Chapter XVI
ETHELWULF’S SONS--DANISH INVASIONS TO THE BAPTISM OF GUTHRUM.
During the twenty years which followed the death of Ethelwulf four of his sons successively filled the West Saxon throne, namely, Ethelbald, Ethelbert, Ethelred, and Alfred. As the last named is to us incomparably the most interesting figure, it will be well to insert here some particulars relating to his childhood which were purposely omitted from the preceding chapter. For these particulars, as for almost all that makes the great king a living reality to us, we are indebted to the little book De Rebus Gestis Aelfredi, written by the Welsh ecclesiastic, Asser.[124]
The question of the date of Alfred’s birth is beset with some difficulty, but on the whole it seems safest to assign it to the year 848. The place of his birth was undoubtedly Wantage in Berkshire, about twenty-five miles from Reading. Throughout his life his chief exploits had reference to the valley of the middle Thames, and if any one county more than another may claim an interest in his glory, it is that county which, as Asser says, “has its name from the wood of Berroc, where the boxtree grows most plentifully”. The mother of Alfred was Osburga, whom Asser describes as “a very religious woman, noble of intellect and noble by birth, daughter of Oslac, the renowned butler of King Ethelwulf, and descended from the old Jutish kings of the Isle of Wight”.
In 853, when Alfred was only four or five years old, he was sent by his father to Rome “with an honourable train of nobles and others”. The Chronicle says that Pope Leo “anointed him as king and adopted him as his godson”. The pope himself, in a still extant letter to Ethelwulf, tells the king that he has “invested his son with the girdle, insignia and robes of the consulate after the manner of Roman consuls”. It is difficult to suppose that Ethelwulf, who had four strong sons older than Alfred, can have wished the little five-year-old child, much as he loved him, to be anointed as king. It has been suggested as a possible explanation of the ceremony that some of the West Saxon retinue, who saw the child invested in the splendid trabea of the consul, and were told that these were the robes once worn by the men who wielded kingly power in Rome, attached to the ceremony a political importance greater than was its due. Two years later the boy again went to Rome, accompanying his father on the visit already described. He returned with him through France, and doubtless witnessed the marriage ceremony which gave him a step-mother six years older than himself.
It is probably to the interval between his first and second visits to Rome that we must refer the episode of the ballad-book prize, the best-known story of Alfred’s childhood. That story must be told in Asser’s own words:--
“His father and mother loved him greatly, more than all his brethren; and so, too, did all men in his father’s court, in which he was ever nourished. As infancy grew into boyhood, he appeared more comely than all his brethren and pleasanter in countenance, in speech and in manners. From his very cradle, notwithstanding the practical bent of his disposition, his intellect, noble as his birth, inspired him with an earnest desire for wisdom, but, sad to say, through the shameful neglect of his parents and guardians, he remained unlettered till the twelfth year of his age or even later. He was, however, both by night and day an earnest and frequent listener to the recitation of Saxon poems, and being an apt pupil he easily retained them in his memory....
“Now one day his mother showed to him and his brothers a certain Saxon book of poetry which she had in her hand, and said: ‘Whoever shall soonest learn this codex to him will I give it,’ at which word he, being urged by some Divine inspiration, and also attracted by the beauty of an initial letter in the book, anticipating his brothers (older than he in years but not in grace) answered his mother thus: ‘Will you really give that book to him who shall soonest understand and repeat it to you?’ ‘Yes, I will,’ said she with a happy smile. Hereupon he at once took the book from her hand, went to a master and read it,[125] and having read it he took it back to his mother and recited it to her.” It is probable that Asser here intended only to describe the quickness of the child’s apprehension and the strength of his memory. The story has nothing really to do with Alfred’s learning to read, which, as we are told, did not take place till his twelfth year or even later. He took the book to his master, learned the contents from him and repeated them accurately to his mother. The words “and read it,” which are the sole stumbling-block to those who would thus understand the narrative, are possibly due to some slip of the copyist[126] or to the confused way in which Asser tells his tale.
From the story of Alfred’s childhood we return to the main stream of Anglo-Saxon history. As has been said, Ethelwulf died in the beginning of 858. His second son, Ethelbert, probably succeeded him in the eastern half of his kingdom, while ETHELBALD, the eldest, and possibly the over-lord, reigned in the west. The only notable fact, and that a disgraceful one, in Ethelbald’s reign was his marriage to his father’s young widow, Judith of France. Though the first marriage was perhaps one only in name, the unlawful union excited the disapprobation of all Western Europe, and the premature death of Ethelbald in 860 was probably regarded as a Divine judgment on the sinner. Soon after her second husband’s death Judith returned to France, and having after two years eloped with her father’s handsome forester, Baldwin, obtained with difficulty the paternal forgiveness, and permission to contract lawful wedlock with her lover. Baldwin, who received a grant of the borderland of Flanders with the title of count or marquis, was the ancestor by Judith of a long line of Baldwins, who gave to their dominions the name of Baldwinsland, and one of whom in 1204 donned the imperial buskins and was crowned by his fellow-crusaders at Constantinople Emperor of Rome. From the same romantic union of Baldwin and Judith sprang also in the seventh generation Matilda, the wife of William the Conqueror.
ETHELBERT, the second son of Ethelwulf, who succeeded to the throne and reigned for six years (860–66), probably added the western half of the kingdom to the eastern, and thus ruled over the whole country south of the Thames. He held it, says the chronicler, “in good agreement and much peacefulness,” but already upon his reign was cast the shadow of coming calamity. “In his days,” says the Chronicle, “there came a great fleet to land and broke down Winchester.” It is true that the invaders were afterwards defeated and put to flight by the ealdormen of Hampshire and Berkshire, but it is alarming to see the facility with which they gained possession of the capital of Wessex. No doubt this was owing to the fact that the English had made no systematic attempt to keep up the great fortresses which they had inherited from the Romans and which they themselves in their earlier invasion had laid in ruins.[127] All this was to be altered ere the end of the century by the fortifying hand of Alfred.
On the death of Ethelbert the third brother, ETHELRED, mounted the menaced throne and reigned for five troublous years (866–71). He was assisted in the labour of governing and fighting by his brother Alfred, who bore the title, unique in Anglo-Saxon history, of Secundarius. Apparently he and Alfred were fonder of one another than any others of the royal brethren, and had it not been for his early death he had perhaps achieved renown as enduring as that of his successor. The West Saxon was indeed a menaced throne. Already a year before the death of Ethelbert the fiercest of all the Scandinavian storm-winds had begun to blow. The Danes were now bent upon settlement, not merely on pillage. In 865 “the heathen army encamped in Thanet and made peace with the men of Kent, who promised them money therefor, and under cover of the peace and the promised money, the army stole away by night up country and harried all Kent eastwards”. Thus was set the fatal precedent of the payment of ransom. We hear with no surprise that next year there came a mighty heathen army to England and took up their winter quarters in East Anglia. There the sailors supplied themselves with horses and made peace--such peace as it was--with the inhabitants.
Next year (867) the heathen host moved northwards, crossed the Humber and made for York. The affairs of Northumbria were in their usual confusion. Osbert, the lawful king, had been driven out, and another king of non-royal blood named Ella had grasped the reins of power. This is that Ella to whom, in sagas, is assigned the possession of the pit full of serpents into which was thrown the viking Ragnar Lodbrog. Late in the year the two rivals agreed to join their powers and march against “the army”. Having mustered a large force, they marched to York, already occupied by the Danes, and took the city by storm. Some of the Northumbrians, too confident of victory, entered the city. The walls which were still standing severed their army in twain. A terrible slaughter was made of them, “some within and some without”. Both the rival kings were slain and the miserable Northumbrian remnant made peace with “the army”. In the next year, 868, the Danes, who had now no thought of returning home, invaded Mercia and took up their winter quarters at Nottingham. Burhred, King of Mercia, by the advice of his witan called on his West Saxon brothers-in-law for help. They marched with the fyrd of Wessex to Nottingham, but finding the Danes strongly entrenched durst not attack them. “There was no serious fighting there”; the men of Mercia had to make their own peace, and the West Saxon fyrd returned inglorious to their homes.
In 869 “the army” remained quartered in York, doubtless strengthening their hold on Deira, which was rapidly becoming a mere Danish province. But next year (870) witnessed an event, one of the most memorable in the whole story of Scandinavian invasion, an event which led to the canonisation of an English prince, and called into existence the stateliest but one of English monasteries. The king of East Anglia at this time was a young man named Edmund, of pure and noble character. The legends of later centuries have been busy with the story of his boyhood, representing him as a native of Nuremberg, chosen as his heir by an East Anglian king as he went on pilgrimage to Jerusalem, sent to England, and after many romantic adventures, obtaining the kingdom of his patron. Though this traditional history be set aside as altogether untrustworthy, it is difficult to resist the conclusion that there was some strain of foreign blood in King Edmund’s ancestry, regal though it seems to have been.[128] However this may be, all the authorities agree in fixing his accession to the throne at a very early period of his life, and it is probable that, though he had already reigned for about sixteen years, he was not much past the thirtieth year of his age when in 870 the Danes, under the command of two brothers named Inguar and Ubba, leaving Mercia, invaded East Anglia and took up their winter quarters at Thetford. Battle was joined on November 20, and the invaders won a decisive victory, of which they made use to spread themselves over the country and destroy all the monasteries which abounded in that pious land.
Both the Chronicle and Asser seem to imply that King Edmund, “fighting fiercely,” was slain on the field of battle; but it is hardly possible altogether to reject another widely credited version of the story, according to which the young king was taken prisoner on the battle-field; was offered his life by Inguar on condition of renouncing his faith and accepting the heathens as his over-lords; steadfastly refused in any way to compromise his profession of Christianity; was tied to a tree and made a target for the Northmen’s arrows; till at last the Danish leaders took pity on his sufferings and ordered the executioner to strike off his head. This story, which is said to have been often told by Dunstan, who had it from Edmund’s armour-bearer, was universally believed two generations after his death, and procured for the East Anglian king the title of saint and the crown of martyrdom.
The battle in which St. Edmund was defeated was fought at Hoxne, about twenty miles east of Thetford. The martyr’s body, according to the legend, was found miraculously guarded by a wolf, and after an interval of thirty-three years was transferred to the town of Beadoricesworth, about ten miles south of Thetford, where, in the course of time, the magnificent abbey of Bury St. Edmund’s rose above the relics of the saint. Strange to say, the Danish King Canute was the most enthusiastic of the earlier benefactors of this monastery and ever professed an especial reverence for the memory of the martyred king. St. Edmund soon became one of the most popular of English saints, a popularity sufficiently attested by the ancient churches, between fifty and sixty in number, distributed throughout more than half the counties of England from Durham to Devonshire, which are still dedicated to his memory.[129]
In the course of the same campaign, Inguar and Ubba came to Peterborough, then called Medeshamstede; and, as a monk of that abbey pathetically relates, “they burned and brake, slew abbot and monks, and so dealt with what they found there, which was erewhile full rich that they brought it to nothing”. And thus ended the year 870.
The year 871, a famous date in English history, “the year of battles,” the date of Alfred’s accession, now dawned upon the distracted land.[130] Berkshire was the great battle-ground which was invaded in January by a Danish host fresh from the slaughter of St. Edmund and his East Anglians. They came to “the royal town which is called Reading,” situated on the southern bank of the Thames, took it and entrenched a camp on its southward side between Thames and Kennet. A party of plunderers headed by two jarls[131] rode westwards as far as the little village of Englefield, about six miles from Reading, where they were stopped by Ethelwulf, ealdorman of Berkshire, who had taken up a position on a hill overlooking the valley of the Pang. In the encounter which followed, the Danes were defeated, one of the jarls named Sidroc was slain, and the scanty remnant of his troops crept back to the Danish camp at Reading. Four days after this engagement, the royal brothers Ethelred and Alfred, having mustered the troops of Wessex, came to Reading, cut off many of the straggling plunderers, and tried to storm the Danish camp. But the heathen made a fierce sally; the Christians were repulsed; the brave ealdorman Ethelwulf was slain, and the enemy held the field of slaughter.
Emboldened by this victory the Danes again sped westward, possibly intending to harry Somerset and Wiltshire, and occupied Aescesdune, which Asser translates “the hill of the ash,”[132] and which has been generally identified with what are now known as the Downs or as Ashdown Hills. These are a chalk ridge some 600 or 700 feet in height, which runs for about ten miles east and west through the northern part of Berkshire and divides the valley of the Thames from that of the Kennet. The Saxons marched after the enemy in haste and both nations arrayed themselves for battle. The Danes held the higher ground: the centre of their army being commanded by their two kings, Halfdene, brother of Inguar, and Bagseg; while the wings were under the command of the numerous jarls who followed their standard. On the Saxon side it was arranged that Ethelred should encounter the kings and Alfred the jarls. But when the heathens began to march down the hill, and the Saxons should have received the word to spring forward to meet them, that signal was not given from the royal tent. There knelt Ethelred, listening to Mass, and refusing to stir till the rite was ended. “He would not,” he said, “abandon the service of God for that of men.” On Alfred, therefore, rested the responsibility of assuming the chief command and leading the whole army to battle. It is probable, though not distinctly so stated by Asser, that Ethelred, against whose personal courage no imputation is made, soon emerged from his tent and hastened after his fighting “fyrd” men. A single stunted thorn-tree, still standing apparently when Asser wrote, marked the spot where the clash of the opposing armies was deadliest and where the battle-shouts were heard the loudest. Long and desperate was the encounter, but at last, near night-fall, the Saxons prevailed and the heathens fled in utter confusion, leaving dead on the field Bagseg, the king, five jarls and many thousands of the rank and file, whose bodies covered the whole broad ridge of Ashdown.
It was a great victory, certainly, but like so many other battles in this strange campaign it was utterly indecisive. The Danes who had succeeded in reaching their stronghold, now marched southward, apparently threatening Winchester: Ethelred and Alfred followed them, and after another tough fight were defeated at Basing, near to the site of that far-famed “Loyalty House” which eight centuries later was held so gallantly and so long by the Marquis of Winchester for Charles I. against the army of the Parliament. The Danish victory at Basing, however, was, as we are expressly told, “a victory without spoils”. The invaders seem to have renounced their intended attack on Winchester and turned back to their entrenched camp at Reading. Two months pass, during which some of the nameless battles that bring the tale of this year’s conflicts up to nine, may have been fought. When the veil again lifts we find the Danes apparently attempting to turn the English left, marching the whole length of Berkshire to Hungerford, and seeking to penetrate into Wiltshire. The next battle was fought on the edge of Savernake Forest; Ethelred and Alfred each put their enemies to flight, “and far into the day they had the victory,” but after many had fallen on either side, the Danes held the field of slaughter. The chronicler’s entry is extremely enigmatical, and we are perhaps allowed to conjecture that in the moment of victory Ethelred received a mortal wound which changed the fortunes of the day, for our next entry is as follows: “And the Easter after King Ethelred died, having reigned five years, and his body lieth at Wimborne”. As we are told at the same time that “a mickle summer army came to Reading,” we may consider that two events stand out clearly in these April days of 871, the arrival from over-seas of a great fresh body of troops, who had not wintered in England, to reinforce their countrymen at Reading; and the death of King Ethelred, whose body was not taken to be buried in his own city of Winchester, but, probably owing to the disturbed state of the country, had to be interred in the nearer minster of Wimborne in Dorsetshire. There his epitaph (not contemporary) records that he died “by the hands of the pagans”.
The accession of ALFRED to the throne, in 871, on his brother’s death, seems to have passed almost unnoticed in the deadly earnestness of the great encounter. There were battles at Reading and at Wilton, in which, as usual, the Saxons seemed to be on the point of winning when the Danes, turning at the right moment on their disorderly pursuers, changed defeat into victory, and kept possession of the battle-field. They were, however, by this time as much wearied and wasted by the events of this awful year as the Saxons themselves, with whom they now made peace, a peace which, as the historian remarks with surprise, they kept for four years unbroken.
During these years, however, from 872 to 875, they were greatly strengthening their hold on the northern kingdoms. After besieging London and putting it to a heavy ransom, they marched through Mercia, occupied successively Torksey on the Trent and Repton in Derbyshire, dethroned Alfred’s brother-in-law, Burhred (874), and set up in his stead “a foolish thegn named Ceolwulf,” who bound himself by oaths and hostages to hand Mercia back to his new lords whenever they should demand it. Burhred, heart-weary of the strife and the toil of his twenty-two years of reigning, went to the paradise of Anglo-Saxons, Rome, died there and was buried in the new church of St. Mary which Pope Leo IV. had built in the precincts of the Saxon school.
In the next year, 875, while part of the Danish force went to Cambridge and took up their quarters there, a vigorous detachment, headed by the fierce Halfdene, crossed the Tyne and invaded Bernicia, whose inhabitants had driven out a puppet-king named Egbert, reigning there as vassal of the Danes. This spasmodic stroke for liberty was cruelly avenged by the ravage of the till then unharried province. It was probably at this time that the Christian civilisation of Northumbria, such as we find it in the pages of Bede, received its death-stroke. Under the leadership of Halfdene, as Symeon of Durham informs us, the Danish army indulged in a wild revel of cruelty, first mocking and then slaying the servants and handmaidens of God, and in short spreading murder and conflagration from the eastern to the western sea. The devastation was not confined to the Anglian kingdom; the Picts on the north and the Britons of Strathclyde on the north-west shared in the general ruin.
This invasion of Halfdene’s set in motion a pilgrimage which was full of significance for the ecclesiastical history of Northumbria, the memorable migration of the body of Saint Cuthbert. Now, at last, under the terror of the pagan hosts, the little isle of Lindisfarne, which for 240 years had been the spiritual capital of Bernicia, relapsed into its pristine loneliness. Seeing the widespread ravage wrought by the heathen men, bishop Eardulf resolved on flight, but could not bear to leave behind the uncorrupted body of the patron saint. He called into council Edred, abbot of St. Cuthbert’s monastery at Carlisle, who reminded him of the saint’s own words: “Dig ye up my bones and find a home elsewhere as God may direct you, rather than consent to the iniquity of the schismatics”. St. Cuthbert’s forebodings perhaps pointed to a recrudescence of the Easter controversy, but the churchmen rightly held that they were applicable to the far more terrible invasion of the Danes. Accordingly they took up the body of the saint (still incorrupt, according to the legend): they took also its companion relics, the head of St. Oswald, some bones of St. Aidan and of the three bishops who followed him; and provided with these precious talismans they set forth on their first great pilgrimage. For eight years they wandered: at first like sheep over the moors of Northumbria; then they came down to the western coast at Workington, and were on the point of setting sail for Ireland when a wind which sprang up, as if by miracle, drove them back upon the shore. In the hurry of the abortive embarkation they dropped into the sea the precious and beautifully illuminated Lindisfarne Gospels, but miraculously recovered the treasure after many days. This manuscript is still preserved in the British Museum, showing stains as if of sea-water on its pages.
At last, in 883, five years after the peace which will mark the conclusion of this chapter, the uncorrupted body and its weary guardians found rest at the old Roman station of Chester-le-Street, eight miles south of Newcastle, under the shelter of the rule of a converted Dane, Guthred, son of Harthacnut. “He gave them,” says the chronicler, “all the land between Wear and Tyne for a perpetual possession, and ordained that the church which they were about to build should be constituted a sanctuary, that whosoever for any cause should flee to the saint’s body should have respite for thirty-seven days from his pursuers.” Such were the magnificent possessions and privileges bestowed on the minster which now rose at Chester-le-Street by the old Roman highway, and which, after a little more than a century, were to be transferred in 995 to the more famous sanctuary at Durham.
