand or fall.
[Sidenote: The Land]
As the blood-bond gave its first form to English justice, so it gave
their first forms to English society and English warfare. Kinsmen fought
side by side in the hour of battle, and the feelings of honour and
discipline which held the host together were drawn from the common duty
of every man in each little group of warriors to his house. And as they
fought side by side on the field, so they dwelled side by side on the
soil. Harling abode by Harling, and Billing by Billing; and each "wick"
or "ham" or "stead" or "tun" took its name from the kinsmen who dwelled
together in it. In this way the home or "ham" of the Billings was
Billingham, and the "tun" or township of the Harlings was Harlington. But
in such settlements the tie of blood was widened into the larger tie of
land. Land with the German race seems at a very early time to have become
everywhere the accompaniment of full freedom. The freeman was strictly
the free-holder, and the exercise of his full rights as a free member of
the community to which he belonged became inseparable from the possession
of his "holding" in it. But property had not as yet reached that stage of
absolutely personal possession which the social philosophy of a later
time falsely regarded as its earliest state. The woodland and
pasture-land of an English village were still undivided, and every free
villager had the right of turning into it his cattle or swine. The
meadow-land lay in like manner open and undivided from hay-harvest to
spring. It was only when grass began to grow afresh that the common
meadow was fenced off into grass-fields, one for each household in the
village; and when hay-harvest was over fence and division were at an end
again. The plough-land alone was permanently allotted in equal shares
both of corn-land and fallow-land to the families of the freemen, though
even the plough-land was; subject to fresh division as the number of
claimants grew greater or less.
[Sidenote: Læt and Slave]
It was this sharing in the common land which marked off the freeman or
ceorl from the unfree man or læt, the tiller of land which another owned.
As the ceorl was the descendant of settlers who, whether from their
earlier arrival or from kinship with the original settlers of the
village, had been admitted to a share in its land and its corporate life,
so the læt was a descendant of later comers to whom such a share was
denied, or in some cases perhaps of earlier dwellers from whom the land
had been wrested by force of arms. In the modern sense of freedom the læt
was free enough. He had house and home of his own, his life and limb were
as secure as the ceorl's--save as against his lord; it is probable from
what we see in later laws that as time went on he was recognized as a
member of the nation, summoned to the folk-moot, allowed equal right at
law, and called like the full free man to the hosting. But he was unfree
as regards lord and land. He had neither part nor lot in the common land
of the village. The ground which he tilled he held of some freeman of the
tribe to whom he paid rent in labour or in kind. And this man was his
lord. Whatever rights the unfree villager might gain in the general
social life of his fellow villagers, he had no rights as against his
lord. He could leave neither land nor lord at his will. He was bound to
render due service to his lord in tillage or in fight. So long however as
these services were done the land was his own. His lord could not take it
from him; and he was bound to give him aid and protection in exchange for
his services.
Far different from the position of the læt was that of the slave, though
there is no ground for believing that the slave class was other than a
small one. It was a class which sprang mainly from debt or crime. Famine
drove men to "bend their heads in the evil days for meat"; the debtor,
unable to discharge his debt, flung on the ground his freeman's sword and
spear, took up the labourer's mattock, and placed his head as a slave
within a master's hands. The criminal whose kinsfolk would not make up
his fine became a crime-serf of the plaintiff or the king. Sometimes a
father pressed by need sold children and wife into bondage. In any case
the slave became part of the live stock of his master's estate, to be
willed away at death with horse or ox, whose pedigree was kept as
carefully as his own. His children were bondsmen like himself; even a
freeman's children by a slave mother inherited the mother's taint. "Mine
is the calf that is born of my cow," ran an English proverb. Slave cabins
clustered round the homestead of every rich landowner; ploughman,
shepherd, goatherd, swineherd, oxherd and cowherd, dairymaid, barnman,
sower, hayward and woodward, were often slaves. It was not indeed slavery
such as we have known in modern times, for stripes and bonds were rare:
if the slave was slain it was by an angry blow, not by the lash. But his
master could slay him if he would; it was but a chattel the less. The
slave had no place in the justice court, no kinsmen to claim vengeance or
guilt-fine for his wrong. If a stranger slew him, his lord claimed the
damages; if guilty of wrong-doing, "his skin paid for him" under his
master's lash. If he fled he might be chased like a strayed beast, and
when caught he might be flogged to death. If the wrong-doer were a
woman-slave she might be burned.
[Sidenote: The Moot]
With the public life of the village however the slave had nothing, the
last in early days little, to do. In its Moot, the common meeting of its
villagers for justice and government, a slave had no place or voice,
while the last was originally represented by the lord whose land he
tilled. The life, the sovereignty of the settlement resided solely in the
body of the freemen whose holdings lay round the moot-hill or the sacred
tree where the community met from time to time to deal out its own
justice and to make its own laws. Here new settlers were admitted to the
freedom of the township, and bye-laws framed and headman and tithing-man
chosen for its governance. Here plough-land and meadow-land were shared
in due lot among the villagers, and field and homestead passed from man
to man by the delivery of a turf cut from its soil. Here strife of farmer
with farmer was settled according to the "customs" of the township as its
elder men stated them, and four men were chosen to follow headman or
ealdorman to hundred-court or war. It is with a reverence such as is
stirred by the sight of the head-waters of some mighty river that one
looks back to these village-moots of Friesland or Sleswick. It was here
that England learned to be a "mother of Parliaments." It was in these
tiny knots of farmers that the men from whom Englishmen were to spring
learned the worth of public opinion, of public discussion, the worth of
the agreement, the "common sense," the general conviction to which
discussion leads, as of the laws which derive their force from being
expressions of that general conviction. A humourist of our own day has
laughed at Parliaments as "talking shops," and the laugh has been echoed
by some who have taken humour for argument. But talk is persuasion, and
persuasion is force, the one force which can sway freemen to deeds such
as those which have made England what she is. The "talk" of the village
moot, the strife and judgement of men giving freely their own rede and
setting it as freely aside for what they learn to be the wiser rede of
other men, is the groundwork of English history.
[Sidenote: The Folk]
Small therefore as it might be, the township or village was thus the
primary and perfect type of English life, domestic, social, and
political. All that England has been since lay there. But changes of
which we know nothing had long before the time at which our history opens
grouped these little commonwealths together in larger communities,
whether we name them Tribe, People, or Folk. The ties of race and kindred
were no doubt drawn tighter by the needs of war. The organization of each
Folk, as such, sprang in all likelihood mainly from war, from a common
greed of conquest, a common need of defence. Its form at any rate was
wholly military. The Folk-moot was in fact the war-host, the gathering of
every freeman of the tribe in arms. The head of the Folk, a head who
existed only so long as war went on, was the leader whom the host chose
to command it. Its Witenagemot or meeting of wise men was the host's
council of war, the gathering of those ealdormen who had brought the men
of their villages to the field. The host was formed by levies from the
various districts of the tribe; the larger of which probably owed their
name of "hundreds" to the hundred warriors which each originally sent to
it. In historic times however the regularity of such a military
organization, if it ever existed, had passed away, and the quotas varied
with the varying customs of each district. But men, whether many or few,
were still due from each district to the host, and a cry of war at once
called town-reeve and hundred-reeve with their followers to the field.
The military organization of the tribe thus gave from the first its form
to the civil organization. But the peculiar shape which its civil
organization assumed was determined by a principle familiar to the
Germanic races and destined to exercise a vast influence on the future of
mankind. This was the principle of representation. The four or ten
villagers who followed the reeve of each township to the general muster
of the hundred were held to represent the whole body of the township from
whence they came. Their voice was its voice, their doing its doing, their
pledge its pledge. The hundred-moot, a moot which was made by this
gathering of the representatives of the townships that lay within its
bounds, thus became at once a court of appeal from the moots of each
separate village as well as of arbitration in dispute between township
and township. The judgement of graver crimes and of life or death fell to
its share; while it necessarily possessed the same right of law-making
for the hundred that the village-moot possessed for each separate
village. And as hundred-moot stood above town-moot, so above the
hundred-moot stood the Folk-moot, the general muster of the people in
arms, at once war-host and highest law-court and general Parliament of
the tribe. But whether in Folk-moot or hundred-moot, the principle of
representation was preserved. In both the constitutional forms, the forms
of deliberation and decision, were the same. In each the priests
proclaimed silence, the ealdormen of higher blood spoke, groups of
freemen from each township stood round, shaking their spears in assent,
clashing shields in applause, settling matters in the end by loud shouts
of "Aye" or "Nay."
[Sidenote: Social Life]
Of the social or the industrial life of our fathers in this older England
we know less than of their political life. But there is no ground for
believing them to have been very different in these respects from the
other German peoples who were soon to overwhelm the Roman world. Though
their border nowhere touched the border of the Empire they were far from
being utterly strange to its civilization. Roman commerce indeed reached
the shores of the Baltic, and we have abundant evidence that the arts and
refinement of Rome were brought into contact with these earlier
Englishmen. Brooches, sword-belts, and shield-bosses which have been
found in Sleswick, and which can be dated not later than the close of the
third century, are clearly either of Roman make or closely modelled on
Roman metal-work. Discoveries of Roman coins in Sleswick peat-mosses
afford a yet more conclusive proof of direct intercourse with the Empire.
But apart from these outer influences the men of the three tribes were
far from being mere savages. They were fierce warriors, but they were
also busy fishers and tillers of the soil, as proud of their skill in
handling plough and mattock or steering the rude boat with which they
hunted walrus and whale as of their skill in handling sword and spear.
They were hard drinkers, no doubt, as they were hard toilers, and the
"ale-feast" was the centre of their social life. But coarse as the revel
might seem to modern eyes, the scene within the timbered hall which rose
in the midst of their villages was often Homeric in its simplicity and
dignity. Queen or Eorl's wife with a train of maidens bore ale-bowl or
mead-bowl round the hall from the high settle of King or Ealdorman in the
midst to the mead benches ranged around its walls, while the gleeman sang
the hero-songs of his race. Dress and arms showed traces of a love of art
and beauty, none the less real that it was rude and incomplete. Rings,
amulets, ear-rings, neck-pendants, proved in their workmanship the
deftness of the goldsmith's art. Cloaks were often fastened with golden
buckles of curious and exquisite form, set sometimes with rough jewels
and inlaid with enamel. The bronze boar-crest on the warrior's helmet,
the intricate adornment of the warrior's shield, tell like the honour in
which the smith was held their tale of industrial art. The curiously
twisted glass goblets, so common in the early graves of Kent, are shewn
by their form to be of English workmanship. It is only in the English
pottery, hand-made, and marked with coarse zigzag patterns, that we find
traces of utter rudeness.
[Sidenote: Religion]
The religion of these men was the same as that of the rest of the German
peoples. Christianity had by this time brought about the conversion of
the Roman Empire, but it had not penetrated as yet among the forests of
the north. The common God of the English people was Woden, the war-god,
the guardian of ways and boundaries, to whom his worshippers attributed
the invention of letters, and whom every tribe held to be the first
ancestor of its kings. Our own names for the days of the week still
recall to us the gods whom our fathers worshipped in their German
homeland. Wednesday is Woden's-day, as Thursday is the day of Thunder,
the god of air and storm and rain. Friday is Frea's-day, the deity of
peace and joy and fruitfulness, whose emblems, borne aloft by dancing
maidens, brought increase to every field and stall they visited. Saturday
may commemorate an obscure god Sætere; Tuesday the dark god, Tiw, to meet
whom was death. Eostre, the goddess of the dawn or of the spring, lends
her name to the Christian festival of the Resurrection. Behind these
floated the dim shapes of an older mythology; "Wyrd," the death-goddess,
whose memory lingered long in the "Weird" of northern superstition; or
the Shield-maidens, the "mighty women" who, an old rime tells us,
"wrought on the battle-field their toil and hurled the thrilling
javelins." Nearer to the popular fancy lay deities of wood and fell, or
hero-gods of legend and song; Nicor, the water-sprite who survives in our
nixies and "Old Nick"; Weland, the forger of weighty shields and
sharp-biting swords, who found a later home in the "Weyland's smithy" of
Berkshire; Ægil, the hero-archer, whose legend is one with that of
Cloudesly or Tell. A nature-worship of this sort lent itself ill to the
purposes of a priesthood; and though a priestly class existed it seems at
no time to have had much weight among Englishmen. As each freeman was his
own judge and his own lawmaker, so he was his own house-priest; and
English worship lay commonly in the sacrifice which the house-father
offered to the gods of his hearth.
[Sidenote: The English Temper]
It is not indeed in Woden-worship or in the worship of the older gods of
flood and fell that we must look for the real religion of our fathers.
The song of Beowulf, though the earliest of English poems, is as we have
it now a poem of the eighth century, the work it may be of some English
missionary of the days of Bæda and Boniface who gathered in the very
homeland of his race the legends of its earlier prime. But the thin veil
of Christianity which he has flung over it fades away as we follow the
hero-legend of our fathers; and the secret of their moral temper, of
their conception of life breathes through every line. Life was built with
them not on the hope of a hereafter, but on the proud self-consciousness
of noble souls. "I have this folk ruled these fifty winters," sings the
hero-king as he sits death-smitten beside the dragon's mound. "Lives
there no folk-king of kings about me--not any one of them--dare in the
war-strife welcome my onset! Time's change and chances I have abided,
held my own fairly, sought not to snare men; oath never sware I falsely
against right. So for all this may I glad be at heart now, sick though I
sit here, wounded with death-wounds!" In men of such a temper, strong
with the strength of manhood and full of the vigour and the love of life,
the sense of its shortness and of the mystery of it all woke chords of a
pathetic poetry. "Soon will it be," ran the warning rime, "that sickness
or sword-blade shear thy strength from thee, or the fire ring thee, or
the flood whelm thee, or the sword grip thee, or arrow hit thee, or age
o'ertake thee, and thine eye's brightness sink down in darkness." Strong
as he might be, man struggled in vain with the doom that encompassed him,
that girded his life with a thousand perils and broke it at so short a
span. "To us," cries Beowulf in his last fight, "to us it shall be as our
Weird betides, that Weird that is every man's lord!" But the sadness with
which these Englishmen fronted the mysteries of life and death had
nothing in it of the unmanly despair which bids men eat and drink for
to-morrow they die. Death leaves man man and master of his fate. The
thought of good fame, of manhood, is stronger than the thought of doom.
"Well shall a man do when in the strife he minds but of winning longsome
renown, nor for his life cares!" "Death is better than life of shame!"
cries Beowulf's sword-fellow. Beowulf himself takes up his strife with
the fiend, "go the weird as it will." If life is short, the more cause to
work bravely till it is over. "Each man of us shall abide the end of his
life-work; let him that may work, work his doomed deeds ere death come!"
[Sidenote: English Piracy]
The energy of these peoples found vent in a restlessness which drove them
to take part in the general attack of the German race on the Empire of
Rome. For busy tillers and busy fishers as Englishmen were, they were at
heart fighters; and their world was a world of war. Tribe warred with
tribe, and village with village; even within the village itself feuds
parted household from household, and passions of hatred and vengeance
were handed on from father to son. Their mood was above all a mood of
fighting men, venturesome, self-reliant, proud, with a dash of hardness
and cruelty in it, but ennobled by the virtues which spring from war, by
personal courage and loyalty to plighted word, by a high and stern sense
of manhood and the worth of man. A grim joy in hard fighting was already
a characteristic of the race. War was the Englishman's "shield-play" and
"sword-game"; the gleeman's verse took fresh fire as he sang of the rush
of the host and the crash of its shield-line. Their arms and weapons,
helmet and mailshirt, tall spear and javelin, sword and seax, the short
broad dagger that hung at each warrior's girdle, gathered to them much of
the legend and the art which gave colour and poetry to the life of
Englishmen. Each sword had its name like a living thing. And next to
their love of war came their love of the sea. Everywhere throughout
Beowulf's song, as everywhere throughout the life that it pictures, we
catch the salt whiff of the sea. The Englishman was as proud of his
sea-craft as of his war-craft; sword in hand he plunged into the sea to
meet walrus and sea-lion; he told of his whale-chase amidst the icy
waters of the north. Hardly less than his love for the sea was the love
he bore to the ship that traversed it. In the fond playfulness of English
verse the ship was "the wave-floater," "the foam-necked," "like a bird"
as it skimmed the wave-crest, "like a swan" as its curved prow breasted
the "swan-road" of the sea.
Their passion for the sea marked out for them their part in the general
movement of the German nations. While Goth and Lombard were slowly
advancing over mountain and plain the boats of the Englishmen pushed
faster over the sea. Bands of English rovers, outdriven by stress of
fight, had long found a home there, and lived as they could by sack of
vessel or coast. Chance has preserved for us in a Sleswick peat-bog one
of the war-keels of these early pirates. The boat is flat-bottomed,
seventy feet long and eight or nine feet wide, its sides of oak boards
fastened with bark ropes and iron bolts. Fifty oars drove it over the
waves with a freight of warriors whose arms, axes, swords, lances, and
knives, were found heaped together in its hold. Like the galleys of the
Middle Ages such boats could only creep cautiously along from harbour to
harbour in rough weather; but in smooth water their swiftness fitted them
admirably for the piracy by which the men of these tribes were already
making themselves dreaded. Its flat bottom enabled them to beach the
vessel on any fitting coast; and a step on shore at once transformed the
boatmen into a war-band. From the first the daring of the English race
broke out in the secrecy and suddenness of the pirates' swoop, in the
fierceness of their onset, in the careless glee with which they seized
either sword or oar. "Foes are they," sang a Roman poet of the time,
"fierce beyond other foes and cunning as they are fierce; the sea is
their school of war and the storm their friend; they are sea-wolves that
live on the pillage of the world!"
[Sidenote: Britain]
Of the three English tribes the Saxons lay nearest to the Empire, and
they were naturally the first to touch the Roman world; at the close of
the third century indeed their boats appeared in such force in the
English Channel as to call for a special fleet to resist them. The piracy
of our fathers had thus brought them to the shores of a land which, dear
as it is now to Englishmen, had not as yet been trodden by English feet.
This land was Britain. When the Saxon boats touched its coast the island
was the westernmost province of the Roman Empire. In the fifty-fifth year
before Christ a descent of Julius Cæsar revealed it to the Roman world;
and a century after Cæsar's landing the Emperor Claudius undertook its
conquest. The work was swiftly carried out. Before thirty years were over
the bulk of the island had passed beneath the Roman sway and the Roman
frontier had been carried to the Firths of Forth and of Clyde. The work
of civilization followed fast on the work of the sword. To the last
indeed the distance of the island from the seat of empire left her less
Romanized than any other province of the west. The bulk of the population
scattered over the country seem in spite of imperial edicts to have clung
to their old law as to their old language, and to have retained some
traditional allegiance to their native chiefs. But Roman civilization
rested mainly on city life, and in Britain as elsewhere the city was
thoroughly Roman. In towns such as Lincoln or York, governed by their own
municipal officers, guarded by massive walls, and linked together by a
network of magnificent roads which reached from one end of the island to
the other, manners, language, political life, all were of Rome.
For three hundred years the Roman sword secured order and peace without
Britain and within, and with peace and order came a wide and rapid
prosperity. Commerce sprang up in ports amongst which London held the
first rank; agriculture flourished till Britain became one of the
corn-exporting countries of the world; the mineral resources of the
province were explored in the tin mines of Cornwall, the lead mines of
Somerset or Northumberland, and the iron mines of the Forest of Dean. But
evils which sapped the strength of the whole Empire told at last on the
province of Britain. Wealth and population alike declined under a
crushing system of taxation, under restrictions which fettered industry,
under a despotism which crushed out all local independence. And with
decay within came danger from without. For centuries past the Roman
frontier had held back the barbaric world beyond it, the Parthian of the
Euphrates, the Numidian of the African desert, the German of the Danube
or the Rhine. In Britain a wall drawn from Newcastle to Carlisle bridled
the British tribes, the Picts as they were called, who had been sheltered
from Roman conquest by the fastnesses of the Highlands. It was this mass
of savage barbarism which broke upon the Empire as it sank into decay. In
its western dominions the triumph of these assailants was complete. The
Franks conquered and colonized Gaul. The West-Goths conquered and
colonized Spain. The Vandals founded a kingdom in Africa. The Burgundians
encamped in the border-land between Italy and the Rhone. The East-Goths
ruled at last in Italy itself.
[Sidenote: Conquests of Jute and Saxon]
It was to defend Italy against the Goths that Rome in the opening of the
fifth century withdrew her legions from Britain, and from that moment the
province was left to struggle unaided against the Picts. Nor were these
its only enemies. While marauders from Ireland, whose inhabitants then
bore the name of Scots, harried the west, the boats of Saxon pirates, as
we have seen, were swarming off its eastern and southern coasts. For some
thirty years Britain held bravely out against these assailants; but civil
strife broke its powers of resistance, and its rulers fell back at last
on the fatal policy by which the Empire invited its doom while striving
to avert it, the policy of matching barbarian against barbarian. By the
usual promises of land and pay a band of warriors was drawn for this
purpose from Jutland in 449 with two ealdormen, Hengest and Horsa, at
their head. If by English history we mean the history of Englishmen in
the land which from that time they made their own, it is with this
landing of Hengest's war-band that English history begins. They landed on
the shores of the Isle of Thanet at a spot known since as Ebbsfleet. No
spot can be so sacred to Englishmen as the spot which first felt the
tread of English feet. There is little to catch the eye in Ebbsfleet
itself, a mere lift of ground with a few grey cottages dotted over it,
cut off nowadays from the sea by a reclaimed meadow and a sea-wall. But
taken as a whole the scene has a wild beauty of its own. To the right the
white curve of Ramsgate cliffs looks down on the crescent of Pegwell Bay;
far away to the left across grey marsh-levels where smoke-wreaths mark
the sites of Richborough and Sandwich the coast-line trends dimly towards
Deal. Everything in the character of the spot confirms the national
tradition which fixed here the landing-place of our fathers; for the
physical changes of the country since the fifth century have told little
on its main features. At the time of Hengest's landing a broad inlet of
sea parted Thanet from the mainland of Britain; and through this inlet
the pirate boats would naturally come sailing with a fair wind to what
was then the gravel-spit of Ebbsfleet.
[Illustration: Britain and the English Conquest (v1-map-1t.png)]
The work for which the mercenaries had been hired was quickly done; and
the Picts are said to have been scattered to the winds in a battle fought
on the eastern coast of Britain. But danger from the Pict was hardly over
when danger came from the Jutes themselves. Their fellow-pirates must
have flocked from the Channel to their settlement in Thanet; the inlet
between Thanet and the mainland was crossed, and the Englishmen won their
first victory over the Britons in forcing their passage of the Medway at
the village of Aylesford. A second defeat at the passage of the Cray
drove the British forces in terror upon London; but the ground was soon
won back again, and it was not till 465 that a series of petty conflicts
which had gone on along the shores of Thanet made way for a decisive
struggle at Wippedsfleet. Here however the overthrow was so terrible that
from this moment all hope of saving Northern Kent seems to have been
abandoned, and it was only along its southern shore that the Britons held
their ground. Eight years later, in 473, the long contest was over, and
with the fall of Lymne, whose broken walls look from the slope to which
they cling over the great flat of Romney Marsh, the work of the first
English conqueror was done.
The warriors of Hengest had been drawn from the Jutes, the smallest of
the three tribes who were to blend in the English people. But the greed
of plunder now told on the great tribe which stretched from the Elbe to
the Rhine, and in 477 Saxon invaders were seen pushing slowly along the
strip of land which lay westward of Kent between the weald and the sea.
Nowhere has the physical aspect of the country more utterly changed. A
vast sheet of scrub, woodland, and waste which then bore the name of the
Andredsweald stretched for more than a hundred miles from the borders of
Kent to the Hampshire Downs, extending northward almost to the Thames and
leaving only a thin strip of coast which now bears the name of Sussex
between its southern edge and the sea. This coast was guarded by a
fortress which occupied the spot now called Pevensey, the future
landing-place of the Norman Conqueror; and the fall of this fortress of
Anderida in 491 established the kingdom of the South-Saxons. "Ælle and
Cissa beset Anderida," so ran the pitiless record of the conquerors, "and
slew all that were therein, nor was there henceforth one Briton left."
But Hengest and Ælle's men had touched hardly more than the coast, and
the true conquest of Southern Britain was reserved for a fresh band of
Saxons, a tribe known as the Gewissas, who in 495 landed under Cerdic and
Cynric on the shores of the Southampton Water, and pushed to the great
downs or Gwent where Winchester offered so rich a prize. Nowhere was the
strife fiercer than here; and it was not till 519 that a decisive victory
at Charford ended the struggle for the "Gwent" and set the crown of the
West-Saxons on the head of Cerdic. But the forest-belt around it checked
any further advance; and only a year after Charford the Britons rallied
under a new leader, Arthur, and threw back the invaders as they pressed
westward through the Dorsetshire woodlands in a great overthrow at
Badbury or Mount Badon. The defeat was followed by a long pause in the
Saxon advance from the southern coast, but while the Gewissas rested a
series of victories whose history is lost was giving to men of the same
Saxon tribe the coast district north of the mouth of the Thames. It is
probable however that the strength of Camulodunum, the predecessor of our
modern Colchester, made the progress of these assailants a slow and
doubtful one; and even when its reduction enabled the East-Saxons to
occupy the territory to which they have given their name of Essex a line
of woodland which has left its traces in Epping and Hainault Forests
checked their further advance into the island.
[Sidenote: Conquests of the Eagle]
Though seventy years had passed since the victory of Aylesford only the
outskirts of Britain were won. The invaders were masters as yet but of
Kent, Sussex, Hampshire, and Essex. From London to St. David's Head, from
the Andredsweald to the Firth of Forth the country still remained
unconquered: and there was little in the years which followed Arthur's
triumph to herald that onset of the invaders which was soon to make
Britain England. Till now its assailants had been drawn from two only of
the three tribes whom we saw dwelling by the northern sea, from the
Saxons and the Jutes. But the main work of conquest was to be done by the
third, by the tribe which bore that name of Engle or Englishmen which was
to absorb that of Saxon and Jute, and to stamp itself on the people which
sprang from the union of the conquerors as on the land that they won. The
Engle had probably been settling for years along the coast of Northumbria
and in the great district which was cut off from the rest of Britain by
the Wash and the Fens, the later East-Anglia. But it was not till the
moment we have reached that the line of defences which had hitherto held
the invaders at bay was turned by their appearance in the Humber and the
Trent. This great river-line led like a highway into the heart of
Britain; and civil strife seems to have broken the strength of British
resistance. But of the incidents of this final struggle we know nothing.
One part of the English force marched from the Humber over the Yorkshire
wolds to found what was called the kingdom of the Deirans. Under the
Empire political power had centred in the district between the Humber and
the Roman wall; York was the capital of Roman Britain; villas of rich
landowners studded the valley of the Ouse; and the bulk of the garrison
maintained in the island lay camped along its northern border. But no
record tells us how Yorkshire was won, or how the Engle made themselves
masters of the uplands about Lincoln. It is only by their later
settlements that we follow their march into the heart of Britain. Seizing
the valley of the Don and whatever breaks there were in the woodland that
then filled the space between the Humber and the Trent, the Engle
followed the curve of the latter river, and struck along the line of its
tributary the Soar. Here round the Roman Ratæ, the predecessor of our
Leicester, settled a tribe known as the Middle-English, while a small
body pushed further southwards, and under the name of "South-Engle"
occupied the oolitic upland that forms our present Northamptonshire. But
the mass of the invaders seem to have held to the line of the Trent and
to have pushed westward to its head-waters. Repton, Lichfield, and
Tamworth mark the country of these western Englishmen, whose older name
was soon lost in that of Mercians, or Men of the March. Their settlement
was in fact a new march or borderland between conqueror and conquered;
for here the impenetrable fastness of the Peak, the mass of Cannock
Chase, and the broken country of Staffordshire enabled the Briton to make
a fresh and desperate stand.
[Sidenote: Conquests of West-Saxons]
It was probably this conquest of Mid-Britain by the Engle that roused the
West-Saxons to a new advance. For thirty years they had rested inactive
within the limits of the Gwent, but in 552 their capture of the hill-fort
of Old Sarum threw open the reaches of the Wiltshire downs, and a march
of King Cuthwulf on the Thames in 571 made them masters of the districts
which now form Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire. Pushing along the upper
valley of Avon to a new battle at Barbury Hill they swooped at last from
their uplands on the rich prey that lay along the Severn. Gloucester,
Cirencester, and Bath, cities which had leagued under their British kings
to resist this onset, became in 577 the spoil of an English victory at
Deorham, and the line of the great western river lay open to the arms of
the conquerors. Once the West-Saxons penetrated to the borders of
Chester, and Uriconium, a town beside the Wrekin which has been recently
brought again to light, went up in flames. The raid ended in a crushing
defeat which broke the West-Saxon strength, but a British poet in verses
still left to us sings piteously the death-song of Uriconium, "the white
town in the valley," the town of white stone gleaming among the green
woodlands. The torch of the foe had left it a heap of blackened ruins
where the singer wandered through halls he had known in happier days, the
halls of its chief Kyndylan, "without fire, without light, without song,"
their stillness broken only by the eagle's scream, the eagle who "has
swallowed fresh drink, heart's blood of Kyndylan the fair."
CHAPTER II
THE ENGLISH KINGDOMS
577-796
[Sidenote: Britain becomes England]
With the victory of Deorham the conquest of the bulk of Britain was
complete. Eastward of a line which may be roughly drawn along the
moorlands of Northumberland and Yorkshire through Derbyshire and the
Forest of Arden to the Lower Severn, and thence by Mendip to the sea, the
island had passed into English hands. Britain had in the main become
England. And within this new England a Teutonic society was settled on
the wreck of Rome. So far as the conquest had yet gone it had been
complete. Not a Briton remained as subject or slave on English ground.
Sullenly, inch by inch, the beaten men drew back from the land which
their conquerors had won; and eastward of the border line which the
English sword had drawn all was now purely English.
It is this which distinguishes the conquest of Britain from that of other
provinces of Rome. The conquest of Gaul by the Franks or that of Italy by
the Lombards proved little more than a forcible settlement of the one or
the other among tributary subjects who were destined in a long course of
ages to absorb their conquerors. French is the tongue, not of the Frank,
but of the Gaul whom he overcame; and the fair hair of the Lombard is all
but unknown in Lombardy. But the English conquest of Britain up to the
point which we have reached was a sheer dispossession of the people whom
the English conquered. It was not that Englishmen, fierce and cruel as at
times they seem to have been, were more fierce or more cruel than other
Germans who attacked the Empire; nor have we any ground for saying that
they, unlike the Burgundian or the Frank, were utterly strange to the
Roman civilization. Saxon mercenaries are found as well as Frank
mercenaries in the pay of Rome; and the presence of Saxon vessels in the
Channel for a century before the descent on Britain must have
familiarized its invaders with what civilization was to be found in the
Imperial provinces of the West. What really made the difference between
the fate of Britain and that of the rest of the Roman world was the
stubborn courage of the British themselves. In all the world-wide
struggle between Rome and the German peoples no land was so stubbornly
fought for or so hardly won. In Gaul no native resistance met Frank or
Visigoth save from the brave peasants of Britanny and Auvergne. No
popular revolt broke out against the rule of Odoacer or Theodoric in
Italy. But in Britain the invader was met by a courage almost equal to
his own. Instead of quartering themselves quietly, like their fellows
abroad, on subjects who were glad to buy peace by obedience and tribute,
the English had to make every inch of Britain their own by hard fighting.
This stubborn resistance was backed too by natural obstacles of the
gravest kind. Elsewhere in the Roman world the work of the conquerors was
aided by the very civilization of Rome. Vandal and Frank marched along
Roman highways over ground cleared by the Roman axe and crossed river or
ravine on the Roman bridge. It was so doubtless with the English
conquerors of Britain. But though Britain had long been Roman, her
distance from the seat of Empire left her less Romanized than any other
province of the West. Socially the Roman civilization had made little
impression on any but the townsfolk, and the material civilization of the
island was yet more backward than its social. Its natural defences threw
obstacles in its invaders' way. In the forest belts which stretched over
vast spaces of country they found barriers which in all cases checked
their advance and in some cases finally stopped it. The Kentishmen and
the South-Saxons were brought utterly to a standstill by the
Andredsweald. The East-Saxons could never pierce the woods of their
western border. The Fens proved impassable to the Northfolk and the
Southfolk of East-Anglia. It was only after a long and terrible struggle
that the West-Saxons could hew their way through the forests which
sheltered the "Gwent" of the southern coast. Their attempt to break out
of the circle of woodland which girt in the downs was in fact fruitless
for thirty years; and in the height of their later power they were thrown
back from the forests of Cheshire.
[Sidenote: Withdrawal of the Britons]
It is only by realizing in this way the physical as well as the moral
circumstances of Britain that we can understand the character of its
earlier conquest. Field by field, town by town, forest by forest, the
land was won. And as each bit of ground was torn away by the stranger,
the Briton sullenly withdrew from it only to turn doggedly and fight for
the next. There is no need to believe that the clearing of the land meant
so impossible a thing as the general slaughter of the men who held it.
Slaughter there was, no doubt, on the battle-field or in towns like
Anderida whose long resistance woke wrath in their besiegers. But for the
most part the Britons were not slaughtered; they were defeated and drew
back. Such a withdrawal was only made possible by the slowness of the
conquest. For it is not only the stoutness of its defence which
distinguishes the conquest of Britain from that of the other provinces of
the Empire, but the weakness of attack. As the resistance of the Britons
was greater than that of the other provincials of Rome so the forces of
their assailants were less. Attack by sea was less easy than attack by
land, and the numbers who were brought across by the boats of Hengest or
Cerdic cannot have rivalled those which followed Theodoric or Chlodewig
across the Alps or the Rhine. Landing in small parties, and but gradually
reinforced by after-comers, the English invaders could only slowly and
fitfully push the Britons back. The absence of any joint action among the
assailants told in the same way. Though all spoke the same language and
used the same laws, they had no such bond of political union as the
Franks; and though all were bent on winning the same land, each band and
each leader preferred their own separate course of action to any
collective enterprise.
[Sidenote: The English settlement]
Under such conditions the overrunning of Britain could not fail to be a
very different matter from the rapid and easy overrunning of such
countries as Gaul. How slow the work of English conquest was may be seen
from the fact that it took nearly thirty years to win Kent alone, and
sixty to complete the conquest of Southern Britain, and that the conquest
of the bulk of the island was only wrought out after two centuries of
bitter warfare. But it was just through the length of the struggle that
of all the German conquests this proved the most thorough and complete.
So far as the English sword in these earlier days had reached, Britain
had become England, a land, that is, not of Britons but of Englishmen.
Even if a few of the vanquished people lingered as slaves round the
homesteads of their English conquerors, or a few of their household words
mingled with the English tongue, doubtful exceptions such as these leave
the main facts untouched. The keynote of the conquest was firmly struck.
When the English invasion was stayed for a while by the civil wars of the
invaders, the Briton had disappeared from the greater part of the land
which had been his own; and the tongue, the religion, the laws of his
English conquerors reigned without a break from Essex to Staffordshire
and from the British Channel to the Firth of Forth.
[Illustration: The English Kingdoms in A.D. 600 (v1-map-2t.jpg)]
For the driving out of the Briton was, as we have seen, but a prelude to
the settlement of his conqueror. What strikes us at once in the new
England is this, that it was the one purely German nation that rose upon
the wreck of Rome. In other lands, in Spain or Gaul or Italy, though they
were equally conquered by German peoples, religion, social life,
administrative order, still remained Roman. Britain was almost the only
province of the Empire where Rome died into a vague tradition of the
past. The whole organization of government and society disappeared with
the people who used it. Roman roads indeed still led to desolate cities.
Roman camps still crowned hill and down. The old divisions of the land
remained to furnish bounds of field and farm for the new settlers. The
Roman church, the Roman country-house, was left standing, though reft of
priest and lord. But Rome was gone. The mosaics, the coins which we dig
up in our fields are no relics of our English fathers, but of a world
which our fathers' sword swept utterly away. Its law, its literature, its
manners, its faith, went with it. Nothing was a stronger proof of the
completeness of this destruction of all Roman life than the religious
change which passed over the land. Alone among the German assailants of
Rome the English stood aloof from the faith of the Empire they helped to
overthrow. The new England was a heathen country. Homestead and boundary,
the very days of the week, bore the names of new gods who displaced
Christ.
As we stand amidst the ruins of town or country-house which recall to us
the wealth and culture of Roman Britain, it is hard to believe that a
conquest which left them heaps of crumbling stones was other than a curse
to the land over which it passed. But if the new England which sprang
from the wreck of Britain seemed for the moment a waste from which the
arts, the letters, the refinement of the world had fled hopelessly away,
it contained within itself germs of a nobler life than that which had
been destroyed. The base of Roman society here as everywhere throughout
the Roman world was the slave, the peasant who had been crushed by
tyranny, political and social, into serfdom. The base of the new English
society was the freeman whom we have seen tilling, judging, or fighting
for himself by the Northern Sea. However roughly he dealt with the
material civilization of Britain while the struggle went on, it was
impossible that such a man could be a mere destroyer. War in fact was no
sooner over than the warrior settled down into the farmer, and the home
of the ceorl rose beside the heap of goblin-haunted stones that marked
the site of the villa he had burned. The settlement of the English in the
conquered land was nothing less than an absolute transfer of English
society in its completest form to the soil of Britain. The slowness of
their advance, the small numbers of each separate band in its descent
upon the coast, made it possible for the invaders to bring with them, or
to call to them when their work was done, the wives and children, the læt
and slave, even the cattle they had left behind them. The first wave of
conquest was but the prelude to the gradual migration of a whole people.
It was England which settled down on British soil, England with its own
language, its own laws, its complete social fabric, its system of village
life and village culture, its township and its hundred, its principle of
kinship, its principle of representation. It was not as mere pirates or
stray war-bands, but as peoples already made, and fitted by a common
temper and common customs to draw together into our English nation in the
days to come, that our fathers left their German home-land for the land
in which we live. Their social and political organization remained
radically unchanged. In each of the little kingdoms which rose on the
wreck of Britain, the host camped on the land it had won, and the
divisions of the host supplied here as in its older home the rough
groundwork of local distribution. The land occupied by the hundred
warriors who formed the unit of military organization became perhaps the
local hundred; but it is needless to attach any notion of precise
uniformity, either in the number of settlers or in the area of their
settlement, to such a process as this, any more than to the army
organization which the process of distribution reflected. From the large
amount of public land which we find existing afterwards it has been
conjectured with some probability that the number of settlers was far too
small to occupy the whole of the country at their disposal, and this
unoccupied ground became "folk-land," the common property of the tribe as
at a later time of the nation. What ground was actually occupied may have
been assigned to each group and each family in the group by lot, and Eorl
and Ceorl gathered round them their læt and slave as in their homeland by
the Rhine or the Elbe. And with the English people passed to the shores
of Britain all that was to make Englishmen what they are. For distant and
dim as their life in that older England may have seemed to us, the whole
after-life of Englishmen was there. In its village-moots lay our
Parliament; in the gleeman of its village-feasts our Chaucer and our
Shakspere; in the pirate-bark stealing from creek to creek our Drakes and
our Nelsons. Even the national temper was fully formed. Civilization,
letters, science, religion itself, have done little to change the inner
mood of Englishmen. That love of venture and of toil, of the sea and the
fight, that trust in manhood and the might of man, that silent awe of the
mysteries of life and death which lay deep in English souls then as now,
passed with Englishmen to the land which Englishmen had won.
[Sidenote: The King]
But though English society passed thus in its completeness to the soil of
Britain, its primitive organization was affected in more ways than one by
the transfer. In the first place conquest begat the King. It seems
probable that the English had hitherto known nothing of kings in their
own fatherland, where each tribe was satisfied in peace time with the
customary government of village-reeve and hundred-reeve and ealdonnan,
while it gathered at fighting times under war leaders whom it chose for
each campaign. But in the long and obstinate warfare which they waged
against the Britons it was needful to find a common leader whom the
various tribes engaged in conquests such as those of Wessex or Mercia
might follow; and the ceaseless character of a struggle which left few
intervals of rest or peace raised these leaders into a higher position
than that of temporary chieftains. It was no doubt from this cause that
we find Hengest and his son Æsc raised to the kingdom in Kent, or Ælle in
Sussex, or Cerdic and Cynric among the West Saxons. The association of
son with father in this new kingship marked the hereditary character
which distinguished it from the temporary office of an ealdorman. The
change was undoubtedly a great one, but it was less than the modern
conception of kingship would lead us to imagine. Hereditary as the
succession was within a single house, each successive king was still the
free choice of his people, and for centuries to come it was held within a
people's right to pass over a claimant too weak or too wicked for the
throne. In war indeed the king was supreme. But in peace his power was
narrowly bounded by the customs of his people and the rede of his wise
men. Justice was not as yet the king's justice, it was the justice of
village and hundred and folk in town-moot and hundred-moot and folk-moot.
It was only with the assent of the wise men that the king could make laws
and declare war and assign public lands and name public officers. Above
all, should his will be to break through the free customs of his people,
he was without the means of putting his will into action, for the one
force he could call on was the host, and the host was the people itself
in arms.
[Sidenote: The Thegn]
With the new English king rose a new order of English nobles. The social
distinction of the eorl was founded on the peculiar purity of his blood,
on his long descent from the original settler around whom township and
thorpe grew up. A new distinction was now to be found in service done to
the king. From the earliest times of German society it had been the wont
of young men greedy of honour or seeking training in arms to bind
themselves as "comrades" to king or chief. The leader whom they chose
gave them horses, arms, a seat in his mead hall, and gifts from his
hoard. The "comrade" on the other hand--the gesith or thegn, as he was
called--bound himself to follow and fight for his lord. The principle of
personal dependence as distinguished from the warrior's general duty to
the folk at large was embodied in the thegn. "Chieftains fight for
victory," says Tacitus; "comrades for their chieftain." When one of
Beowulf's "comrades" saw his lord hard bested "he minded him of the
homestead he had given him, of the folk right he gave him as his father
had it; nor might he hold back then." Snatching up sword and shield he
called on his fellow-thegns to follow him to the fight. "I mind me of the
day," he cried, "when we drank the mead, the day we gave pledge to our
lord in the beer hall as he gave us these rings, our pledge that we would
pay him back our war-gear, our helms and our hard swords, if need befel
him. Unmeet is it, methinks, that we should bear back our shields to our
home unless we guard our lord's life." The larger the band of such
"comrades," the more power and repute it gave their lord. It was from
among the chiefs whose war-band was strongest that the leaders of the
host were commonly chosen; and as these leaders grew into kings, the
number of their thegns naturally increased. The rank of the "comrades"
too rose with the rise of their lord. The king's thegns were his
body-guard, the one force ever ready to carry out his will. They were his
nearest and most constant counsellors. As the gathering of petty tribes
into larger kingdoms swelled the number of eorls in each realm, and in a
corresponding degree diminished their social importance, it raised in
equal measure the rank of the king's thegns. A post among them was soon
coveted and won by the greatest and noblest in the land. Their service
was rewarded by exemption from the general jurisdiction of hundred-court
or shire-court, for it was part of a thegn's meed for his service that he
should be judged only by the lord he served. Other meed was found in
grants of public land which made them a local nobility, no longer bound
to actual service in the king's household or the king's war-band, but
still bound to him by personal ties of allegiance far closer than those
which bound an eorl to the chosen war-leader of his tribe. In a word,
thegnhood contained within itself the germ of that later feudalism which
was to battle so fiercely with the Teutonic freedom out of which it grew.
[Sidenote: The Bernicians]
But the strife between the conquering tribes which at once followed on
their conquest of Britain was to bring about changes even more momentous
in the development of the English people. While Jute and Saxon and Engle
were making themselves masters of central and southern Britain, the
English who had landed on its northernmost shores had been slowly winning
for themselves the coast district between the Forth and the Tyne which
bore the name of Bernicia. Their progress seems to have been small till
they were gathered into a kingdom in 547 by Ida the "Flame-bearer," who
found a site for his King's town on the impregnable rock of Bamborough;
nor was it till the reign of his fourth son Æthelric that they gained
full mastery over the Britons along their western border. But once
masters of the Britons the Bernician Englishmen turned to conquer their
English neighbours to the south, the men of Deira, whose first King Ælla
was now sinking to the grave. The struggle filled the foreign markets
with English slaves, and one of the most memorable stories in our history
shows us a group of such captives as they stood in the market-place at
Rome, it may be in the great Forum of Trajan, which still in its decay
recalled the glories of the Imperial City. Their white bodies, their fair
faces, their golden hair was noted by a deacon who passed by. "From what
country do these slaves come?" Gregory asked the trader who brought them.
The slave-dealer answered "They are English," or as the word ran in the
Latin form it would bear at Rome, "they are Angles." The deacon's pity
veiled itself in poetic humour. "Not Angles but Angels," he said, "with
faces so angel-like! From what country come they?" "They come," said the
merchant, "from Deira." "_De irâ!_" was the untranslatable wordplay of
the vivacious Roman--"aye, plucked from God's ire and called to Christ's
mercy! And what is the name of their king?" They told him "Ælla," and
Gregory seized on the word as of good omen. "Alleluia shall be sung in
Ælla's land," he said, and passed on, musing how the angel-faces should
be brought to sing it.
While Gregory was thus playing with Ælla's name the old king passed away,
and with his death in 588 the resistance of his kingdom seems to have
ceased. His children fled over the western border to find refuge among
the Welsh, and Æthelric of Bernicia entered Deira in triumph. A new age
of our history opens in this submission of one English people to another.
When the two kingdoms were united under a common lord the period of
national formation began. If a new England sprang out of the mass of
English states which covered Britain after its conquest, we owe it to the
gradual submission of the smaller peoples to the supremacy of a common
political head. The difference in power between state and state which
inevitably led to this process of union was due to the character which
the conquest of Britain was now assuming. Up to this time all the
kingdoms which had been established by the invaders had stood in the main
on a footing of equality. All had taken an independent share in the work
of conquest. Though the oneness of a common blood and a common speech was
recognized by all we find no traces of any common action or common rule.
Even in the two groups of kingdoms, the five English and the five Saxon
kingdoms, which occupied Britain south of the Humber, the relations of
each member of the group to its fellows seem to have been merely local.
It was only locally that East and West and South and North English were
grouped round the Middle English of Leicester, or East and West and South
and North Saxons round the Middle Saxons about London. In neither
instance do we find any real trace of a confederacy, or of the rule of
one member of the group over the others; while north of the Humber the
feeling between the Englishmen of Yorkshire and the Englishmen who had
settled towards the Firth of Forth was one of hostility rather than of
friendship. But this age of isolation, of equality, of independence, had
now come to an end. The progress of the conquest had drawn a sharp line
between the kingdoms of the conquerors. The work of half of them was
done. In the south of the island not only Kent but Sussex, Essex, and
Middlesex were surrounded by English territory, and hindered by that
single fact from all further growth. The same fate had befallen the East
Engle, the South Engle, the Middle and the North Engle. The West Saxons,
on the other hand, and the West Engle, or Mercians, still remained free
to conquer and expand on the south of the Humber, as the Englishmen of
Deira and Bernicia remained free to the north of that river. It was
plain, therefore, that from this moment the growth of these powers would
throw their fellow kingdoms into the background, and that with an
ever-growing inequality of strength must come a new arrangement of
political forces. The greater kingdoms would in the end be drawn to
subject and absorb the lesser ones, and to the war between Englishman and
Briton would be added a struggle between Englishman and Englishman.
[Sidenote: Kent]
It was through this struggle and the establishment of a lordship on the
part of the stronger and growing states over their weaker and stationary
fellows that the English kingdoms were to make their first step towards
union in a single England. Such an overlordship seemed destined but a few
years before to fall to the lot of Wessex. The victories of Ceawlin and
Cuthwulf left it the most powerful of the English kingdoms. None of its
fellow states seemed able to hold their own against a power which
stretched from the Chilterns to the Severn and from the Channel to the
Ouse. But after its defeat in the march upon Chester Wessex suddenly
broke down into a chaos of warring tribes; and her place was taken by two
powers whose rise to greatness was as sudden as her fall. The first of
these was Kent. The Kentish king Æthelberht found himself hemmed in on
every side by English territory; and since conquest over Britons was
denied him he sought a new sphere of action in setting his kingdom at the
head of the conquerors of the south. The break up of Wessex no doubt
aided his attempt; but we know little of the causes or events which
brought about his success. We know only that the supremacy of the Kentish
king was owned at last by the English peoples of the east and centre of
Britain. But it was not by her political action that Kent was in the end
to further the creation of a single England; for the lordship which
Æthelberht built up was doomed to fall for ever with his death, and yet
his death left Kent the centre of a national union far wider as it was
far more enduring than the petty lordship which stretched over Eastern
Britain. Only three or four years after Gregory had pitied the English
slaves in the market-place of Rome, he found himself as Bishop of the
Imperial City in a position to carry out his dream of winning Britain to
the faith; and an opening was given him by Æthelberht's marriage with
Bertha, a daughter of the Frankish king Charibert of Paris. Bertha like
her Frankish kindred was a Christian; a Christian bishop accompanied her
from Gaul; and a ruined Christian church, the church of St. Martin beside
the royal city of Canterbury, was given them for their worship. The king
himself remained true to the gods of his fathers; but his marriage no
doubt encouraged Gregory to send a Roman abbot, Augustine, at the head of
a band of monks to preach the Gospel to the English people. The
missionaries landed in 597 in the Isle of Thanet, at the spot where
Hengest had landed more than a century before; and Æthelberht received
them sitting in the open air on the chalk-down above Minster, where the
eye nowadays catches miles away over the marshes the dim tower of
Canterbury. The king listened patiently to the long sermon of Augustine
as the interpreters the abbot had brought with him from Gaul rendered it
in the English tongue. "Your words are fair," Æthelberht replied at last
with English good sense, "but they are new and of doubtful meaning." For
himself, he said, he refused to forsake the gods of his fathers, but with
the usual religious tolerance of the German race he promised shelter and
protection to the strangers. The band of monks entered Canterbury bearing
before them a silver cross with a picture of Christ, and singing in
concert the strains of the litany of their Church. "Turn from this city,
O Lord," they sang, "Thine anger and wrath, and turn it from Thy holy
house, for we have sinned." And then in strange contrast came the
jubilant cry of the older Hebrew worship, the cry which Gregory had
wrested in prophetic earnestness from the name of the Yorkshire king in
the Roman market-place, "Alleluia!"