The year 876 marked the end of the truce and the renewal of the Danish attacks on Wessex. Three Danish kings, one of whom was the famous Guthrum, after wintering in Cambridge, stole past the West Saxon fyrd, and apparently by a series of night marches succeeded in reaching Wareham. Here, surrounded by the rivers Piddle and Frome, they could feel themselves as secure as in the islands of Thanet or Sheppey. Worsted, however, by blockade rather than by battle, the Danish kings came to terms with Alfred. They gave hostages once more of their most honourable men and swore upon a certain sacred armlet--an oath, says the chronicler, which they had never given to any other people--that they would truly depart out of the kingdom. Not all of “the army,” however, kept this solemn compact. Hostages and oath notwithstanding, the mounted men rode off to Exeter and entrenched themselves there. King Alfred’s pursuit with the infantry of the fyrd was vain. Fortunately, however, the fleet which should have co-operated with the Danes was overtaken by a fierce storm, and 120 ships filled with warriors were dashed to pieces on the rocks of Purbeck. Disheartened by this calamity, the Northmen at Exeter once more swore great oaths, gave hostages and marched forth from Wessex to their own now vassal kingdom of Mercia.
This happened in the autumn of 877. Soon after Twelfth night, at the beginning of 878, another gang of plunderers came suddenly to the “royal villa” of Chippenham, probably hoping to capture the king himself. With a small band of followers Alfred escaped to the woods and morasses of Athelney in Somerset; but though they thus missed their chief prize, this invasion of Wessex, for some reason unknown to us, came nearer to success than any which had preceded it. From Chippenham as a centre the Danes harried the country far and wide; they drove many of the inhabitants across the sea; those who remained had to accept them as their lords; it seemed as if Wessex would have to follow the example of Mercia and Northumbria, and bow its neck to the Danish yoke. Meanwhile Alfred, in the little island of Athelney--an island then, because surrounded on all sides by marshes, but an island now no longer--was gathering his faithful followers round him and quietly preparing for the recovery of his throne.[133] The little band of his followers wrought at the construction of a rude fortress, which was finished by Easter, and which proved impregnable by the heathen assailants. Behind this earthwork the West Saxon king “greatly stood at bay,” and from hence he and the men of the Somerset fyrd, who gathered round him under their ealdorman Ethelnoth, made several successful sallies against the enemy.
Ere long there came to cheer them the tidings of a great victory gained by the men of Devon, near Bideford Bay, over a Danish army which seems to have been commanded by Ubba, the murderer of St. Edmund. After wintering in South Wales, Ubba had crossed the Bristol Channel, landed in Devonshire and besieged the soldiers of the fyrd in a poorly fortified stronghold which they had constructed and which was called Cynuit.[134] The fort had no spring of water near it, and the victory of the invaders seemed assured, but despair gave courage to the besieged, who sallied forth at dawn, took the besiegers by surprise, and slew of them eight hundred. Only a scanty remnant escaped to their ships; the great raven standard, the flapping of whose wings betokened victory, was taken, and Ubba himself was among the slain. The death of the royal martyr of East Anglia was thus at length avenged.
At last, close upon Whitsuntide, Alfred emerged from the forest of Selwood, which seems to have hitherto served him as cover, collected round him at “Egbert’s Stone” the men of three counties, Somerset, Wilts and Hants (who, as the chronicler beautifully says, “were fain of their recovered king”), and by two days’ marches came up with the Danish army at Ethandune.[135] Here he won a crushing victory. The Danes fled to their fortified camp, probably at Chippenham; Alfred pursued them, shut them up in their stronghold and besieged it for a fortnight. Then came offers of submission, and a promise to withdraw from Wessex. Hostages and oaths were again offered to the conqueror, and--what was more significant--“the army promised that their king, Guthrum, should receive the rite of baptism”.
Alfred returned to the neighbourhood of Athelney, and there waited for the pagan chief’s fulfilment of his promise. He was not disappointed; Guthrum came with thirty of his chiefs to Aller, near Athelney, was baptised and received in rising from the font the Saxon name of Athelstan. It is probable, though not expressly stated, that his thirty warriors were baptised with him. The two kings then went together to Wedmore, a royal vill under the Mendips, where Alfred for twelve nights gave the new convert hospitable entertainment. Guthrum-Athelstan laid aside the white robes of the catechumen at the end of a week, and departed laden with gifts by his spiritual father. “The army” cleared out of Wessex and marched to Cirencester. The most dangerous of Alfred’s wars with the Danes was ended, and the land had rest for fourteen years.
XVII. ALFRED AT PEACE
The fourteen years which followed the Peace of Wedmore (878 to 892) were, as has been said, in the main years of peace, and may be considered to justify the heading of this chapter; yet that peace was not all unbroken, nor was Alfred’s Danish godson always a placid and peaceful Christian. There were still some slight heavings of the barbarian sea, which must be shortly described before we turn to the much more interesting subject of Alfred’s peaceful labours. The main condition of the Peace of Wedmore was that the Danes should evacuate Wessex. The agreement that the Watling Street should be the boundary between the two nations cannot be stated to have been one of the conditions of the peace now concluded. We have, in fact, no accurate information as to the territorial arrangements of 878. The extremely interesting document called Aelfredes and Guthrumes Frith (the peace of Alfred and Guthrum) must belong to some later year than the meeting at Wedmore, and the course of the history seems to justify us in assigning it to the year 885 or thereabouts.[136]
After Guthrum and his men had lingered for some time in the neighbourhood of Cirencester, they marched across England to East Anglia (879), and made a permanent settlement there, “occupying and dividing the land”. This probably means that they exchanged the destructive excitement of the life of the viking for the peaceful existence of the husbandman. But when, five years later, in 884, a division of “the army” which had been ravaging Gaul came to Kent and besieged Rochester, the sight of their fellow-countrymen, harrying on the other side of the Thames estuary, seems to have been too much for Danish self-control. Guthrum “broke peace with King Alfred,” and probably sent some of his men to help in the siege. Alfred, however, set to work to besiege the besiegers, who had “wrought another fastness round themselves,” and in the end forced them to abandon their enterprise, leave their horses as the prize of victory, and depart over seas. He then proceeded to chastise the East Anglian Danes for their breach of faith, sending a fleet against them from Kent which won a signal victory. Notwithstanding a subsequent defeat, his operations must have been on the whole successful, for he rescued London from the Danish yoke and concluded, probably in 885, that treaty with Guthrum which as before said is still extant, bearing the title of Alfred’s and Guthrum’s frith.
If the provisions of Wedmore had made the Watling Street the boundary between the two nationalities, which is doubtful, the treaty now concluded was certainly more favourable to the English. It went from the Thames northwards “up the Lea to its source, then straight on to Bedford, and then up along the Ouse to the Watling Street,” which throughout a large part of its further course became practically the boundary of the two nations. This line gave to the English king London, previously abandoned to the Danes, and with London the region round it north of the Thames and west of the Lea, which had previously formed part of the kingdom of Essex, but which now, perhaps, received a special organisation of its own, and the name that it has since borne for ten centuries, Middlesex. It also gave to Alfred the larger and fairer half of Mercia, being in fact all that portion of the midland counties which lies south and west of the London and North Western Railway,[137] together with half of Hertfordshire and two-thirds of Bedfordshire. But then, on the other hand, it is true that the rest of Mercia, East Anglia, Essex (mutilated) and Northumbria were practically handed over to the Danes, either as personal rulers or as over-lords. This surrender has often been treated as a wise and politic act of self-sacrifice on Alfred’s part, a view which was the natural result of the historical teaching which spoke of Egbert and his descendants as unquestioned monarchs of all Anglo-Saxon Britain. Now, however, that we see what a precarious and shadowy thing was the supremacy of the ninth century Kings of Wessex over northern and midland England, a supremacy which under a feeble king like Ethelwulf perhaps almost vanished into nothingness, we can see that the settlement which generally (though incorrectly) goes by the name of the Peace of Wedmore was not so great a sacrifice on Alfred’s part as we used to imagine. Bitter doubtless it was to Alfred as to every patriotic heart among the “Angel-cyn” to see the Dane so firmly rooted in the north and east of England, but that was the actual position of affairs, and he, as a statesman, was bound to recognise it. On the other hand, the larger half of Mercia now came under Alfred’s personal rule and was irrevocably joined to his realm, and this great new kingdom was now preparing to enter the lists against the Scandinavian invaders with a fairer prospect of success than could ever have been entertained by the disunited, mutually suspicious states of the “Heptarchy”. As has been already pointed out, the Dane was the real though involuntary creator of a united England.
It is worth our while to notice the language of the great frith which thus settled the boundary of the two races. It professes to be concluded “between Alfred, king, and Guthrum, king, and all the witan of the English kinship, and all the folk that is in East Anglia, for themselves and for their offspring”. “If any man be slain, as we hold all equally dear, both Englishmen and Danes, the penalty shall be eight half-marks of pure gold,[138] but if he be a ceorl or freed-man on gafol [rented] land, the penalty shall be 200 scillings.” “And we all agreed on this day when men swore their [mutual] oaths that neither bond nor free shall fare unto the [Danish] army without leave, nor shall any one of them come to us. Should it happen that one of them wishes to have business with us, or one of us with them, in respect of land or cattle, that is to be permitted only on condition of his giving hostages for the observance of the peace and as a testimony that he has a clean back,” in other words, that his past record is that of a peaceable neighbour.
Evidently the continuance of friendly relations between the two races, parted only by two small streams and the old Roman road, was felt to be precarious, and both rulers agreed that the less they mingled with one another the better.
* * * * *
It is pleasant to turn from the monotonous story of the conflict with the Danes to the subject of Alfred’s family life. In 868, three years before “the year of battles” and his own accession to the throne, he married a noble Mercian lady named Ealhswith, daughter of Ethelred, ealdorman of the Gaini(?), and descended on her mother’s side from the royal family of Mercia. By this lady (who survived him three years) Alfred had five children who grew up. The eldest, Ethelfled, when little more than a child, was given in marriage to Ethelred, ealdorman of the Mercians, and became, after her father’s death, a personage of great importance, ruling her mother’s country with spirit and success under the proud title of “Lady of the Mercians”. The next child, Edward, who was eventually his father’s successor, had for his especial companion his sister Elfrida. “When he was not hunting or engaged in other manly exercises, he was with her learning the psalter or books of Saxon poetry, showing affability and gentleness towards all, both natives and foreigners, and ever in complete subjection to his father.” In after life the two playmates were widely separated. The boy became Edward the Elder, one of the greatest of English kings; the girl was sent across the seas to become the wife of Baldwin II. of Flanders, son of Judith of France, and her husband the handsome forester. After more than two centuries the brother and sister playmates were once more to meet in the persons of their progeny, when Elfrida’s descendant Henry Beauclerk, son of Matilda of Flanders, married Matilda of Scotland, descended in the seventh degree from Edward the Elder. Of the two other children of Alfred, we know only that Ethelgiva was early dedicated to the monastic life, becoming Abbess of Shaftesbury; and that Ethelweard, the youngest of the family, was a pupil in a court school founded by his father, probably in imitation of the similar institutions founded by Charlemagne, in which the sons of the nobility and some others were taught to read books both Latin and Anglo-Saxon, and also learned to write. Ethelweard (who must not be confounded with his kinsman of the same name, author of a chronicle) seems to have specially profited by this training, and was probably the most learned member of his family.
An obscure statement of Asser’s with reference to Alfred’s marriage reveals to us the fact that the great king’s life was in some mysterious way one long battle with disease. From early boyhood he suffered from some malady which caused him grievous pain. In his twentieth year, just about the time of his marriage, this malady left him, but was succeeded by another which caused him at intervals yet sharper pain, and always kept him in terror of its recurrence. This affliction endured from his twentieth till his forty-fifth year, if not longer.[139] These hints, obscure as they are, heighten our admiration of the heroic spirit with which Alfred, often suffering from acute bodily pain, with the ever-present fear of attacks either by disease or by the Danes, set himself to fulfil his duties towards his subjects in the wide and comprehensive sense in which he understood them. Of his wisely planned and efficient schemes for the defence of his realm from hostile invasion something will be said in the next chapter. We are now concerned with his earnest endeavours to dispel the intellectual darkness which brooded over his country, yet of which only the king himself and a few chosen friends were fully conscious.
It is clear that in the course of the century which elapsed between the death of Bede and the birth of Alfred, the intellect of England had suffered a terrible relapse into ignorance and barbarism. It was not the inroads of the Northmen alone which had brought about this result, though, of course, the ruin of so many Northumbrian monasteries and the destruction of so many manuscripts were influences unfavourable to the cause of learning. But independently of Scandinavian ravages, England herself was becoming barbarised. In Northumbria the beacon light of Christianity and culture, which had once shone so brightly, was quenched in the blood of her kings, murdered and murderers. In Mercia there was a little more interest in literary pursuits, but apparently there only; East Anglia and Wessex were intellectually dead. As Alfred himself says, in the preface to his translation of Pope Gregory’s Regula Pastoralis: “Even before all this burning and ravaging [by the Danes in the reigns of Ethelwulf and his sons], when the churches were still filled with books and sacred vessels, and God’s servants abounded, yet they knew very little of the contents of their books, because they were not written in their own idiom”. “Formerly men came from beyond our borders, seeking wisdom in our own land; now, if we are to have it at all, we must look for it abroad. So great was the decay of learning among Englishmen that there were very few on this side Humber, and I ween not many north of it, who could understand the ritual [of Mass] or translate a letter from Latin into English. No, I cannot remember one such, south of the Thames, when I came to the throne.”
To help him in the arduous task of once more bringing the English race under the influence of literary culture, nay, rather to teach him who yearned to be the teacher of his people, Alfred sought the aid of learned ecclesiastics beyond his own borders. With much earnestness he invited the Welshman Asser, his future biographer, to repair to his court. From Mercia he imported Plegmund, who became in 890 archbishop of Canterbury, and Werferth, who eventually returned to the midlands as bishop of Worcester. From St. Omer came Grimbald, who was consecrated abbot of the new minster founded by Alfred at Winchester; and from the lands near the mouth of the Elbe came John the Old Saxon, whose ancestors had probably fought hard for heathenism against Charlemagne, but who was himself a learned ecclesiastic. He helped Alfred much in his literary work, and was made by him abbot of his monastery at Athelney; an uneasy post, for two of his monks contrived a villainous plot against his life and his reputation, but were foiled by the vigorous resistance made by the stalwart Old Saxon, who had been a warrior in his youth, when the would-be murderers set upon him by night in the lonely convent church.
These were the chief of Alfred’s literary assistants, and with their help he enriched his people with translations of some of the most highly prized works which the dying Roman world had bequeathed to Teutonic Europe.
1. The passage quoted above concerning the decay of learning in England comes from the king’s translation of Pope Gregory’s Regula Pastoralis, or as Alfred calls it his Herd-book. In this book the great pope to whom England was so largely indebted for her Christianity, gave many excellent hints as to the character, duties and special temptations of the Christian pastor. In his preface, King Alfred explained the reasons which had moved him to undertake the work of a translator. He marvelled that none of the good and wise men who had been in England before him had anticipated him in the work, but concluded that this was because they expected that learning would flourish yet more instead of decaying, and that another generation would be so familiar with Latin as to need no translations. Then on the other hand he remembered how the Old Testament itself had been translated from the Hebrew, first into Greek and then into Latin, and from thence, at any rate in part, into the languages of the other Christian nations of Europe; and on this precedent he resolved to act. “For it seems to me desirable,” he said, “that we should turn some of the books which all men ought to know into that language which we can all understand, and so bring it to pass (as we certainly may do if we only have rest from our enemies) that all the free youth of England, sons of men of substance, shall devote themselves to learning in their early years before they are fit for other occupations; that they shall first learn to read English writing, and then if they are still willing to continue as pupils and desire to rise to the higher ranks of the state, that they shall be taught the Latin language.”
The king then proceeds to describe his mode of translation: “sometimes word for word and sometimes meaning for meaning; as I learned the sense from Plegmund, mine archbishop, and Asser, my bishop, and Grimbald and John my mass-priests”. He describes the measures which he has taken to supply every see in his kingdom with a copy of the book, enriched with an aestel (clasp or book-marker?) worth 300 scillings, and commands in God’s name that no man shall take the aestel from the book or the book from the minster. “Thank God! we have now abundance of learned bishops, but we know not how long this may continue; and I therefore ordain that each book be always kept in the place to which now I send it, unless the bishop himself desire to borrow it, or give a written order for its loan to another.”
2. In order that his subjects might have some knowledge of the history of that great and splendid Roman past which lay in ruins behind them, Alfred, always with the help of his ecclesiastic friends, translated the seven books of the History of Paulus Orosius against the Pagans. The selection was in many respects an excellent one, for Orosius, a Spanish ecclesiastic of the fifth century and a friend of St. Augustine, has here set forth, in a concise manner and fairly interesting style, all that his contemporaries knew of the history of the world from the building of Babylon to Alaric’s capture of Rome. He was credulous and inaccurate, and his work, except for the events of his own age, has no scientific value, but as a manual of ancient history for the young Anglo-Saxon nobleman it could hardly have been surpassed. Both Alfred, however, and his readers must have been somewhat unnecessarily depressed by its perusal; for as the book had a polemical bearing, adversus Paganos, and was intended to show that the calamities which were befalling the Roman empire in the fifth century were not due to its adoption of the Christian faith, its author was naturally led to exaggerate the misery of the world in preceding ages. While enumerating, therefore, all the murders, pestilences and earthquakes of which he could find mention in the 5,617 years that had elapsed since the creation of the world, he omits to notice the long interspaces of quiet happiness which there had been in some ages and some countries of the world, and he has no praise for the progress which Humanity had made in some departments of life from Sardanapalus to Constantine.
King Alfred and his teachers were evidently sometimes at a loss to understand the meaning of their author, and it is amusing to see the ingenious arts by which in such cases they evaded the difficulty. They decided, no doubt wisely, that the unabridged history would be too long for their Saxon students, and therefore practised severe compression. Unfortunately for us this compression applies much more to the later portions of the history, where Orosius’s testimony is valuable, and where his translators might have added something of importance, than to the earlier books where neither he nor they have anything to say that we care to hear. The long account of Cæsar’s campaign in Gaul is reduced within the limits of a single sentence, and even the story of his British campaigns is shortened, though here we derive from the translation the fact that in Alfred’s opinion the site of Cæsar’s third battle was “near the river that is called Thames, near the ford that is called Wallingford”.
Incomparably the most interesting, however, of Alfred’s interpolations is made at the very beginning of the history, in the long geographical description which Orosius thought it his duty to prefix to his work. In translating this chapter the king has allowed himself very great freedom and sometimes has not improved upon his author; as when he volunteers a statement, borrowed doubtless from some classical geographer, that Scotland (by which, of course, he means Ireland) lies over against the Wendel Sea (or Mediterranean) at its western end. But when he comes to speak of the Teutonic and Scandinavian lands, he breaks quite away from Orosius and gives us a detailed ethnological description of Northern Europe, which, though in some of its details not easy of interpretation, is far more valuable than the meagre Orosian sentences for which it is exchanged. And then, suddenly, without any pretence of following his author’s guidance, he introduces the weather-beaten forms of two Norwegian pilots, Ohthere and Wulfstan, and imparts to his subjects and to posterity the information which they had given him as to their voyages in the North Sea and the Baltic.
Of these two men Ohthere, “who dwelt northmost of all the Northmen,” was the most adventurous. He told how he had sailed northward as far as any of the whale-hunters go, keeping the waste land on his right and the wide sea on his left hand. Then, leaving even the whalers behind, he had sailed northward for three days more, at the end of which time he found the coast turning suddenly to the east and then to the south. After this he had anchored his ship at the mouth of a great river. In other words, this bold seaman had doubled the North Cape, entered the White Sea, and probably cast anchor at the mouth of the river Dwina, somewhere near the site of the modern Archangel. The conversation of this old salt concerning the whales and walruses of the Polar Sea, the Fins and their reindeer, their accumulated skins of martens and bears, and feathers of sea-birds, which constituted the sole wealth of those desolate regions, evidently made a deep impression on the mind of “his lord King Alfred”. Though we may be inclined to smile at the naïve literary device which introduced all these details into the history of a Spanish presbyter who lived some five centuries earlier, we must be grateful to the king who preserved for us this record of the exploits of the Franklins and the Nansens of that long-vanished age.
3. It was not, however, only the history of the Biblical and classical ages which Alfred desired to render accessible to his people. He knew that the deeds of their own forefathers since they had entered the land of Britain, were worthy of their remembrance, and he rightly judged that the great struggle with the Danes, in which he was himself engaged, would soon be History, as memorable as anything that was recorded in the pages of Orosius. With this view, as Geoffrey Gaimar, a historian of the twelfth century, says, “He caused to be written an English book of adventures and of laws of the land and of the kings who made war”. In other words, Alfred’s orders brought into being the Saxon Chronicle. As its latest editor[140] says: “The popular answer is in this case the right one. The Chronicle is the work of Alfred the Great. The idea of a national chronicle, as opposed to merely local annals, was his, and that this idea was realised under his direction and supervision, I most firmly believe. And we may, I think, safely place in the forefront of the Chronicle the inscription which encircles Alfred’s jewel [found at Athelney in 1693 and now in the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford], AELFRED MEC HEHT GEWYRCAN, ‘Alfred ordered me to be made’.”
4. In further pursuance of the same plan a translation of Bede’s Ecclesiastical History from Latin into Anglo-Saxon was made, as we have reason to believe, either by Alfred’s own hand or under his immediate supervision. As this book had become a kind of classic among churchmen, Alfred allowed himself here less liberty than in some of his other translations. Some letters, epitaphs and similar documents are omitted, and there is an almost complete erasure of the chapters relating to the wearisome Paschal controversy. In other respects the king’s translation seems to be a fairly accurate reproduction of the original work.
5. Last, and in some ways most interesting of all the literary labours of Alfred, comes his translation of the Consolation of Philosophy by Boethius. This is a book which, after enjoying during the early Middle Ages a popularity perhaps somewhat greater than its merits, has fallen since the revival of learning into much less deserved oblivion. In it Boethius, a Roman nobleman who was cast into prison and eventually executed by order of the Gothic king Theodoric, sets forth the comfort which came to him in his wearisome imprisonment by meditations on Divine Philosophy. The problem which perplexed him and which Philosophy, the spiritual companion of his solitude, sought to solve, was the world-old one, “Why do the wicked flourish and why are the righteous afflicted?” Strange to say, though Boethius was a Christian, and was even in a certain sense a martyr for the Catholic faith, the Christian solution of the problem is kept almost entirely out of sight, and the answers suggested are such as might have been given by Socrates or Epictetus. Boethius believes in a Divine Ruler of the universe, and the general tendency of the book is towards the strengthening of belief, but it is belief rather of a theistic than of a definitely Christian type. However with all its defects and all its strange silences, the book was one which had a great attraction for many of the noblest minds of a bewildered Europe, and not least for the great West Saxon king, who, struggling against the depressing influences of disease, and ever dreading a fresh outburst of the Danish volcano, felt that he, too, like the author, had much need of “the Consolation of Philosophy”. In his other translations he had been working for his people; in this, which was probably executed towards the close of his reign, he was, perhaps, working rather for himself, for the solace and fortification of his own troubled spirit.
We have seen that Alfred did not take a slavish view of the duties of a translator; and in his Boethius he is more lordly than ever, omitting, adding, altering with a sublime contempt for mere verbal accuracy. It is, however, these very changes which make the book so precious to a student of Alfred’s own character. We see therein what were the thoughts which were most akin to his nature; we learn something of the secret springs of his actions; we can almost listen to the conversations which he held with his bishops and thegns in the great wooden palace at Winchester.
In the first place, he gives to the whole inquiry a more religious turn than he found in the original. For “Nature” he substitutes “God”; he sometimes introduces the name of Christ; he speaks of the Judgment-day, and his language has throughout that distinctly religious tone which is so strangely absent from the meditations of Boethius. He takes us into his royal council and tells us the principles upon which he has sought to administer the state, using for his instruments three sorts of ministers, men of prayer, men of war, and men of work, for all of whom suitable maintenance must be found out of the land. He expands a slight sentence of Boethius in praise of friendship into a noble passage, in which he declares that true friendship is not an earthly but a heavenly blessing; that all other objects of desire in this world are sought after in obedience to some selfish motive, but a true friend we love for love’s own sake and because of our trust in his truth, hoping for no other return. “Nature joins friends together and unites them with an inseparable love, whereas by our worldly goods and the wealth of this life we more often make foes than friends.”[141]
Boethius puts into the mouth of Philosophy some words deprecatory of too great regard for noble birth; but Alfred says boldly on his own account that “true high birth is that of the mind not of the flesh,” a memorable utterance in the mouth of the man whose lineage “went unto Cerdic” and who according to the songs of Saxon bards was descended from Woden. There are also in this most interesting translation many passages which show Alfred’s keen perception of the beauties of Nature, his unfailing interest in geography, and his knowledge of Saxon folk-lore (as illustrated by his allusion to the bones of Weland the Smith), besides some which reveal his naïve ignorance of well-known facts of ancient history, as when he describes the sella curulis as a kind of carriage, or when he tells us that Cassius was another name for Brutus. One sees with pleasure that the wise king had a certain gift of humour, and that he could at times be even sarcastic. He alone, not his author, is responsible for the following remark attributed to Philosophy: “Two things honour and power can do, if they fall into the hands of a fool: they can cause him to be respected and even revered by other fools”. Whosoever would get at the heart of this great man, the true founder of the English kingdom, and discover his inmost thoughts, should carefully study Alfred’s translation of Boethius, and observe where he neglects and where he reinforces from his own experience the maxims and arguments of the Roman statesman.
To the interval of comparative peace with which we are now dealing we may probably assign the reorganisation of the royal household. Apparently service in the palace was conducted on parallel lines with service in the army, being performed in both cases by men who had houses of their own to govern and lands of their own to cultivate. The king, therefore, ordained that the household should be divided into three portions, each of which should take palace-duty (“night and day,” says the biographer) for one month, and then, being relieved by another detachment, return home for two months’ furlough. The same principle of threefold division prevailed partially in the simple budget of Alfred’s exchequer. He divided, says Asser, all the revenue which was yearly collected by his officers into two parts, one of which was devoted to secular and the other to religious uses. Of the secular portion one-third was paid to the household, according to their respective dignities and special services; one-third to the workmen of various nationalities whom he had gathered about him for his great works of building and restoration; and one-third to the foreigners--probably for the most part scholars or professors of some liberal art--who flocked in great numbers to his court. Of the religious half of his revenue, one-quarter went to the poor, one-quarter to the two new monasteries founded by him at Winchester and Athelney, one-quarter to the court school, and the remainder promiscuously to the various monasteries in Wessex and Mercia, and the needy churches in Britain and even in Gaul and Ireland.
One of the most extraordinary of the king’s benefactions, one which we might well have doubted had it not been vouched for by the contemporary evidence of the Chronicle, is thus described therein: “And that same year [883 for 882] Sighelm and Athelstan carried to Rome the alms which he had vowed to send thither when he was fighting the [Danish] army at London: and also to India to St. Thomas and St. Bartholomew”. Of the campaign before London in the course of which this vow was made we have no more definite information. The sending of alms to Rome is easily understood, but the mission of West Saxon almoners to “St. Thomas’s Christians” in India is indeed a marvellous fact if true. Unfortunately the tendency of modern criticism is somewhat unfavourable to the genuineness of the entry.[142]
* * * * *
Though we know not the exact year when Alfred’s Dooms were compiled, this will be the best place for a brief statement of the legislative work of the great king.
“These are the dooms which Alfred the king chose, in order that no man should deem them otherwise than according to his will.” Such is the opening sentence of the laws. Then follows an elaborate table of contents including Ine’s laws as well as his own; and then, strangely enough, we have almost the whole of four chapters of the book of Exodus (xx.-xxiii.), containing the Ten Commandments and the Mosaic code of civil law in all its archaic simplicity and with all its Draconian sternness: the principle of “an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth”; “whosoever doeth this or that he shall surely die,” the keynote of the whole. Then, however, comes a reference to the mission of “the Lord’s Son, our God, who is Jesus Christ, who came into the world, not to destroy the law but to fulfil it, and to increase it with all good things. With mild-heartedness and humility did He teach.”
Thereupon follows a description of the Council of Jerusalem as given in the fifteenth chapter of the Acts of the Apostles, and a rehearsal of its decrees about “abstaining from fornication, from things offered in sacrifice to idols, from things strangled and from blood”. The acts of this council end with the Golden Rule (omitted from the manuscripts on which the Received Text of the New Testament is founded, but inserted in Codex Bezae and several early authorities), “And that which ye will that other men should not do to you, do not ye to other men”. “On this one doom,” says the king, “let each man meditate that he may judge each one rightly; nor needs he any other law-book. Let him seek for no other doom upon his neighbour than he would be willing to have pronounced upon himself.”
But, as Alfred proceeds to show, since the conversion of many nations to Christianity, synods have been held at which bishops and other distinguished witan have been present, and these assemblies, for the sake of the “mild-heartedness” which Christ taught, have commuted the death-penalty for the offences named in the Mosaic law to money payments on the scale set forth by them; and such payments may, therefore, without sin be taken by the secular lords to whom they are made payable. Only, there is one crime for which no money payment must be suffered to atone; and that is treason against a man’s rightful lord, because Almighty God ordained no remission of punishment to those who despised Himself, nor could His Son give any such remission to the traitor who delivered Him to death; and He ordered that a man should love his lord even as himself.
These passages give us an interesting glimpse of the mental process which governed the compilation of Alfred’s law-book. In the same spirit in which he translated Orosius and Gregory for his subjects’ benefit, he sets before them what he considers the source of all legislation, the divine ordinances given amidst the thunders of Sinai. He then shows how that law was modified by the teaching of Christ; he rehearses the several points of the decree of the Council of Jerusalem, and thence glides by an easy transition to that tariff of compensations and fines (payment of wergild and wite) by which, in his day, atonement might be made for all offences, with the one exception here so emphatically insisted on, the crime of treason against a man’s natural lord. Of course, modern historical science cannot concede to Church synods the credit of this great change, which we believe to have been wrought possibly through long ages in the forests of Germany--namely, the change by which the blood feud slowly gave place to the exacted wer: but doubtless Christian ecclesiastics accepted the principle, perhaps in many instances regulated its application; and King Alfred was so far right in claiming the authority of the Church for the practice of money compensation instead of the relentless severity of some of the ordinances of Exodus. The conclusion of Alfred’s Prologue is important as indicating what was the legislative competence of the king and how he shared it with the witan.
“I then, King Alfred, gathered these laws together and caused them to be written down, selecting many which pleased me from among those ordained by my predecessors. And many of those which I liked not I abrogated by the counsel of my Witan, ordaining some different way for the future. For I did not dare to set down in writing many of my own suggestions, not knowing how they would be liked by those who should come after. But whenever I found in the laws passed in the days of my kinsman Ine, or of Offa, King of Mercia, or of Ethelbert, the first English convert to Christianity, anything that seemed to me to be most justly decided, such laws I gathered in and the others I left out.”
Generally speaking, Alfred’s laws differ from those of Ine, and still more from those of Kentish Ethelbert, in the direction of greater leniency, the amount of fine payable for injuries to the person being almost always considerably reduced. This tendency, when we compare Alfred’s and Ethelbert’s laws, is at first sight obscured by the fact that the fines imposed by the latter are expressed in terms of the Kentish scilling, which was worth four times as much as that of Wessex, but when we have made the necessary correction for this difference, it comes out very clearly. Thus the fine for cutting off the thumb was in Ethelbert’s code the equivalent of 80 shillings of Wessex, while under Alfred it was only 30. For the like injury to the middle finger it was respectively 32 and 15 shillings; for the “gold” or ring finger, 24 and 17.
This remarkable diminution in the scale of pecuniary punishments was probably due, not simply to “mild-heartedness” on the part of the king and his witan, but also to the economic effect of the Danish ravages. So much of the portable wealth of the country had been carried off from hall and monastery to the homesteads of Scandinavia, that the value of gold and silver remaining in the land was sensibly increased, and a fine which was reasonable at the beginning of the eighth century became exorbitant at the close of the ninth. This abatement of pecuniary penalty is modified in a singular way in the case of forest trespass. It may be remembered that by the laws of Ine, a man going into a forest and felling timber for his own use was liable to a fine of 30 scillings for each tree so felled, up to three, but that 90 scillings was the maximum penalty. Now, by the laws of Alfred the penalty for each tree so felled was only 5 scillings, but there was no maximum. A forest-thief, therefore, who cut down twenty trees would fare worse under the new law than under the old. One would like to know what were the developments in English forestry which led to this singular modification of the law.
Our attention begins to be directed to the public assemblies for the transaction of business, the local moots which, as we know from other sources, had judicial as well as administrative duties to discharge, arranging the levy of men for the fyrd and raising money for the equipment of ships, as well as settling important questions of inheritance and disputes about property. It was important that such meetings should not be disturbed by the brawls of unruly partisans of the litigants, and accordingly we find it enacted that “if any man fight before the king’s ealdorman in the gemot (meeting), he shall pay his wer and wite as the law ordains for any assault that he may have committed, and in addition shall pay a fine (wite) of 120 scillings to the ealdorman”.
Law 42 in Alfred’s code illustrates in an interesting manner that gradual transition from the blood-feud to the law-suit which was perhaps the most important conquest of Teutonic civilisation. By the various sections of this law it is provided that no man who has a grievance against another shall fight his foe until he has first demanded justice of him. That done, however, and justice denied, he may, if he have a sufficiently strong body of friends to back him, besiege the defendant for seven days. Should that blockade bring about a surrender and a disarmament, he must keep his adversary in custody for thirty days, sending word to his kinship that they may come and pay the mulct for which the prisoner is liable. What is to happen if the surrender does not take place at the end of the seven days, or the payment at the end of the thirty, we are not informed, but it seems to be implied that the claimant may then fight and even slay his enemy without guilt. If the plaintiff have not sufficient power to besiege his foe, he must ride to the ealdorman and demand his aid. Failing that, he must seek redress of the king, before he takes it upon himself to fight his foe. Moreover, a man might always fight for his lord or his kinsman without incurring the penalties of blood-guiltiness, and so too he could wage “lawful war” with the seducer of his wife, his sister, or his mother. We see that the ideas of the old blood-feud and of the so-called “Fist-right” still lingered in the mind even of so wise and religious a legislator as Alfred. Redress of wrongs by the action of courts of law might be the ideal, but in the actual Saxon world private warfare must still be allowed, and all that the king could hope to accomplish was to confine it within narrow bounds and regulate its procedure.
On the condition of the servile class, the theows and esnes, in the time of Alfred, not much light is thrown by Alfred’s Doom-book. We learn, however, that there was already a large class of free-men working for wages, for whose holidays, amounting in all to about thirty-six days in the year, the forty-third of Alfred’s laws made provision. From this enactment the theows and esnes are expressly excluded, but it is provided that all men in servile condition shall have the four Wednesdays in the Ember-weeks, on which days they are graciously permitted to make a present of their labour to any one who may have helped them in God’s name, or even to work for themselves. There is also a curious provision (law 20) exempting from liability the lord of a monk who has received money on deposit which he has failed to restore. This passage coincides with some others which seem to indicate that owing to the ruin of the monasteries wrought by the Danes, many of the monks, in order to keep body and soul together, accepted a servile position on the estate or in the house of some great landowner.
There are other indications that during the two centuries which had elapsed since the legislation of Ine, the tendency which was even then observable, towards the formation of large landed estates and the lessening of the number of free and independent ceorls, had been going forward. One cause which probably contributed to this result was the conversion of Folkland into Bookland: two terms which, after puzzling a whole generation of English historians, have at last, it may be hoped, yielded up their secret to the patient research of a foreign student of our institutions.[143] Folkland, it seems now safe to say, was “family land held by common right and without written evidence”.[144] Bookland was, as it is called by a Latin interpreter,[145] terra testamentalis, land over which the owner had full power of disposition by will, and his right to which rested on some “book” or written document, not on folk-right and immemorial custom. A striking illustration of the difference between the two kinds of property is afforded by the will of a certain ealdorman Alfred who was a contemporary of his great namesake the king.[146] This nobleman leaves the bulk of his large property, which is expressly stated to be bookland, to his widow and “our common bairn” Aldryth: but there is also a son, probably not born in wedlock, for whom he wishes to make provision. After leaving him a certain small “bookland” property, he adds: “If the king will let him have the folkland in addition to this bookland, then let him have and enjoy it”; if not, the widow is to convey to him certain other bookland estates. It is argued with much force that here we have the case of a nobleman owning large properties which have been conveyed to him by perhaps recent “books,” written instruments of purchase and sale, royal donations and the like. But he has inherited also another, probably smaller, property which has been in his family from time immemorial, is his by folk-right, and is called folkland. But this property is held subject to certain customary laws of inheritance, and is perhaps liable to reversion to other members of the kinship in default of male heirs. The ealdorman hopes for the king’s intervention on behalf of his son should any difficulty be made about his succession to the folkland, and, failing that, desires that the loss shall be made up to him out of the bookland estate, over which his disposing power is incontestable.
If, as there is reason to believe, the cases of conversion of folkland into bookland were frequent throughout the later Saxon centuries, if the slumbering rights of succession of distant members of the kinship were being barred by “books” granting the land to members of the royal household, to convents and churches, or simply confirming ordinary commercial transactions of sale and exchange, it is easy to see that the class of “twy-hind” ceorls would be sensibly diminished and the possessions of the “twelf-hynd” man, the thegn or the king’s retainer visibly increased. All these causes would augment the number of poor and struggling freemen who, especially in times of war and invasion during “the clash of mighty opposites,” were glad to sacrifice some part of their precarious independence by “commending” themselves to the protection of some powerful landowner.
XVIII. ALFRED’S LAST DAYS
From the peaceful labours which had occupied him for the last seven years, Alfred was recalled to the weary work of war by tidings of the return of the dreaded here to the English coast. During those seven years the chronicler had been nervously noting the deeds of “the army” beyond seas. They had been fighting chiefly in the north of Gaul, pressing up the rivers Somme, Seine and Marne, and even laying close siege for ten months (November, 885, to September, 886) to the city of Paris itself, a siege which the Emperor Charles the Fat had raised, not by arms but by the ignominious payment of tribute. It is easy to trace a connexion between these vehement attacks on Frankish territory and the resistance which, in our own country, from Athelney onwards, had been so valiantly offered by Alfred. But now the process was reversed, and the Northmen, severely handled by a Frankish king, were thrown back upon England. In the year 887 Charles the Fat, who had disgusted his subjects by his ignominious treaty with the Danes, was deposed from his imperial dignity, and Arnulf, his nephew, was chosen king by the Franks east of the Rhine, by whose aid he won for himself, nine years after, the grander title of emperor. In 891 he won a great victory over the Danes near the modern city of Louvain. Hereupon the Scandinavians, recognising that “Francia” was for the present closed against them by the might of this new German king, decided to try their fortune once more on the other side of the channel.
The operations of the five years that followed (892–896[147]) are described by the Chronicle in great detail and with unusual vividness and vigour. A recent editor[148] calls the six or seven pages devoted to these campaigns “the most remarkable piece of writing in the whole series of chronicles”. It is allowable to conjecture that such a narrative, if not from Alfred’s own pen, comes from some person in the immediate neighbourhood of the king. Fresh and vivid, however, as the narrative is, it is not easy to discover therefrom the precise sequence of events. Different bands of Danes are seen to be operating in different parts of the kingdom, and the difficulty which they probably felt in combining their efforts meets also the historian who seeks to combine their narratives. Here it will be sufficient to indicate some of the principal stages of the contest.