[Sidenote: Christian England]
It was thus that the spot which witnessed the landing of Hengest became
yet better known as the landing-place of Augustine. But the second
landing at Ebbsfleet was in no small measure a reversal and undoing of
the first. "Strangers from Rome" was the title with which the
missionaries first fronted the English king. The march of the monks as
they chaunted their solemn litany was in one sense a return of the Roman
legions who withdrew at the trumpet-call of Alaric. It was to the tongue
and the thought not of Gregory only but of the men whom his Jutish
fathers had slaughtered or driven out that Æthelberht listened in the
preaching of Augustine. Canterbury, the earliest royal city of German
England, became a centre of Latin influence. The Roman tongue became
again one of the tongues of Britain, the language of its worship, its
correspondence, its literature. But more than the tongue of Rome returned
with Augustine. Practically his landing renewed that union with the
Western world which the landing of Hengest had destroyed. The new England
was admitted into the older commonwealth of nations. The civilization,
art, letters, which had fled before the sword of the English conquerors
returned with the Christian faith. The fabric of the Roman law indeed
never took root in England, but it is impossible not to recognize the
result of the influence of the Roman missionaries in the fact that codes
of the customary English law began to be put in writing soon after their
arrival.
[Sidenote: Æthelfrith]
A year passed before Æthelberht yielded to the preaching of Augustine.
But from the moment of his conversion the new faith advanced rapidly and
the Kentish men crowded to baptism in the train of their king. The new
religion was carried beyond the bounds of Kent by the supremacy which
Æthelberht wielded over the neighbouring kingdoms. Sæberht, King of the
East-Saxons, received a bishop sent in 604 from Kent, and suffered him to
build up again a Christian church in what was now his subject city of
London, while soon after the East-Anglian king Rædwald resolved to serve
Christ and the older gods together. But while Æthelberht was thus
furnishing a future centre of spiritual unity in Canterbury, the see to
which Augustine was consecrated, the growth of Northumbria was pointing
it out as the coming political centre of the new England. In 593, four
years before the landing of the missionaries in Kent, Æthelric was
succeeded by his son Æthelfrith, and the new king took up the work of
conquest with a vigour greater than had yet been shown by any English
leader. For ten years he waged war with the Britons of Strathclyde, a
tract which stretched along his western border from Dumbarton to
Carlisle. The contest ended in a great battle at Dægsastan, perhaps
Dawston in Liddesdale; and Æthelfrith turned to deliver a yet more
crushing blow on his southern border. British kingdoms still stretched
from Clyde-mouth to the mouth of Severn; and had their line remained
unbroken the British resistance might yet have withstood the English
advance. It was with a sound political instinct therefore that Æthelfrith
marched in 613 upon Chester, the point where the kingdom of Cumbria, a
kingdom which stretched from the Lune to the Dee, linked itself to the
British states of what we now call Wales. Hard by the city two thousand
monks were gathered in one of those vast religious settlements which were
characteristic of Celtic Christianity, and after a three days' fast a
crowd of these ascetics followed the British army to the field.
Æthelfrith watched the wild gestures of the monks as they stood apart
from the host with arms outstretched in prayer, and bade his men slay
them in the coming fight. "Bear they arms or no," said the King, "they
war against us when they cry against us to their God," and in the
surprise and rout which followed the monks were the first to fall.
With the battle of Chester Britain as a country ceased to exist. By their
victory at Deorham the West-Saxons had cut off the Britons of Dyvnaint,
of our Devon, Dorset, Somerset, and Cornwall, from the general body of
their race. By Æthelfrith's victory at Chester and the reduction of
southern Lancashire which followed it what remained of Britain was broken
into two several parts. From this time therefore the character of the
English conquest of Britain changes. The warfare of Briton and Englishman
died down into a warfare of separate English kingdoms against separate
British kingdoms, of Northumbria against the Cumbrians and Strathclyde,
of Mercia against the Welsh between Anglesea and the British Channel, of
Wessex against the tract of country from Mendip to the Land's End. But
great as was the importance of the battle of Chester to the fortunes of
Britain, it was of still greater importance to the fortunes of England
itself. The drift towards national unity had already begun, but from the
moment of Æthelfrith's victory this drift became the main current of our
history. Masters of the larger and richer part of the land, its
conquerors were no longer drawn greedily westward by the hope of plunder;
while the severance of the British kingdoms took from their enemies the
pressure of a common danger. The conquests of Æthelfrith left him without
a rival in military power, and he turned from victories over the Welsh,
as their English foes called the Britons, to the building up of a
lordship over his own countrymen.
[Sidenote: Eadwine]
The power of Æthelberht seems to have declined with old age, and though
the Essex men still owned his supremacy, the English tribes of
Mid-Britain shook it off. So strong however had the instinct of union now
become, that we hear nothing of any return to their old isolation.
Mercians and Southumbrians, Middle-English and South-English now owned
the lordship of the East-English King Rædwald. The shelter given by
Rædwald to Ælla's son Eadwine served as a pretext for a Northumbrian
attack. Fortune however deserted Æthelfrith, and a snatch of northern
song still tells of the day when the river Idle by Retford saw his defeat
and fall. But the greatness of Northumbria survived its king. In 617
Eadwine was welcomed back by his own men of Deira; and his conquest of
Bernicia maintained that union of the two realms which the Bernician
conquest of Deira had first brought about. The greatness of Northumbria
now reached its height. Within his own dominions, Eadwine displayed a
genius for civil government which shows how utterly the mere age of
conquest had passed away. With him began the English proverb so often
applied to after kings: "A woman with her babe might walk scatheless from
sea to sea in Eadwine's day." Peaceful communication revived along the
deserted highways; the springs by the roadside were marked with stakes,
and a cup of brass set beside each for the traveller's refreshment. Some
faint traditions of the Roman past may have flung their glory round this
new "Empire of the English"; a royal standard of purple and gold floated
before Eadwine as he rode through the villages; a feather tuft attached
to a spear, the Roman tufa, preceded him as he walked through the
streets. The Northumbrian king became in fact supreme over Britain as no
king of English blood had been before. Northward his frontier reached to
the Firth of Forth, and here, if we trust tradition, Eadwine founded a
city which bore his name, Edinburgh, Eadwine's burgh. To the west his
arms crushed the long resistance of Elmet, the district about Leeds; he
was master of Chester, and the fleet he equipped there subdued the isles
of Anglesea and Man. South of the Humber he was owned as overlord by the
five English states of Mid-Britain. The West-Saxons remained awhile
independent. But revolt and slaughter had fatally broken their power when
Eadwine attacked them. A story preserved by Bæda tells something of the
fierceness of the struggle which ended in the subjection of the south to
the overlordship of Northumbria. In an Easter-court which he held in his
royal city by the river Derwent, Eadwine gave audience to Eumer, an envoy
of Wessex, who brought a message from its king. In the midst of the
conference Eumer started to his feet, drew a dagger from his robe, and
rushed on the Northumbrian sovereign. Lilla, one of the king's war-band,
threw himself between Eadwine and his assassin; but so furious was the
stroke that even through Lilla's body the dagger still reached its aim.
The king however recovered from his wound to march on the West-Saxons; he
slew or subdued all who had conspired against him, and returned
victorious to his own country.
[Sidenote: Conversion of Northumbria]
Kent had bound itself to him by giving him its King's daughter as a wife,
a step which probably marked political subordination; and with the
Kentish queen had come Paulinus, one of Augustine's followers, whose tall
stooping form, slender aquiline nose, and black hair falling round a thin
worn face, were long remembered in the North. Moved by his queen's
prayers Eadwine promised to become Christian if he returned successful
from Wessex; and the wise men of Northumbria gathered to deliberate on
the new faith to which he bowed. To finer minds its charm lay then as now
in the light it threw on the darkness which encompassed men's lives, the
darkness of the future as of the past. "So seems the life of man, O
king," burst forth an aged ealdorman, "as a sparrow's flight through the
hall when one is sitting at meat in winter-tide with the warm fire
lighted on the hearth but the icy rain-storm without. The sparrow flies
in at one door and tarries for a moment in the light and heat of the
hearth-fire, and then flying forth from the other vanishes into the
darkness whence it came. So tarries for a moment the life of man in our
sight, but what is before it, what after it, we know not. If this new
teaching tell us aught certainly of these, let us follow it." Coarser
argument told on the crowd. "None of your people, Eadwine, have
worshipped the gods more busily than I," said Coifi the priest, "yet
there are many more favoured and more fortunate. Were these gods good for
anything they would help their worshippers." Then leaping on horseback,
he hurled his spear into the sacred temple at Godmanham, and with the
rest of the Witan embraced the religion of the king.
[Sidenote: Penda]
But the faith of Woden and Thunder was not to fall without a struggle.
Even in Kent a reaction against the new creed began with the death of
Æthelberht. The young kings of the East-Saxons burst into the church
where the Bishop of London was administering the Eucharist to the people,
crying, "Give us that white bread you gave to our father Saba," and on
the bishop's refusal drove him from their realm. This earlier tide of
reaction was checked by Eadwine's conversion; but Mercia, which had as
yet owned the supremacy of Northumbria, sprang into a sudden greatness as
the champion of the heathen gods. Its king, Penda, saw in the rally of
the old religion a chance of winning back his people's freedom and giving
it the lead among the tribes about it. Originally mere settlers along the
Upper Trent, the position of the Mercians on the Welsh border invited
them to widen their possessions by conquest while the rest of their
Anglian neighbours were shut off from any chance of expansion. Their
fights along the frontier too kept their warlike energy at its height.
Penda must have already asserted his superiority over the four other
English tribes of Mid-Britain before he could have ventured to attack
Wessex and tear from it in 628 the country of the Hwiccas and Magesætas
on the Severn. Even with this accession of strength however he was still
no match for Northumbria. But the war of the English people with the
Britons seems at this moment to have died down for a season, and the
Mercian ruler boldly broke through the barrier which had parted the two
races till now by allying himself with a Welsh King, Cadwallon, for a
joint attack on Eadwine. The armies met in 633 at a place called the
Heathfield, and in the fight which followed Eadwine was defeated and
slain.
[Sidenote: Oswald]
Bernicia seized on the fall of Eadwine to recall the line of Æthelfrith
to its throne; and after a year of anarchy his second son, Oswald, became
its king. The Welsh had remained encamped in the heart of the north, and
Oswald's first fight was with Cadwallon. A small Northumbrian force
gathered in 635 near the Roman Wall, and pledged itself at the new King's
bidding to become Christian if it conquered in the fight. Cadwallon fell
fighting on the "Heaven's Field," as after times called the field of
battle; the submission of Deira to the conqueror restored the kingdom of
Northumbria; and for seven years the power of Oswald equalled that of
Eadwine. It was not the Church of Paulinus which nerved Oswald to this
struggle for the Cross, or which carried out in Bernicia the work of
conversion which his victory began. Paulinus fled from Northumbria at
Eadwine's fall; and the Roman Church, though established in Kent, did
little in contending elsewhere against the heathen reaction. Its place in
the conversion of northern England was taken by missionaries from
Ireland. To understand the true meaning of this change we must remember
how greatly the Christian Church in the west had been affected by the
German invasion. Before the landing of the English in Britain the
Christian Church stretched in an unbroken line across Western Europe to
the furthest coasts of Ireland. The conquest of Britain by the pagan
English thrust a wedge of heathendom into the heart of this great
communion and broke it into two unequal parts. On one side lay Italy,
Spain, and Gaul, whose churches owned obedience to and remained in direct
contact with the See of Rome, on the other, practically cut off from the
general body of Christendom, lay the Church of Ireland. But the condition
of the two portions of Western Christendom was very different. While the
vigour of Christianity in Italy and Gaul and Spain was exhausted in a
bare struggle for life, Ireland, which remained unscourged by invaders,
drew from its conversion an energy such as it has never known since.
Christianity was received there with a burst of popular enthusiasm, and
letters and arts sprang up rapidly in its train. The science and Biblical
knowledge which fled from the Continent took refuge in its schools. The
new Christian life soon beat too strongly to brook confinement within the
bounds of Ireland itself. Patrick, the first missionary of the island,
had not been half a century dead when Irish Christianity flung itself
with a fiery zeal into battle with the mass of heathenism which was
rolling in upon the Christian world. Irish missionaries laboured among
the Picts of the Highlands and among the Frisians of the northern seas.
An Irish missionary, Columban, founded monasteries in Burgundy and the
Apennines. The canton of St. Gall still commemorates in its name another
Irish missionary before whom the spirits of flood and fell fled wailing
over the waters of the Lake of Constance. For a time it seemed as if the
course of the world's history was to be changed, as if the older Celtic
race that Roman and German had swept before them had turned to the moral
conquest of their conquerors, as if Celtic and not Latin Christianity was
to mould the destinies of the Churches of the West.
[Sidenote: Aidan]
On a low island of barren gneiss-rock off the west coast of Scotland an
Irish refugee, Columba, had raised the famous mission-station of Iona. It
was within its walls that Oswald in youth found refuge, and on his
accession to the throne of Northumbria he called for missionaries from
among its monks. The first preacher sent in answer to his call obtained
little success. He declared on his return that among a people so stubborn
and barbarous as the Northumbrian folk success was impossible. "Was it
their stubbornness or your severity?" asked Aidan, a brother sitting by;
"did you forget God's word to give them the milk first and then the
meat?" All eyes turned on the speaker as fittest to undertake the
abandoned mission, and Aidan sailing at their bidding fixed his bishop's
see in the island-peninsula of Lindisfarne. Thence, from a monastery
which gave to the spot its after name of Holy Island, preachers poured
forth over the heathen realms. Aidan himself wandered on foot, preaching
among the peasants of Yorkshire and Northumbria. In his own court the
King acted as interpreter to the Irish missionaries in their efforts to
convert his thegns. A new conception of kingship indeed began to blend
itself with that of the warlike glory of Æthelfrith or the wise
administration of Eadwine, and the moral power which was to reach its
height in Ælfred first dawns in the story of Oswald. For after times the
memory of Oswald's greatness was lost in the memory of his piety. "By
reason of his constant habit of praying or giving thanks to the Lord he
was wont wherever he sat to hold his hands upturned on his knees." As he
feasted with Bishop Aidan by his side, the thegn, or noble of his
war-band, whom he had set to give alms to the poor at his gate told him
of a multitude that still waited fasting without. The king at once bade
the untasted meat before him be carried to the poor, and his silver dish
be parted piecemeal among them. Aidan seized the royal hand and blessed
it. "May this hand," he cried, "never grow old."
Oswald's lordship stretched as widely over Britain as that of his
predecessor Eadwine. In him even more than in Eadwine men saw some faint
likeness of the older Emperors; once indeed a writer from the land of the
Picts calls Oswald "Emperor of the whole of Britain." His power was bent
to carry forward the conversion of all England, but prisoned as it was to
the central districts of the country heathendom fought desperately for
life. Penda was still its rallying-point. His long reign was one
continuous battle with the new religion; but it was a battle rather with
the supremacy of Christian Northumbria than with the supremacy of the
Cross. East-Anglia became at last the field of contest between the two
powers; and in 642 Oswald marched to deliver it from the Mercian rule.
But his doom was the doom of Eadwine, and in a battle called the battle
of the Maserfeld he was overthrown and slain. For a few years after his
victory at the Maserfeld, Penda stood supreme in Britain. Heathenism
triumphed with him. If Wessex did not own his overlordship as it had
owned that of Oswald, its king threw off the Christian faith which he had
embraced but a few years back at the preaching of Birinus. Even Deira
seems to have owned Penda's sway. Bernicia alone, though distracted by
civil war between rival claimants for its throne, refused to yield. Year
by year the Mercian king carried his ravages over the north; once he
reached even the royal city, the impregnable rock-fortress of Bamborough.
Despairing of success in an assault, he pulled down the cottages around,
and piling their wood against its walls fired the mass in a fair wind
that drove the flames on the town. "See, Lord, what ill Penda is doing,"
cried Aidan from his hermit cell in the islet of Farne, as he saw the
smoke drifting over the city, and a change of wind--so ran the legend of
Northumbria's agony--drove back the flames on those who kindled them. But
burned and harried as it was, Bernicia still clung to the Cross. Oswiu, a
third son of Æthelfrith, held his ground stoutly against Penda's inroads
till their cessation enabled him to build up again the old Northumbrian
kingdom by a march upon Deira. The union of the two realms was never
henceforth to be dissolved; and its influence was at once seen in the
renewal of Christianity throughout Britain. East-Anglia, conquered as it
was, had clung to its faith. Wessex quietly became Christian again.
Penda's own son, whom he had set over the Middle-English, received
baptism and teachers from Lindisfarne. At last the missionaries of the
new belief appeared fearlessly among the Mercians themselves. Penda gave
them no hindrance. In words that mark the temper of a man of whom we
would willingly know more, Bæda tells us that the old king only "hated
and scorned those whom he saw not doing the works of the faith they had
received." His attitude shows that Penda looked with the tolerance of his
race on all questions of creed, and that he was fighting less for
heathenism than for political independence. And now the growing power of
Oswiu called him to the old struggle with Northumbria. In 655 he met
Oswiu in the field of Winwæd by Leeds. It was in vain that the
Northumbrian sought to avert Penda's attack by offers of ornaments and
costly gifts. "If the pagans will not accept them," Oswiu cried at last,
"let us offer them to One that will"; and he vowed that if successful he
would dedicate his daughter to God, and endow twelve monasteries in his
realm. Victory at last declared for the faith of Christ. Penda himself
fell on the field. The river over which the Mercians fled was swollen
with a great rain; it swept away the fragments of the heathen host, and
the cause of the older gods was lost for ever.
[Sidenote: Oswiu]
The terrible struggle between heathendom and Christianity was followed by
a long and profound peace. For three years after the battle of Winwæd
Mercia was governed by Northumbrian thegns in Oswiu's name. The winning
of central England was a victory for Irish Christianity as well as for
Oswiu. Even in Mercia itself heathendom was dead with Penda. "Being thus
freed," Bæda tells us, "the Mercians with their King rejoiced to serve
the true King, Christ." Its three provinces, the earlier Mercia, the
Middle-English, and the Lindiswaras, were united in the bishopric of the
missionary Ceadda, the St. Chad to whom Lichfield is still dedicated.
Ceadda was a monk of Lindisfarne, so simple and lowly in temper that he
travelled on foot on his long mission journeys till Archbishop Theodore
with his own hands lifted him on horseback. The old Celtic poetry breaks
out in his death-legend, as it tells us how voices of singers singing
sweetly descended from heaven to the little cell beside St. Mary's Church
where the bishop lay dying. Then "the same song ascended from the roof
again, and returned heavenward by the way that it came." It was the soul
of his brother, the missionary Cedd, come with a choir of angels to
solace the last hours of Ceadda.
[Sidenote: Cuthbert]
In Northumbria the work of his fellow missionaries has almost been lost
in the glory of Cuthbert. No story better lights up for us the new
religious life of the time than the story of this Apostle of the
Lowlands. Born on the southern edge of the Lammermoor, Cuthbert found
shelter at eight years old in a widow's house in the little village of
Wrangholm. Already in youth his robust frame hid a poetic sensibility
which caught even in the chance word of a game a call to higher things,
and a passing attack of lameness deepened the religious impression. A
traveller coming in his white mantle over the hillside and stopping his
horse to tend Cuthbert's injured knee seemed to him an angel. The boy's
shepherd life carried him to the bleak upland, still famous as a
sheepwalk, though a scant herbage scarce veils the whinstone rock. There
meteors plunging into the night became to him a company of angelic
spirits carrying the soul of Bishop Aidan heavenward, and his longings
slowly settled into a resolute will towards a religious life. In 651 he
made his way to a group of straw-thatched log-huts, in the midst of an
untilled solitude, where a few Irish monks from Lindisfarne had settled
in the mission-station of Melrose. To-day the land is a land of poetry
and romance. Cheviot and Lammermoor, Ettrick and Teviotdale, Yarrow and
Annan-water, are musical with old ballads and border minstrelsy.
Agriculture has chosen its valleys for her favourite seat, and drainage
and steam-power have turned sedgy marshes into farm and meadow. But to
see the Lowlands as they were in Cuthbert's day we must sweep meadow and
farm away again, and replace them by vast solitudes, dotted here and
there with clusters of wooden hovels and crossed by boggy tracks, over
which travellers rode spear in hand and eye kept cautiously about them.
The Northumbrian peasantry among whom he journeyed were for the most part
Christians only in name. With Teutonic indifference they yielded to their
thegns in nominally accepting the new Christianity as these had yielded
to the king. But they retained their old superstitions side by side with
the new worship; plague or mishap drove them back to a reliance on their
heathen charms and amulets; and if trouble befell the Christian preachers
who came settling among them, they took it as proof of the wrath of the
older gods. When some log-rafts which were floating down the Tyne for the
construction of an abbey at its mouth drifted with the monks who were at
work on them out to sea, the rustic bystanders shouted, "Let nobody pray
for them; let nobody pity these men; for they have taken away from us our
old worship, and how their new-fangled customs are to be kept nobody
knows." On foot, on horseback, Cuthbert wandered among listeners such as
these, choosing above all the remoter mountain villages from whose
roughness and poverty other teachers turned aside. Unlike his Irish
comrades, he needed no interpreter as he passed from village to village;
the frugal, long-headed Northumbrians listened willingly to one who was
himself a peasant of the Lowlands, and who had caught the rough
Northumbrian burr along the banks of the Tweed. His patience, his
humorous good sense, the sweetness of his look, told for him, and not
less the stout vigorous frame which fitted the peasant-preacher for the
hard life he had chosen. "Never did man die of hunger who served God
faithfully," he would say, when nightfall found them supperless in the
waste. "Look at the eagle overhead! God can feed us through him if He
will"--and once at least he owed his meal to a fish that the scared bird
let fall. A snowstorm drove his boat on the coast of Fife. "The snow
closes the road along the shore," mourned his comrades; "the storm bars
our way over sea." "There is still the way of heaven that lies open,"
said Cuthbert.
[Sidenote: Cædmon]
While missionaries were thus labouring among its peasantry, Northumbria
saw the rise of a number of monasteries, not bound indeed by the strict
ties of the Benedictine rule, but gathered on the loose Celtic model of
the family or the clan round some noble and wealthy person who sought
devotional retirement. The most notable and wealthy of these houses was
that of Streoneshealh, where Hild, a woman of royal race, reared her
abbey on the cliffs of Whitby, looking out over the Northern Sea. Hild
was a Northumbrian Deborah whose counsel was sought even by kings; and
the double monastery over which she ruled became a seminary of bishops
and priests. The sainted John of Beverley was among her scholars. But the
name which really throws glory over Whitby is the name of a cowherd from
whose lips during the reign of Oswiu flowed the first great English song.
Though well advanced in years, Cædmon had learned nothing of the art of
verse, the alliterative jingle so common among his fellows, "wherefore
being sometimes at feasts, when all agreed for glee's sake to sing in
turn, he no sooner saw the harp come towards him than he rose from the
board and went homewards. Once when he had done thus, and gone from the
feast to the stable where he had that night charge of the cattle, there
appeared to him in his sleep One who said, greeting him by name, 'Sing,
Cædmon, some song to Me.' 'I cannot sing,' he answered; 'for this cause
left I the feast and came hither.' He who talked with him answered,
'However that be, you shall sing to Me.' 'What shall I sing?' rejoined
Cædmon. 'The beginning of created things,' replied He. In the morning the
cowherd stood before Hild and told his dream. Abbess and brethren alike
concluded 'that heavenly grace had been conferred on him by the Lord.'
They translated for Cædmon a passage in Holy Writ, 'bidding him, if he
could, put the same into verse.' The next morning he gave it them
composed in excellent verse, whereon the abbess, understanding the divine
grace in the man, bade him quit the secular habit and take on him the
monastic life." Piece by piece the sacred story was thus thrown into
Cædmon's poem. "He sang of the creation of the world, of the origin of
man, and of all the history of Israel; of their departure from Egypt and
entering into the Promised Land; of the incarnation, passion, and
resurrection of Christ, and of His ascension; of the terror of future
judgement, the horror of hell-pangs, and the joys of heaven."
[Sidenote: Synod of Whitby]
But even while Cædmon was singing the glories of Northumbria and of the
Irish Church were passing away. The revival of Mercia was as rapid as its
fall. Only a few years after Penda's defeat the Mercians threw off
Oswin's yoke and set Wulfhere, a son of Penda, on their throne. They were
aided in their revolt, no doubt, by a religious strife which was now
rending the Northumbrian realm. The labour of Aidan, the victories of
Oswald and Oswin, seemed to have annexed the north to the Irish Church.