The invasion of 892 seems to have been made by two bodies of Danes, acting to some extent independently of each other. “The great army” which had been defeated by Arnulf at Louvain, went westwards from Flanders to Boulogne, embarked from the latter port “with horses and all” in a fleet of 250 ships, and sailed across to the Kentish coast. According to their usual custom they made use of a river channel to penetrate into the interior; but the river up which they fared and which probably entered the sea at Lymne, has long since disappeared in that region of silted-up streams. Up the river they towed their ships for four miles, and there they found a “work” half finished and defended by a few rustics. Their capture of this work well illustrates a remark of Asser’s that “of the many forts which Alfred ordered to be built, some were never begun and others, begun too late, were not finished when the enemy broke in upon them by land and sea,” causing tardy repentance and shame on the part of the disobedient builders. The Danish army then constructed for themselves a “work” at Appledore, some twenty miles west of Hythe. The nature of these “works,” of which we hear so much at this point of the history, is explained to us by the Frankish chronicler who describes the Emperor Arnulf’s victory in 891, and who tells us that the Northmen “had according to their usual manner fortified themselves with wood and heaped-up earth”.[149] The description points to a mound crowned with a palisading, such as the Romans had used to protect their encampments.
Meanwhile another horde, not so large as the first, and fleeing, not so much from the conquering sword of Arnulf, as from the famine which waited upon their own destructive footsteps, having crossed the channel with eighty ships, had entered the Thames and made a “work” in Kent near the Isle of Sheppey. The leader of this band was the far-famed Haesten or Hasting, a pirate who had sailed up the Loire to ravage Central Gaul in the year 866, and in the twenty-six years which followed had not often rested from the work of devastation. Between these two invading armies Alfred took up a position (893) in the great Andredesweald which stretched along the whole length of Kent and Sussex dividing the two counties, and from thence or from the burhs or fortresses which he had erected, forays were constantly made with some success on the unwelcome visitors. So things seem to have remained through the winter. At Easter the larger host, having broken up from Appledore, wandered through Hants and Berks, ravaging as they went. The young “Etheling” Edward, son of Alfred, being informed of their movements, and having collected his troops, pursued the spoil-laden plunderers and came up with them at Farnham. He fought them and gained a complete victory; the booty was all recovered and the robbers in their desperation swam the Thames without waiting to find a ford, and made their way up the little stream of the Hertfordshire Colne to the river island of Thorney. There apparently Edward was forced to leave them, for the fyrd was divided into two parts, each bound to serve for six months only. The time for relieving guard had now arrived, and while one half was marching “thitherward” (to the front) and the other half homeward, the favourable moment passed away for pursuing the Danes, whose king had been wounded in the late encounter. Some of the enemy penetrated to the coast, collected a hundred ships and sailed westward to make a raid on Devonshire, whither Alfred was forced to follow them.
Leaving “the great army” for a time, we turn to follow the fortunes of Hasting. It seems that he had pretended to imitate the example of Guthrum (who had died three years before, at peace with Alfred), and had expressed his willingness to become a Christian. He gave hostages, swore oaths of peace and friendship, and was probably baptised along with his two sons, the godfathers being Alfred and his son-in-law Ethelred of Mercia, his stout ally in all these campaigns. But some turn in the fortunes of war, perhaps the disloyal attitude of the Danes of Northumbria and Mercia, who were hungering for war, sent Hasting again into armed opposition. He made a “work” at Benfleet in the south-east corner of Essex, and as soon as it was finished he began, as the chronicler says with indignation, to harry that realm of Mercia which Ethelred, his godfather, was bound to defend. Alfred, who had been summoned to Exeter by the tidings of another Danish raid, now returned rapidly to London where a strong burh had been built, a stout-hearted body of citizens having been sworn to defend it. Marching forth with these and with his own troops, he assailed the “work” at Benfleet and carried it by storm. Great spoil was found there as well as many women and children--a sure token that the Northmen had come to settle in the land. All the treasure was gathered within the safe shelter of London-burh, but Alfred, recognising the obligations of spiritual kindred, though Hasting had so soon forgotten them, restored to the old pirate his wife and her two sons. After this the two Danish armies seem to have united and to have made a great “work” at Shoebury in Essex, not far from the abandoned Benfleet. Hasting henceforward fades out of the narrative, possibly unwilling to continue to fight against his generous foe.[150]
The avowed union of all the men of the “Danelaw” (as the district settled by the Danes was now called), both in East Anglia and Northumbria, gave a new character to the war. It was no longer a mere descent of sea-rovers on Kent or Devonshire; it was a terrible internal struggle, and all along the Watling Street, the boundary between the two kingdoms, the shuttle of war flew swiftly. Leaving their camp at Shoebury, the Danes marched up the valley of the Thames and across the country to the Severn. But now the whole forces of the kingdom were collected for the contest. Not only Ethelred of Mercia but “the Ealdormen of Wilts and Somerset and such of the king’s thegns as were then at home at the works, gathered together from every town east of the Parret, from both sides of Selwood, from the north of the Thames and the west of the Severn, and with them came also”--a memorable addition--“some part of the North Welsh race”. Evidently the Welshmen had learned by experience that there were worse enemies than the Saxons, and probably also the righteous rule of Alfred had won their confidence. The army thus collected marched after the Danes and came up with them at a place called Buttington on the Severn. For many weeks the two armies sat watching each other, the river flowing between them. At last, after the Danes had eaten most of their horses, they sallied forth and crossed the river to fight. The battle which followed was a bloody one, many of the king’s thegns falling; but the slaughter on the Danish side was greater, and victory remained with the English. Back into Essex fled the beaten remnant of the army, but having ere winter gathered to them many helpers from the Danelaw, and having entrusted ships and wives and property to the care of the East Angles, they once more followed the Watling Street into Cheshire, which for some reason or other (possibly connected with the Danish conquest of Ireland) they persistently made the objective of their campaign. Day and night they marched, till they came to the estuary of the Dee. Here, still surrounded by its grass-grown walls, lay the silent and ruined city which had for near four centuries resounded to the shouts of the twentieth legion, “Valerian and Victorious”. In its desolation it yet bore the name of “the camp of the legions” (lega-ceaster), but it was “a waste Chester”. A Chester it is still, by its picturesque medieval architecture pre-eminent above all others of its kind, but happily no longer waste. The fyrd hastened with all speed after the here, but failed to overtake them ere they had taken refuge in the ghostly city. They had, therefore, to be satisfied with destroying all the cattle and corn in the neighbourhood, slaying some straggling Danes and leaving nought but a hungry wilderness round the survivors. The blockade of Chester (894) was not a strict one; before long the Danes, urged by famine, broke out of the city, and escaping into the friendly Danelaw marched across the country to the island of Mersea at the mouth of the Blackwater, not far from their old winter quarters in Essex. At the same time the invaders who had been troubling Devonshire sailed homeward, but on their way harried the west of Sussex, until the burg-ware (townsfolk) of Chichester issued forth to battle, routed them, slew many hundreds, and captured some of their ships. Throughout this second Danish war, the martial ardour of the inhabitants of the burhs built or refortified by the king is very conspicuous.
It was now apparently 895, the fourth year since the great scip-here had appeared off the coast of Kent. The Danes who had wintered in Mersea, still hankering doubtless after the spoil of London, sailed round to the estuary of the Thames and towed their ships up the sluggish waters of the Lea, which now forms the boundary between Essex and Middlesex. Here, about twenty miles above London--that is, probably in the neighbourhood of Bishop Stortford--they wrought a “work,” and remained encamped for six months. When summer came a multitude of the burg-ware of London marched forth to storm the Danish work. This time, unfortunately, civic valour did not triumph. The burg-ware were put to flight, and four of the king’s thegns, who had been acting as their leaders, were slain.
Autumn was now approaching and it was important that the men of Essex should not be attacked while they were gathering in their harvest. Accordingly Alfred encamped in the neighbourhood of London. One day he rode up the Lea to reconnoitre the Danish position, and something in the course of the river suggested to his mind, fertile in expedients and enriched by the study of ancient historians, that it might be possible so to obstruct it as to hinder the escape of the Danes. The scheme ripened; he set two bodies of troops to erect works above and below the station of the ships. Ere the works were finished the Danes saw that their position was being made untenable; they abandoned the ships--probably by night--and marched off, still no doubt through the friendly Danelaw, till they came to Bridgnorth on the Severn, where they again wrought a work and fixed their winter quarters. While the fyrd rode after them towards the north, the men of London-burh came out and captured the ships, some of which they broke up and others, the more serviceable, they towed down stream to London. Such was the strange campaign of the Lea. Any one who knows the Lea in its present conditions, who has seen the sleepy bargemen gliding along from lock to lock, the anglers sitting all day on the banks which Izaak Walton has made classic ground, all the indescribable restfulness and tranquillity of the scene, will feel the contrast between this peaceful Present and the days when Alfred’s men were toiling at their noisy labours and when the heathens howled forth their execrations on finding their passage barred by the Saxons.
In the following summer (896) “the here went some to East Anglia, some to Northumbria, and those who were moneyless got them ships and fared over sea to the Seine. Thus had the army,” says the chronicler, “not utterly broken all the English race. But they were more fearfully broken during those three years by pestilence both of cattle and of men, especially because the most eminent of the king’s thegns died in those three years.” The chronicler then gives the name and rank of the chief victims of the plague: the bishops of Rochester and Dorchester, the ealdormen of Kent, Essex and Hants, a king’s thegn of Sussex, the town-reeve of Winchester, a grand constable (king’s horse-thegn) and many others.
Though the great land invasion was thus defeated, the king had still to deal with a harassing swarm of sea-pirates, whose long ships named “ashes,” built of the wood of the ill-omened ash tree, were constantly appearing off the southern coast, often manned by insurgent Danes from East Anglia and Northumbria. In order to grapple with these pestilent enemies Alfred turned shipbuilder. He may have already taken some steps towards this end, but the following entry in the Chronicle for the year 897 (= 896) is the earliest definite information that we receive as to the beginnings of England’s navy: “Then King Alfred bade build long ships against the ashes; they were full nigh twice as long as the others. Some had sixty oars, some more. They were both swifter and steadier and eke higher than the others. They were not built on Frisian nor yet on Danish lines, but as he himself thought that they might be most serviceable.”
An engagement of no great importance, which is, however, described in great detail by the chronicler, took place between the pirates and nine of the new ships which had been despatched by Alfred to stop their depredations, and had sealed them up in some estuary or land-locked bay (such as Brading harbour) in the Isle of Wight. While the tide was high the crews of the big English ships captured and slew to their hearts’ content, but when the tide ebbed they were left aground, as the chronicler says, “very inconveniently” half on one side of the estuary and half on the other, with the Danish ashes, also aground, between them. At dead low water the shore was firm enough for the Danish pirates to climb down out of their ship, paddle across the sands and challenge a fight with the crews of the three English ships nearest to them. For such small contending forces the battle seems to have been a bloody one. One hundred and twenty Danes fell and sixty-two English, but among these latter were many men of high rank, a king’s reeve and a king’s companion (geneat), and also many of the Frisian captains and sailors whom Alfred, knowing their nautical skill, had attracted to his service. When the battle was ended, in came the flowing tide, on which the Danish ships could float out to sea while the larger ships of the new navy were still lying “very inconveniently aground”. So the three pirate ships escaped for the time, but they were sorely strained and damaged, so that they could not all sail round the coast of Sussex. Two were wrecked on that coast, and their crews being brought to Winchester and led into the king’s presence, were ordered by him to be hanged. This order was not like the usual clemency of the king, but he probably felt that it was necessary to repress with a strong hand movements which were now no longer warfare but mere brigandage. The third ship escaped both the winds and the English pursuers, and landed her crew, a troop of sore-wounded and weary men, on the East Anglian coast.
Not more than four years of rest seem to have been granted to Alfred after the repulse of this last invasion before death ended his labours. There can be little doubt that some part at least of that plentiful literary harvest which was described in the preceding chapter belongs to these closing years. Especially interesting is it to note that, according to the judgment of the most careful modern inquirers, the king’s metrical translation of Boethius should be referred to this period. The proem to that translation alludes to “the manifold worldly cares that oft troubled him both in mind and body” when he was turning it from Latin into English prose, and then again to the cares, apparently the yet heavier cares, “that in his days came upon the kingdom to which he had succeeded,” but which did not prevent him--so high was his value for the great Consolatio--from “working it up once more into verse” as the reader may now behold it. All these cares were now at an end, and ended, too, all his noble toil for the defence, the enlightenment and the guidance of his people. He died on October 26, 900,[151] in the fifty-third year of his age, and was buried in St. Swithun’s monastery at Winchester. In 903, however (according to the legend told by William of Malmesbury), as “the delirious fancies of the canons” declared that the king’s ghost, resuming possession of his corpse, wandered at night through their cells, the royal remains were transferred to the New Minster, founded by his son in fulfilment of a plan which Alfred himself had formed and had confided to his friend and spiritual adviser, Grimbald the Frank. In the reign of Henry I. the monks of New Minster migrated from their narrow domain within the city to a large and convenient site called Hyde Mead, on its northern side, and in their migration they took with them the body of the king. At the suppression of the monasteries Hyde Abbey fell into decay, and near the close of the eighteenth century the Hampshire magistrates purchased the site for the purpose of erecting thereon a county jail. The tombs were ruthlessly opened, the stone coffins were turned into horse troughs, the lead which covered a coffin, presumably Alfred’s, was sold for two guineas, and apparently the dust of the great king himself was scattered to the winds. No leader of the Danish army could have shown greater zest in the work of desecration. This New Minster at Winchester was consecrated by one of Alfred’s friends, Archbishop Plegmund, and numbered another of his friends, Grimbald, as first on its list of abbots. Its records, known as the Liber Monasterii de Hyda, furnish us with some valuable information concerning the reigns of Alfred and his sons.
As for the great king himself, several of the chroniclers, especially his kinsman, Ethelweard, and Florence of Worcester, have celebrated his praises in fitting terms, but his best epitaph is contained in three simple words of an unknown scribe of the twelfth century, “Alfred, England’s Darling”. His fame and the glory of his noble character have grown brighter as the centuries have rolled by, and at this day he is really nearer to the hearts of Englishmen than all, save one, of his successors.
NOTE.
ON THE EXTENT OF THE DANELAW.
The political boundaries of the Danish state recognised after the Peace of Wedmore have been sufficiently indicated by historians, and it may be said that for all practical purposes they nearly coincide with the old Roman road called the Watling Street, the sphere of Danish influence lying to the north and east, that of Saxon influence and rule to the south and west of that line, which, as previously remarked, coincides very nearly with the line of the London and North Western Railway. There is, however, another question both interesting and important: “To what extent did the Danish population fill up the district thus assigned to them?” In other words, “How far did the ethnological coincide with the political boundary?” This is a question which we have not as yet sufficient materials to answer fully or accurately. Much study and much patient research on the part of our local antiquaries, study of dialects and research in sepulchral tumuli, will probably be needed before we can say with certainty: “Here the old Anglian population remained preponderant, and here the Danish or Norwegian immigrants so filled the land as to make it practically a Scandinavian district”. But in the meantime some help is gained from a consideration of the place-names in the several districts of England; only we must beware of looking at the conclusions thus arrived at as final and irreversible.
Broadly, however, we may say with some confidence that place-names ending in ton, ham, yard and worth are Saxon or Anglian; those ending in by, thorpe and toft are Danish; in thwaite, garth, beck, haugh, and fell, Norwegian; in borough, probably Anglian; in wick or wich, if inland, Saxon, if near the sea-coast, Danish. Applying these tests we find evidence of considerable Danish settlements, but no Danish preponderance, in Norfolk and Suffolk. The great fen district round Peterborough seems to have been an impassable barrier, and we find no Danish names to the west of it; on the other hand, the Humber and the Wash must have been constantly visited by the ships of the vikings, for their shores swarm with Danish names. As has been said by Mr. Isaac Taylor,[152] “A district in Lincolnshire, about nine miles by twelve, between Tattersall, New Bolingbroke, Horncastle and Spilsby, would appear to have been more exclusively Danish than any other in the kingdom. In this small space there are some forty unmistakably Danish village names, such as Kirby, Moorby, Enderby, etc., all denoting the fixed residence of a Danish population.” “The Danish local names radiate from the Wash.[153] In Leicestershire, Rutland, Northamptonshire and Yorkshire the Danish names preponderate over those of the Anglo-Saxon type; while Cambridgeshire, Huntingdonshire, Bedfordshire and the adjacent counties, protected by the fens, present scarcely a single Danish name.” There can be no more striking proof of the absolute preponderance of the Danish element in the north-east corner of Yorkshire (where probably the influence of the invaders radiated from the estuary of the Tees) than the fact that Streanæshalc itself, the Anglian sanctuary, home of St. Hilda and meeting-place of the great Paschal Synod, meekly bowed its head to the alien yoke and accepted the Danish name of Whitby.
In the midland counties the most striking proof of the numerical superiority of the Danes was exhibited by the powerful confederation of the five boroughs, Leicester, Lincoln, Nottingham, Stamford and Derby. It is true that only one of these bore an unmistakably Danish name, but the part which they played politically, their strong offensive and defensive alliance, seems to confirm the generally accepted conclusion that the five boroughs were essentially a Danish confederation. Going further north we find very slight indications of Danish settlement in Durham and Northumberland. This part of Northumbria the invaders seem to have visited only for ravage, not for settlement, being satisfied to leave it under the rule of some subservient earl, who might or might not be of their own race. Further north still, across the Scottish border, Danish names die out altogether; but when we go far enough we find abundant traces of the other great stream of Scandinavian invasion, the Norwegian, and about this a few words must be said in reference, not to Scotland (Shetland, Orkney, Hebrides, etc.), but to the western coast of England.
The place-names of Cumberland and Westmorland must always have arrested the attention of careful philologists. While the names of mountains and rivers, such as Helvellyn, Blencathra, Glaramara, Derwent, are for the most part of Celtic origin, we find a great number of names of villages and some also of hills and streams which evidently are Scandinavian rather than Celtic. Such are all the multitudinous thwaites and ghylls, the garths and haughs, and the frequently recurring beck for a stream, and fell for a high hill. Mr. Robert Ferguson called attention to the fact that this multitude of non-Celtic terminations--so remarkable in a country which actually bears the name of the Cymri--pointed to a large immigration of Scandinavians, not, however, of the Danish but of the Norwegian type. Of such immigration we have scarcely a hint in the chroniclers, but the philological evidence adduced by Mr. Ferguson[154] is so strong that his conclusion has been generally accepted by ethnologists. As to the date of this migration, his theory is that after the Saxon king Edmund in 945 had overrun the district of Cumbria and had left it wasted and bare of people, the Norwegians from their stronghold in the Isle of Man, discerning their advantage, covered the Solway with their ships, and pouring into that land of mountains and lakes and long stream-watered valleys--a land so like their fatherland--settled there and made it their own. This migration he would therefore place in the latter part of the tenth century, between the just mentioned Cumbrian campaign of Edmund (945) and the similar campaign of Ethelred (1000) which was undertaken, Henry of Huntingdon says, against “the Danes” yet involved the ravaging of Cumberland.
However this question of the date may hereafter be settled, there can be little doubt that the race which peoples these two most picturesque counties of England is pre-eminently of Norwegian origin. There seems to have been two other settlements of Scandinavians which deserve remark. One was in that curious peninsula of Cheshire, called the Wirral, between the estuaries of Dee and Mersey, a region which teems with Norse names; and the other, an exceptional instance of a Norse settlement south of the Watling Street, was in the promontory of Pembrokeshire, where a number of towns and villages, of which the best known is the watering-place of Tenby, attest by their names their Danish origin.
XIX. EDWARD AND HIS SONS
With the death of Alfred and the accession of his son EDWARD (called in later times “the Elder,” to distinguish him from his descendants, “the Martyr” and “the Confessor”) we enter upon a new century. Like its predecessor, the tenth century was for Europe generally a time of gloom, dismay and depression. The break-up of the empire of Charlemagne went on with increasing rapidity, the imperial title itself becoming the prize of obscure Italian princes until, about the middle of the century, the great Otto I. of Saxony (962–73) did something to restore its lustre and to bring back the Italian peninsula within the sphere of the imperial unity. In some measure, too, he succeeded in rehabilitating the office of the papacy, cruelly discredited by the intrigues of two profligate women, Theodora and Marozia, who had placed their lovers, their husbands and their young and licentious sons on the most venerated throne in Christendom. In France the Carolingian line was yielding to the same process of decay which had destroyed its Merovingian predecessor; and thirteen years before the end of the century Hugh Capet followed the example of Pippin and, thrusting the descendants of Charlemagne into the background, became the acknowledged king of the diminished territory of France; a position in which he was somewhat overshadowed by the greatness of his nominal vassals, the Norman dukes descended from Rollo. For France and Germany it is true that the invasions of the Northmen had practically ceased, but the ravages of the Hungarians during the first half of the century were a terror to Europe. In England, however, this age was not nearly so dark a time as many of its predecessors. In fact the tenth century saw the Anglo-Saxon monarchy attain its highest point of power and prosperity, though it also before its close saw it sink to the lowest depths of misery and degradation.
The first five years of Edward’s reign[155] were disturbed by the rebellion of his cousin Ethelwald, son of Ethelred. According to the theories of strict hereditary succession which have since prevailed, Ethelwald’s title as representative of an elder son was incontestable, and in fact Alfred himself according to these theories was but a usurper, yet it need hardly be said that these theories had no place in the Anglo-Saxon polity. The son, if a minor, or for any other reason unsuitable, had no indefeasible right to wear his dead father’s crown. Among the Saxons, as with most of the other Teutonic nations, the two principles of inheritance and election were closely, we are inclined to say illogically, blended. The new king must be of the royal race; in the case of Wessex his line must “go unto Cerdic”; but he must also be “chosen and raised to be king” by the witan, the wise men or senators of the kingdom. This ceremony had been duly complied with at Edward’s accession, and therefore he was rightful king though sprung from a younger branch of the royal house. Moreover it was a matter of reproach against Ethelwald that he had “without the king’s leave and against the bishop’s ordinance married or cohabited with a woman who had before been hallowed as a nun”. Yet for all this he did not lack adherents, some of whom probably held that he was wrongfully excluded from the throne.
Ethelwald’s rebellion was announced to the world by his occupation of a royal vill at Badbury in Dorsetshire, near his father’s sepulchre at Wimborne. Thither rode the new king with a portion of the local fyrd, but found all the approaches to the place blocked by order of the insurgent Etheling. It was rumoured that Ethelwald had said to his followers, “Here will I die or here will I lie”: nevertheless his heart failed him when it came to the pinch, and he stole away by night to Northumbria, vainly pursued by the men of King Edward. The Danish army in the northern realm accepted him for their king; the men of East Anglia joined them, and after three years all marched through Mercia, ravaging as they went, as far as Cricklade in Wiltshire. At the approach of Edward with his fyrd, the insurgents moved rapidly northwards with the spoil which they had gathered. Edward pursued, and ravaged all their land between the Cambridgeshire dykes and the river Ouse, as far northward as the fens. He then sounded a retreat, but the men of Kent, eager for the fight, though seven times ordered to withdraw, continued to face the enemy. The battle which ensued was evidently a defeat of the Saxons, and cost the lives of two ealdormen and many distinguished nobles of Kent. Practically however it was as good as a victory, since Ethelwald, “who enticed the Danes to that breach of the peace,” lay dead upon the field. Peace seems naturally to have followed upon his death, and thus was ended in 905 what might have been a dangerous civil war.
The chief work of Edward’s reign was the conquest of the new Danish kingdoms of East Anglia, Essex and the remainder of Mercia. The settlement which followed the Peace of Wedmore, a wise and statesmanlike compromise at the time, had ceased to be applicable to the existing state of affairs. At every serious crisis of the West Saxon state the Danes beyond Watling Street at once broke the frith, and their dreaded “army” crossed the Saxon border. It was time that this intolerable state of things should be brought to an end, and to its termination Edward, himself “a man of war from his youth,” and with an army of Saxon veterans at his back, now successfully devoted himself. We hear of him in 910 beating the Danes at Tettenhall in Staffordshire; in 911, at some place unnamed, winning a great victory over the Northumbrian Danes--a victory in which two kings, many jarls and holds (earls and chief captains) and thousands of soldiers of meaner rank were slain. Then, in 912, he “took possession of London and Oxford, and all the lands thereto belonging”. This however was apparently no fresh conquest, but only a peaceful resumption of territories previously appertaining to Mercia. In 913 he fortified Hertford, encamped at Maldon in Essex, and received the submission of the greater part of that kingdom. In 914 and 915 the chief victories seem to have been won not by the king in person, but by the warlike energies of the local militia. In the former year they defeated a plundering host of Northamptonshire and Leicestershire Danes at Leighton Buzzard, and stripped them of their accumulated spoil. In the latter, operations after a long interval were begun anew by marauders from beyond sea. A scip-here, or naval armament, from the coast of Brittany, made its unwelcome appearance at the mouth of the Severn and captured a Welsh bishop whom Edward ransomed for forty pounds (of silver); and then the men of Hereford, of Gloucester and of all the nearest burhs came out against them, slew one of the two jarls who commanded them and the brother of his colleague, and drove them into a “park” or enclosed space, which the men of the fyrd beset so closely that the Danes were forced to give hostages for their peaceable departure from the country. Apparently, however, they broke their promises, stole away by night and made two hostile descents on the coast of Somerset, one at Watchet and one at Porlock, both of which were successfully repulsed. After betaking themselves to the two islands of Flatholme and Steepholme, in the middle of the Bristol Channel, and seeing many of their number die of sheer starvation on those desolate islands, the remnant departed, first to South Wales and then to Ireland, and were heard of no more.
The largest share of the credit for the conquest of Danish Mercia must be given to Edward’s manlike sister, Ethelfled, “lady of the Mercians”. Daughter herself of a Mercian princess and married to a husband (Ethelred) who was probably related to the royal line of Offa, she seems after her husband’s death in 911 to have still commanded, to an extraordinary degree, the love and loyalty of the Mercian people, and to have wielded the warlike resources of the Midland kingdom with wonderful energy and success. Each year she struck a heavy blow either at the men of the Danelaw, on her right, or at the Welsh of Gwynedd--now no longer friendly to the Saxon--on her left. With her, as with her brother, the plan of campaign, generally centred round some burh which the English ruler built in the hostile territory and defended against all comers. After Chester had been repaired, probably by Ethelred, the chief fortresses built and defended by his widow were Bromesberrow, near Ledbury in Herefordshire, Shrewsbury, Bridgnorth, Stafford, Eddisbury in the forest of Delamere, Warwick, Chirk in Denbighshire, Warburton and Runcorn in the south of Lancashire. While some of these forts were within, most of them were decidedly beyond the Watling Street line, and their erection betokened the recovery for the English of an important portion of the Danelaw. The Denbighshire fort is evidence of the determination of the high-hearted “lady of the Mercians” to reduce her Welsh neighbours to obedience; a determination which was shown still more plainly when in June 19, 916, she sent the Mercian fyrd into South Wales, took Brecon by storm and captured the wife of the Welsh king with thirty-four other persons, probably nobles of his court.
By this time, however, the conquering career of Ethelfled was drawing to a close. Towards the end of July, 917, she “with the aid of God obtained the burh which is called Derby, with all pertaining thereto”. The victory, however, was not bloodless. “There were slain within the gates four of her thegns, of those who were dearest unto her.” The next year by the same Divine aid “she gained peaceable possession of the burh of Leicester and subdued to herself the largest part of the here that owned allegiance thereto. Also the men of York promised obedience, and some gave bail, while others confirmed with oaths their covenant to be under her rule.” Apparently the Lady of Mercia was destined to become also Lady of Northumbria. Not so, however. “Very swiftly after this covenant was made, twelve nights before midsummer (918) she died at Tamworth, in the eighth year that she had held power with right lordship over the Mercians. And her body lieth at Gloucester in the east porch of St. Peter’s Church.” From this entry it appears probable that Tamworth was the favourite residence of the Lady of the Mercians as it had been of her royal predecessors.[156] What was the precise nature of the political relation between Ethelfled and her royal brother, it is perhaps impossible to discover. Clearly the status of Ethelred and his wife was not kingly. He is correctly spoken of as ealdorman and as hlaford (lord), while she is described as hlæfdige (lady); yet in all her actions, in her military movements, her sieges and her treaties, she seems to act as independently as Penda or Offa. Probably the term which is sometimes used in the Chronicle, mund-bora (protector), most fittingly expresses the relation which during Ethelfled’s lifetime Edward held toward his sister. She is not absolutely independent, yet she governs her subjects, marches her armies about, and promotes her well-beloved thegns to honour, as seems meet to her. She is a subject-ally, most faithful and most valiant of all allies, and he, should she ever need to call upon him for help, will not fail as her “protector”.
Whatever may have been the precise nature of the peculiar relation between Wessex and Mercia, it came to an end soon after the death of Ethelfled. She left, indeed, a daughter named Elfwyn, who seems for about eighteen months to have wielded her mother’s authority, but in 919, “three weeks before mid-winter,” she was deprived of all power over the Mercians and led away into Wessex. There are some slight indications in the Chronicle that this obliteration of Mercia as a semi-independent state was not altogether acceptable to the people of the middle kingdom. However this may have been, Edward, now sending forth into the field the united armies of Wessex and Mercia, carried forward with irresistible might the process of the unification of the kingdom. The burhs which he erected between 913 and 924 rounded off the work of Ethelfled. These were Hertford, Bedford, Huntingdon and Towcester in the East Midlands, Maldon and Colchester in Essex, Stamford in Lincolnshire, Nottingham and Bakewell in the country of the Peak, Thelwall in Cheshire, and Manchester, the last being expressly stated to have been “in Northumbria”. The work of subduing and over-aweing the Welsh was not forgotten. In 921 Edward built a burh at Wigmore in Herefordshire, in sight of the long range of Radnor Forest, and another at the mouth of the Cleddau in Pembrokeshire, a proof that his arms had penetrated as far as to Milford Haven.
Round all these newly built burhs the tide of battle fiercely ebbed and flowed ere the people whom they were meant to hold down patiently submitted to their domination. Thus we hear of an unsuccessful assault by “the army” of East Anglia and Mercia on the burh at Wigmore; of “the army” breaking the frith and marching against Towcester. “And they fought against it all day and thought to carry it by storm, but the folk that were therein defended it till help came, whereupon they departed ravaging as they went.” In consequence of this attack, unsuccessful as it was, Edward surrounded Towcester with a stone wall which it had not previously possessed. The enemy vainly endeavoured to imitate Edward’s castle-building policy. The Danes of Huntingdon and East Anglia built a great fort at Tempsford on the river Ouse (a little south of St. Neots), “and thought that they should therefrom with battle and un-peace win back to themselves more of this land”. But they were disappointed, for the people from the nearest burhs having gathered themselves together, fought against Tempsford and overthrew it, slaying the Danish king and two of his jarls, and all who were found fighting therein.
The year which is marked in the chief manuscript of the Chronicle as 921 but which probably was in truth 918, saw the full tide of English successes, and in consequence we now hear of the complete submission of East Anglia and Essex to the rule of Edward. “To him submitted much folk both of the East Angles and the East Saxons, who had been erewhile under the Danish power, and all the ‘army’ in East Anglia swore to oneness with him, that they would all will that which he willed, and be at peace with those with whom he was at peace, whether by sea or land. And the here that belonged to Cambridge chose him specially for lord and protector (mund-bora) and confirmed this by oaths as he commanded them.” In 919, the year after the death of Ethelfled, three kings of North Wales and all the North Welsh kin sought Edward to be their lord. His conquest of Nottingham followed, and here we observe with interest that he garrisoned the newly captured fort with Danes as well as with Englishmen; also that all the folk that were in Mercia submitted to his rule, whether they were Danes or Englishmen.
Thus then we now have Edward not wielding the shadowy power of a Bretwalda, but actual king, personally ruling over all the lands south of the Humber, acknowledged as over-lord by North Wales, probably also by Northumbria. Did his overlordship extend yet farther north? Did Scotland recognise him as supreme king? That question seems to be answered decisively in the affirmative by the celebrated entry in the Chronicle for the year 924 which probably should be corrected to 921. After describing Edward’s operations in the midlands, his building a bridge over the Trent between the two burhs of Nottingham, his going from thence into the Peak country and ordering a burh to be built as near as possible to Bakewell, the chronicler thus proceeds: “Him chose as father and lord the Scottish king and all the Scottish people; and Raegnald, Eadulf’s son [king of Northumbria], and all the dwellers in Northumbria whether they were Englishmen or Danes or Northmen or any others, and eke the king of the Welsh of Strathclyde and all his people [did the like]”. The facts here related, as far as they concern the men of Strathclyde and Northumbria, are not seriously disputed, though one may note in passing the distinction now first met with between “Danes” and “Northmen” or Norwegians. But how as to Edward’s over-lordship of Scotland, which seems to be vouched for by the beginning of the sentence, and which was made, four centuries later by his namesake, Edward Plantagenet, the basis of a claim to exercise the rights of lord paramount? The answer to that question has involved historians on both sides of the Border in fierce debate. It is, of course, impossible here to do more than sketch the bare outline of the controversy, but so much as this must be attempted.
The champions of the English claim to supremacy over Scotland[157] maintain that “in 921 Edward received--what no West Saxon king had ever before received--the submission of the Scots and the Strathclyde Welsh.... In the Latin phrase they commended themselves to him; they promised him fidelity and put themselves under his protection.” “There was nothing strange or degrading in this relation; it was the relation in which in theory all other princes stood to the Emperor.”[158] “From this time to the fourteenth century the vassalage of Scotland was an essential part of the public law of the isle of Britain. No doubt many attempts were made to cast off the dependent relation which had been voluntarily incurred; but when a king of the English had once been chosen ‘to father and to lord,’ his successors never willingly gave up the position which had thus been bestowed upon them.”[159] On the other side, Scottish historians[160] naturally point to the fact that it is a Saxon chronicler who makes the statement from which such mighty consequences are deduced. The law does not allow a suitor to make evidence for himself; but here is an alleged “commendation” of which we have no hint in the records of the king and the nation by whom it is alleged to have been made; only in the chronicles of the pretended receiver. They further throw doubt on the genuineness of the passage and suggest that it may be a late interpolation. One argument against its genuineness is that it seems to represent the “commendation” as taking place in the heart of Derbyshire, whereas such a transaction would naturally have been performed on the boundary of the two kingdoms. Another and more serious objection is that Raegnald of Northumbria is here named as taking part in the “commendation” in the year 924, whereas “in the Irish annals, at this period most accurate and trustworthy authorities for all that relates to the family of Raegnald,”[161] the death of this chieftain is assigned to a date three years earlier, 921.
The question at issue, now merely academic but once of vital importance to the two countries, has been much complicated by subsequent transactions, alleged cessions of Lothian and Strathclyde on terms of feudal dependence, homage rendered by Scottish kings for possessions in England and so forth. The allegation of fact made by the English chronicler seems entirely worthy of credit. Doubtless for polemical purposes such a statement if made by a Scottish authority would have been more valuable; but the writer of the Chronicle was a contemporary; his work though not very luminous and often careless of strict chronological accuracy, certainly impresses one’s mind with a general feeling of its honesty and good faith; there is no trace of interpolation in the manuscripts (which are all long antecedent to the reign of Edward I.); nor is there any very obvious reason why a monastic scribe writing at Winchester or Canterbury should have invented the transactions here detailed if they never happened. When the entry is carefully examined and compared with similar passages in the same Chronicle, it is seen that the writer is not committed to the statement that the interview took place at Bakewell. Nor will the objection drawn from the date of Raegnald’s death appear formidable to any one who knows how loose is the chronology of the Chronicle everywhere, but especially in this part of it, in which, for reasons quite unconnected with this controversy, its latest editor considers that all the events are post-dated by three years.
If then we accept as probably true the statement that “the Scottish king [Constantine II.] and all the Scottish people chose Edward as father and as lord,” what does that statement imply? It is perhaps a mistake to introduce the word “commendation,” though that word may pretty nearly describe the nature of the transaction. But the word itself, though known to the Franks and occurring in the Bavarian law-book, does not seem to have been ever used by our Anglo-Saxon ancestors. The Teutonic word mund-byrd (protection), which most nearly corresponds to it, is not used of the transactions of 921, though it is used shortly before concerning the men of Huntingdon who “bowed to King Edward and sought his frith (peace) and his mund-byrd”. In such a difficult and obscure discussion, it is surely better to keep quite close to the original words of the historian, avoiding all mention of “commendation” and far more of “vassalage,” which last term, as all agree, does not correctly represent any relation established in Britain early in the tenth century. Let us repeat simply that the King of Scots “chose Edward as father and as lord”.
What then was the meaning of that choice? Did it make “the vassalage of Scotland an essential part of the public law of the isle of Britain”? The word “vassalage” no one would insist upon; but may we not also demur to the expression “the public law of the isle of Britain” at this period of its history? Where is there a trace in that age of such a refined juristic conception? Is not everything in the relation between the races and kingdoms of Britain vague, ill-defined, anarchic? The Danes make a frith and break it; the West Saxons establish some kind of supremacy over the Mercians; Edward’s personal rule is advanced as far as the Humber; he becomes thereby undoubtedly the most powerful man in Britain; Scots, Northumbrians and Britons of Strathclyde take note of the fact and desire to become allies--we may safely say subject-allies--of so mighty a prince, whom they accordingly take “as father and as lord”. That is all that has yet happened. There was something here which on the one hand, as the current of the age swept on towards feudalism, might have been developed into lordship and vassalage, or, on the other, might have utterly disappeared. In the next reign the very districts which have thus acknowledged the superiority of Edward are found fighting against his son. Under such a weak king as Ethelred the germ involved in the transaction of 921 must have disappeared altogether. No one can suppose that the Redeless King, who could not defend his own throne against the attacks of the Danes, was in any sense “father and lord” of Scotland. Thus the question, which is academic to us now, was or should have been equally academic in the thirteenth century. Whatever other grounds Edward I. might have for claiming high-lordship over Scotland, the dead and buried rights or duties or courtesies of 921 ought not to have been imported into the controversy.
Shortly after the events last described, at the end of 924 or the beginning of 925, King Edward died at Farndon[162] in Mercia. Only sixteen days after his death his son Elfweard died also, and father and son were both buried in the New Minster at Winchester. Edward, though one of the noblest of his race, was a man much less richly endowed with intellectual gifts than his father. We cease to hear of works undertaken for the instruction of his subjects, and the great Chronicle begins to languish in his reign. His character also seems to lack some of the beauty of his father’s; one can hardly imagine Alfred dealing with Ethelwald or with Elfwyn exactly in the same manner as his son. But he was essentially a soldier, probably a strict disciplinarian, and he, with the help of that Amazon, his sister, carried strongly and steadily forward the great work which their father had begun, the recovery of England for the English.
* * * * *
ATHELSTAN, who now succeeded to the throne, and who reigned, probably, from 924 to 940, was much the eldest of the remaining sons of Edward. The others were but children, while he was thirty years of age at his father’s death. Although he cannot have been more than six years old when Alfred died, we are told that his comely face and winning ways so endeared him to his grandfather that the latter made him “a premature soldier,” robing him in a scarlet mantle and girding him with a little sword, golden-scabbarded, and hung round his neck by a jewelled baldric. Moreover, Alfred is said to have prayed that the royal child might one day have a prosperous reign. It is not very easy to reconcile these stories with the fact, alleged by William of Malmesbury, that the stain of illegitimacy rested on his birth. The same authority tells us that he was the son of Egwinna, a noble lady, and then in another place describes her as the daughter of a shepherd, marked out by a dream for high destiny, and introduced to Edward by his old nurse, at whose cottage he was visiting. It is difficult entirely to reject the statement that there was something irregular about Athelstan’s birth which caused difficulties about his accession even in that age, not fastidious about the strict principles of legitimacy. There is also something slightly suspicious about the emphasis which the chroniclers lay on the premature death of his half-brother, Elfweard, as if, had that event not occurred, he would have been at least a partner in the throne, if not its sole occupant. We need not, perhaps, greatly concern ourselves with William of Malmesbury’s story of a certain Alfred, the rival of Athelstan, who opposed his elevation to the throne on the ground of his illegitimacy, went to Rome to state his case before the Pope and died in the act of taking an oath, presumably a false oath, in its support. All this, though it raises a suspicion that for some reason or other the accession of Athelstan was not wholly unopposed, is too doubtful and legendary to be made the ground-work of serious history. We can only say that Athelstan’s day was a glorious one, if there were some clouds which hung round its sunrise. It should, perhaps, also be mentioned that Athelstan when a boy had been entrusted by his grandfather to the care of Ethelred and Ethelfled, and seems before his accession to the West Saxon throne to have been specially connected with Mercia.