The monks of Lindisfarne, or of the new religious houses whose foundation
followed that of Lindisfarne, looked for their ecclesiastical tradition,
not to Rome but to Ireland; and quoted for their guidance the
instructions, not of Gregory, but of Columba. Whatever claims of
supremacy over the whole English Church might be pressed by the see of
Canterbury, the real metropolitan of the Church as it existed in the
North of England was the Abbot of Iona. But Oswiu's queen brought with
her from Kent the loyalty of the Kentish Church to the Roman See; and the
visit of two young thegns to the Imperial City raised their love of Rome
into a passionate fanaticism. The elder of these, Benedict Biscop,
returned to denounce the usages in which the Irish Church differed from
the Roman as schismatic; and the vigour of his comrade Wilfrid stirred so
hot a strife that Oswiu was prevailed upon to summon in 664 a great
council at Whitby, where the future ecclesiastical allegiance of his
realm should be decided. The points actually contested were trivial
enough. Colman, Aidan's successor at Holy Island, pleaded for the Irish
fashion of the tonsure, and for the Irish time of keeping Easter: Wilfrid
pleaded for the Roman. The one disputant appealed to the authority of
Columba, the other to that of St. Peter. "You own," cried the king at
last to Colman, "that Christ gave to Peter the keys of the kingdom of
heaven--has He given such power to Columba?" The bishop could but answer
"No." "Then will I rather obey the porter of heaven," said Oswiu, "lest
when I reach its gates he who has the keys in his keeping turn his back
on me, and there be none to open." The humorous tone of Oswiu's decision
could not hide its importance, and the synod had no sooner broken up than
Colman, followed by the whole of the Irish-born brethren and thirty of
their English fellows, forsook the see of St. Aidan and sailed away to
Iona. Trivial in fact as were the actual points of difference which
severed the Roman Church from the Irish, the question to which communion
Northumbria should belong was of immense moment to the after fortunes of
England. Had the Church of Aidan finally won, the later ecclesiastical
history of England would probably have resembled that of Ireland. Devoid
of that power of organization which was the strength of the Roman Church,
the Celtic Church in its own Irish home took the clan system of the
country as the basis of its government. Tribal quarrels and
ecclesiastical controversies became inextricably confounded; and the
clergy, robbed of all really spiritual influence, contributed no element
save that of disorder to the state. Hundreds of wandering bishops, a vast
religious authority wielded by hereditary chieftains, the dissociation of
piety from morality, the absence of those larger and more humanizing
influences which contact with a wider world alone can give, this is a
picture which the Irish Church of later times presents to us. It was from
such a chaos as this that England was saved by the victory of Rome in the
Synod of Whitby. But the success of Wilfrid dispelled a yet greater
danger. Had England clung to the Irish Church it must have remained
spiritually isolated from the bulk of the Western world. Fallen as Rome
might be from its older greatness, it preserved the traditions of
civilization, of letters and art and law. Its faith still served as a
bond which held together the nations that sprang from the wreck of the
Empire. To fight against Rome was, as Wilfrid said, "to fight against the
world." To repulse Rome was to condemn England to isolation. Dimly as
such thoughts may have presented themselves to Oswiu's mind, it was the
instinct of a statesman that led him to set aside the love and gratitude
of his youth and to link England to Rome in the Synod of Whitby.
[Sidenote: Theodore]
Oswiu's assent to the vigorous measures of organization undertaken by a
Greek monk, Theodore of Tarsus, whom Rome despatched in 668 to secure
England to her sway as Archbishop of Canterbury, marked a yet more
decisive step in the new policy. The work of Theodore lay mainly in the
organization of the episcopate, and thus the Church of England, as we
know it to-day, is the work, so far as its outer form is concerned, of
Theodore. His work was determined in its main outlines by the previous
history of the English people. The conquest of the Continent had been
wrought either by races which were already Christian, or by heathens who
bowed to the Christian faith of the nations they conquered. To this
oneness of religion between the German invaders of the Empire and their
Roman subjects was owing the preservation of all that survived of the
Roman world. The Church everywhere remained untouched. The Christian
bishop became the defender of the conquered Italian or Gaul against his
Gothic and Lombard conqueror, the mediator between the German and his
subjects, the one bulwark against barbaric violence and oppression. To
the barbarian, on the other hand, he was the representative of all that
was venerable in the past, the living record of law, of letters, and of
art. But in Britain the priesthood and the people had been driven out
together. When Theodore came to organize the Church of England, the very
memory of the older Christian Church which existed in Roman Britain had
passed away. The first missionaries to the Englishmen, strangers in a
heathen land, attached themselves necessarily to the courts of the kings,
who were their earliest converts, and whose conversion was generally
followed by that of their people. The English bishops were thus at first
royal chaplains, and their diocese was naturally nothing but the kingdom.
In this way realms which are all but forgotten are commemorated in the
limits of existing sees. That of Rochester represented till of late an
obscure kingdom of West Kent, and the frontier of the original kingdom of
Mercia may be recovered by following the map of the ancient bishopric of
Lichfield. In adding many sees to those he found Theodore was careful to
make their dioceses co-extensive with existing tribal demarcations. But
he soon passed from this extension of the episcopate to its organization.
In his arrangement of dioceses, and the way in which he grouped them
round the see of Canterbury, in his national synods and ecclesiastical
canons, Theodore did unconsciously a political work. The old divisions of
kingdoms and tribes about him, divisions which had sprung for the most
part from mere accidents of the conquest, were now fast breaking down.
The smaller states were by this time practically absorbed by the three
larger ones, and of these three Mercia and Wessex were compelled to bow
to the superiority of Northumbria. The tendency to national unity which
was to characterize the new England had thus already declared itself; but
the policy of Theodore clothed with a sacred form and surrounded with
divine sanctions a unity which as yet rested on no basis but the sword.
The single throne of the one Primate at Canterbury accustomed men's minds
to the thought of a single throne for their one temporal overlord. The
regular subordination of priest to bishop, of bishop to primate, in the
administration of the Church, supplied a mould on which the civil
organization of the state quietly shaped itself. Above all, the councils
gathered by Theodore were the first of our national gatherings for
general legislation. It was at a much later time that the Wise Men of
Wessex, or Northumbria, or Mercia learned to come together in the
Witenagemot of all England. The synods which Theodore convened as
religiously representative of the whole English nation led the way by
their example to our national parliaments. The canons which these synods
enacted led the way to a national system of law.
[Sidenote: Wulfhere]
The organization of the episcopate was followed by the organization of
the parish system. The mission-station or monastery from which priest or
bishop went forth on journey after journey to preach and baptize
naturally disappeared as the land became Christian. The missionaries
turned into settled clergy. As the king's chaplain became a bishop and
the kingdom his diocese, so the chaplain of an English noble became the
priest and the manor his parish. But this parish system is probably later
than Theodore, and the system of tithes which has been sometimes coupled
with his name dates only from the close of the eighth century. What was
really due to him was the organization of the episcopate, and the impulse
which this gave to national unity. But the movement towards unity found a
sudden check in the revived strength of Mercia. Wulfhere proved a
vigorous and active ruler, and the peaceful reign of Oswiu left him free
to build up again during fifteen years of rule (659-675) that Mercian
overlordship over the tribes of Mid-England which had been lost at
Penda's death. He had more than his father's success. Not only did Essex
again own his supremacy, but even London fell into Mercian hands. The
West-Saxons were driven across the Thames, and nearly all their
settlements to the north of that river were annexed to the Mercian realm.
Wulfhere's supremacy soon reached even south of the Thames, for Sussex in
its dread of West-Saxons found protection in accepting his overlordship,
and its king was rewarded by a gift of the two outlying settlements of
the Jutes--the Isle of Wight and the lands of the Meonwaras along the
Southampton water--which we must suppose had been reduced by Mercian
arms. The industrial progress of the Mercian kingdom went hand in hand
with its military advance. The forests of its western border, the marshes
of its eastern coast, were being cleared and drained by monastic
colonies, whose success shows the hold which Christianity had now gained
over its people. Heathenism indeed still held its own in the wild western
woodlands and in the yet wilder fen-country on the eastern border of the
kingdom which stretched from the "Holland," the sunk, hollow land of
Lincolnshire, to the channel of the Ouse, a wilderness of shallow waters
and reedy islets wrapped in its own dark mist-veil and tenanted only by
flocks of screaming wild-fowl. But in either quarter the new faith made
its way. In the western woods Bishop Ecgwine found a site for an abbey
round which gathered the town of Evesham, and the eastern fen-land was
soon filled with religious houses. Here through the liberality of King
Wulfhere rose the Abbey of Peterborough. Here too, Guthlac, a youth of
the royal race of Mercia, sought a refuge from the world in the solitudes
of Crowland, and so great was the reverence he won, that only two years
had passed since his death when the stately Abbey of Crowland rose over
his tomb. Earth was brought in boats to form a site; the buildings rested
on oaken piles driven into the marsh; a great stone church replaced the
hermit's cell; and the toil of the new brotherhood changed the pools
around them into fertile meadow-land.
[Sidenote: Ecgfrith]
In spite however of this rapid recovery of its strength by Mercia,
Northumbria remained the dominant state in Britain: and Ecgfrith, who
succeeded Oswiu in 670, so utterly defeated Wulfhere when war broke out
between them that he was glad to purchase peace by the surrender of
Lincolnshire. Peace would have been purchased more hardly had not
Ecgfrith's ambition turned rather to conquests over the Briton than to
victories over his fellow Englishmen. The war between Briton and
Englishman which had languished since the battle of Chester had been
revived some twelve years before by an advance of the West-Saxons to the
south-west. Unable to save the possessions of Wessex north of the Thames
from the grasp of Wulfhere, their king, Cenwealh, sought for compensation
in an attack on his Welsh neighbours. A victory at Bradford on the Avon
enabled him to overrun the country near Mendip which had till then been
held by the Britons; and a second campaign in 658, which ended in a
victory on the skirts of the great forest that covered Somerset to the
east, settled the West-Saxons as conquerors round the sources of the
Parret. It may have been the example of the West-Saxons which spurred
Ecgfrith to a series of attacks upon his British neighbours in the west
which widened the bounds of his kingdom. His reign marks the highest
pitch of Northumbrian power. His armies chased the Britons from the
kingdom of Cumbria, and made the district of Carlisle English ground. A
large part of the conquered country was bestowed upon the see of
Lindisfarne, which was at this time filled by one whom we have seen
before labouring as the Apostle of the Lowlands. Cuthbert had found a new
mission-station in Holy Island, and preached among the moors of
Northumberland as he had preached beside the banks of Tweed. He remained
there through the great secession which followed on the Synod of Whitby,
and became prior of the dwindled company of brethren, now torn with
endless disputes against which his patience and good humour struggled in
vain. Worn out at last, he fled to a little island of basaltic rock, one
of the Farne group not far from Ida's fortress of Bamborough, strewn for
the most part with kelp and sea-weed, the home of the gull and the seal.
In the midst of it rose his hut of rough stones and turf, dug down within
deep into the rock, and roofed with logs and straw. But the reverence for
his sanctity dragged Cuthbert back to fill the vacant see of Lindisfarne.
He entered Carlisle, which the king had bestowed upon the bishopric, at a
moment when all Northumbria was waiting for news of a fresh campaign of
Ecgfrith's against the Britons in the north. The Firth of Forth had long
been the limit of Northumbria, but the Picts to the north of it owned
Ecgfrith's supremacy. In 685 however the king resolved on their actual
subjection and marched across the Forth. A sense of coming ill weighed on
Northumbria, and its dread was quickened by a memory of the curses which
had been pronounced by the bishops of Ireland on its king, when his navy,
setting out a year before from the newly-conquered western coast, swept
the Irish shores in a raid which seemed like sacrilege to those who loved
the home of Aidan and Columba. As Cuthbert bent over a Roman fountain
which still stood unharmed amongst the ruins of Carlisle, the anxious
bystanders thought they caught words of ill-omen falling from the old
man's lips. "Perhaps," he seemed to murmur, "at this very hour the peril
of the fight is over and done." "Watch and pray," he said, when they
questioned him on the morrow; "watch and pray." In a few days more a
solitary fugitive escaped from the slaughter told that the Picts had
turned desperately to bay as the English army entered Fife; and that
Ecgfrith and the flower of his nobles lay, a ghastly ring of corpses, on
the far-off moorland of Nectansmere.
[Sidenote: Mercian greatness]
The blow was a fatal one for Northumbrian greatness, for while the Picts
pressed on the kingdom from the north Æthelred, Wulfhere's successor,
attacked it on the Mercian border, and the war was only ended by a peace
which left him master of Middle-England and free to attempt the direct
conquest of the south. For the moment this attempt proved a fruitless
one. Mercia was still too weak to grasp the lordship which was slipping
from Northumbria's hands, while Wessex which seemed her destined prey
rose at this moment into fresh power under the greatest of its early
kings. Ine, the West-Saxon king whose reign covered the long period from
688 to 726, carried on during the whole of it the war which Cenwealh and
Centwine had begun. He pushed his way southward round the marshes of the
Parret to a more fertile territory, and guarded the frontier of his new
conquests by a fort on the banks of the Tone which has grown into the
present Taunton. The West-Saxons thus became masters of the whole
district which now bears the name of Somerset. The conquest of Sussex and
of Kent on his eastern border made Ine master of all Britain south of the
Thames, and his repulse of a new Mercian king Ceolred in a bloody
encounter at Wanborough in 715 seemed to establish the threefold division
of the English race between three realms of almost equal power. But able
as Ine was to hold Mercia at bay, he was unable to hush the civil strife
that was the curse of Wessex, and a wild legend tells the story of the
disgust which drove him from the world. He had feasted royally at one of
his country houses, and on the morrow, as he rode from it, his queen bade
him turn back thither. The king returned to find his house stripped of
curtains and vessels, and foul with refuse and the dung of cattle, while
in the royal bed where he had slept with Æthelburh rested a sow with her
farrow of pigs. The scene had no need of the queen's comment: "See, my
lord, how the fashion of this world passeth away!" In 726 he sought peace
in a pilgrimage to Rome. The anarchy which had driven Ine from the throne
broke out in civil strife which left Wessex an easy prey to Æthelbald,
the successor of Ceolred in the Mercian realm. Æthelbald took up with
better fortune the struggle of his people for supremacy over the south.
He penetrated to the very heart of the West-Saxon kingdom, and his siege
and capture of the royal town of Somerton in 733 ended the war. For
twenty years the overlordship of Mercia was recognized by all Britain
south of the Humber. It was at the head of the forces not of Mercia only
but of East-Anglia and Kent, as well as of the West-Saxons, that
Æthelbald marched against the Welsh on his western border.
[Sidenote: Bæda]
In so complete a mastery of the south the Mercian King found grounds for
a hope that Northern Britain would also yield to his sway. But the dream
of a single England was again destined to be foiled. Fallen as
Northumbria was from its old glory, it still remained a great power.
Under the peaceful reigns of Ecgfrith's successors, Aldfrith and
Ceolwulf, their kingdom became the literary centre of Western Europe. No
schools were more famous than those of Jarrow and York. The whole
learning of the age seemed to be summed up in a Northumbrian scholar.
Bæda--the Venerable Bede as later times styled him--was born nine years
after the Synod of Whitby on ground which passed a year later to Benedict
Biscop as the site of the great abbey which he reared by the mouth of the
Wear. His youth was trained and his long tranquil life was wholly spent
in an offshoot of Benedict's house which was founded by his friend
Ceolfrid. Bæda never stirred from Jarrow. "I spent my whole life in the
same monastery," he says, "and while attentive to the rule of my order
and the service of the Church, my constant pleasure lay in learning, or
teaching, or writing." The words sketch for us a scholar's life, the more
touching in its simplicity that it is the life of the first great English
scholar. The quiet grandeur of a life consecrated to knowledge, the
tranquil pleasure that lies in learning and teaching and writing, dawned
for Englishmen in the story of Bæda. While still young he became a
teacher, and six hundred monks besides strangers that flocked thither for
instruction formed his school of Jarrow. It is hard to imagine how among
the toils of the schoolmaster and the duties of the monk, Bæda could have
found time for the composition of the numerous works that made his name
famous in the West. But materials for study had accumulated in
Northumbria through the journeys of Wilfrid and Benedict Biscop and the
libraries which were forming at Wearmouth and York. The tradition of the
older Irish teachers still lingered to direct the young scholar into that
path of Scriptural interpretation to which he chiefly owed his fame.
Greek, a rare accomplishment in the West, came to him from the school
which the Greek Archbishop Theodore founded beneath the walls of
Canterbury. His skill in the ecclesiastical chant was derived from a
Roman cantor whom Pope Vitalian sent in the train of Benedict Biscop.
Little by little the young scholar thus made himself master of the whole
range of the science of his time; he became, as Burke rightly styled him,
"the father of English learning." The tradition of the older classic
culture was first revived for England in his quotations of Plato and
Aristotle, of Seneca and Cicero, of Lucretius and Ovid. Virgil cast over
him the same spell that he cast over Dante; verses from the Æneid break
his narratives of martyrdoms, and the disciple ventures on the track of
the great master in a little eclogue descriptive of the approach of
spring. His work was done with small aid from others. "I am my own
secretary," he writes; "I make my own notes. I am my own librarian." But
forty-five works remained after his death to attest his prodigious
industry. In his own eyes and those of his contemporaries the most
important among these were the commentaries and homilies upon various
books of the Bible which he had drawn from the writings of the Fathers.
But he was far from confining himself to theology. In treatises compiled
as textbooks for his scholars, Bæda threw together all that the world had
then accumulated in astronomy and meteorology, in physics and music, in
philosophy, grammar, rhetoric, arithmetic, medicine. But the encyclopædic
character of his researches left him in heart a simple Englishman. He
loved his own English tongue, he was skilled in English song, his last
work was a translation into English of the Gospel of St. John, and almost
the last words that broke from his lips were some English rimes upon
death.
But the noblest proof of his love of England lies in the work which
immortalizes his name. In his "Ecclesiastical History of the English
Nation," Bæda was at once the founder of mediæval history and the first
English historian. All that we really know of the century and a half that
follows the landing of Augustine we know from him. Wherever his own
personal observation extended, the story is told with admirable detail
and force. He is hardly less full or accurate in the portions which he
owed to his Kentish friends, Albinus and Nothelm. What he owed to no
informant was his exquisite faculty of story-telling, and yet no story of
his own telling is so touching as the story of his death. Two weeks
before the Easter of 735 the old man was seized with an extreme weakness
and loss of breath. He still preserved however his usual pleasantness and
gay good-humour, and in spite of prolonged sleeplessness continued his
lectures to the pupils about him. Verses of his own English tongue broke
from time to time from the master's lip--rude rimes that told how before
the "need-fare," Death's stern "must go," none can enough bethink him
what is to be his doom for good or ill. The tears of Bæda's scholars
mingled with his song. "We never read without weeping," writes one of
them. So the days rolled on to Ascension-tide, and still master and
pupils toiled at their work, for Based longed to bring to an end his
version of St. John's Gospel into the English tongue and his extracts
from Bishop Isidore. "I don't want my boys to read a lie," he answered
those who would have had him rest, "or to work to no purpose after I am
gone." A few days before Ascension-tide his sickness grew upon him, but
he spent the whole day in teaching, only saying cheerfully to his
scholars, "Learn with what speed you may; I know not how long I may
last." The dawn broke on another sleepless night, and again the old man
called his scholars round him and bade them write. "There is still a
chapter wanting," said the scribe, as the morning drew on, "and it is
hard for thee to question thyself any longer." "It is easily done," said
Bæda; "take thy pen and write quickly." Amid tears and farewells the day
wore on till eventide. "There is yet one sentence unwritten, dear
master," said the boy. "Write it quickly," bade the dying man. "It is
finished now," said the little scribe at last. "You speak truth," said
the master; "all is finished now." Placed upon the pavement, his head
supported in his scholar's arms, his face turned to the spot where he was
wont to pray, Bæda chanted the solemn "Glory to God." As his voice
reached the close of his song he passed quietly away.
[Sidenote: Fall of Æthelbald]
First among English scholars, first among English theologians, first
among English historians, it is in the monk of Jarrow that English
literature strikes its roots. In the six hundred scholars who gathered
round him for instruction he is the father of our national education. In
his physical treatises he is the first figure to which our science looks
back. But the quiet tenor of his scholar's life was broken by the growing
anarchy of Northumbria, and by threats of war from its Mercian rival. At
last Æthelbald marched on a state which seemed exhausted by civil discord
and ready for submission to his arms. But its king Eadberht showed
himself worthy of the kings that had gone before him, and in 740 he threw
back Æthelbald's attack in a repulse which not only ruined the Mercian
ruler's hopes of northern conquest but loosened his hold on the south.
Already goaded to revolt by exactions, the West-Saxons were roused to a
fresh struggle for independence, and after twelve years of continued
outbreaks the whole people mustered at Burford under the golden dragon of
their race. The fight was a desperate one, but a sudden panic seized the
Mercian King. He fled from the field, and a decisive victory freed Wessex
from the Mercian yoke. Æthelbald's own throne seems to have been shaken;
for three years later, in 757, the Mercian king was surprised and slain
in a night attack by his ealdormen, and a year of confusion passed ere
his kinsman Offa could avenge him on his murderers and succeed to the
realm.
But though Eadberht might beat back the inroads of the Mercians and even
conquer Strathclyde, before the anarchy of his own kingdom he could only
fling down his sceptre and seek a refuge in the cloister of Lindisfarne.
From the death of Bæda the history of Northumbria became in fact little
more than a wild story of lawlessness and bloodshed. King after king was
swept away by treason and revolt, the country fell into the hands of its
turbulent nobles, its very fields lay waste, and the land was scourged by
famine and plague. An anarchy almost as complete fell on Wessex after the
recovery of its freedom. Only in Mid-England was there any sign of order
and settled rule. The crushing defeat at Burford, though it had brought
about revolts which stripped Mercia of all the conquests it had made, was
far from having broken the Mercian power. Under the long reign of Offa,
which went on from 758 to 796, it rose again to all but its old dominion.
Since the dissolution of the temporary alliance which Penda formed with
the Welsh King Cadwallon the war with the Britons in the west had been
the one great hindrance to the progress of Mercia. But under Offa Mercia
braced herself to the completion of her British conquests. Pushing after
779 over the Severn, and carrying his ravages into the heart of Wales,
Offa drove the King of Powys from his capital, which changed its old name
of Pengwern for the significant English title of the Town in the Scrub or
Bush, Scrobbesbyryg, Shrewsbury. Experience however had taught the
Mercians the worthlessness of raids like these and Offa resolved to
create a military border by planting a settlement of Englishmen between
the Severn, which had till then served as the western boundary of the
English race, and the huge "Offa's Dyke" which he drew from the mouth of
Wye to that of Dee. Here, as in the later conquests of the West-Saxons,
the old plan of extermination was definitely abandoned and the Welsh who
chose to remain dwelled undisturbed among their English conquerors. From
these conquests over the Britons Offa turned to build up again the realm
which had been shattered at Burford. But his progress was slow. A
reconquest of Kent in 775 woke anew the jealousy of the West-Saxons; and
though Offa defeated their army at Bensington in 779 the victory was
followed by several years of inaction. It was not till Wessex was again
weakened by fresh anarchy that he was able in 794 to seize East-Anglia
and restore his realm to its old bounds under Wulfhere. Further he could
not go. A Kentish revolt occupied him till his death in 796, and his
successor Cenwulf did little but preserve the realm he bequeathed him. At
the close of the eighth century the drift of the English peoples towards
a national unity was in fact utterly arrested. The work of Northumbria
had been foiled by the resistance of Mercia; the effort of Mercia had
broken down before the resistance of Wessex. A threefold division seemed
to have stamped itself upon the land; and so complete was the balance of
power between the three realms which parted it that no subjection of one
to the other seemed likely to fuse the English tribes into an English
people.
CHAPTER III
WESSEX AND THE NORTHMEN
796-947
[Sidenote: The Northmen]
The union which each English kingdom in turn had failed to bring about
was brought about by the pressure of the Northmen. The dwellers in the
isles of the Baltic or on either side of the Scandinavian peninsula had
lain hidden till now from Western Christendom, waging their battle for
existence with a stern climate, a barren soil, and stormy seas. It was
this hard fight for life that left its stamp on the temper of Dane,
Swede, or Norwegian alike, that gave them their defiant energy, their
ruthless daring, their passion for freedom and hatred of settled rule.
Forays and plunder raids over sea eked out their scanty livelihood, and
at the close of the eighth century these raids found a wider sphere than
the waters of the northern seas. Tidings of the wealth garnered in the
abbeys and towns of the new Christendom which had risen from the wreck of
Rome drew the pirates slowly southwards to the coasts of Northern Gaul;
and just before Offa's death their boats touched the shores of Britain.
To men of that day it must have seemed as though the world had gone back
three hundred years. The same northern fiords poured forth their
pirate-fleets as in the days of Hengest or Cerdic. There was the same
wild panic as the black boats of the invaders struck inland along the
river-reaches or moored round the river isles, the same sights of horror,
firing of homesteads, slaughter of men, women driven off to slavery or
shame, children tossed on pikes or sold in the market-place, as when the
English themselves had attacked Britain. Christian priests were again
slain at the altar by worshippers of Woden; letters, arts, religion,
government disappeared before these northmen as before the northmen of
three centuries before.