The coronation of Athelstan took place at Kingston-on-Thames, which for the rest of this century was the chief crowning place of English kings. In the new king, whatever may have been the clouds overhanging his birth, or the difficulties attending his accession, we have a more splendid type of English royalty than has yet been displayed even by the great kings of Northumbria. By his family alliances, by the renown which he inherited from his father, and by that which he achieved for himself as the successful champion of his people, he obtained a commanding position among the rulers of western Europe, and he early assumed and not doubtfully vindicated for himself the proud title of “lord of the whole of Britain”.
By the marriages of his half-sisters, the daughters of Edward, Athelstan was brought into close connexion with the most powerful rulers of France and Germany. Not powerful it is true, though highly placed, was his brother-in-law, the unfortunate Charles the Simple, King of France (893–929), who married Edgiva, was dethroned and died in a dungeon; but his son, Louis IV. (“d’outre mer”), after having been smuggled out of Laon in a truss of straw, was brought to England by his devoted mother; was reared at the court of Athelstan; recalled to his native country and played the part of the king of France not altogether unsuccessfully for eighteen years (936–54). A too powerful subject of these Carolingian kings, one whose greatness overshadowed their throne and whose son eventually succeeded in winning it for himself, was Hugh the Great, Duke of France. This nobleman sought another of Athelstan’s sisters in marriage, even the Lady Eadhilda, in whom as a chronicler says “all the elements of beauty which other women have in part, naturally flowed together in one”. The messenger who came to urge this suit, and who was himself Athelstan’s first cousin,[163] brought with him gorgeous gifts, precious relics, consecrated swords, lances and banners. Among the presents may be specially noted an onyx vase (surely of antique workmanship) so skilfully carved that on it you seemed to see the corn waving, the vines putting forth their shoots, the figures of men moving, and swift horses prancing in their golden trappings. The pleadings of the ambassador or the splendour of the gifts prevailed. The lovely Eadhilda became the wife of Hugh the Great, though not for her but for a successor was reserved the honour of being the mother of the new line of kings of France. When German Otto, the future Roman emperor, wished to wed one of the same royal sisterhood, he seems not to have proffered so humble a request, but in lordly fashion to have signified his pleasure that a princess should be sent unto him. Thereupon, Athelstan sent two of his sisters, Edgitha and Elfgiva, that Otto might choose between them. He chose Edgitha, whose marriage seems to have been a happy one, and who was much loved by the German people. Elfgiva, who remained on the continent, had to be satisfied with the humbler position of wife of a sub-Alpine prince.
A striking feature of Athelstan’s policy was his friendship for the Scandinavian powers. He probably saw that notwithstanding all that England had suffered at the hands of the Danes, the Northmen were tending towards the condition of an organised state, and that it would be wise for “the lord of all Britain” to cultivate their friendship. His reign coincided with the last years of the long reign of Harold the Fair-haired, the first king of Norway, and the legend of the dealings of the two kings with one another, though probably untrue in the letter, may well illustrate the relations between the two kings as remembered by the people.
“One day a messenger of Athelstan appeared at the court of Haarfager (the Fair-haired one) bearing a sword whose hilt was enwrought with gold and silver and set with most precious gems. The messenger said: ‘Here is a sword which King Athelstan sendeth thee, bidding thee take it withal’. Harold grasped the sword, and the envoy completed his message thus: ‘Now hast thou taken the sword according to our king’s bidding. Henceforth thou must needs be his thegn.’ Harold dissembled his vexation and next year sent a ship to England under the command of his favourite champion, Hawk High-breech, into whose keeping he gave the little Hakon, the son of his old age by his bondwoman, Thora. Norseman Hawk was hospitably entertained by the king and bidden to a right worthy feast in the city of London. After due greetings interchanged, the old captain took the boy and set him on Athelstan’s knee. ‘Why dost thou do that?’ said the king. ‘Because King Harold thus ordereth thee to foster the child of his bondwoman,’ was the reply. The king was angry and began to feel for his sword, but the messenger said: ‘Thou hast set him on thy knee, and now thou mayest murder him if thou wilt, but not so wilt thou make an end of the sons of King Harold’.”[164] These sons were in truth an almost countless throng, and the wars and tumults of them, their sons and grandsons, kept Norway in an uproar for a century. The little lad, however, who sat on Athelstan’s knee at the great London banquet was actually reared at the English court and grew up to be King of Norway, being known as Hakon the Good, and endeavouring with no great success to convert his people to Christianity.
The determination of Athelstan to be “lord of all Britain” naturally urged him northwards, since all the region south of the Humber was, or seemed to be, securely resting under the dominion of Wessex. Into the extremely difficult and obscure history of the Kings of Northumbria after the death of Guthred, the friend of the monks of St. Cuthbert, it is not necessary here to enter. A variety of Sihtrics, Anlafs and Godfreys flit across the scene, and the confusion is increased by the fact that there are generally two contemporaneous princes bearing the same name. It may be remarked in passing, however, that this is the period of Danish pre-eminence in Ireland (whose capital, Dublin, is a memorial of Danish rule), and that the fortunes of the two sets of invaders in Northumbria and in Ireland were almost inextricably intertwined. Also that we have traces of an Anglian dynasty still existing at Bamburgh, though probably owning the overlordship of Danish kings.
Almost immediately after his father’s death, Athelstan had an interview at the Mercian capital, Tamworth, with Sihtric the Dane, King of the Northumbrians. Sihtric received Athelstan’s sister (his only sister of the full blood) in marriage, and probably agreed, as part of the compact, to embrace Christianity. Next year, however, he died, after having, according to some of the chroniclers, repudiated both his new wife and his new religion. Hereupon Athelstan marched northward (probably in 926), expelled Sihtric’s successor, Guthfred, and his son, Anlaf, from the country, and “assumed the kingdom of the Northumbrians,” thus for a time--it was only a short time--governing directly and not as overlord the whole of what is now England except Strathclyde.[165] The Chronicle adds that he subjugated all the kings who were in this island--Howel, King of the West Welsh (Cornishmen); Constantine, King of Scots; Owen, King of Gwent (North Wales); and Ealdred, son of Eardulf of Bamburgh. One of the conditions of the peace which was ratified (probably at Emmet in Holderness) on July 12, 926, was that all idolatry should be strictly forbidden. Possibly we have here a combination of the Christian powers in Britain; Saxon, Anglian and Celtic against the heathen Danes.
If such a combination were formed, it did not long endure, for eight years later, in 934, we find Athelstan again moving northward to fight against the kings of Scotland and Strathclyde. The monk of Durham who records this fact takes care to mention that on his journey Athelstan presented the church of St. Cuthbert at Chester-le-Street with many costly ornaments and no fewer than twelve vills, and that he charged his brother, Edmund, in the event of his falling in battle, to bring his body back to St. Cuthbert’s minster and bury it there. “Having defeated the two kings both by sea and land, he subdued Scotland to himself,” says the same chronicler. This was certainly a most precarious subjugation if it ever took place, for after the lapse of three years, in 937, Athelstan had to face the mightiest combination of his foes that any English king had yet had to encounter; and the very soul and centre of that combination was the hoary Scottish king, Constantine, who had chosen Edward “to father and to lord,” and whom in this entry he is represented as having utterly subdued.
The chief factors in this combination were besides Constantine, his son-in-law, Anlaf (son of the Northumbrian Sihtric), king of the Danes settled in Ireland; another Anlaf, cousin of the former, and also king of the Irish Danes; and Eugenius, king of Strathclyde. Such a formidable combination between two pagan and two Christian kings is in itself a proof of the fear inspired by the growing power of Athelstan. King Anlaf is said[166] to have owned 615 ships with which he sailed to join his allies of Scotland and Cumberland.[167]
The great battle of Brunanburh, in which Athelstan defeated the confederate army, has been celebrated in a war-song which is in some respects the most interesting relic that has been preserved of Anglo-Saxon literature. Unfortunately a tantalising obscurity rests upon the site of the battle. Numerous identifications have been suggested, but without discussing or criticising these it may be allowable here to mention one, of which it may at least be said that it has not been proved to be impossible. On the coast of Dumfriesshire in Scotland rises a range of mountains which look across the sandy Solway to the mountains in Cumberland, and according to popular tradition have strange weather-sympathy with their Cumbrian brethren. Here is the high hill of Criffel, which whenever Skiddaw is wrapped in cloud, wears his cloud-cap likewise, and here is the long, flat-topped, altar-shaped hill of Burnswark which overlooks Annandale and once dominated the old Roman road, the northern continuation of the Watling Street. This road led in the second century from the wall of Hadrian to the wall of Antoninus, from Carlisle to the neighbourhood of Glasgow. The multitude of Roman camps which skirt this hill or are to be found in its near vicinity, show that it was once a most important military position, and such in some measure it may well have continued to be far on into Anglo-Saxon times; the Roman roads still, after the lapse of so many centuries, being the best, often the only, roads available for the march of armies.
One of these Roman camps bears, and apparently has always borne since the Anglian occupation, the name of Birrens, which is evidently connected with the name Birrenswork or Burnswark given to the altar-shaped hill above it. Now the scene of the great battle was evidently close to some great hill-fortress. This is testified by the varying forms of the name, which is called by Ethelweard Brunandune, by Florence of Worcester Brunanburgh, by Symeon of Durham Weondune or Etbrunnanwerc or Brunanbyrig, and by Geoffrey Gaimar (a twelfth century writer, but one who often gives us curious little scraps of valuable information) Bruneswerce or Burneweste. It is evident that in these last forms the name approaches very near to the local form, Burnswark, which has finally prevailed. It seems probable that Athelstan, marching rapidly northward to meet the confederate hostile armies, met them in the great north-western road in Annandale, near the point where Anlaf Sihtricson had just landed his troops; that the battle raged, as the ballad tells us, ymbe Brunnanburh, all round the camp-scarred hill of Burnswark, and that when Anlaf fled “over the yellow sea” (on fealene flod) it was the sand-laden waters of the shallow Solway Firth that witnessed his ignominious flight.
The ballad which is here inserted in the Chronicle, lightening up its dull pages with a gleam of Homeric brilliance, is familiar to every English student,[168] and it will therefore not be necessary to do more than to gather up the information--not very copious or minute--which is vouchsafed to us by the minstrel in his rushing career of song. The two chief English heroes were King Athelstan himself, “liberal bestower of bracelets,” and his half-brother Edmund Atheling, a youth about seventeen years old. Under their guidance the men of Wessex and Mercia broke down the stubborn shield-wall of the confederate army. The battle began at sunrise and lasted as long as the daylight.
Five young kings put asleep by the sword-stroke, Seven strong earls of the army of Anlaf Fell on the war-field, numberless numbers Shipmen and Scotsmen.
The Danish leader was hard pressed by the victorious army; with few followers he escaped to his warship and saved his life by a scurrying voyage “over the fallow flood”. Especially does the minstrel triumph over the humiliation of the old Scottish king, Constantine, the same who thirteen years before had chosen Athelstan’s sire “to father and to lord”.
Also the crafty one, Constantinus, Crept to his North again, hoar-headed hero. Slender reason had he to be glad of The clash of the war-glaive-- Traitor and trickster and spurner of treaties,-- He nor had Anlaf With armies so broken a reason for bragging That they had the better in perils of battle On places of slaughter,-- The struggle of standards, the rush of the javelins, The crash of the chargers, the wielding of weapons, The play that they played with the children of Edward.
* * * * *
Never had huger slaughter of heroes Slain by the sword-edge, such as old writers Have writ of in histories, Happed in this isle, since up from the East hither Saxon and Angle from over the broad billow Broke into Britain with haughty war-workers who Harried the Welshman, when Earls that were lured by the Hunger of glory gat hold of the land.
The Anglo-Saxon Tyrtaeus in this shrill song of triumph naturally makes no mention of the losses on his own side, but we learn from another source[169] that two of Athelstan’s cousins, Elwin and Ethelwin, fell “in the war against Anlaf,” which probably means at Brunanburh. However, one-sided as all our information is about the great battle, it cannot be doubted that it was a real and important victory for the English.
The campaigns in Northumbria were apparently the most memorable events in the reign of Athelstan, but we hear also of his forcing the king of Wales to pay him tribute, of his visiting Cornwall, probably in hostile guise, of his expelling the “West Welsh” from Exeter and turning it into a purely Saxon city. He thus fixed the Tamar as the limit against the old British population in the south of England, as the Wye had been fixed further north.[170] It is clear that he came somewhat nearer than any of his predecessors to the position which would have been described in feudal times as lord paramount over the whole island. It is not only that he is generally described in the charters, which he granted with lavish hand to the monasteries, as rex totius Britanniæ, sometimes substituting for Britannia the half-mythical word Albion, which he must have learned from his ecclesiastical friends. Nor is it only that he first uses of himself the Greek word Basileus, which was regarded with awe throughout Western Europe as expressing the mysterious majesty of the Cæsars at Constantinople. These titles might be regarded as only the ornaments of style affected by the clerks of this period, or as the pompous assumptions of regal vanity; but when we find the meetings of the witan attended, and Athelstan’s charters signed, by Welsh kings (Howel, Juthwal and Morcant) who are styled sub-reguli; when we find, even at a meeting of the witan held as far south as Buckingham (in 934), the attesting signature of “Ego Constantinus subregulus,” and when we know that this is Constantine II., King of Scots (900–43), we feel that there was something real in Athelstan’s claim to be lord of all Britain; and the story of Constantine’s commendation of himself to Edward the Elder becomes decidedly more probable, even though “that old deceiver” did afterwards break his frith and stand in arms against his patron on the field of Brunanburh.
Athelstan does not seem to have ever married, and we may perhaps conjecture that he purposely abstained from leaving issue who might contest the claims of the legitimate descendants of his father. With one doubtful exception his relations with all his half-brothers and sisters seem to have been not only friendly but affectionate. That exception relates to his half-brother Edwin, as to whom the Chronicle for the year 933 simply asserts: “Now the Etheling Edwin was drowned in the sea”. Symeon of Durham, however, or rather the Cuthbertine annalist from whom he quotes,[171] has this ugly entry under the same date: “King Athelstan ordered his brother Edwin to be drowned in the sea”. This annal grew by the time of William of Malmesbury into a long and fanciful narrative, which William himself only half believed, and which connected the death of Edwin with some opposition to Athelstan at the time of his accession to the throne, on the ground of his illegitimacy. This evidently legendary story need not weigh greatly with us, and is at least balanced by the statement of Henry of Huntingdon, that Athelstan “was moved to tears by the news of the drowning of his brother, a youth of great vigour and of fine disposition”.[172]
The person and character of Athelstan are painted in bright colours by later historians; his manly stature, his yellow hair interwoven with threads of gold, his free and easy manner of joking with laymen, while meek and reverent towards ecclesiastics, his majestic deportment towards the nobles of his realm, and his condescension to the poor; qualities all of which so endeared him to his subjects that we should probably not err in calling him the most popular of all the West Saxon kings. He was a most generous giver to the Church, and his martial piety, as displayed in the curious document[173] called the Prayer of Athelstan, breathes a spirit not unworthy of a David or a Joshua. He died in the prime and vigour of his life, in the forty-seventh year of his age, October 27, 940, three years after the battle of Brunanburh, and he was succeeded by his half-brother Edmund. He was buried in the abbey of Malmesbury, where, by his order, the bodies of his two young cousins who fell at Brunanburh had already been laid.
Athelstan was succeeded by EDMUND, who reigned from 940 to 946, and he by Edred, who reigned from 946 to 955. The reigns of these two young kings, sons of Edward the Elder, will be best considered together, as they make but one act in the drama, the struggle with Danish revolts in the northern kingdoms. The personal history of the two brothers, as far as we know it, is soon told. Edmund, “the dear deed-doer” of Anglo-Saxon minstrelsy, who had already fought well at Brunanburh, was eighteen years old when he came to the throne. He was twice married: his first wife, Elgiva, who after her death was recognised as a saint, bore him two sons, Edwy and Edgar, both of whom reigned after him. His second marriage was childless. Edmund was evidently a man of much force of character, and if his policy in some respects differed from that of his predecessor--the Heimskringla, contrasting him with Athelstan, says that “he could not away with Northmen”--still, had his reign been prolonged for the thirty or forty years which might reasonably have been expected, he might have rivalled the glories of Edward or of Athelstan. In fact, however, it was prematurely cut short by a felon stroke, the story of which gives us a strange picture of life in the West Saxon court. It was the feast of St. Augustine, May 26, 946; the king and his thegns were banqueting at the royal vill at Pucklechurch in Gloucestershire. A robber named Liofa, who six years before had been banished for his crimes, entered the hall, and striding up to an ealdorman to whom the king had just sent a dish from the royal table, sat himself down beside him. The guests, deeply drinking, did not notice the intrusion, but the king’s dish-thegn bade him begone and was at once assaulted by the robber. Enraged at the man’s insolence the king leaped up from his seat, grasped Liofa by the hair and hurled him to the ground. Hereupon the robber unsheathed a dagger and drove it with all his force into the king’s heart. The royal servants rushed upon him, and after receiving many wounds, succeeded in tearing him limb from limb. But the robber had dealt a mortal stroke. The valiant deed-doer, Edmund, in the twenty-fifth year of his age, was laid in the tomb at Glastonbury, near the flowering thorn of St. Joseph of Arimathea, and Edred, his brother, reigned in his stead.
EDRED, who was probably about twenty-three when he was solemnly crowned at Kingston-on-Thames, suffered from chronic dyspepsia and died when but little over thirty. Thus his reign, like that of his great ancestor, Alfred, was one long battle with disease, but he seems to have followed that ancestor’s example and not to have neglected his kingly duties for all his sufferings. He came much under the influence of the rising churchman Dunstan, and was also in some measure guided by the counsels of his mother, the widowed Edgiva. Faint as are the colours of Edred’s portrait, he seems to have been not the least deserving of the princes of his line. The attitude of these two brothers towards the other rulers of Britain is somewhat less lordly than that of Athelstan. The proud claim to be “King of all Britain” disappears almost entirely from their charters, and is generally replaced by the more modest title “King of the English,” to which, however, is often added “governor and ruler of the other nations round about”. Thus the claim to predominance in Britain is not wholly dropped, but it is put in a somewhat less offensive form than by the victor of Brunanburh. The Greek word “Basileus,” doubtless attractive by reason of its very strangeness, still sometimes makes its appearance; but Edmund’s favourite epithet for himself is “Industrious,” probably a translation of the Saxon “daed-fruma” (deed-doer), by which the minstrels of the people sang his praises. In a world which had seen, not long before, the degenerate race of the fainéant kings of France, deed-doer was an epithet full of meaning.
Let us pass to the history of Danish revolts and their suppression. From the short and often obscure statements of the chroniclers, it is hard to discover what amount of permanent success resulted from the victories of even the most prosperous kings. It certainly seemed as if Athelstan had made himself undisputed King of Mercia and overlord of Northumbria, yet, if we may trust Symeon of Durham, Edmund at the very outset of his reign had once more to accept the Watling Street as the boundary between himself and a Danish ruler, that ruler being apparently Anlaf Sihtricson who had been defeated at Brunanburh, but who now reappeared in Northumbria and fixed his capital at York. In the next year (942) a fragment of ballad assigns to “the dear deed-doer” the deliverance of the Five Boroughs (Leicester, Lincoln, Nottingham, Stamford and Derby) from Danish thraldom. But these very five boroughs, though undoubtedly containing a large Danish population, were expressly or by implication included in the conquests of Edward and Ethelfled. Evidently much is left unwritten of this portion of English history. It seems probable that at the coming of Anlaf there had been a general rising of the Danelaw, and that the suppression of this revolt, being more complete than the earlier conquest, took a stronger hold on the popular imagination. Hence it was that the poet chronicler of Edmund’s reign attributes to him, not to his predecessors, the deliverance of the native population:--
Under the Northmen need-constrained In heathen bondage long time chained.
The result of Edmund’s Mercian campaign seems to have been a treaty of peace, negotiated by the two archbishops Oda and Wulfstan on the lines of the peace between Alfred and Guthrum. Anlaf and his brother-king Raegnald were baptised, Edmund acting as their sponsor; and the Watling Street was again made the boundary between Englishman and Dane. The peace thus concluded lasted but a year. In 943 Anlaf and his Danes were again in Mercia, and--ominous conjunction--Wulfstan, Archbishop of York, was abetting the invaders. They stormed Tamworth, they took much spoil and great was the slaughter, but on Edmund’s approach they retired to Leicester where they were besieged by the king. Notwithstanding the escape of Anlaf and the rebel archbishop, Edmund was victorious, and next year (944) he invaded Northumbria and drove out his two rebellious god-sons, who appear no more upon the scene.
In the following year, 945, Edmund ravaged all “Cumbraland,” a region which probably included all that was left of the old kingdom of Strathclyde south of the Solway, the northern portion having been gradually appropriated by the Scottish kings. We now come to another of the great academic battlefields between English and Scottish historians. We are told by the chronicler that having ravaged Cumberland, “he let it all to Malcolm, King of Scotland, on condition that he should be his fellow-worker both on sea and land”. What was the relation thus established between Edmund and Malcolm I. who had succeeded “the hoary old deceiver” Constantine? Of course a feudal lawyer of the twelfth century pondering these words would discover in them a regular case of the relation of lord and vassal. But they do not in themselves seem to imply more than friendship and alliance, and it is admitted that the fully developed feudal theory was not yet known in England. As with the “commendation” of 921, we may probably conclude that the transaction would mean anything or nothing according to the after course of events, and the shifting of the centre of gravity between the two contracting parties. In itself this “cession of Cumberland” was probably a politic measure, as it enlisted the sympathies of the Scottish “fellow-worker” on the English side and interposed a barrier between the vikings of Dublin and their Northumbrian fellow-countrymen.
On the assassination of Edmund in 946, Edred seems to have taken up the endless task and laboured at it successfully. “He took to the kingdom and soon subdued all Northumbria to his power, and the Scots swore to him oaths that they would do all his will.” Wulfstan, the turbulent or patriotic archbishop of York, plays a prominent and singular part in Northumbrian politics during the reign of Edred; and princes of the royal houses of Norway and Denmark also bear a hand in the perplexing game. One such was Eric Blood-axe, son of fair-haired Harold of Norway, who when driven forth from his kingdom by Hakon the Good, Athelstan’s foster-son, sailed for the Orkneys, ravaged Scotland and the northern parts of England, but on receiving a message from Athelstan, who reminded him of the old friendship between himself and his father, made peace, consented to be baptised along with his wife and children, and became for a time the peaceful under-king of Northumbria. This settlement had endured during the life of Athelstan, but on Edmund’s accession, Eric, knowing that he was not beloved of the new king, and hearing a rumour that he would set another king over Northumberland, renounced his allegiance to Winchester, resumed his viking life, gathered together a new “scip-here,” chiefly from among the Irish Danes, harried Wales and all the southern coasts of England, but ere long fell in battle against the English.
Another Eric, the son of another Harold, then appeared upon the scene. This was the son of Harold Blue-Tooth, King of Denmark. In 948 the witan of Northumbria, headed by Archbishop Wulfstan, chose this Danish prince for their king, though but a year before they had solemnly plighted faith to Edred. Enraged hereat the Saxon king marched northwards and “harried over all Northumberland”. So ruthless or so careless was the work of destruction that even Wilfrid’s famous minster at Ripon perished in the flames. During Edred’s homeward march the Danish garrison of York sallied forth, and overtaking the rear of his army at Chesterford[174] inflicted upon it grievous slaughter. Exasperated by the defeat, Edred, whose weak health perhaps made him exceptionally irritable, meditated a second ravage of Northumbria, but consented to forego his revenge when the witan of the northern kingdom expelled Eric and paid compensation for the injury which had been inflicted by their countrymen. We need not follow minutely the fortunes of King Eric. Expelled and restored twice, if not thrice, in the anarchy of Northumbria, he is said to have perished in 954, “deceitfully slain” (according to Roger of Wendover) “with his son and his brother in a lonely place which is called Stainmoor, by the treasonable contrivance of Earl Oswulf”. This event is memorable as finally closing the book of Northumbrian royalty. Oswulf of Bamburgh succeeds to the chief place in the northern province with the title of earl, and henceforth we hear no more of kings in Northumbria.
The strange career of the rebel archbishop, Wulfstan, came speedily to an end. In 952 Edred ordered him to be imprisoned in a fortress “because he had been often accused to the king,” or according to William of Malmesbury, “because he meditated desertion to his countrymen”. Probably the phrase “his countrymen” means merely the men of Northumbria. It is, however, possible that Wulfstan may have been of Danish descent. We have clearer information as to the Danish descent of his contemporary Oda, Archbishop of Canterbury. It certainly throws a strange light on the relation of the two races, as well as on the ecclesiastical history of the period, that the first and possibly the second of the highest places in the English Church should have been filled by scions of that still barely Christianised stock. In 954, the year of the extinction of the Northumbrian kingdom, Edred thought himself safe in giving to Wulfstan the Mercian bishopric of Dorchester, where, three years after, he died. The only other noteworthy event in the reign of Edred was “a great slaughter” which in his usual passionate way he ordered to be made among the inhabitants, probably the Danish inhabitants, of Thetford in East Anglia in revenge for their murder of the abbot Eadhelm (952). Three years after this, on Nov. 23, 955, Edred died at Frome in Somerset and was buried in the old monastery at Winchester. No nightly appearances in his case, as in that of his great ancestor, seem to have troubled the repose of the dwellers in the convent.
XX. EDGAR AND DUNSTAN
“On the death of Edred, EADWIG [or EDWY] succeeded to the kingdom. Two years afterwards, his younger brother Edgar succeeded to the kingdom of the Mercians.”
“In 958, Oda, Archbishop of Canterbury, separated King Edwy from his wife Elfgyfu, because they were too near akin.”
“In 959, King Edwy died on the 1st of October, and Edgar his brother succeeded to the kingdom as well of the West Saxons as of the Northumbrians and Mercians, being then about sixteen years old.”
Such is the only information (with one important exception) vouchsafed us in the Chronicle concerning the short reign of the unfortunate Edwy, who when about fifteen years of age succeeded his father Edmund. These sentences suggest much--internal discord, fraternal rivalry, a matrimonial union condemned by the Church, the early death of a broken-hearted husband--but they tell us nothing as to the causes of these events. Later historians have believed that they found the clue to the mystery in the one sentence which has not yet been quoted. “And in the same year [957] Abbot Dunstan was driven away over sea.” However this may be, the story of Edwy’s reign is so inextricably intertwined with the life of this man, the most famous English saint between Cuthbert and Becket, that for a little space history must give place to biography.
Dunstan was born about the year 925, near the commencement of the reign of Athelstan. His birthplace was in the immediate neighbourhood of the great Abbey of Glastonbury; his parents must have belonged to the higher ranks of Anglo-Saxon society, since he numbered two bishops and certain members of the royal household among his near kinsmen and was in some way related to a niece of Athelstan’s. Glastonbury was probably the only great sanctuary in which the religious life of the Celt had flowed on without interruption into a Teutonic channel; and it may have been on account of its old British traditions that it became the resort of “certain Irish pilgrims who looked on that place with great affection, especially on account of their reverence for the younger Patrick, who is said to be there resting in the Lord”.[175] Taught by these men, the boy early acquired great familiarity with Scripture; he received the tonsure and performed some of an acolyte’s duties in the church of the Virgin, but was not as yet definitely vowed to a religious life. He seems to have been admitted as a lad to some place about the court of King Athelstan, who probably often visited the royal estate of his own great ancestor at Wedmore, a few miles from Glastonbury. But the future archbishop’s experience of court life was not a pleasant one. He was evidently a lad of quick intelligence with a nervous and sensitive frame, a soul much exercised by the joys and the terrors of the world of spirits. He had already seen some visions, and in the delirium of fever had climbed to the roof of the church at Glastonbury, his safe descent wherefrom was accounted a miracle. His young kinsmen, the pages of the court, with their rough and fleshly natures, could not tolerate this pale and pious playfellow, and they treated him as bullying schoolboys in later generations have often treated an unpopular comrade. At last, by an accusation of extracting from Latin books a knowledge of unholy arts, they obtained an order for his expulsion from court, which they emphasised in their own brutal way by throwing him into a marshy pool, and then trampling him down into the stinking mud. The poor victim escaped to the neighbouring house of one of his friends, but on arriving there was set upon by the dogs, who in his besmirched figure scarcely recognised a human being, much less one of their master’s friends. When they heard his voice, however, they at once gave him a warm canine greeting, whereupon the young saint wept at the contrast between the friendliness of the dog and the cruel animosity of man.
At this point Dunstan had come to the parting of the ways. “The ancient enemy of mankind,” says his biographer, “sorely tempted him with suggestions of the delightfulness of family life, and the love of woman,” but, on the other hand, his kinsman, Elphege, Bishop of Winchester, strongly urged him to become a monk, and to this advice he yielded after a sharp attack of some sickness, in the nature of bubonic plague, from which he was like to have died. It was no doubt the great monastery of Glastonbury in which he made his profession. Near to that monastery was the dwelling of an elderly lady named Ethelfled, a relative and patroness of Dunstan. The saint in his old age sometimes told the story of the barrel of mead which in answer to Ethelfled’s prayers was miraculously replenished, when a sudden visit from her uncle Athelstan found her without sufficient provision of liquor for all his thirsty courtiers. He told too of the white dove which he saw alighting on the roof of the blessed matron’s house when she lay a-dying, and of the converse which on his entering her room he found her holding with an invisible heavenly visitor.
In Dunstan’s monastic life, both now and later on when he had attained to high office in the Church, there was always room left for other occupations besides prayer and psalmody. We are told that “in the intervals of his study of sacred literature, he diligently cultivated his talent for playing on the harp, as well as for painting, and that he became a skilful judge of all articles used in the household”. At the request of a devout lady who was his friend, he sketched out for her a design for a stole with various kinds of patterns, which she could afterwards embroider with gold and gems. A bell was long preserved at Canterbury fashioned by the saint’s own fingers; and late in life he presented to Malmesbury Abbey an organ, bells and stoup for holy water, all of his own manufacture.
After the accession of Edmund, Dunstan, who was still but a youth, was recalled to court, and probably on account of his literary qualifications “was numbered among the royal chiefs and princes of the palace”. What precise official rank these words betoken it would be difficult to say; but whatever it may have been, he soon lost it through the machinations of his enemies, who probably again whispered in Edmund’s ear the old accusation, “Dunstan traffics with the powers of darkness”. Bowing his head to the storm, Dunstan prepared to quit the realm, and taking advantage of the presence at court of certain messengers from “the eastern kingdom,” he begged them to procure him an asylum in that land. What is the meaning of these words “the eastern kingdom” is by no means clear. Germany has been suggested, but on the whole it is perhaps slightly more probable that the biographer--not a very accurate writer--means by these words to describe East Anglia. That region, though not strictly a kingdom, was still bound by a somewhat loose tie to Wessex, and was at this time ruled by a great noble named Athelstan, who, though properly speaking he was only an ealdorman, was known in the common speech of men as “the half-king”.
Whatever may have been the exact name of Dunstan’s intended place of refuge, it was not, in fact, necessary for him to betake himself thither. The court was at this time staying at Cheddar, that well-known and beautiful village at the foot of the Mendips, where steep cliffs and stalactite caves attest the wonder-working presence of the limestone formation. One day Edmund, while hunting, became separated from his companions, and found himself following the hounds and the stag alone. In its desperation the hunted animal made for the cliffs, leaped from the top and was dashed to pieces. The hounds followed, and the king followed also, pulling in vain at the bridle of a hard-mouthed horse, and seeing a terrible death immediately before him. In that moment Edmund reviewed his past life, and thought with satisfaction: “I do not remember to have ever wittingly injured any man”. But then Dunstan’s name came into his mind. “Too true! I have injured Dunstan. O God, if Thou wilt preserve my life, I will be reconciled to Thy servant.” The horse stopped, on the very edge of the precipice, and the king’s life was saved.
Meanwhile, however, the first act of the delivered king was to send for Dunstan, provide him with a horse and ride with him to Glastonbury. After offering prayer, the king took the monk’s right hand, gave him the kiss of peace, led him up to the abbot’s chair and seated him thereon, saying: “Be thou occupant of this seat and a faithful abbot of this church. Whatever may be lacking for the performance of divine service and the due observance of your holy rule, I will supply it from my royal bounty.” Thus was Dunstan, still in very early manhood, installed as abbot in the great historic house of Glastonbury. The Benedictine rule, if it had been adopted in this monastery, had become much relaxed, but Dunstan at once set to work to restore the discipline of the brotherhood. He enlarged the buildings, and collected round him a crowd of young followers, whom he instructed in Holy Scripture, so that from this monastery, as from a school of the prophets, many deans, abbots, bishops, even some archbishops went forth to guide and govern the English Church. At this point of the story we hear much of Dunstan’s conflicts with the Powers of Darkness, conflicts which were believed to endure throughout his monastic life. Now the Evil One appeared to him in the form of a bear, now as a dog, now as a fox, shaking his tail in terror and shrinking from the keen glance of the holy man. All these appearances and others like them, which later ages delighted to record and to magnify, belong to the intellectual pathology of the cloister and are not to be specially attributed to the spiritual discernment or the cerebral excitability of this particular recluse, though we may be permitted to observe that they occupy a more prominent place and are of a more grotesque character in the authentic Lives of Dunstan than in the pages of Bede. Unfortunately they have, by their frequent repetition, somewhat obscured the real greatness of the alleged devil-fighter, both as ecclesiastic and as statesman.[176]
After the death of Edmund (of which the saint is said to have had supernatural warnings) his successor Edred took Dunstan into high favour and committed to him the charge of his treasure and of many of the deeds relating to his various estates, besides the precious things accumulated by the old kings his predecessors. All these were deposited at Glastonbury. Moreover, Edred desired to make his friend bishop of Crediton, but Dunstan refused, nor could even the entreaties of the king’s mother, Edgiva, though she had great influence with him, prevail upon him to consent to take the nominal charge of so distant a diocese. When Edred’s long struggle with disease was nearing its end, he ordered Dunstan to bring to him the treasures committed to his charge that he might make a death-bed division of them among his kinsfolk. The saint complied with the order, visited Glastonbury and had gone several stages on the return journey, when he heard a voice from heaven saying: “Behold! now King Edred has departed in peace”. A yet greater marvel! his horse, hearing the same voice and “being unable to bear the presence of the angelic sublimity,” fell down and died on the road. When Dunstan reached the palace he found that his patron’s death had taken place at the very same hour at which he had received the heavenly communication.
We have now reached the same point in Dunstan’s life at which we had already arrived in the history of the kingdom. Edred dead, and the boy-king Edwy seated on the throne (955), we come to the well-known scene at the coronation banquet. Dunstan’s biographer tells us that after the great ceremony had been performed, when according to the unanimous choice of all the English nobles, Edwy had been anointed and hallowed as king, he suddenly leaped up and left the merry banquet and the company of his own nobles, whom he forsook for the companionship of two high-born dames, Ethelgiva and her daughter Elfgiva. These ladies were of royal descent, Edwy’s near relations; and it is a plausible conjecture, though only a conjecture, that the elder lady may have acted as foster-mother to the king, who had lost his own mother in childhood. It was natural, if not politic, for the boy-king (still scarcely fifteen years of age) to leave the company of the grim warriors and hoary churchmen who composed his witan, and to refresh himself with the livelier talk of his child-sweetheart and her mother. But the nobles of the witan felt themselves insulted by the king’s departure, and Oda, the Archbishop of Canterbury, who had Danish blood in his veins, in a loud and angry voice gave utterance to the general discontent. “Let some one,” he said, “be chosen who shall bring back the king to take his place, as is fitting, at our merry banquet.” All others refused, not liking to face the women’s wrath, but at last Abbot Dunstan and his relative Kinsige, Bishop of Lichfield, were chosen for the disagreeable task. When they entered the royal apartment they found the crown cast carelessly on the ground and the king seated on a couch between the two ladies. “We are sent,” said they, “by the nobles to beg you to return at once to your fitting place at the board and not to disdain to mingle in the joyous feast of your thegns.” The boy at first refused and the women scolded, but Dunstan raised the king from the couch, put his crown becomingly on his head and led him back, an obviously reluctant banqueter, to the company of his nobles. Such was the scene, natural and intelligible enough and worth studying for the sake of the light thrown by it on the habits of our forefathers in the tenth century, but by no means justifying either the praise or the blame which have been bestowed on the chief actors therein, especially the foul imputations which the monkish biographer has cast upon the characters of “the two she-wolves,” as he terms them, the ladies Ethelgiva and Elfgiva.[177]
Dunstan’s intervention at such a time was not likely to recommend him to royal favour, and it is with no surprise that we read the Chronicle’s entry for the year 957: “In this year abbot Dunstan was driven away over sea”. Even his own friends were partially alienated from him, for his biographer lays the blame of his banishment and the confiscation of his goods not only on “the impudent virago, that Jezebel,” Ethelgiva, but also on “the secret machinations of his own disciples, whom he himself had nurtured in their tender years with the nectareous sweetness of his teaching”. This is one of several indications that the struggle, a very obscure one and difficult to understand, which took place during Edwy’s short reign, was not, as was formerly supposed, a struggle between the boy-king on the one hand and an arrogant and united Church-party on the other. There were ecclesiastics on both sides, and Edwy, at any rate, was no declared enemy of the Anglo-Saxon Church. There are in the Saxon Cartulary copies of grants made by him to Glastonbury, to Bath, to Worcester, to Abingdon and many other monasteries. But there are also grants made by him in surprising numbers to the thegns of his court, and this lavish generosity looks like a sign of weakness and may have had something to do with the revolt against his authority.[178]
Notwithstanding the uproar at Edwy’s coronation, the lady Elfgiva, who was one of the persons blamed for his absence from the feast, became soon afterwards his wife. To one document which is assigned to the year 956 the names of Elfgiva, “king’s wife,” and Ethelgiva, “king’s wife’s mother,” are attached as witnesses. It was not till two years after this time that, according to the Chronicle, “Oda, Archbishop of Canterbury, separated King Edwy from his wife Elfgiva because they were too near akin” (958). At this point Edwy’s wife and her mother disappear from authentic history. Writers of little judgment, the earliest of whom lived a century and a half after the event, tell us distressing stories of the branding of Elfgiva’s face with a hot iron, of her or her mother’s flight into Ireland, return and miserable death under the cruel operation of ham-stringing. The authority for these tales is poor, their style legendary, the confusion which they make between Ethelgiva and Elfgiva an additional reason for distrust. On the whole, though a painful suspicion may rest on our minds that there was some basis of fact underlying these ghastly traditions, we are not bound to accept them as history. In any case no one has a right to impute these cruelties, if ever committed, to Dunstan, who was almost certainly still in exile at the alleged date of their infliction.