[Sidenote: Ecgberht]
In 794 a pirate band plundered the monasteries of Wearmouth and Jarrow,
and the presence of the freebooters soon told on the political balance of
the English realms. A great revolution was going on in the south, where
Mercia was torn by civil wars which followed on Cenwulf's death, while
the civil strife of the West-Saxons was hushed by a new king, Ecgberht.
In Offa's days Ecgberht had failed in his claim of the crown of Wessex
and had been driven to fly for refuge to the court of the Franks. He
remained there through the memorable year during which Charles the Great
restored the Empire of the West, and returned in 802 to be quietly
welcomed as King by the West-Saxon people. A march into the heart of
Cornwall and the conquest of this last fragment of the British kingdom in
the south-west freed his hands for a strife with Mercia, which broke out
in 825 when the Mercian King Beornwulf marched into the heart of
Wiltshire. A victory of Ecgberht at Ellandun gave all England south of
Thames to the West-Saxons, and the defeat of Beornwulf spurred the men of
East-Anglia to rise in a desperate revolt against Mercia. Two great
overthrows at their hands had already spent its strength when Ecgberht
crossed the Thames in 828, and the realm of Penda and Offa bowed without
a struggle to its conqueror. But Ecgberht had wider aims than those of
supremacy over Mercia alone. The dream of a union of all England drew him
to the north. Northumbria was still strong; in learning and arts it stood
at the head of the English race; and under a king like Eadberht it would
have withstood Ecgberht as resolutely as it had withstood Æthelbald. But
the ruin of Jarrow and Wearmouth had cast on it a spell of terror. Torn
by civil strife, and desperate of finding in itself the union needed to
meet the northmen, Northumbria sought union and deliverance in subjection
to a foreign master. Its thegns met Ecgberht in Derbyshire, and owned the
supremacy of Wessex.
[Sidenote: Conquests of the Northmen]
With the submission of Northumbria the work which Oswiu and Æthelbald had
failed to do was done, and the whole English race was for the first time
knit together under a single rule. The union came not a moment too soon.
Had the old severance of people from people, the old civil strife within
each separate realm, gone on it is hard to see how the attacks of the
northmen could have been withstood. They were already settled in Ireland;
and from Ireland a northern host landed in 836 at Charmouth in
Dorsetshire strong enough to drive Ecgberht, when he hastened to meet
them, from the field. His victory the year after at Hengestdun won a
little rest for the land; but Æthelwulf who mounted the throne on
Ecgberht's death in 839 had to face an attack which was only beaten off
by years of hard fighting. Æthelwulf fought bravely in defence of his
realm; in his defeat at Charmouth as in a final victory at Aclea in 851
he led his troops in person against the sea-robbers; and his success won
peace for the land through the short and uneventful reigns of his sons
Æthelbald and Æthelberht. But the northern storm burst in full force upon
England when a third son, Æthelred, followed his brothers on the throne.
The northmen were now settled on the coast of Ireland and the coast of
Gaul; they were masters of the sea; and from west and east alike they
closed upon Britain. While one host from Ireland fell on the Scot kingdom
north of the Firth of Forth, another from Scandinavia landed in 866 on
the coast of East-Anglia under Ivar the Boneless and marched the next
year upon York. A victory over two claimants of its crown gave the
pirates Northumbrian and seizing the passage of the Trent they threatened
an attack on the Mercian realm. Mercia was saved by a march of King
Æthelred to Nottingham, but the peace he made there with the northmen
left them leisure to prepare for an invasion of East-Anglia, whose
under-king, Eadmund, brought prisoner before their leaders, was bound to
a tree and shot to death with arrows. His martyrdom by the heathen made
Eadmund the St. Sebastian of English legend; in later days his figure
gleamed from the pictured windows of church after church along the
eastern coast, and the stately Abbey of St. Edmundsbury rose over his
relics. With him ended the line of East-Anglian under-kings, for his
kingdom was not only conquered, but divided among the soldiers of the
pirate host when in 880 Guthrum assumed its crown. Already the northmen
had turned to the richer spoil of the great abbeys of the Fen.
Peterborough, Crowland, Ely went up in flames, and their monks fled or
lay slain among the ruins. Mercia, though still free from actual attack,
cowered panic-stricken before the Danes, and by payment of tribute owned
them as its overlords.
[Illustration: England and the Danelaw (v1-map-3t.jpg)]
[Sidenote: Wessex and the Northmen]
In five years the work of Ecgberht had been undone, and England north of
the Thames had been torn from the overlordship of Wessex. So rapid a
change could only have been made possible by the temper of the conquered
kingdoms. To them the conquest was simply their transfer from one
overlord to another, and it may be that in all there were men who
preferred the overlordship of the Northman to the overlordship of the
West-Saxon. But the loss of the subject kingdoms left Wessex face to face
with the invaders. The time had now come for it to fight, not for
supremacy, but for life. As yet the land seemed paralyzed by terror. With
the exception of his one march on Nottingham, King Æthelred had done
nothing to save his under-kingdoms from the wreck. But the pirates no
sooner pushed up Thames to Reading in 871 than the West-Saxons, attacked
on their own soil, turned fiercely at bay. A desperate attack drove the
northmen from Ashdown on the heights that overlook the Vale of White
Horse, but their camp in the tongue of land between the Kennet and Thames
proved impregnable. Æthelred died in the midst of the struggle, and his
brother Ælfred, who now became king, bought the withdrawal of the pirates
and a few years' breathing-space for his realm. It was easy for the quick
eye of Ælfred to see that the northmen had withdrawn simply with the view
of gaining firmer footing for a new attack; three years indeed had hardly
passed before Mercia was invaded and its under-king driven over sea to
make place for a tributary of the invaders. From Repton half their host
marched northwards to the Tyne, while Guthrum led the rest to Cambridge
to prepare for their next year's attack on Wessex. In 876 his fleet
appeared before Wareham, and in spite of a treaty bought by Ælfred, the
northmen threw themselves into Exeter. Their presence there was likely to
stir a rising of the Welsh, and through the winter Ælfred girded himself
for this new peril. At break of spring his army closed round the town, a
hired fleet cruised off the coast to guard against rescue, and the defeat
of their fellows at Wareham in an attempt to relieve them drove the
pirates to surrender. They swore to leave Wessex and withdrew to
Gloucester. But Ælfred had hardly disbanded his troops when his enemies,
roused by the arrival of fresh hordes eager for plunder, reappeared at
Chippenham, and in the opening of 878 marched ravaging over the land. The
surprise of Wessex was complete, and for a month or two the general panic
left no hope of resistance. Ælfred, with his small band of followers,
could only throw himself into a fort raised hastily in the isle of
Athelney among the marshes of the Parret, a position from which he could
watch closely the movements of his foes. But with the first burst of
spring he called the thegns of Somerset to his standard, and still
gathering troops as he moved marched through Wiltshire on the northmen.
He found their host at Edington, defeated it in a great battle, and after
a siege of fourteen days forced them to surrender and to bind themselves
by a solemn peace or "frith" at Wedmore in Somerset. In form the Peace of
Wedmore seemed a surrender of the bulk of Britain to its invaders. All
Northumbria, all East-Anglia, all Central England east of a line which
stretched from Thames' mouth along the Lea to Bedford, thence along the
Ouse to Watling Street, and by Watling Street to Chester, was left
subject to the northmen. Throughout this "Danelaw"--as it was called--the
conquerors settled down among the conquered population as lords of the
soil, thickly in northern Britain, more thinly in its central districts,
but everywhere guarding jealously their old isolation and gathering in
separate "heres" or armies round towns which were only linked in loose
confederacies. The peace had in fact saved little more than Wessex
itself. But in saving Wessex it saved England. The spell of terror was
broken. The tide of invasion turned. From an attitude of attack the
northmen were thrown back on an attitude of defence. The whole reign of
Ælfred was a preparation for a fresh struggle that was to wrest back from
the pirates the land they had won.
[Sidenote: Ælfred]
What really gave England heart for such a struggle was the courage and
energy of the King himself. Alfred was the noblest as he was the most
complete embodiment of all that is great, all that is loveable, in the
English temper. He combined as no other man has ever combined its
practical energy, its patient and enduring force, its profound sense of
duty, the reserve and self-control that steadies in it a wide outlook and
a restless daring, its temperance and fairness, its frank geniality, its
sensitiveness to affection, its poetic tenderness, its deep and
passionate religion. Religion indeed was the groundwork of Ælfred's
character. His temper was instinct with piety. Everywhere throughout his
writings that remain to us the name of God, the thought of God, stir him
to outbursts of ecstatic adoration. But he was no mere saint. He felt
none of that scorn of the world about him which drove the nobler souls of
his day to monastery or hermitage. Vexed as he was by sickness and
constant pain, his temper took no touch of asceticism. His rare
geniality, a peculiar elasticity and mobility of nature, gave colour and
charm to his life. A sunny frankness and openness of spirit breathes in
the pleasant chat of his books, and what he was in his books he showed
himself in his daily converse. Ælfred was in truth an artist, and both
the lights and shadows of his life were those of the artistic
temperament. His love of books, his love of strangers, his questionings
of travellers and scholars, betray an imaginative restlessness that longs
to break out of the narrow world of experience which hemmed him in. At
one time he jots down news of a voyage to the unknown seas of the north.
At another he listens to tidings which his envoys bring back from the
churches of Malabar. And side by side with this restless outlook of the
artistic nature he showed its tenderness and susceptibility, its vivid
apprehension of unseen danger, its craving for affection, its
sensitiveness to wrong. It was with himself rather than with his reader
that he communed as thoughts of the foe without, of ingratitude and
opposition within, broke the calm pages of Gregory or Boethius. "Oh, what
a happy man was he," he cries once, "that man that had a naked sword
hanging over his head from a single thread; so as to me it always did!"
"Desirest thou power?" he asks at another time. "But thou shalt never
obtain it without sorrows--sorrows from strange folk, and yet keener
sorrows from thine own kindred." "Hardship and sorrow!" he breaks out
again, "not a king but would wish to be without these if he could. But I
know that he cannot!" The loneliness which breathes in words like these
has often begotten in great rulers a cynical contempt of men and the
judgements of men. But cynicism found no echo in the large and
sympathetic temper of Ælfred. He not only longed for the love of his
subjects, but for the remembrance of "generations" to come. Nor did his
inner gloom or anxiety check for an instant his vivid and versatile
activity. To the scholars he gathered round him he seemed the very type
of a scholar, snatching every hour he could find to read or listen to
books read to him. The singers of his court found in him a brother
singer, gathering the old songs of his people to teach them to his
children, breaking his renderings from the Latin with simple verse,
solacing himself in hours of depression with the music of the Psalms. He
passed from court and study to plan buildings and instruct craftsmen in
gold-work, to teach even falconers and dog-keepers their business. But
all this versatility and ingenuity was controlled by a cool good sense.
Ælfred was a thorough man of business. He was careful of detail,
laborious, methodical. He carried in his bosom a little handbook in which
he noted things as they struck him--now a bit of family genealogy, now a
prayer, now such a story as that of Ealdhelm playing minstrel on the
bridge. Each hour of the day had its appointed task, there was the same
order in the division of his revenue and in the arrangement of his court.
Wide however and various as was the King's temper, its range was less
wonderful than its harmony. Of the narrowness, of the want of proportion,
of the predominance of one quality over another which goes commonly with
an intensity of moral purpose Ælfred showed not a trace. Scholar and
soldier, artist and man of business, poet and saint, his character kept
that perfect balance which charms us in no other Englishman save
Shakspere. But full and harmonious as his temper was, it was the temper
of a king. Every power was bent to the work of rule. His practical energy
found scope for itself in the material and administrative restoration of
the wasted land. His intellectual activity breathed fresh life into
education and literature. His capacity for inspiring trust and affection
drew the hearts of Englishmen to a common centre, and began the
upbuilding of a new England. And all was guided, controlled, ennobled by
a single aim. "So long as I have lived," said the King as life closed
about him, "I have striven to live worthily." Little by little men came
to know what such a life of worthiness meant. Little by little they came
to recognize in Ælfred a ruler of higher and nobler stamp than the world
had seen. Never had it seen a King who lived solely for the good of his
people. Never had it seen a ruler who set aside every personal aim to
devote himself solely to the welfare of those whom he ruled. It was this
grand self-mastery that gave him his power over the men about him.
Warrior and conqueror as he was, they saw him set aside at thirty the
warrior's dream of conquest; and the self-renouncement of Wedmore struck
the key-note of his reign. But still more is it this height and
singleness of purpose, this absolute concentration of the noblest
faculties to the noblest aim, that lifts Ælfred out of the narrow bounds
of Wessex. If the sphere of his action seems too small to justify the
comparison of him with the few whom the world owns as its greatest men,
he rises to their level in the moral grandeur of his life. And it is this
which has hallowed his memory among his own English people. "I desire,"
said the King in some of his latest words, "I desire to leave to the men
that come after me a remembrance of me in good works." His aim has been
more than fulfilled. His memory has come down to us with a living
distinctness through the mists of exaggeration and legend which time
gathered round it. The instinct of the people has clung to him with a
singular affection. The love which he won a thousand years ago has
lingered round his name from that day to this. While every other name of
those earlier times has all but faded from the recollection of
Englishmen, that of Ælfred remains familiar to every English child.
[Sidenote: English Literature]
The secret of Ælfred's government lay in his own vivid energy. He could
hardly have chosen braver or more active helpers than those whom he
employed both in his political and in his educational efforts. The
children whom he trained to rule proved the ablest rulers of their time.
But at the outset of his reign he stood alone, and what work was to be
done was done by the King himself. His first efforts were directed to the
material restoration of his realm. The burnt and wasted country saw its
towns built again, forts erected in positions of danger, new abbeys
founded, the machinery of justice and government restored, the laws
codified and amended. Still more strenuous were Ælfred's efforts for its
moral and intellectual restoration. Even in Mercia and Northumbria the
pirates' sword had left few survivors of the schools of Ecgberht or Bæda,
and matters were even worse in Wessex which had been as yet the most
ignorant of the English kingdoms. "When I began to reign," said Ælfred,
"I cannot remember one priest south of the Thames who could render his
service-book into English." For instructors indeed he could find only a
few Mercian prelates and priests with one Welsh bishop, Asser. "In old
times," the King writes sadly, "men came hither from foreign lands to
seek for instruction, and now if we are to have it we can only get it
from abroad." But his mind was far from being prisoned within his own
island. He sent a Norwegian ship-master to explore the White Sea, and
Wulfstan to trace the coast of Esthonia; envoys bore his presents to the
churches of India and Jerusalem, and an annual mission carried
Peter's-pence to Rome. But it was with the Franks that his intercourse
was closest, and it was from them that he drew the scholars to aid him in
his work of education. Grimbald came from St. Omer to preside over his
new abbey at Winchester; and John, the Old Saxon, was fetched it may be
from the Westphalian abbey of Corbey to rule the monastery that Ælfred's
gratitude for his deliverance from the Danes raised in the marshes of
Athelney. The real work however to be done was done, not by these
teachers but by the King himself. Ælfred established a school for the
young nobles at his own court, and it was to the need of books for these
scholars in their own tongue that we owe his most remarkable literary
effort. He took his books as he found them--they were the popular manuals
of his age--the Consolation of Boethius, the Pastoral Book of Pope
Gregory, the compilation of "Orosius," then the one accessible handbook
of universal history, and the history of his own people by Bæda. He
translated these works into English, but he was far more than a
translator, he was an editor for his people. Here he omitted, there he
expanded. He enriched "Orosius" by a sketch of the new geographical
discoveries in the North. He gave a West-Saxon form to his selections
from Bæda. In one place he stops to explain his theory of government, his
wish for a thicker population, his conception of national welfare as
consisting in a due balance of the priest, the thegn, and the churl. The
mention of Nero spurs him to an outbreak on the abuses of power. The cold
Providence of Boethius gives way to an enthusiastic acknowledgement of
the goodness of God. As he writes, his large-hearted nature flings off
its royal mantle, and he talks as a man to men. "Do not blame me," he
prays with a charming simplicity, "if any know Latin better than I, for
every man must say what he says and do what he does according to his
ability." But simple as was his aim, Ælfred changed the whole front of
our literature. Before him, England possessed in her own tongue one great
poem and a train of ballads and battle-songs. Prose she had none. The
mighty roll of the prose books that fill her libraries begins with the
translations of Ælfred, and above all with the chronicle of his reign. It
seems likely that the King's rendering of Bæda's history gave the first
impulse towards the compilation of what is known as the English or
Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, which was certainly thrown into its present form
during his reign. The meagre lists of the kings of Wessex and the bishops
of Winchester, which had been preserved from older times, were roughly
expanded into a national history by insertions from Bæda: but it is when
it reaches the reign of Ælfred that the chronicle suddenly widens into
the vigorous narrative, full of life and originality, that marks the gift
of a new power to the English tongue. Varying as it does from age to age
in historic value, it remains the first vernacular history of any
Teutonic people, and save for the work of Ulfilas who found no successors
among his Gothic people, the earliest and most venerable monument of
Teutonic prose.
But all this literary activity was only a part of that general upbuilding
of Wessex by which Ælfred was preparing for a fresh contest with the
stranger. He knew that the actual winning back of the Danelaw must be a
work of the sword, and through these long years of peace he was busy with
the creation of such a force as might match that of the northmen. A fleet
grew out of the little squadron which Ælfred had been forced to man with
Frisian seamen. The national fyrd or levy of all freemen at the King's
call was reorganized. It was now divided into two halves, one of which
served in the field while the other guarded its own burhs and townships
and served to relieve its fellow when the men's forty days of service
were ended. A more disciplined military force was provided by subjecting
all owners of five hides of land to thegn-service, a step which
recognized the change that had now substituted the thegn for the eorl and
in which we see the beginning of a feudal system. How effective these
measures were was seen when the new resistance they met on the Continent
drove the northmen to a fresh attack on Britain. In 893 a large fleet
steered for the Andredsweald, while the sea-king Hasting entered the
Thames. Ælfred held both at bay through the year till the men of the
Danelaw rose at their comrades' call. Wessex stood again front to front
with the northmen. But the King's measures had made the realm strong
enough to set aside its old policy of defence for one of vigorous attack.
His son Eadward and his son-in-law Æthelred, whom he had set as Ealdorman
over what remained of Mercia, showed themselves as skilful and active as
the King. The aim of the northmen was to rouse again the hostility of the
Welsh, but while Ælfred held Exeter against their fleet, Eadward and
Æthelred caught their army near the Severn and overthrew it with a vast
slaughter at Buttington. The destruction of their camp on the Lea by the
united English forces ended the war; in 897 Hasting again withdrew across
the Channel, and the Danelaw made peace. It was with the peace he had won
still about him that Ælfred died in 901, and warrior as his son Eadward
had shown himself, he clung to his father's policy of rest. It was not
till 910 that a fresh rising of the northmen forced Ælfred's children to
gird themselves to the conquest of the Danelaw.
[Sidenote: Eadward the Elder]
While Eadward bridled East-Anglia his sister Æthelflæd, in whose hands
Æthelred's death left English Mercia, attacked the "Five Boroughs," a
rude confederacy which had taken the place of the older Mercian kingdom.
Derby represented the original Mercia on the upper Trent, Lincoln the
Lindiswaras, Leicester the Middle-English, Stamford the province of the
Gyrwas, Nottingham probably that of the Southumbrians. Each of these
"Five Boroughs" seems to have been ruled by its earl with his separate
"host"; within each twelve "lawmen" administered Danish law, while a
common "Thing" may have existed for the whole district. In her attack on
this powerful league Æthelflæd abandoned the older strategy of battle and
raid for that of siege and fortress-building. Advancing along the line of
Trent, she fortified Tamworth and Stafford on its head-waters; when a
rising in Gwent called her back to the Welsh border, her army stormed
Brecknock; and its king no sooner fled for shelter to the northmen in
whose aid he had risen than Æthelflæd at once closed on Derby. Raids from
Middle-England failed to draw the Lady of Mercia from her prey; and Derby
was hardly her own when, turning southward, she forced the surrender of
Leicester. Nor had the brilliancy of his sister's exploits eclipsed those
of the King, for the son of Ælfred was a vigorous and active ruler; he
had repulsed a dangerous inroad of the northmen from France, summoned no
doubt by the cry of distress from their brethren in England, and had
bridled East-Anglia to the south by the erection of forts at Hertford and
Witham. On the death of Æthelflæd in 918 he came boldly to the front.
Annexing Mercia to Wessex, and thus gathering the whole strength of the
kingdom into his single hand, he undertook the systematic reduction of
the Danelaw. South of the Middle-English and the Fens lay a tract watered
by the Ouse and the Nen--originally the district of a tribe known as the
South-English, and now, like the Five Boroughs of the north, grouped
round the towns of Bedford, Huntingdon, and Northampton. The reduction of
these was followed by that of East-Anglia; the northmen of the Fens
submitted with Stamford, the Southumbrians with Nottingham. Eadward's
Mercian troops had already seized Manchester; he himself was preparing to
complete his conquests, when in 924 the whole of the North suddenly laid
itself at his feet. Not merely Northumbria but the Scots and the Britons
of Strathclyde "chose him to father and lord."
[Sidenote: Æthelstan]
The triumph was his last. Eadward died in 925, but the reign of his son
Æthelstan, Ælfred's golden-haired grandson whom the King had girded as a
child with a sword set in a golden scabbard and a gem-studded belt,
proved even more glorious than his own. In spite of its submission the
North had still to be won. Dread of the northmen had drawn Scot and
Cumbrian to their acknowledgement of Eadward's overlordship, but
Æthelstan no sooner incorporated Northumbria with his dominions than
dread of Wessex took the place of dread of the Danelaw. The Scot King
Constantine organized a league of Scot, Cumbrian, and Welshman with the
northmen. The league was broken by Æthelstan's rapid action in 926; the
North-Welsh were forced to pay annual tribute, to march in his armies,
and to attend his councils; the West-Welsh of Cornwall were reduced to a
like vassalage, and finally driven from Exeter, which they had shared
till then with its English inhabitants, But eight years later the same
league called Æthelstan again to the North; and though Constantine was
punished by an army which wasted his kingdom while a fleet ravaged its
coasts to Caithness the English army had no sooner withdrawn than
Northumbria rose in 937 at the appearance of a fleet of pirates from
Ireland under the sea-king Anlaf in the Humber. Scot and Cumbrian fought
beside the northmen against the West-Saxon King; but his victory at
Brunanburh crushed the confederacy and won peace till his death. His
brother Eadmund was but eighteen at his accession in 940, and the North
again rose in revolt. The men of the Five Boroughs joined their kinsmen
in Northumbria; once Eadmund was driven to a peace which left him king
but south of the Watling Street; and only years of hard fighting again
laid the Danelaw at his feet.
[Sidenote: Dunstan]
But policy was now to supplement the work of the sword. The completion of
the West-Saxon realm was in fact reserved for the hands, not of a king or
warrior, but of a priest. Dunstan stands first in the line of
ecclesiastical statesmen who counted among them Lanfranc and Wolsey and
ended in Laud. He is still more remarkable in himself, in his own vivid
personality after eight centuries of revolution and change. He was born
in the little hamlet of Glastonbury, the home of his father, Heorstan, a
man of wealth and brother of the bishops of Wells and of Winchester. It
must have been in his father's hall that the fair, diminutive boy, with
scant but beautiful hair, caught his love for "the vain songs of
heathendom, the trifling legends, the funeral chaunts," which afterwards
roused against him the charge of sorcery. Thence too he might have
derived his passionate love of music, and his custom of carrying his harp
in hand on journey or visit. Wandering scholars of Ireland had left their
books in the monastery of Glastonbury, as they left them along the Rhine
and the Danube; and Dunstan plunged into the study of sacred and profane
letters till his brain broke down in delirium. So famous became his
knowledge in the neighbourhood that news of it reached the court of
Æthelstan, but his appearance there was the signal for a burst of
ill-will among the courtiers. Again they drove him from Eadmund's train,
threw him from his horse as he passed through the marshes, and with the
wild passion of their age trampled him under foot in the mire. The
outrage ended in fever, and Dunstan rose from his sick-bed a monk. But
the monastic profession was then little more than a vow of celibacy and
his devotion took no ascetic turn. His nature in fact was sunny,
versatile, artistic; full of strong affections, and capable of inspiring
others with affections as strong. Quick-witted, of tenacious memory, a
ready and fluent speaker, gay and genial in address, an artist, a
musician, he was at the same time an indefatigable worker alike at books
or handicraft. As his sphere began to widen we see him followed by a
train of pupils, busy with literature, writing, harping, painting,
designing. One morning a lady summons him to her house to design a robe
which she is embroidering, and as he bends with her maidens over their
toil his harp hung upon the wall sounds without mortal touch tones which
the excited ears around frame into a joyous antiphon.
[Sidenote: Conquest of the Danelaw]
From this scholar-life Dunstan was called to a wider sphere of activity
towards the close of Eadmund's reign. But the old jealousies revived at
his reappearance at court, and counting the game lost Dunstan prepared
again to withdraw. The king had spent the day in the chase; the red deer
which he was pursuing dashed over Cheddar cliffs, and his horse only
checked itself on the brink of the ravine at the moment when Eadmund in
the bitterness of death was repenting of his injustice to Dunstan. He was
at once summoned on the king's return. "Saddle your horse," said Eadmund,
"and ride with me." The royal train swept over the marshes to his home;
and the king, bestowing on him the kiss of peace, seated him in the
abbot's chair as Abbot of Glastonbury. Dunstan became one of Eadmund's
councillors, and his hand was seen in the settlement of the north. It was
the hostility of the states around it to the West-Saxon rule which had
roused so often revolt in the Danelaw; but from the time of Brunanburh we
hear nothing more of the hostility of Bernicia, while Cumbria was
conquered by Eadmund and turned adroitly to account in winning over the
Scots to his cause. The greater part of it was granted to their king
Malcolm on terms that he should be Eadmund's "fellow-worker by sea and
land." The league of Scot and Briton was thus finally broken up, and the
fidelity of the Scots secured by their need of help in holding down their
former ally. The settlement was soon troubled by the young king's death.
As he feasted at Pucklechurch in the May of 946, Leofa, a robber whom
Eadmund had banished from the land, entered the hall, seated himself at
the royal board, and drew sword on the cup-bearer when he bade him
retire. The king sprang in wrath to his thegn's aid, and seizing Leofa by
the hair, flung him to the ground; but in the struggle the robber drove
his dagger to Eadmund's heart. His death at once stirred fresh troubles
in the north; the Danelaw rose against his brother and successor, Eadred,
and some years of hard fighting were needed before it was again driven to
own the English supremacy. But with its submission in 954 the work of
conquest was done. Dogged as his fight had been, the Dane at last owned
himself beaten. From the moment of Eadred's final triumph all resistance
came to an end. The Danelaw ceased to be a force in English politics.
North might part anew from South; men of Yorkshire might again cross
swords with men of Hampshire; but their strife was henceforth a local
strife between men of the same people; it was a strife of Englishmen with
Englishmen, and not of Englishmen with Northmen.
CHAPTER IV
FEUDALISM AND THE MONARCHY
954-1071
[Sidenote: Absorption of the Northmen]
The fierceness of the northman's onset had hidden the real character of
his attack. To the men who first fronted the pirates it seemed as though
the story of the world had gone back to the days when the German
barbarians first broke in upon the civilized world. It was so above all
in Britain. All that tradition told of the Englishmen's own attack on the
island was seen in the northmen's attack on it. Boats of marauders from
the northern seas again swarmed off the British coast; church and town
were again the special object of attack; the invaders again settled on
the conquered soil; heathendom again proved stronger than the faith of
Christ. But the issues of the two attacks showed the mighty difference
between them. When the English ceased from their onset upon Roman
Britain, Roman Britain had disappeared, and a new people of conquerors
stood alone on the conquered land. The Northern storm on the other hand
left land, people, government unchanged. England remained a country of
Englishmen. The conquerors sank into the mass of the conquered, and Woden
yielded without a struggle to Christ. The strife between Briton and
Englishman was in fact a strife between men of different races, while the
strife between northman and Englishman was a strife between men whose
race was the same. The followers of Hengest or of Ida were men utterly
alien from the life of Britain, strange to its arts, its culture, its
wealth, as they were strange to the social degradation which Rome had
brought on its province. But the northman was little more than an
Englishman bringing back to an England which had drifted far from its
origin the barbaric life of its earliest forefathers. Nowhere throughout
Europe was the fight so fierce, because nowhere else were the fighters
men of one blood and one speech. But just for this reason the union of
the combatants was nowhere so peaceful or so complete. The victory of the
house of Ælfred only hastened a process of fusion which was already going
on. From the first moment of his settlement in the Danelaw the northman
had been passing into an Englishman. The settlers were few; they were
scattered among a large population; in tongue, in manner, in institutions
there was little to distinguish them from the men among whom they dwelt.
Moreover their national temper helped on the process of assimilation.
Even in France, where difference of language and difference of custom
seemed to interpose an impassable barrier between the northman settled in
Normandy and his neighbours, he was fast becoming a Frenchman. In
England, where no such barriers existed, the assimilation was even
quicker. The two peoples soon became confounded. In a few years a
northman in blood was Archbishop of Canterbury and another northman in
blood was Archbishop of York.
[Sidenote: The three Northern Kingdoms]
The fusion might have been delayed if not wholly averted by continued
descents from the Scandinavian homeland. But with Eadred's reign the long
attack which the northman had directed against western Christendom came,
for a while at least, to an end. On the world which it assailed its
results had been immense. It had utterly changed the face of the west.
The empire of Ecgberht, the empire of Charles the Great, had been alike
dashed to pieces. But break and change as it might, Christendom had held
the northmen at bay. The Scandinavian power which had grown up on the
western seas had disappeared like a dream. In Ireland the northman's rule
had dwindled to the holding of a few coast towns. In France his
settlements had shrunk to the one settlement of Normandy. In England
every northman was a subject of the English King. Even the empire of the
seas had passed from the sea-kings' hands. It was an English and not a
Scandinavian fleet that for fifty years to come held mastery in the
English and the Irish Channels. With Eadred's victory in fact the
struggle seemed to have reached its close. Stray pirate boats still hung
off headland and coast; stray wikings still shoved out in springtide to
gather booty. But for nearly half-a-century to come no great pirate fleet
made its way to the west, or landed on the shores of Britain. The
energies of the northmen were in fact absorbed through these years in the
political changes of Scandinavia itself. The old isolation of fiord from
fiord and dale from dale was breaking down. The little commonwealths
which had held so jealously aloof from each other were being drawn
together whether they would or no. In each of the three regions of the
north great kingdoms were growing up. In Sweden King Eric made himself
lord of the petty states about him. In Denmark King Gorm built up in the
same way a monarchy of the Danes. Norway itself was the first to become a
single monarchy. Legend told how one of its many rulers, Harald of
Westfold, sent his men to bring him Gytha of Hordaland, a girl he had
chosen for wife, and how Gytha sent his men back again with taunts at his
petty realm. The taunts went home, and Harald vowed never to clip or comb
his hair till he had made all Norway his own. So every springtide came
war and hosting, harrying and burning, till a great fight at Hafursfiord
settled the matter, and Harald "Ugly-Head," as men called him while the
strife lasted, was free to shear his locks again and became Harald
"Fair-Hair." The Northmen loved no master, and a great multitude fled out
of the country, some pushing as far as Iceland and colonizing it, some
swarming to the Orkneys and Hebrides till Harald harried them out again
and the sea-kings sailed southward to join Guthrum's host in the Rhine
country or follow Hrolf to his fights on the Seine. But little by little
the land settled down into order, and the three Scandinavian realms
gathered strength for new efforts which were to leave their mark on our
after history.
[Sidenote: England and its King]
But of the new danger which threatened it in this union of the north
England knew little. The storm seemed to have drifted utterly away; and
the land passed from a hundred years of ceaseless conflict into a time of
peace. Here as elsewhere the northman had failed in his purpose of
conquest; but here as elsewhere he had done a mighty work. In shattering
the empire of Charles the Great he had given birth to the nations of
modern Europe. In his long strife with Englishmen he had created an
English people. The national union which had been brought about for a
moment by the sword of Ecgberht was a union of sheer force which broke
down at the first blow of the sea-robbers. The black boats of the
northmen were so many wedges that split up the fabric of the
roughly-built realm. But the very agency which destroyed the new England
was destined to bring it back again, and to breathe into it a life that
made its union real. The peoples who had so long looked on each other as
enemies found themselves fronted by a common foe. They were thrown
together by a common danger and the need of a common defence. Their
common faith grew into a national bond as religion struggled hand in hand
with England itself against the heathen of the north. They recognized a
common king as a common struggle changed Ælfred and his sons from mere
leaders of West-Saxons into leaders of all Englishmen in their fight with
the stranger. And when the work which Ælfred set his house to do was
done, when the yoke of the northman was lifted from the last of his
conquests, Engle and Saxon, Northumbrian and Mercian, spent with the
battle for a common freedom and a common country, knew themselves in the
hour of their deliverance as an English people.
The new people found its centre in the King. The heightening of the royal
power was a direct outcome of the war. The dying out of other royal
stocks left the house of Cerdic the one line of hereditary kingship. But
it was the war with the northmen that raised Ælfred and his sons from
tribal leaders into national kings. The long series of triumphs which
wrested the land from the stranger begot a new and universal loyalty;
while the wider dominion which their success bequeathed removed the kings
further and further from their people, lifted them higher and higher
above the nobles, and clothed them more and more with a mysterious
dignity. Above all the religious character of the war against the
northmen gave a religious character to the sovereigns who waged it. The
king, if he was no longer sacred as the son of Woden, became yet more
sacred as "the Lord's Anointed." By the very fact of his consecration he
was pledged to a religious rule, to justice, mercy, and good government;
but his "hallowing" invested him also with a power drawn not from the
will of man or the assent of his subjects but from the will of God, and
treason against him became the worst of crimes. Every reign lifted the
sovereign higher in the social scale. The bishop, once ranked equal with
him in value of life, sank to the level of the ealdorman. The ealdorman
himself, once the hereditary ruler of a smaller state, became a mere
delegate of the national king, with an authority curtailed in every shire
by that of the royal shire-reeves, officers charged with levying the
royal revenues and destined ultimately to absorb judicial authority.
Among the later nobility of the thegns personal service with such a lord
was held not to degrade but to ennoble. "Horse-thegn," and "cup-thegn,"
and "border," the constable, butler, and treasurer, found themselves
officers of state; and the developement of politics, the wider extension
of home and foreign affairs were already transforming these royal
officers into a standing council or ministry for the transaction of the
ordinary administrative business and the reception of judicial appeals.
Such a ministry, composed of thegns or prelates nominated by the king,
and constituting in itself a large part of the Witenagemot when that
assembly was gathered for legislative purposes, drew the actual control
of affairs more and more into the hands of the sovereign himself.
[Sidenote: Growth of Feudalism]
But the king's power was still a personal power. He had to be everywhere
and to see for himself that everything he willed was done. The royal
claims lay still far ahead of the real strength of the Crown. There was a
want of administrative machinery in actual connexion with the government,
responsible to it, drawing its force directly from it, and working
automatically in its name even in moments when the royal power was itself
weak or wavering. The Crown was strong under a king who was strong, whose
personal action was felt everywhere throughout the realm, whose dread lay
on every reeve and ealdorman. But with a weak king the Crown was weak.
Ealdor-men, provincial witenagemots, local jurisdictions, ceased to move
at the royal bidding the moment the direct royal pressure was loosened or
removed. Enfeebled as they were, the old provincial jealousies, the old
tendency to severance and isolation lingered on and woke afresh when the
crown fell to a nerveless ruler or to a child. And at the moment we have
reached the royal power and the national union it embodied had to battle
with fresh tendencies towards national disintegration which sprang like
itself from the struggle with the northman. The tendency towards personal
dependence and towards a social organization based on personal dependence
received an overpowering impulse from the strife. The long insecurity of
a century of warfare drove the ceorl, the free tiller of the soil, to
seek protection more and more from the thegn beside him. The freeman
"commended" himself to a lord who promised aid, and as the price of this
shelter he surrendered his freehold to receive it back as a fief laden
with conditions of military service. The principle of personal allegiance
which was embodied in the very notion of thegnhood, itself tended to
widen into a theory of general dependence. From Ælfred's day it was
assumed that no man could exist without a lord. The "lordless man" became
a sort of outlaw in the realm. The free man, the very base of the older
English constitution, died down more and more into the "villein," the man
who did suit and service to a master, who followed him to the field, who
looked to his court for justice, who rendered days of service in his
demesne. The same tendencies drew the lesser thegns around the greater
nobles, and these around the provincial ealdormen. The ealdormen had
hardly been dwarfed into lieutenants of the national sovereign before
they again began to rise into petty kings, and in the century which
follows we see Mercian or Northumbrian thegns following a Mercian or
Northumbrian ealdorman to the field though it were against the lord of
the land. Even the constitutional forms which sprang from the old English
freedom tended to invest the higher nobles with a commanding power. In
the "great meeting" of the Witenagemot or Assembly of the Wise lay the
rule of the realm. It represented the whole English people, as the
wise-moots of each kingdom represented the separate peoples of each; and
its powers were as supreme in the wider field as theirs in the narrower.
It could elect or depose the King. To it belonged the higher justice, the
imposition of taxes, the making of laws, the conclusion of treaties, the
control of wars, the disposal of public lands, the appointment of great
officers of state. But such a meeting necessarily differed greatly in
constitution from the Witan of the lesser kingdoms. The individual
freeman, save when the host was gathered together, could hardly take part
in its deliberations. The only relic of its popular character lay at last
in the ring of citizens who gathered round the Wise Men at London or
Winchester, and shouted their "aye" or "nay" at the election of a king.
Distance and the hardships of travel made the presence of the lesser
thegns as rare as that of the freemen; and the national council
practically shrank into a gathering of the ealdormen, the bishops, and
the officers of the crown.
[Sidenote: Feudalism and the Monarchy]
The old English democracy had thus all but passed into an oligarchy of
the narrowest kind. The feudal movement which in other lands was breaking
up every nation into a mass of loosely-knit states with nobles at their
head who owned little save a nominal allegiance to their king threatened
to break up England itself. What hindered its triumph was the power of
the Crown, and it is the story of this struggle between the monarchy and
these tendencies to feudal isolation which fills the period between the
death of Eadred and the conquest of the Norman. It was a struggle which
England shared with the rest of the western world, but its issue here was
a peculiar one. In other countries feudalism won an easy victory over the
central government. In England alone the monarchy was strong enough to
hold feudalism at bay. Powerful as he might be, the English ealdorman
never succeeded in becoming really hereditary or independent of the
Crown. Kings as weak as Æthelred could drive ealdormen into exile and
could replace them by fresh nominees. If the Witenagemot enabled the
great nobles to bring their power to bear directly on the Crown, it
preserved at any rate a feeling of national unity and was forced to back
the Crown against individual revolt. The Church too never became
feudalized. The bishop clung to the Crown, and the bishop remained a
great social and political power. As local in area as the ealdorman, for
the province was his diocese and he sat by his side in the local
Witenagemot, he furnished a standing check on the independence of the
great nobles. But if feudalism proved too weak to conquer the monarchy,
it was strong enough to paralyze its action. Neither of the two forces
could master the other, but each could weaken the other, and throughout
the whole period of their conflict England lay a prey to disorder within
and to insult from without.
The first sign of these troubles was seen when the death of Eadred in 955
handed over the realm to a child king, his nephew Eadwig. Eadwig was
swayed by a woman of high lineage, Æthelgifu; and the quarrel between her
and the older counsellors of Eadred broke into open strife at the
coronation feast. On the young king's insolent withdrawal to her chamber
Dunstan, at the bidding of the Witan, drew him roughly back to his seat.
But the feast was no sooner ended than a sentence of outlawry drove the
abbot over sea, while the triumph of Æthelgifu was crowned in 957 by the
marriage of her daughter to the king and the spoliation of the
monasteries which Dunstan had befriended. As the new queen was Eadwig's
kinswoman the religious opinion of the day regarded his marriage as
incestuous, and it was followed by a revolution. At the opening of 958
Archbishop Odo parted the King from his wife by solemn sentence; while
the Mercians and Northumbrians rose in revolt, proclaimed Eadwig's
brother Eadgar their king, and recalled Dunstan. The death of Eadwig a
few months later restored the unity of the realm; but his successor
Eadgar was only a boy of sixteen and at the outset of his reign the
direction of affairs must have lain in the hands of Dunstan, whose
elevation to the see of Canterbury set him at the head of the Church as
of the State. The noblest tribute to his rule lies in the silence of our
chroniclers. His work indeed was a work of settlement, and such a work
was best done by the simple enforcement of peace. During the years of
rest in which King and Primate enforced justice and order northman and
Englishman drew together into a single people. Their union was the result
of no direct policy of fusion; on the contrary Dunstan's policy preserved
to the conquered Danelaw its local rights and local usages. But he
recognized the men of the Danelaw as Englishmen, he employed northmen in
the royal service, and promoted them to high posts in Church and State.
For the rest he trusted to time, and time justified his trust. The fusion
was marked by a memorable change in the name of the land. Slowly as the
conquering tribes had learned to know themselves, by the one national
name of Englishmen, they learned yet more slowly to stamp their name on
the land they had won. It was not till Eadgar's day that the name of
Britain passed into the name of Engla-land, the land of Englishmen,
England. The same vigorous rule which secured rest for the country during
these years of national union told on the growth of material prosperity.
Commerce sprang into a wider life. Its extension is seen in the complaint
that men learned fierceness from the Saxon of Germany, effeminacy from
the Fleming, and drunkenness from the Dane. The laws of Æthelred which
provide for the protection and regulation of foreign trade only recognize
a state of things which grew up under Eadgar. "Men of the Empire,"
traders of Lower Lorraine and the Rhine-land, "Men of Rouen," traders
from the new Norman duchy of the Seine, were seen in the streets of
London. It was in Eadgar's day indeed that London rose to the commercial
greatness it has held ever since.
[Sidenote: Eadward the Martyr]
Though Eadgar reigned for sixteen years, he was still in the prime of
manhood when he died in 975. His death gave a fresh opening to the great
nobles. He had bequeathed the crown to his elder son Eadward; but the
ealdorman of East-Anglia, Æthelwine, rose at once to set a younger child,
Æthelred, on the throne. But the two primates of Canterbury and York who
had joined in setting the crown on the head of Eadgar now joined in
setting it on the head of Eadward, and Dunstan remained as before master
of the realm. The boy's reign however was troubled by strife between the
monastic party and their opponents till in 979 the quarrel was cut short
by his murder at Corfe, and with the accession of Æthelred, the power of
Dunstan made way for that of ealdorman Æthelwine and the queen-mother.
Some years of tranquillity followed this victory; but though Æthelwine
preserved order at home he showed little sense of the danger which
threatened from abroad. The North was girding itself for a fresh, onset
on England. The Scandinavian peoples had drawn together into their
kingdoms of Denmark, Sweden, and Norway; and it was no longer in isolated
bands but in national hosts that they were about to seek conquests in the
South. As Æthelred drew to manhood some chance descents on the coast told
of this fresh stir in the North, and the usual result of the northman's
presence was seen in new risings among the Welsh.
[Sidenote: Æthelred]
In 991 ealdorman Brihtnoth of East-Anglia fell in battle with a Norwegian
force at Maldon, and the withdrawal of the pirates had to be bought by
money. Æthelwine too died at this moment, and the death of the two
ealdormen left Æthelred free to act as King. But his aim was rather to
save the Crown from his nobles than England from the northmen. Handsome
and pleasant of address, the young King's pride showed itself in a string
of imperial titles, and his restless and self-confident temper drove him
to push the pretensions of the Crown to their furthest extent. His aim
throughout his reign was to free himself from the dictation of the great
nobles, and it was his indifference to their "rede" or counsel that won
him the name of "Æthelred the Redeless." From the first he struck boldly
at his foes, and Ælfric, the ealdorman of Central Wessex, whom the death
of his rival Æthelwine left supreme in the realm, was driven possibly by
fear to desert to a Danish force which he was sent in 992 to drive from
the coast. Æthelred turned from his triumph at home to meet the forces of
the Danish and Norwegian kings, Swein and Olaf, which anchored off London
in 994. His policy through-out was a policy of diplomacy rather than of
arms, and a treaty of subsidy gave time for intrigues which parted the
invaders till troubles at home drew both again to the North. Æthelrod
took quick advantage of his success at home and abroad; the place of the
great ealdormen in the royal councils was taken by court-thegns, in whom
we see the rudiments of a ministry, while the king's fleet attacked the
pirates' haunts in Cumberland and the Cotentin. But in spite of all this
activity the news of a fresh invasion found England more weak and broken
than ever. The rise of the "new men" only widened the breach between the
court and the great nobles, and their resentment showed itself in delays
which foiled every attempt of Æthelred to meet the pirate-bands who still
clung to the coast.
[Sidenote: Swein]
They came probably from the other side of the Channel, and it was to
clear them away as well as secure himself against Swein's threatened
descent that Æthelred took a step which brought England in contact with a
land over-sea. Normandy, where the northmen had settled a hundred years
before, was now growing into a great power, and it was to win the
friendship of Normandy and to close its harbours against Swein that
Æthelred in 1002 took the Norman Duke's daughter, Emma, to wife. The same
dread of invasion gave birth to a panic of treason from the northern
mercenaries whom the king had drawn to settle in the land as a fighting
force against their brethren; and an order of Æthelred brought about a
general massacre of them on St. Brice's day. Wedding and murder however
proved feeble defences against Swein. His fleet reached the coast in
1003, and for four years he marched through the length and breadth of
southern and eastern England, "lighting his war-beacons as he went" in
blazing homestead and town. Then for a heavy bribe he withdrew, to
prepare for a later and more terrible onset. But there was no rest for
the realm. The fiercest of the Norwegian jarls took his place, and from
Wessex the war extended over Mercia and East-Anglia. In 1012 Canterbury
was taken and sacked, Æltheah the Archbishop dragged to Greenwich, and
there in default of ransom brutally slain. The Danes set him in the midst
of their husting, pelting him with bones and skulls of oxen, till one
more pitiful than the rest clove his head with an axe. Meanwhile the
court was torn with intrigue and strife, with quarrels between the
court-thegns in their greed of power and yet fiercer quarrels between
these favourites and the nobles whom they superseded in the royal
councils. The King's policy of finding aid among his new ministers broke
down when these became themselves ealdormen. With their local position
they took up the feudal claims of independence; and Eadric, whom Æthelred
raised to be ealdorman of Mercia, became a power that overawed the Crown.
In this paralysis of the central authority all organization and union was
lost. "Shire would not help other" when Swein returned in 1013. The war
was terrible but short. Everywhere the country was pitilessly harried,
churches plundered, men slaughtered. But, with the one exception of
London, there was no attempt at resistance. Oxford and Winchester flung
open their gates. The thegns of Wessex submitted to the northmen at Bath.
Even London was forced at last to give way, and Æthelred fled over-sea to
a refuge in Normandy.
[Sidenote: Cnut]
He was soon called back again. In the opening of 1014 Swein died suddenly
at Gainsborough; and the spell of terror was broken. The Witan recalled
"their own born lord," and Æthelred returned to see the Danish fleet
under Swein's son, Cnut, sail away to the North. It was but to plan a
more terrible return. Youth of nineteen as he was, Cnut showed from the
first the vigour of his temper. Setting aside his brother he made himself
king of Denmark; and at once gathered a splendid fleet for a fresh attack
on England, whose king and nobles were again at strife, and where a
bitter quarrel between ealdorman Eadric of Mercia and Æthelred's son
Eadmund Ironside broke the strength of the realm. The desertion of Eadric
to Cnut as soon as he appeared off the coast threw open England to his
arms; Wessex and Mercia submitted to him; and though the loyalty of
London enabled Eadmund, when his father's death raised him in 1016 to the
throne, to struggle bravely for a few months against the Danes, a
decisive overthrow at Assandun and a treaty of partition which this
wrested from him at Olney were soon followed by the young king's death.
Cnut was left master of the realm. His first acts of government showed
little but the temper of the mere northman, passionate, revengeful,
uniting the guile of the savage with his thirst for blood. Eadric of
Mercia, whose aid had given him the Crown, was felled by an axe-blow at
the king's signal; a murder removed Eadwig, the brother of Eadmund
Ironside, while the children of Eadmund were hunted even into Hungary by
his ruthless hate. But from a savage such as this the young conqueror
rose abruptly into a wise and temperate king. His aim during twenty years
seems to have been to obliterate from men's minds the foreign character
of his rule and the bloodshed in which it had begun.
Conqueror indeed as he was, the Dane was no foreigner in the sense that
the Norman was a foreigner after him. His language differed little from
the English tongue. He brought in no new system of tenure or government.
Cnut ruled in fact not as a foreign conqueror but as a native king. He
dismissed his Danish host, and retaining only a trained band of household
troops or "hus-carls" to serve as a body-guard relied boldly for support
within his realm on the justice and good government he secured it. He
fell back on "Eadgar's Law," on the old constitution of the realm, for
his rule of government; and owned no difference between Dane and
Englishman among his subjects. He identified himself even with the
patriotism which had withstood the stranger. The Church had been the
centre of the national resistance; Archbishop Ælfheah had been slain by
Danish hands. But Cnut sought the friendship of the Church; he translated
Ælfheah's body with great pomp to Canterbury; he atoned for his father's
ravages by gifts to the religious houses; he protected English pilgrims
even against the robber-lords of the Alps. His love for monks broke out
in a song which he composed as he listened to their chaunt at Ely.
"Merrily sang the monks of Ely when Cnut King rowed by" across the vast
fen-waters that surrounded their abbey. "Row, boatmen, near the land, and
hear we these monks sing." A letter which Cnut wrote after twelve years
of rule to his English subjects marks the grandeur of his character and
the noble conception he had formed of kingship. "I have vowed to God to
lead a right life in all things," wrote the king, "to rule justly and
piously my realms and subjects, and to administer just judgement to all.
If heretofore I have done aught beyond what was just, through headiness
or negligence of youth, I am ready, with God's help, to amend it
utterly." No royal officer, either for fear of the king or for favour of
any, is to consent to injustice, none is to do wrong to rich or poor "as
they would value my friendship and their own well-being." He especially
denounces unfair exactions: "I have no need that money be heaped together
for me by unjust demands." "I have sent this letter before me," Cnut
ends, "that all the people of my realm may rejoice in my well-doing; for
as you yourselves know, never have I spared, nor will I spare, to spend
myself and my toil in what is needful and good for my people."
[Sidenote: Cnut and Scotland]
Cnut's greatest gift to his people was that of peace. With him began the
long internal tranquillity which was from this time to be the keynote of
the national history. Without, the Dane was no longer a terror; on the
contrary it was English ships and English soldiers who now appeared in
the North and followed Cnut in his campaigns against Wend or Norwegian.
Within, the exhaustion which follows a long anarchy gave fresh strength
to the Crown, and Cnut's own ruling temper was backed by the force of
hus-carls at his disposal. The four Earls of Northumberland, Mercia,
Wessex, and East-Anglia, whom he set in the place of the older caldormen,
knew themselves to be the creatures of his will; the ablest indeed of
their number, Godwine, earl of Wessex, was the minister or close
counsellor of the King. The troubles along the Northern border were ended
by a memorable act of policy. From Eadgar's day the Scots had pressed
further and further across the Firth of Forth till a victory of their
king Malcolm over Earl Eadwulf at Carham in 1018 made him master of
Northern Northumbria. In 1031 Cnut advanced to the North, but the quarrel
ended in a formal cession of the district between the Forth and the
Tweed, Lothian as it was called, to the Scot-king on his doing homage to
Cnut. The gain told at once on the character of the Northern kingdom. The
kings of the Scots had till now been rulers simply of Gaelic and Celtic
peoples; but from the moment that Lothian with its English farmers and
English seamen became a part of their dominions it became the most
important part. The kings fixed their seat at Edinburgh, and in the midst
of an English population passed from Gaelic chieftains into the Saxon
rulers of a mingled people.
[Sidenote: Cnut's Sons]
But the greatness of Cnut's rule hung solely on the greatness of his
temper, and the Danish power was shaken by his death in 1035. The empire
he had built up at once fell to pieces. He had bequeathed both England
and Denmark to his son Harthacnut; but the boy's absence enabled his
brother, Harald Harefoot, to acquire all England save Godwine's earldom
of Wessex, and in the end even Godwine was forced to submit to him.
Harald's death in 1040 averted a conflict between the brothers, and
placed Harthacnut quietly on the throne. But the love which Cnut's
justice had won turned to hatred before the lawlessness of his
successors. The long peace sickened men of their bloodshed and violence.
"Never was a bloodier deed done in the land since the Danes came," ran a
popular song, when Harald's men seized Ælfred, a brother of Eadmund
Ironside, who returned to England from Normandy where he had found a
refuge since his father's flight to its shores. Every tenth man among his
followers was killed, the rest sold for slaves, and Ælfred's eyes torn
out at Ely. Harthacnut, more savage than his predecessor, dug up his
brother's body and flung it into a marsh; while a rising at Worcester
against his hus-carls was punished by the burning of the town and the
pillage of the shire. The young king's death was no less brutal than his
life; in 1042 "he died as he stood at his drink in the house of Osgod
Clapa at Lambeth." England wearied of rulers such as these: but their
crimes helped her to free herself from the impossible dream of Cnut. The
North, still more barbarous than herself, could give her no new element
of progress or civilization. It was the consciousness of this and a
hatred of rulers such as Harald and Harthacnut which co-operated with the
old feeling of reverence for the past in calling back the line of Ælfred
to the throne.
[Sidenote: Eadward the Confessor]
It is in such transitional moments of a nation's history that it needs
the cool prudence, the sensitive selfishness, the quick perception of
what is possible, which distinguished the adroit politician whom the
death of Cnut left supreme in England. Originally of obscure origin,
Godwine's ability had raised him high in the royal favour; he was allied
to Cnut by marriage, entrusted by him with the earldom of Wessex, and at
last made the Viceroy or justiciar of the King in the government of the
realm. In the wars of Scandinavia he had shown courage and skill at the
head of a body of English troops, but his true field of action lay at
home. Shrewd, eloquent, an active administrator, Godwine united
vigilance, industry, and caution with a singular dexterity in the
management of men. During the troubled years that followed the death of
Cnut he did his best to continue his master's policy in securing the
internal union of England under a Danish sovereign and in preserving her
connexion with the North. But at the death of Harthacnut Cnut's policy
had become impossible, and abandoning the Danish cause Godwine drifted
with the tide of popular feeling which called Eadward, the one living son
of Æthelred, to the throne. Eadward had lived from his youth in exile at
the court of Normandy. A halo of tenderness spread in after-time round
this last king of the old English stock; legends told of his pious
simplicity, his blitheness and gentleness of mood, the holiness that
gained him his name of "Confessor" and enshrined him as a saint in his
abbey-church at Westminster. Gleemen sang in manlier tones of the long
peace and glories of his reign, how warriors and wise counsellors stood
round his throne, and Welsh and Scot and Briton obeyed him. His was the
one figure that stood out bright against the darkness when England lay
trodden under foot by Norman conquerors; and so dear became his memory
that liberty and independence itself seemed incarnate in his name.
Instead of freedom, the subjects of William or Henry called for the "good
laws of Eadward the Confessor." But it was as a mere shadow of the past
that the exile really returned to the throne of Ælfred; there was
something shadow-like in his thin form, his delicate complexion, his
transparent womanly hands; and it is almost as a shadow that he glides
over the political stage. The work of government was done by sterner
hands.
[Sidenote: Godwine]
Throughout his earlier reign, in fact, England lay in the hands of its
three Earls, Siward of Northumbria, Leofric of Mercia, and Godwine of
Wessex, and it seemed as if the feudal tendency to provincial separation
against which Æthelred had struggled was to triumph with the death of
Cnut. What hindered this severance was the greed of Godwine. Siward was
isolated in the North: Leofric's earldom was but a fragment of Mercia.
But the Earl of Wessex, already master of the wealthiest part of England,
seized district after district for his house. His son Swein secured an
earldom in the south-west; his son Harold became earl of East-Anglia; his
nephew Beorn was established in Central England: while the marriage of
his daughter Eadgyth to the king himself gave Godwine a hold upon the
throne. Policy led the earl, as it led his son, rather to aim at winning
England itself than at breaking up England to win a mere fief in it. But
his aim found a sudden check through the lawlessness of his son Swein.
Swein seduced the abbess of Leominster, sent her home again with a yet
more outrageous demand of her hand in marriage, and on the king's refusal
to grant it fled from the realm. Godwine's influence secured his pardon,
but on his very return to seek it Swein murdered his cousin Beorn who had
opposed the reconciliation and again fled to Flanders. A storm of
national indignation followed him over-sea. The meeting of the Wise men
branded him as "nithing," the "utterly worthless," yet in a year his
father wrested a new pardon from the King and restored him to his
earldom. The scandalous inlawing of such a criminal left Godwine alone in
a struggle which soon arose with Eadward himself. The king was a stranger
in his realm, and his sympathies lay naturally with the home and friends
of his youth and exile. He spoke the Norman tongue. He used in Norman
fashion a seal for his charters. He set Norman favourites in the highest
posts of Church and State. Foreigners such as these, though hostile to
the minister, were powerless against Godwine's influence and ability, and
when at a later time they ventured to stand alone against him they fell
without a blow. But the general ill-will at Swein's inlawing enabled them
to stir Eadward to attack the earl, and in 1051 a trivial quarrel brought
the opportunity of a decisive break with him. On his return from a visit
to the court Eustace, Count of Boulogne, the husband of the king's
sister, demanded quarters for his train in Dover. Strife arose, and many
both of the burghers and foreigners were slain. All Godwine's better
nature withstood Eadward when the king angrily bade him exact vengeance
from the town for the affront to his kinsman; and he claimed a fair trial
for the townsmen. But Eadward looked on his refusal as an outrage, and
the quarrel widened into open strife. Godwine at once gathered his forces
and marched upon Gloucester, demanding the expulsion of the foreign
favourites. But even in a just quarrel the country was cold in his
support. The earls of Mercia and Northumberland united their forces to
those of Eadward at Gloucester, and marched with the king to a gathering
of the Witenagemot at London. Godwine again appeared in arms, but Swein's
outlawry was renewed, and the Earl of Wessex, declining with his usual
prudence a useless struggle, withdrew over sea to Flanders.
[Sidenote: Harold]
But the wrath of the nation was appeased by his fall. Great as were
Godwine's faults, he was the one man who now stood between England and
the rule of the strangers who flocked to the Court; and a year had hardly
passed when he was strong enough to return. At the appearance of his
fleet in the Thames in 1052 Eadward was once more forced to yield. The
foreign prelates and bishops fled over sea, outlawed by the same meeting
of the Wise men which restored Godwine to his home. But he returned only
to die, and the direction of affairs passed quietly to his son Harold.
Harold came to power unfettered by the obstacles which beset his father,
and for twelve years he was the actual governor of the realm. The
courage, the ability, the genius for administration, the ambition and
subtlety of Godwine were found again in his son. In the internal
government of England he followed out his father's policy while avoiding
its excesses. Peace was preserved, justice administered, and the realm
increased in wealth and prosperity. Its gold work and embroidery became
famous in the markets of Flanders and France. Disturbances from without
were crushed sternly and rapidly; Harold's military talents displayed
themselves in a campaign against Wales, and in the boldness and rapidity
with which, arming his troops with weapons adapted for mountain conflict,
he penetrated to the heart of its fastnesses and reduced the country to
complete submission. With the gift of the Northumbrian earldom on
Siward's death to his brother Tostig all England save a small part of the
older Mercia lay in the hands of the house of Godwine, and as the waning
health of the king, the death of his nephew, the son of Eadmund who had
returned from Hungary as his heir, and the childhood of the Ætheling
Eadgar who stood next in blood, removed obstacle after obstacle to his
plans, Harold patiently but steadily moved forward to the throne.
[Sidenote: Normandy]
But his advance was watched by one even more able and ambitious than
himself. For the last half-century England had been drawing nearer to the
Norman land which fronted it across the Channel. As we pass nowadays
through Normandy, it is English history which is round about us. The name
of hamlet after hamlet has memories for English ears; a fragment of
castle wall marks the home of the Bruce, a tiny village preserves the
name of the Percy. The very look of the country and its people seem
familiar to us; the Norman peasant in his cap and blouse recalls the
build and features of the small English farmer; the fields about Caen,
with their dense hedgerows, their elms, their apple-orchards, are the
very picture of an English country-side. Huge cathedrals lift themselves
over the red-tiled roofs of little market towns, the models of stately
fabrics which superseded the lowlier churches of Ælfred or Dunstan, while
the windy heights that look over orchard and meadowland are crowned with
the square grey keeps which Normandy gave to the cliffs of Richmond and
the banks of Thames. It was Hrolf the Ganger, or Walker, a pirate leader
like Guthrum or Hasting, who wrested this land from the French king,
Charles the Simple, in 912, at the moment when Ælfred's children were
beginning their conquest of the English Danelaw. The treaty of
Clair-on-Epte in which France purchased peace by this cession of the
coast was a close imitation of the Peace of Wedmore. Hrolf, like Guthrum,
was baptized, received the king's daughter in marriage, and became his
vassal for the territory which now took the name of "the Northman's land"
or Normandy. But vassalage and the new faith sat lightly on the Dane. No
such ties of blood and speech tended to unite the northman with the
French among whom he settled along the Seine as united him to the
Englishmen among whom he settled along the Humber. William Longsword, the
son of Hrolf, though wavering towards France and Christianity, remained a
northman in heart; he called in a Danish colony to occupy his conquest of
the Cotentin, the peninsula which runs out from St. Michael's Mount to
the cliffs of Cherbourg, and reared his boy among the northmen of Bayeux
where the Danish tongue and fashions most stubbornly held their own. A
heathen reaction followed his death, and the bulk of the Normans, with
the child Duke Richard, fell away for the time from Christianity, while
new pirate-fleets came swarming up the Seine. To the close of the century
the whole people were still "Pirates" to the French around them, their
land the "Pirates' land," their Duke the "Pirates' Duke." Yet in the end
the same forces which merged the Dane in the Englishman told even more
powerfully on the Dane in France. No race has ever shown a greater power
of absorbing all the nobler characteristics of the peoples with whom they
came in contact, or of infusing their own energy into them. During the
long reign of Duke Richard the Fearless, the son of William Longsword, a
reign which lasted from 945 to 996, the heathen Norman pirates became
French Christians and feudal at heart. The old Norse language lived only
at Bayeux and in a few local names. As the old Northern freedom died
silently away, the descendants of the pirates became feudal nobles and
the "Pirates' land" sank into the most loyal of the fiefs of France.
[Sidenote: Duke William]
From the moment of their settlement on the Frankish coast, the Normans
had been jealously watched by the English kings; and the anxiety of
Æthelred for their friendship set a Norman woman on the English throne.
The marriage of Emma with Æthelred brought about a close political
connexion between the two countries. It was in Normandy that the King
found a refuge from Swein's invasion, and his younger boys grew up in
exile at the Norman court. Their presence there drew the eyes of every
Norman to the rich land which offered so tempting a prey across the
Channel. The energy which they had shown in winning their land from the
Franks, in absorbing the French civilization and the French religion, was
now showing itself in adventures on far-off shores, in crusades against
the Moslem of Spain or the Arabs of Sicily. It was this spirit of
adventure that roused the Norman Duke Robert to sail against England in
Cnut's day under pretext of setting Æthelred's children on its throne,
but the wreck of his fleet in a storm put an end to a project which might
have anticipated the work of his son. It was that son, William the Great,
as men of his own day styled him, William the Conqueror as he was to
stamp himself by one event on English history, who was now Duke of
Normandy. The full grandeur of his indomitable will, his large and
patient statesmanship, the loftiness of aim which lifts him out of the
petty incidents of his age, were as yet only partly disclosed. But there
never had been a moment from his boyhood when he was not among the
greatest of men. His life from the very first was one long mastering of
difficulty after difficulty. The shame of his birth remained in his name
of "the Bastard." His father Robert had seen Arlotta, a tanner's daughter
of the town, as she washed her linen in a little brook by Falaise; and
loving her he had made her the mother of his boy. The departure of Robert
on a pilgrimage from which he never returned left William a child-ruler
among the most turbulent baronage in Christendom; treason and anarchy
surrounded him as he grew to manhood; and disorder broke at last into
open revolt. But in 1047 a fierce combat of horse on the slopes of
Val-ès-dunes beside Caen left the young Duke master of his duchy and he
soon made his mastery felt. "Normans" said a Norman poet "must be trodden
down and kept under foot, for he only that bridles them may use them at
his need." In the stern order he forced on the land Normandy from this
hour felt the bridle of its Duke.
[Sidenote: William and France]
Secure at home, William seized the moment of Godwine's exile to visit
England, and received from his cousin, King Eadward, as he afterwards
asserted, a promise of succession to his throne. Such a promise however,
unconfirmed by the Witenagemot, was valueless; and the return of Godwine
must have at once cut short the young Duke's hopes. He found in fact work
enough to do in his own duchy, for the discontent of his baronage at the
stern justice of his rule found support in the jealousy which his power
raised in the states around him, and it was only after two great
victories at Mortemer and Varaville and six years of hard fighting that
outer and inner foes were alike trodden under foot. In 1060 William stood
first among the princes of France. Maine submitted to his rule. Britanny
was reduced to obedience by a single march. While some of the rebel
barons rotted in the Duke's dungeons and some were driven into exile, the
land settled down into a peace which gave room for a quick upgrowth of
wealth and culture. Learning and education found their centre in the
school of Bec, which the teaching of a Lombard scholar, Lanfranc, raised
in a few years into the most famous school of Christendom. Lanfranc's
first contact with William, if it showed the Duke's imperious temper,
showed too his marvellous insight into men. In a strife with the Papacy
which William provoked by his marriage with Matilda, a daughter of the
Count of Flanders, Lanfranc took the side of Rome. His opposition was met
by a sentence of banishment, and the Prior had hardly set out on a lame
horse, the only one his house could afford, when he was overtaken by the
Duke, impatient that he should quit Normandy. "Give me a better horse and
I shall go the quicker," replied the imperturbable Lombard, and William's
wrath passed into laughter and good will. From that hour Lanfranc became
his minister and counsellor, whether for affairs in the duchy itself or
for the more daring schemes of ambition which opened up across the
Channel.
[Sidenote: William and England]
William's hopes of the English crown are said to have been revived by a
storm which threw Harold, while cruising in the Channel, on the coast of
Ponthieu. Its count sold him to the Duke; and as the price of return to
England William forced him to swear on the relics of saints to support
his claim to its throne. But, true or no, the oath told little on
Harold's course. As the childless King drew to his grave one obstacle
after another was cleared from the earl's path. His brother Tostig had
become his most dangerous rival; but a revolt of the Northumbrians drove
Tostig to Flanders, and the earl was able to win over the Mercian house
of Leofric to his cause by owning Morkere, the brother of the Mercian
Earl Eadwine, as his brother's successor. His aim was in fact attained
without a struggle. In the opening of 1066 the nobles and bishops who
gathered round the death-bed of the Confessor passed quietly from it to
the election and coronation of Harold. But at Eouen the news was welcomed
with a burst of furious passion, and the Duke of Normandy at once
prepared to enforce his claim by arms. William did not claim the Crown.
He claimed simply the right which he afterwards used when his sword had
won it of presenting himself for election by the nation, and he believed
himself entitled so to present himself by the direct commendation of the
Confessor. The actual election of Harold which stood in his way, hurried
as it was, he did not recognize as valid. But with this constitutional
claim was inextricably mingled resentment at the private wrong which
Harold had done him, and a resolve to exact vengeance on the man whom he
regarded as untrue to his oath. The difficulties in the way of his
enterprise were indeed enormous. He could reckon on no support within
England itself. At home he had to extort the consent of his own reluctant
baronage; to gather a motley host from every quarter of France and to
keep it together for months; to create a fleet, to cut down the very
trees, to build, to launch, to man the vessels; and to find time amidst
all this for the common business of government, for negotiations with
Denmark and the Empire, with France, Britanny, and Anjou, with Flanders
and with Rome which had been estranged from England by Archbishop
Stigand's acceptance of his pallium from one who was not owned as a
canonical Pope.
[Sidenote: Stamford Bridge]
But his rival's difficulties were hardly less than his own. Harold was
threatened with invasion not only by William but by his brother Tostig,
who had taken refuge in Norway and secured the aid of its king, Harald
Hardrada. The fleet and army he had gathered lay watching for months
along the coast. His one standing force was his body of hus-carls, but
their numbers only enabled them to act as the nucleus of an army. On the
other hand the Land-fyrd or general levy of fighting-men was a body easy
to raise for any single encounter but hard to keep together. To assemble
such a force was to bring labour to a standstill. The men gathered under
the King's standard were the farmers and ploughmen of their fields. The
ships were the fishing-vessels of the coast. In September the task of
holding them together became impossible, but their dispersion had hardly
taken place when the two clouds which had so long been gathering burst at
once upon the realm. A change of wind released the landlocked armament of
William; but before changing, the wind which prisoned the Duke brought
the host of Tostig and Harald Hardrada to the coast of Yorkshire. The
King hastened with his household troops to the north and repulsed the
Norwegians in a decisive overthrow at Stamford Bridge, but ere he could
hurry back to London the Norman host had crossed the sea and William, who
had anchored on the twenty-eighth of September off Pevensey, was ravaging
the coast to bring his rival to an engagement. His merciless ravages
succeeded in drawing Harold from London to the south; but the King wisely
refused to attack with the troops he had hastily summoned to his banner.
If he was forced to give battle, he resolved to give it on ground he had
himself chosen, and advancing near enough to the coast to check William's
ravages he entrenched himself on a hill known afterwards as that of
Senlac, a low spur of the Sussex downs near Hastings. His position
covered London and drove William to concentrate his forces. With a host
subsisting by pillage, to concentrate is to starve; and no alternative
was left to the Duke but a decisive victory or ruin.
[Sidenote: Battle of Hastings]
On the fourteenth of October William led his men at dawn along the higher
ground that leads from Hastings to the battle-field which Harold had
chosen. From the mound of Telham the Normans saw the host of the English
gathered thickly behind a rough trench and a stockade on the height of
Senlac. Marshy ground covered their right; on the left, the most exposed
part of the position, the hus-carls or body-guard of Harold, men in full
armour and wielding huge axes, were grouped round the Golden Dragon of
Wessex and the Standard of the King. The rest of the ground was covered
by thick masses of half-armed rustics who had flocked at Harold's summons
to the fight with the stranger. It was against the centre of this
formidable position that William arrayed his Norman knighthood, while the
mercenary forces he had gathered in France and Britanny were ordered to
attack its flanks. A general charge of the Norman foot opened the battle;
in front rode the minstrel Taillefer, tossing his sword in the air and
catching it again while he chaunted the song of Roland. He was the first
of the host who struck a blow, and he was the first to fall. The charge
broke vainly on the stout stockade behind which the English warriors
plied axe and javelin with fierce cries of "Out, out," and the repulse of
the Norman footmen was followed by a repulse of the Norman horse. Again
and again the Duke rallied and led them to the fatal stockade. All the
fury of fight that glowed in his Norseman's blood, all the headlong
valour that spurred him over the slopes of Val-ès-dunes, mingled that day
with the coolness of head, the dogged perseverance, the inexhaustible
faculty of resource which shone at Mortemer and Varaville. His Breton
troops, entangled in the marshy ground on his left, broke in disorder,
and as panic spread through the army a cry arose that the Duke was slain.
William tore off his helmet; "I live," he shouted, "and by God's help I
will conquer yet." Maddened by a fresh repulse, the Duke spurred right at
the Standard; unhorsed, his terrible mace struck down Gyrth, the King's
brother; again dismounted, a blow from his hand hurled to the ground an
unmannerly rider who would not lend him his steed. Amidst the roar and
tumult of the battle he turned the flight he had arrested into the means
of victory. Broken as the stockade was by his desperate onset, the
shield-wall of the warriors behind it still held the Normans at bay till
William by a feint of flight drew a part of the English force from their
post of vantage. Turning on his disorderly pursuers, the Duke cut them to
pieces, broke through the abandoned line, and made himself master of the
central ground. Meanwhile the French and Bretons made good their ascent
on either flank. At three the hill seemed won, at six the fight still
raged around the Standard where Harold's hus-carls stood stubbornly at
bay on a spot marked afterwards by the high altar of Battle Abbey. An
order from the Duke at last brought his archers to the front. Their
arrow-flight told heavily on the dense masses crowded around the King and
as the sun went down a shaft pierced Harold's right eye. He fell between
the royal ensigns, and the battle closed with a desperate melly over his
corpse.
Night covered the flight of the English army: but William was quick to
reap the advantage of his victory. Securing Romney and Dover, he marched
by Canterbury upon London. Faction and intrigue were doing his work for
him as he advanced; for Harold's brothers had fallen with the King on the
field of Senlac, and there was none of the house of Godwine to contest
the crown. Of the old royal line there remained but a single boy, Eadgar
the Ætheling. He was chosen king; but the choice gave little strength to
the national cause. The widow of the Confessor surrendered Winchester to
the Duke. The bishops gathered at London inclined to submission. The
citizens themselves faltered as William, passing by their walls, gave
Southwark to the flames. The throne of the boy-king really rested for
support on the Earls of Mercia and Northumbria, Eadwine and Morkere; and
William, crossing the Thames at Wallingford and marching into
Hertfordshire, threatened to cut them off from their earldoms. The
masterly movement forced the Earls to hurry home, and London gave way at
once. Eadgar himself was at the head of the deputation who came to offer
the crown to the Norman Duke. "They bowed to him," says the English
annalist pathetically, "for need." They bowed to the Norman as they had
bowed to the Dane, and William accepted the crown in the spirit of Cnut.
London indeed was secured by the erection of a fortress which afterwards
grew into the Tower, but William desired to reign not as a Conqueror but
as a lawful king. At Christmas he received the crown at Westminster from
the hands of Archbishop Ealdred amid shouts of "Yea, Yea," from his new
English subjects. Fines from the greater landowners atoned for a
resistance which now counted as rebellion; but with this exception every
measure of the new sovereign showed his desire of ruling as a successor
of Eadward or Ælfred. As yet indeed the greater part of England remained
quietly aloof from him, and he can hardly be said to have been recognized
as king by Northumberland or the greater part of Mercia. But to the east
of a line which stretched from Norwich to Dorsetshire his rule was
unquestioned, and over this portion he ruled as an English king. His
soldiers were kept in strict order. No change was made in law or custom.
The privileges of London were recognized by a royal writ which still
remains, the most venerable of its muniments, among the city's archives.
Peace and order were restored. William even attempted, though in vain, to
learn the English tongue that he might personally administer justice to
the suitors in his court. The kingdom seemed so tranquil that only a few
months had passed after the battle of Senlac when leaving England in
charge of his brother, Odo Bishop of Bayeux, and his minister, William
Fitz-Osbern, the King returned in 1067 for a while to Normandy. The peace
he left was soon indeed disturbed. Bishop Odo's tyranny forced the
Kentishmen to seek aid from Count Eustace of Boulogne; while the Welsh
princes supported a similar rising against Norman oppression in the west.
But as yet the bulk of the land held fairly to the new king. Dover was
saved from Eustace; and the discontented fled over sea to seek refuge in
lands as far off as Constantinople, where Englishmen from this time
formed great part of the body-guard or Varangians of the Eastern
Emperors. William returned to take his place again as an English king. It
was with an English force that he subdued a rising in the south-west with
Exeter at its head, and it was at the head of an English army that he
completed his work by marching to the North. His march brought Eadwine
and Morkere again to submission; a fresh rising ended in the occupation
of York, and England as far as the Tees lay quietly at William's feet.
[Sidenote: The Norman Conquest]
It was in fact only the national revolt of 1068 that transformed the King
into a conqueror. The signal for this revolt came from Swein, king of
Denmark, who had for two years past been preparing to dispute England
with the Norman, but on the appearance of his fleet in the Humber all
northern, all western and south-western England rose as one man. Eadgar
the Ætheling with a band of exiles who had found refuge in Scotland took
the head of the Northumbrian revolt; in the south-west the men of Devon,
Somerset, and Dorset gathered to the sieges of Exeter and Montacute;
while a new Norman castle at Shrewsbury alone bridled a rising in the
West. So ably had the revolt been planned that even William was taken by
surprise. The outbreak was heralded by a storm of York and the slaughter
of three thousand Normans who formed its garrison. The news of this
slaughter reached William as he was hunting in the forest of Dean; and in
a wild outburst of wrath he swore "by the splendour of God" to avenge
himself on the North. But wrath went hand in hand with the coolest
statesmanship. The centre of resistance lay in the Danish fleet, and
pushing rapidly to the Humber with a handful of horsemen William bought
at a heavy price its inactivity and withdrawal. Then turning westward
with the troops that gathered round him he swept the Welsh border and
relieved Shrewsbury while William Fitz-Osbern broke the rising around
Exeter. His success set the King free to fulfil his oath of vengeance on
the North. After a long delay before the flooded waters of the Aire he
entered York and ravaged the whole country as far as the Tees. Town and
village were harried and burned, their inhabitants were slain or driven
over the Scottish border. The coast was especially wasted that no hold
might remain for future landings of the Danes. Crops, cattle, the very
implements of husbandry were so mercilessly destroyed that a famine which
followed is said to have swept off more than a hundred thousand victims.
Half a century later indeed the land still lay bare of culture and
deserted of men for sixty miles northward of York. The work of vengeance
once over, William led his army back from the Tees to York, and thence to
Chester and the West. Never had he shown the grandeur of his character so
memorably as in this terrible march. The winter was hard, the roads
choked with snowdrifts or broken by torrents, provisions failed; and his
army, storm-beaten and forced to devour its horses for food, broke out
into mutiny at the order to cross the bleak moorlands that part Yorkshire
from the West. The mercenaries from Anjou and Britanny demanded their
release from service. William granted their prayer with scorn. On foot,
at the head of the troops which still clung to him, he forced his way by
paths inaccessible to horses, often helping the men with his own hands to
clear the road, and as the army descended upon Chester the resistance of
the English died away.
For two years William was able to busy himself in castle-building and in
measures for holding down the conquered land. How effective these were
was seen when the last act of the conquest was reached. All hope of
Danish aid was now gone, but Englishmen still looked for help to Scotland
where Eadgar the Ætheling had again found refuge and where his sister
Margaret had become wife of King Malcolm. It was probably some assurance
of Malcolm's aid which roused the Mercian Earls, Eadwine and Morkere, to
a fresh rising in 1071. But the revolt was at once foiled by the
vigilance of the Conqueror. Eadwine fell in an obscure skirmish, while
Morkere found shelter for a while in the fen country where a desperate
band of patriots gathered round an outlawed leader, Hereward. Nowhere had
William found so stubborn a resistance: but a causeway two miles long was
at last driven across the marshes, and the last hopes of English freedom
died in the surrender of Ely. It was as the unquestioned master of
England that William marched to the North, crossed the Lowlands and the
Forth, and saw Malcolm appear in his camp upon the Tay to swear fealty at
his feet.
BOOK II
ENGLAND UNDER FOREIGN KINGS
1071-1204
AUTHORITIES FOR BOOK II
1071-1204
Among the Norman chroniclers Orderic becomes from this point particularly
valuable and detailed. The Chronicle and Florence of Worcester remain the
primary English authorities, while Simeon of Durham gives much special
information on northern matters. For the reign of William the Red the
chief source of information is Eadmer, a monk of Canterbury, in his
"Historia Noverum" and "Life of Anselm." William of Malmesbury and Henry
of Huntingdon are both contemporary authorities during that of Henry the
First; the latter remains a brief but accurate annalist; the former is
the leader of a new historic school, who treat English events as part of
the history of the world, and emulate classic models by a more
philosophical arrangement of their materials. To these the opening of
Stephen's reign adds the "Gesta Stephani," a record in great detail by
one of the King's clerks, and the Hexham Chroniclers.
All this wealth of historical material however suddenly leaves us in the
chaos of civil war. Even the Chronicle dies out in the midst of Stephen's
reign, and the close at the same time of the works we have noted leaves a
blank in our historical literature which extends over the early years of
Henry the Second. But this dearth is followed by a vast outburst of
historical industry. For the Beket struggle we have the mass of the
Archbishop's own correspondence with that of Foliot and John of
Salisbury. From 1169 to 1192 our primary authority is the Chronicle known
as that of Benedict of Peterborough, whose authorship Professor Stubbs
has shown to be more probably due to the royal treasurer, Bishop Richard
Fitz-Neal. This is continued to 1201 by Roger of Howden in a record of
equally official value. William of Newburgh's history, which ends in
1198, is a work of the classical school, like William of Malmesbury's. It
is distinguished by its fairness and good sense. To these may be added
the Chronicle of Ralph Niger, with the additions of Ralph of Coggeshall,
that of Gervase of Canterbury, and the interesting life of St. Hugh of
Lincoln.
But the intellectual energy of Henry the Second's time is shown even more
remarkably in the mass of general literature which lies behind these
distinctively historical sources, in the treatises of John of Salisbury,
the voluminous works of Giraldus Cambrensis, the "Trifles" and satires of
Walter Map, Glanvill's treatise on Law, Richard Fitz-Neal's "Dialogue on
the Exchequer," to which we owe our knowledge of Henry's financial
system, the romances of Gaimar and of Wace, the poem of the San Graal.
But this intellectual fertility is far from ceasing with Henry the
Second. The thirteenth century has hardly begun when the romantic impulse
quickens even the old English tongue in the long poem of Layamon. The
Chronicle of Richard of Devizes and an "Itinerarium Regis" supplement
Roger of Howden for Richard's reign. With John we enter upon the Annals
of Barnwell and are aided by the invaluable series of the Chroniclers of
St. Albans. Among the side topics of the time, we may find much
information as to the Jews in Toovey's "Anglia Judaica"; the Chronicle of
Jocelyn of Brakelond gives us a peep into social and monastic life; the
Cistercian revival may be traced in the records of the Cistercian abbeys
in Dugdale's Monasticon; the Charter Rolls give some information as to
municipal history; and constitutional developement may be traced in the
documents collected by Professor Stubbs in his "Select Charters."
CHAPTER I
THE CONQUEROR
1071-1085
[Sidenote: The Foreign Kings]
In the five hundred years that followed the landing of Hengest Britain
had become England, and its conquest had ended in the settlement of its
conquerors, in their conversion to Christianity, in the birth of a
national literature, of an imperfect civilization, of a rough political
order. But through the whole of this earlier age every attempt to fuse
the various tribes of conquerors into a single nation had failed. The
effort of Northumbria to extend her rule over all England had been foiled
by the resistance of Mercia; that of Mercia by the resistance of Wessex.
Wessex herself, even under the guidance of great kings and statesmen, had
no sooner reduced the country to a seeming unity than local independence
rose again at the call of the Northmen. The sense of a single England
deepened with the pressure of the invaders; the monarchy of Ælfred and
his house broadened into an English kingdom; but still tribal jealousies
battled with national unity. Northumbrian lay apart from West-Saxon,
Northman from Englishman. A common national sympathy held the country
roughly together, but a real national union had yet to come. It came with
foreign rule. The rule of the Danish kings broke local jealousies as they
had never been broken before, and bequeathed a new England to Godwine and
the Confessor. But Cnut was more Englishman than Northman, and his system
of government was an English system. The true foreign yoke was only felt
when England saw its conqueror in William the Norman.
For nearly a century and a half, from the hour when William turned
triumphant from the fens of Ely to the hour when John fled defeated from
Norman shores, our story is one of foreign masters. Kings from Normandy
were followed by kings from Anjou. But whether under Norman or Angevin
Englishmen were a subject race, conquered and ruled by men of strange
blood and of strange speech. And yet it was in these years of subjection
that England first became really England. Provincial differences were
finally crushed into national unity by the pressure of the stranger. The
firm government of her foreign kings secured the land a long and almost
unbroken peace in which the new nation grew to a sense of its oneness,
and this consciousness was strengthened by the political ability which in
Henry the First gave it administrative order and in Henry the Second
built up the fabric of its law. New elements of social life were
developed alike by the suffering and the prosperity of the times. The
wrong which had been done by the degradation of the free landowner into a
feudal dependant was partially redressed by the degradation of the bulk
of the English lords themselves into a middle class as they were pushed
from their place by the foreign baronage who settled on English soil; and
this social change was accompanied by a gradual enrichment and elevation
of the class of servile and semi-servile cultivators which had lifted
them at the close of this period into almost complete freedom. The middle
class which was thus created was reinforced by the upgrowth of a
corresponding class in our towns. Commerce and trade were promoted by the
justice and policy of the foreign kings; and with their advance rose the
political importance of the trader. The boroughs of England, which at the
opening of this period were for the most part mere villages, were rich
enough at its close to buy liberty from the Crown and to stand ready for
the mightier part they were to play in the developement of our
parliament. The shame of conquest, the oppression of the conquerors,
begot a moral and religious revival which raised religion into a living
thing; while the close connexion with the Continent which foreign
conquest brought about secured for England a new communion with the
artistic and intellectual life of the world without her.
[Sidenote: William the Conqueror]
In a word, it is to the stern discipline of our foreign kings that we owe
not merely English wealth and English freedom but England herself. And of
these foreign masters the greatest was William of Normandy. In William
the wild impulses of the northman's blood mingled strangely with the cool
temper of the modern statesman. As he was the last, so he was the most
terrible outcome of the northern race. The very spirit of the sea-robbers
from whom he sprang seemed embodied in his gigantic form, his enormous
strength, his savage countenance, his desperate bravery, the fury of his
wrath, the ruthlessness of his revenge. "No knight under heaven," his
enemies owned, "was William's peer." Boy as he was at Val-ès-dunes, horse
and man went down before his lance. All the fierce gaiety of his nature
broke out in the warfare of his youth, in his rout of fifteen Angevins
with but five men at his back, in his defiant ride over the ground which
Geoffry Martel claimed from him, a ride with hawk on fist as if war and
the chase were one. No man could bend William's bow. His mace crashed its
way through a ring of English warriors to the foot of the Standard. He
rose to his greatest height at moments when other men despaired. His
voice rang out as a trumpet when his soldiers fled before the English
charge at Senlac, and his rally turned the flight into a means of
victory. In his winter march on Chester he strode afoot at the head of
his fainting troops and helped with his own hand to clear a road through
the snowdrifts. And with the northman's daring broke out the northman's
pitilessness. When the townsmen of Alençon hung raw hides along their
walls in scorn of the "tanner's" grandson, William tore out his
prisoners' eyes, hewed off their hands and feet, and flung them into the
town. Hundreds of Hampshire men were driven from their homes to make him
a hunting-ground and his harrying of Northumbria left Northern England a
desolate waste. Of men's love or hate he recked little. His grim look,
his pride, his silence, his wild outbursts of passion, left William
lonely even in his court. His subjects trembled as he passed. "So stark
and fierce was he," writes the English chronicler, "that none dared
resist his will." His very wrath was solitary. "To no man spake he and no
man dared speak to him" when the news reached him of Harold's seizure of
the throne. It was only when he passed from his palace to the loneliness
of the woods that the King's temper unbent. "He loved the wild deer as
though he had been their father."
[Sidenote: His rule]
It was the genius of William which lifted him out of this mere northman
into a great general and a great statesman. The wary strategy of his
French campaigns, the organization of his attack upon England, the
victory at Senlac, the quick resource, the steady perseverance which
achieved the Conquest showed the wide range of his generalship. His
political ability had shown itself from the first moment of his accession
to the ducal throne. William had the instinct of government. He had
hardly reached manhood when Normandy lay peaceful at his feet. Revolt was
crushed. Disorder was trampled under foot. The Duke "could never love a
robber," be he baron or knave. The sternness of his temper stamped itself
throughout upon his rule. "Stark he was to men that withstood him," says
the Chronicler of his English system of government; "so harsh and cruel
was he that none dared withstand his will. Earls that did aught against
his bidding he cast into bonds; bishops he stripped of their bishopricks,
abbots of their abbacies. He spared not his own brother: first he was in
the land, but the King cast him into bondage. If a man would live and
hold his lands, need it were he followed the King's will." Stern as such
a rule was, its sternness gave rest to the land. Even amidst the
sufferings which necessarily sprang from the circumstances of the
Conquest itself, from the erection of castles or the enclosure of forests
or the exactions which built up William's hoard at Winchester, Englishmen
were unable to forget "the good peace he made in the land, so that a man
might fare over his realm with a bosom full of gold." Strange touches too
of a humanity far in advance of his age contrasted with this general
temper of the Conqueror's government. One of the strongest traits in his
character was an aversion to shed blood by process of law; he formally
abolished the punishment of death, and only a single execution stains the
annals of his reign. An edict yet more honourable to his humanity put an
end to the slave-trade which had till then been carried on at the port of
Bristol. The contrast between the ruthlessness and pitifulness of his
public acts sprang indeed from a contrast within his temper itself. The
pitiless warrior, the stern and aweful king was a tender and faithful
husband, an affectionate father. The lonely silence of his bearing broke
into gracious converse with pure and sacred souls like Anselm. If William
was "stark" to rebel and baron, men noted that he was "mild to those that
loved God."
[Sidenote: William and feudalism]
But the greatness of the Conqueror was seen in more than the order and
peace which he imposed upon the land. Fortune had given him one of the
greatest opportunities ever offered to a king of stamping his own genius
on the destinies of a people; and it is the way in which he seized on
this opportunity which has set William among the foremost statesmen of
the world. The struggle which ended in the fens of Ely had wholly changed
his position. He no longer held the land merely as its national and
elected King. To his elective right he added the right of conquest. It is
the way in which William grasped and employed this double power that
marks the originality of his political genius, for the system of
government which he devised was in fact the result of this double origin
of his rule. It represented neither the purely feudal system of the
Continent nor the system of the older English royalty: more truly perhaps
it may be said to have represented both. As the conqueror of England
William developed the military organization of feudalism so far as was
necessary for the secure possession of his conquests. The ground was
already prepared for such an organization. We have watched the beginnings
of English feudalism in the warriors, the "companions" or "thegns" who
were personally attached to the king's war-band and received estates from
the folk-land in reward for their personal services. In later times this
feudal distribution of estates had greatly increased as the bulk of the
nobles followed the king's example and bound their tenants to themselves
by a similar process of subinfeudation. The pure freeholders on the other
hand, the class which formed the basis of the original English society,
had been gradually reduced in number, partly through imitation of the
class above them, but more through the pressure of the Danish wars and
the social disturbance consequent upon them which forced these freemen to
seek protectors among the thegns at the cost of their independence. Even
before the reign of William therefore feudalism was superseding the older
freedom in England as it had already superseded it in Germany or France.
But the tendency was quickened and intensified by the Conquest. The
desperate and universal resistance of the country forced William to hold
by the sword what the sword had won; and an army strong enough to crush
at any moment a national revolt was needful for the preservation of his
throne. Such an army could only be maintained by a vast confiscation of
the soil, and the failure of the English risings cleared the ground for
its establishment. The greater part of the higher nobility fell in battle
or fled into exile, while the lower thegnhood either forfeited the whole
of their lands or redeemed a portion by the surrender of the rest. We see
the completeness of the confiscation in the vast estates which William
was enabled to grant to his more powerful followers. Two hundred manors
in Kent with more than an equal number elsewhere rewarded the services of
his brother Odo, and grants almost as large fell to William's counsellors
Fitz-Osbern and Montgomery or to barons like the Mowbrays and the Clares.
But the poorest soldier of fortune found his part in the spoil. The
meanest Norman rose to wealth and power in this new dominion of his lord.
Great or small, each manor thus granted was granted on condition of its
holder's service at the King's call; a whole army was by this means
encamped upon the soil; and William's summons could at any hour gather an
overwhelming force around his standard.
Such a force however, effective as it was against the conquered English,
was hardly less formidable to the Crown itself. When once it was
established, William found himself fronted in his new realm by a feudal
baronage, by the men whom he had so hardly bent to his will in Normandy,
and who were as impatient of law, as jealous of the royal power, as eager
for an unbridled military and judicial independence within their own
manors, here as there. The political genius of the Conqueror was shown in
his appreciation of this danger and in the skill with which he met it.
Large as the estates he granted were, they were scattered over the
country in such a way as to render union between the great landowners or
the hereditary attachment of great areas of population to any one
separate lord equally impossible. A yet wiser measure struck at the very
root of feudalism. When the larger holdings were divided by their owners
into smaller sub-tenancies, the under-tenants were bound by the same
conditions of service to their lord as he to the Crown. "Hear, my lord,"
swore the vassal as kneeling bareheaded and without arms he placed his
hands within those of his superior, "I become liege man of yours for life
and limb and earthly regard; and I will keep faith and loyalty to you for
life and death, God help me!" Then the kiss of his lord invested him with
land as a "fief" to descend to him and his heirs for ever. In other
countries such a vassal owed fealty to his lord against all foes, be they
king or no. By the usage however which William enacted in England each
sub-tenant, in addition to his oath of fealty to his lord, swore fealty
directly to the Crown, and loyalty to the King was thus established as
the supreme and universal duty of all Englishmen.
[Sidenote: William and England]
But the Conqueror's skill was shown not so much in these inner checks
upon feudalism as in the counterbalancing forces which he provided
without it. He was not only the head of the great garrison that held
England down, he was legal and elected King of the English people. If as
Conqueror he covered the country with a new military organization, as the
successor of Eadward he maintained the judicial and administrative
organization of the old English realm. At the danger of a severance of
the land between the greater nobles he struck a final blow by the
abolition of the four great earldoms. The shire became the largest unit
of local government, and in each shire the royal nomination of sheriffs
for its administration concentrated the whole executive power in the
King's hands. The old legal constitution of the country gave him the
whole judicial power, and William was jealous to retain and heighten
this. While he preserved the local courts of the hundred and the shire he
strengthened the jurisdiction of the King's Court, which seems even in
the Confessor's day to have become more and more a court of highest
appeal with a right to call up all cases from any lower jurisdiction to
its bar. The control over the national revenue which had rested even in
the most troubled times in the hands of the King was turned into a great
financial power by the Conqueror's system. Over the whole face of the
land a large part of the manors were burthened with special dues to the
Crown: and it was for the purpose of ascertaining and recording these
that William sent into each county the commissioners whose enquiries are
recorded in his Domesday Book. A jury empannelled in each hundred
declared on oath the extent and nature of each estate, the names, number,
and condition of its inhabitants, its value before and after the
Conquest, and the sums due from it to the Crown. These, with the Danegeld
or land-tax levied since the days of Æthelred, formed as yet the main
financial resources of the Crown, and their exaction carried the royal
authority in its most direct form home to every landowner. But to these
were added a revenue drawn from the old Crown domain, now largely
increased by the confiscations of the Conquest, the ever-growing income
from the judicial "fines" imposed by the King's judges in the King's
courts, and the fees and redemptions paid to the Crown on the grant or
renewal of every privilege or charter. A new source of revenue was found
in the Jewish traders, many of whom followed William from Normandy, and
who were glad to pay freely for the royal protection which enabled them
to settle in their quarters or "Jewries" in all the principal towns of
England.
[Sidenote: The Church]
William found a yet stronger check on his baronage in the organization of
the Church. Its old dependence on the royal power was strictly enforced.
Prelates were practically chosen by the King. Homage was exacted from
bishop as from baron. No royal tenant could be excommunicated save by the
King's leave. No synod could legislate without his previous assent and
subsequent confirmation of its decrees. No papal letters could be
received within the realm save by his permission. The King firmly
repudiated the claims which were beginning to be put forward by the court
of Rome. When Gregory VII. called on him to do fealty for his kingdom the
King sternly refused to admit the claim. "Fealty I have never willed to
do, nor will I do it now. I have never promised it, nor do I find that my
predecessors did it to yours." William's reforms only tended to tighten
this hold of the Crown on the clergy. Stigand was deposed; and the
elevation of Lanfranc to the see of Canterbury was followed by the
removal of most of the English prelates and by the appointment of Norman
ecclesiastics in their place. The new archbishop did much to restore
discipline, and William's own efforts were no doubt partly directed by a
real desire for the religious improvement of his realm. But the foreign
origin of the new prelates cut them off from the flocks they ruled and
bound them firmly to the foreign throne; while their independent position
was lessened by a change which seemed intended to preserve it.
Ecclesiastical cases had till now been decided, like civil cases, in
shire or hundred-court, where the bishop sate side by side with ealdorman
or sheriff. They were now withdrawn from it to the separate court of the
bishop. The change was pregnant with future trouble to the Crown; but for
the moment it told mainly in removing the bishop from his traditional
contact with the popular assembly and in effacing the memory of the
original equality of the religious with the civil power.
[Sidenote: William's death]
In any struggle with feudalism a national king, secure of the support of
the Church, and backed by the royal hoard at Winchester, stood in
different case from the merely feudal sovereigns of the Continent. The
difference of power was seen as soon as the Conquest was fairly over, and
the struggle which William had anticipated opened between the baronage
and the Crown. The wisdom of his policy in the destruction of the great
earldoms which had overshadowed the throne was shown in an attempt at
their restoration made in 1075 by Roger, the son of his minister William
Fitz-Osbern, and by the Breton, Ralf de Guader, whom the King had
rewarded for his services at Senlac with the earldom of Norfolk. The
rising was quickly suppressed, Roger thrown into prison, and Ralf driven
over sea. The intrigues of the baronage soon found another leader in
William's half-brother, the Bishop of Bayeux. Under pretence of aspiring
by arms to the papacy Bishop Odo collected money and men, but the
treasure was at once seized by the royal officers and the bishop arrested
in the midst of the court. Even at the King's bidding no officer would
venture to seize on a prelate of the Church; and it was with his own
hands that William was forced to effect his arrest. The Conqueror was as
successful against foes from without as against foes from within. The
fear of the Danes, which had so long hung like a thunder-cloud over
England, passed away before the host which William gathered in 1085 to
meet a great armament assembled by king Cnut. A mutiny dispersed the
Danish fleet, and the murder of its king removed all peril from the
north. Scotland, already humbled by William's invasion, was bridled by
the erection of a strong fortress at Newcastle-upon-Tyne; and after
penetrating with his army to the heart of Wales the King commenced its
systematic reduction by settling three of his great barons along its
frontier. It was not till his closing years that William's unvarying
success was troubled by a fresh outbreak of the Norman baronage under his
son Robert and by an attack which he was forced to meet in 1087 from
France. Its king mocked at the Conqueror's unwieldy bulk and at the
sickness which bound him to his bed at Rouen. "King William has as long a
lying-in," laughed Philip, "as a woman behind her curtains." "When I get
up," William swore grimly, "I will go to mass in Philip's land and bring
a rich offering for my churching. I will offer a thousand candles for my
fee. Flaming brands shall they be, and steel shall glitter over the fire
they make." At harvest-tide town and hamlet flaring into ashes along the
French border fulfilled the ruthless vow. But as the King rode down the
steep street of Mantes which he had given to the flames his horse
stumbled among the embers, and William was flung heavily against his
saddle. He was borne home to Rouen to die. The sound of the minster bell
woke him at dawn as he lay in the convent of St. Gervais, overlooking the
city--it was the hour of prime--and stretching out his hands in prayer
the King passed quietly away. Death itself took its colour from the
savage solitude of his life. Priests and nobles fled as the last breath
left him, and the Conqueror's body lay naked and lonely on the floor.