The cartularies further show us that under the reign of Edwy his venerable grandmother Edgiva, widow of Edward the Elder, was deprived of some portion of her property, which she recovered after the accession of Edgar. It is evident, from this and other indications, that many personal and political questions were involved in the revolution which has next to be described; and it is probable that the great ecclesiastical controversy which sounded so loud through the next twenty years had no connexion therewith. Of that revolution itself we have most scanty details. The chiefs of the realm, we are told, dissatisfied with Edwy’s government, proclaimed as king his brother EDGAR, a boy of some thirteen years old. We hear of no battles. A compromise was soon arranged, by the terms of which Edgar reigned in the lands north of the Thames, and Edwy south of that boundary. We may probably trace here some remains of the old jealousy between the kingdoms. Edwy retained the allegiance of loyal Wessex, while Mercia, glad of any pretext for recovering her lost independence, rallied round the standard of his brother and was joined by East Anglia, under whose “half-king” Athelstan and his wife Elfwen, Edgar had been reared from infancy. This compromise was arranged in 957, and in the following year, or in 959, Edwy died and Edgar reigned alone over the whole kingdom. There is no suggestion of foul play, but it is natural to conjecture that Edwy’s early death was caused by worry and disappointment at the unfortunate turn which his affairs had taken both in his household and in his kingdom.
The accession of Edgar to the Mercian throne was speedily followed by the recall of Dunstan from exile.[179] When the young abbot was sent away “over-sea” by the offended Edwy, he sought shelter in Flanders, then ruled by a grandson of Alfred the Great, Count Arnulf the Old. His temporary home was the great monastery of St. Peter’s at Ghent, and his observation of the strict discipline there maintained by the abbot doubtless stirred his emulation to begin similar reforms in the monasteries of England. On his return from banishment he was promoted to the office of bishop of the Mercian see of Worcester. To Worcester in 959 the see of London was added, a strange instance of plurality but probably a temporary expedient resulting from the determination of the old queen Edgiva and the other advisers of Edgar that the highest place in the English Church should eventually be filled by the great reformer. The old Danish archbishop Oda died, probably in 958. His immediate successor, Elfsige, of whom it was related that he spake vaunting and contemptuous words of the late archbishop, striking with a staff insultingly on his grave, was soon punished for his irreverence. On his way to Rome to receive the pallium, he caught so severe a chill in the snows of St. Bernard that he died in the land of the stranger. A second successor, Beorhthelm, was appointed in 959, immediately before Edwy’s death, but was unceremoniously deposed by Edgar in the following year to make room for Dunstan. This great saint, who had now reached the zenith of his orbit, ruled the Church of England with eminent wisdom and success for twenty-eight years, from 960 to 988, but evidently his sphere of action was not confined to the Church. It is probable that much of the success of the undoubtedly successful reign of Edgar was due to the advice of Dunstan, and if the saint’s biographers would but have retrenched one half of the miracles which they have recorded in his honour, and would have described some of the affairs of state which he guided to a right issue, they would have conferred a great benefit on history, and they would probably have placed their favourite’s name high beyond the reach of doubt among the Christian statesmen of England. At present that reputation, great as it is and much as it has grown of recent years, is rather a matter of highly probable inference than of actual proof.
Politically the reign of Edgar the Peaceful, as we know it, is somewhat barren of events and seems to have been characterised by almost unbroken tranquillity. Save for the facts that in 966 “Thored son of Gunner harried Westmorland,” and that three years later “King Edgar commanded the land of Thanet to be ravaged,” no military operations are recorded in the Chronicle; and so great is the obscurity that we do not even know whether the first operation was undertaken in obedience to, or in defiance of, the orders of the king. Nor can we tell whether the ravage of the Isle of Thanet was a penalty for some movement of revolt or a precaution against its occupation by the Danes. On the whole, the latter hypothesis is perhaps somewhat the more probable.
But by far the most memorable event in Edgar’s reign, and the event with which his name and Dunstan’s are chiefly connected, was of an ecclesiastical kind, the famous monastic reform. This movement was not, as it used sometimes to be considered, primarily a struggle like Hildebrand’s on behalf of the celibacy of the clergy: it was essentially a struggle for the reform of the relaxed discipline of the convents, and the restoration to monks, strictly so called, of houses and lands which had been gradually filched from them by the hybrid order of canonici. These men may be considered as occupying a half-way position between the parish priest and the professed monk. Following the canon, the rule framed by Chrodegang, Bishop of Metz, in the latter part of the eighth century, these canonici, priests leading a collegiate life, were bound to chastity and obedience but not to the renunciation of all private property. Thus their standard was in some respects lower than that of the regular monks, and if their rivals are to be trusted--which is perhaps doubtful--they fell far below even that lowered standard. The staid and decorous William of Malmesbury laments that his beloved monastery had been turned into “a stable of clerics”. Florence of Worcester says that Edgar “cast out from the convents the impostures of clerics,” and many similar passages might be quoted, in which the monks speak with the utmost bitterness of their canonical rivals.
The great reform, however, with which the names of Edgar and Dunstan are associated, consisted not merely in the casting forth of the canons and the restoration of Benedictine regulars to their homes. It was also part of a great general movement for the purification of conventual life and the uplifting of the standard of morals in the whole Christian community; a movement which began in Eastern France, spread thence over Flanders, Germany and Italy, and will be for ever associated with the venerable name of the monastery of Cluny, founded in 910 by William, Duke of Aquitaine. In the monastery of Cluny and the religious houses which followed its example, the rule of St. Benedict was restored in more than its old strictness. The chanting of the whole Psalter every twenty-four hours; silence so nearly total that the monks almost lost the habit of speech; the entire prohibition of the flesh of four-footed animals for food; coarse clothing of a dun colour; absolute obedience to the ecclesiastical superior, and the entire prohibition of private property; these were the chief points of the restored monastic discipline which Dunstan brought back with him from the Continent.
Three other ecclesiastics besides Dunstan threw their weight into the reforming scale. The first was the venerable archbishop, Oda the Dane, who, however, died in 958 or 959 while the movement was still in its infancy. His nephew Oswald, who was consecrated bishop of Worcester in 961, and who eleven years later received in addition to that dignity the archiepiscopal mitre of York, was after Dunstan the most eminent churchman of the age, and zealously seconded the efforts of his brother of Canterbury. The most active, however, as well as the harshest and most unpitying of the reformers, was Ethelwold, Bishop of Winchester, who was, like his teacher Dunstan, of noble birth and had served as a lad in Athelstan’s palace. He was also like Dunstan skilful with his hands, and left behind him bells and other implements of religious service, the products of his own cunning handicraft. After ruling the monastery of Abingdon he was, in 963, consecrated to the see of Winchester, where he carried out the work of reform with a high hand. Both the Old and New Minsters at Winchester had been filled with canonici many of whom were married. To all Ethelwold offered but one choice: “Assume the monastic habit or depart hence”. All but three departed, and Chertsey and Milton Abbas in Dorsetshire were then similarly purged. The last monastery was situated without the bounds of Ethelwold’s diocese, but he seems to have held from the king a kind of roving commission to rebuild and reform monasteries wherever he would. In pursuance of this commission Ethelwold next visited the great monasteries of the fen country, Ely and Medeshamstede (now known as Peterborough). In their most flourishing time these monasteries must have worn a somewhat desolate appearance, standing as they did in the midst of the waste of waters which then covered half Cambridgeshire. Of Peterborough the chronicler expressly tells us that owing to its having been “fore-done by heathen folk, Ethelwold found nothing but old walls and wild woods”. Here then no extrusion was necessary; all that the reformer had to do was to rebuild the fabrics and once more to instal in the restored abbeys the industrious monks, who would again make these oases in the fen lands to blossom as the rose.
The Abingdon chronicler tells us of these good deeds of Ethelwold, naturally magnifying the glory of his convent’s most famous abbot. Strangely enough we do not hear of any actual foundation of a new monastery at Canterbury, or expulsion of canonici from the precincts of the old one, by Dunstan himself, though we know that he was heart and soul with the new movement. In fact, Dunstan’s tolerance of the canons, even at Canterbury, and his abstention from deeds of violence in furtherance of the reform, are singularly at variance with the character for persecuting harshness which he has somehow acquired in English history. So, too, his fellow archbishop, Oswald, far gentler than Ethelwold, if a little more energetic than Dunstan, seems always to have preferred persuasion to force. At Worcester, instead of expelling the canons from the cathedral church of SS. Mary and Peter, he founded a new monastery which he attached to a new cathedral, and these younger institutions gradually supplanted the old in popular favour.
* * * * *
Next to ecclesiastical affairs the pageants of the peaceful king’s reign seem most to have attracted the attention of his contemporaries. When he had been already reigning as sole king for more than thirteen years and had attained the thirtieth year of his age, he was solemnly “hallowed” as king on Whitsunday in the old Roman city of Bath (973). The reason for this long delay in the king’s coronation is not obvious, but possibly, as the words of the coronation service seem to have expressly hailed him as “King of the Saxons, Mercians and Northumbrians,”[180] the ceremony may have been postponed till some unrecorded transactions, peaceful or warlike, with the chiefs of the Danelaw secured their presence at the pageant and showed that the words of the coronation service were not an idle vaunt. “And straightway after the hallowing,” says the Chronicle, “the king led all his naval force to Laegeceaster [Chester], and there came unto him six kings to meet him, and all plighted faith with him that they would be his fellow-workers on sea and on land.” This is that celebrated meeting of Edgar with his British under-kings of which later chroniclers are so proud. Both Florence of Worcester and William of Malmesbury, writing in the early part of the twelfth century, record that eight kings were constrained by Edgar to come to his Witenagemot, to bind themselves to him by an oath of perpetual fidelity, and then to row him in solemn pomp upon the river Dee, while he sat in the barge’s prow in regal magnificence. “He is reported to have said that now at last his successors might boast that they were truly kings of the English since they would inherit the honourable precedence which was thus accorded him.” The two historians give us the names of these eight kings: Kenneth of Scotland, Malcolm of Cumberland, Maccus, “the archpirate” (that is, the Viking), “king of many islands” (possibly Man and the Hebrides), and five Welsh kings whose names need not here be recorded, especially as one at least of them is incorrectly reported. It is interesting, however, to find this act of vassalage admitted by a Welsh annalist, though the scene of it is transferred, with much probability, from Chester to Caerleon-upon-Usk--much nearer than the former city to the scene of Edgar’s coronation. “And five kings from Cymry,” says the Brut-y-Tywysogion, “Edgar compelled to come to his court, and in Kaerllion-ar-Wyse he commanded them to row him in a bark while he himself sat at its prow.” Upon the whole, this celebrated water procession seems to be attested upon sufficient and trustworthy authority.[181]
In this connexion a romantic legend may be related which meets us in the pages of William of Malmesbury. He tells us that Edgar, though strong and wiry, was of small stature, and that this caused Kenneth of Scotland to remark that he marvelled why such great territories should be willing to be subject to such a pigmy of a king. The saying was carried by tale-bearers to Edgar, who sent for Kenneth as if he were about to consult him on some most important secret of state. He drew him apart into a lonely wood, offered him his choice of two swords which he had brought with him, and called upon him to prove his strength in a hand-to-hand encounter. “For it is a base thing for a king to babble at a banquet and not be willing to prove his words in fight.” Hereupon Kenneth fell at Edgar’s feet and implored his forgiveness for words which, as he protested, had only been spoken in jest.
From the same source--one, it must be admitted, of secondary authority--we derive the well-known story of the yearly tribute of 300 wolves’ heads which he imposed on the Welsh king, Juthwal, a tribute which is said to have been paid for three years and then of necessity discontinued because the breed of wolves was exterminated. Magnifying in similar fashion the resources and the renown of the peaceful king, Florence of Worcester tells us that he collected a fleet of 3,600 strong ships, one-third of which, when Easter was past, were ordered to muster in the north of the island and sail to the Straits of Dover, one-third on the east for a voyage to the Land’s End, and one-third on the west which sailed to Cape Wrath. Thus was the whole island circumnavigated and safeguarded against invasion by a foreign foe. There is probably some historic fact at the bottom of this story, but no one need accept the enormous numbers vouched for by Florence.
The chief characteristic of Edgar’s reign was the peace which he maintained in the land and which contrasted so painfully with the troubled reign of his son. Hence, doubtless, was derived the surname of the Peaceful, which is that by which he is known in the pages of Florence of Worcester There was something brilliant and attractive in his personality, and the staunch support which he gave to the victorious party in the Church was sufficient guarantee that his good deeds would not be forgotten. Yet even the monastic chronicler, as an honest man, could not dissemble the fact that the bright and comely little king was no saint. He quotes from a poem which after praising the piety of Edgar and magnifying his power “before whom mighty kings and earls gladly bowed” concludes thus:--
But one misdeed he did, aye all too oft, The evil customs of strange folk he loved, And heathen manners into this our land Too fast he brought, And hither introduced outlandish men And hurtful people drew unto the realm.
But God’s grace grant him that his well-done deeds Weigh heavier in the balance than his sins, And guard his soul upon the longsome road.
It will be seen that the poet speaks of introducing foreign vices and hurtful heathenish customs, but does not distinctly charge Edgar with personal immorality. Later historians, more out-spoken, tell a story, which seems to have some foundation in fact, about his seduction of a novice named Wulfthryth, whom he is said to have carried off from the abbey of Wilton, and by whom he had a daughter named Edith, who took the vows of a nun and died an abbess. The long delay of Edgar’s coronation (which happened, as we have seen, in the fourteenth year of his reign) has been connected by later writers with this intrigue, and with an alleged penance inflicted on the king by Dunstan, who is said to have forbidden him to wear his crown for seven years. Chronological arguments, however, prove the untruth of this theory.[182] Edgar’s first wedded wife was apparently Ethelfled the Fair, who was known also by the epithet of “the Duck”. She was the daughter of a certain Ordmaer whom Edgar seems to have ennobled by bestowing upon him forty hides of land at Hatfield, thus giving him the appanage of an earl, though his birth would appear to have been insufficient to qualify him for exalted office.[183] By this lady Edgar was the father of a son known in English history as Edward the Martyr. The married life of the beautiful Ethelfled, however terminated, whether by her death or divorce, must have been a short one, for in 964 Edgar married another woman celebrated for her beauty, Elfthryth or Elfrida, daughter of the Earl Ordgar, who became ealdorman of Devon and possibly of the two adjoining counties of Somerset and Dorset.[184] Elfrida, however, had been previously married, her first husband being Ethelwold, ealdorman of East Anglia and son of “the half-king” Athelstan. Elfrida exercised undoubtedly a baneful influence on English history throughout the closing years of the tenth century; and arguing perhaps from these known tendencies of her character and from Edgar’s evil record for sexual immorality, later writers, especially the poetical historian, Geoffrey Gaimar, have constructed a long and unsavoury romance, according to which Ethelwold, having first deceived his master as to Elfrida’s beauty and thus secured her for himself, was afterwards murdered like Uriah the Hittite in order to make way for his royal rival. This story, also, though long accepted by historians, vanishes at the touch of criticism which clearly shows that Elfrida’s first husband died at least two years before her marriage with Edgar.[185] But however innocent may have been the story of the peaceful king’s courtship of his second wife, there can be no doubt that when she was once seated in the palace her influence on the lives of its inmates was disastrous.
Edgar survived his coronation but two years. He died in the thirty-third year of his age, July 8, 975, and was buried in the Abbey of Glastonbury, which he and his father had so highly favoured.
XXI. EDWARD THE MARTYR--OLD AGE OF DUNSTAN--NORMANS AND NORTHMEN
Of the two sons left by Edgar, one, EDWARD, son of “Ethelfled the Duck,” was about thirteen years old, and the other, Elfrida’s son, Ethelred, was but seven at the death of their father. This being so, it is surprising that there should have been any debate as to which son should succeed to the vacant throne. Possibly the kinsfolk of Elfrida, a powerful clan, may have raised doubts as to the regularity of Edgar’s marriage to Ethelfled, or they may have insisted on the superior position of the child Ethelred as the son of a queen, for Elfrida, first of all royal consorts since Judith, wife of Ethelwulf, had been permitted to bear that envied name.[186] The debate was, however, decided, apparently by the united influence of the two archbishops, Dunstan and Oswald, in favour of Edward, upon whose head the crown of England was placed by the kindly hands of the Archbishop of Canterbury.
The politics of the short reign of Edward, which lasted barely four years, are as obscure and difficult to trace as the cause of its premature close. It is clear, however, that immediately on the death of Edgar there was a certain reaction against that king’s monastic policy. It was in Mercia that this reaction was most powerful, and the leader in the movement was the ealdorman Elfhere, “enemy of the monks,” as the Chronicle calls him; “most wicked of consuls,” as he is styled by the classically minded Henry of Huntingdon. There was a certain Oslac, earl of Northumbria, who was driven into banishment by Elfhere, and from the way in which his name is mentioned we are led to conjecture that he was a partisan of the monks.
Then was in Mercia’s land, as I have heard, Widely and everywhere the Maker’s praise Laid low on earth; then many were out-driven, God’s learned ministers. Then much must mourn The man who in his breast bore burning love To God who made him. Then the Glorious King, The Lord of Victories, Who the heavens doth rule, Was too much scorned, and shattered were His rights, Then forth was driven the hero bold of mood, Oslac, the hoary-headed veteran, The wise, the eloquent. He forth must fare, Forth from the land, over the billow’s roll, Over the gannet’s bath, the whale’s domain. Yea, o’er the water’s throng, bereft of home. Then too was seen, high in the firmament, That star appearing, which brave men of old, Men wise of soul and skilled interpreters, Widely denoted by the comet’s name; Thus through the nations was the Ruler’s wrath Broadly proclaimed and Famine marked its path.
Thus sings the monk of Winchester. He of Peterborough, after also deviating into verse, adds in quiet prose: “In this year (975) there were great disturbances throughout England; and Elfhere the ealdorman ordered the demolition of many monasteries which king Edgar had erewhile ordered the holy bishop Ethelwold to establish. And at the same time the great earl Oslac was banished from England.”
There are hints, especially in the life of St. Oswald of York, that Elfhere’s anti-monastic policy was connected with a certain amount of spoliation of the abbey lands, which were probably in some measure distributed among his followers. On the other hand, we hear that Ethelwin, Ealdorman of East Anglia, son of “half-king” Athelstan and brother-in-law of Elfrida, zealously opposed Elfhere’s policy and championed the cause of the monks. A yet more strenuous defender of the order was his brother, Alfwold, who slew a certain man accused by him of fraudulently obtaining some of the abbey lands of Peterborough. Desiring to obtain absolution for the deed he went to Winchester to beg it of bishop Ethelwold. In his penitence and remorse, Alfwold in his hostel unloosed his shoes and went, humble and barefooted, to meet the great bishop. But Ethelwold, knowing in whose cause he had stricken the blow, would have none of such needless humiliation. He went forth clad in full vestments, with holy water, cross and thurible to meet “the general and defender of the Church”. Prayers were offered, the acolytes replaced the shoes on the feet of the Church’s champion, and the rest of the day was spent in rejoicings. “Thus did the pious chieftain of the East Angles defend all the possessions of the monasteries with great honour, wherefore he was called the Friend of God.”
Concerning the actual cause of the struggle we are very imperfectly informed. The East Anglian chiefs were joined by Brihtnoth, ealdorman of Essex, brother-in-law of “the half-king,” and for some time it seemed as if the dispute would have to be settled by force of arms. Happily this was averted, and in three meetings of the witan, held probably in three successive years, 977, 978 and 979 (the last after the death of Edward), it was perhaps arranged that the two parties should compromise on the basis of uti possidetis, the monasteries in East Anglia and Essex not being disturbed, but those in Mercia not being restored to the monks, at any rate during the lifetime of Elfhere.
At the first of these Witenagemots, which was held at Kirtlington, in Oxfordshire, Sideman, the aged Bishop of Crediton, who had been the young King Edward’s teacher and guide, suddenly expired. At the second, which was held in an upper chamber at Calne, in Wiltshire, the floor suddenly gave way and “all the chief witan of the English race” were precipitated into the room below. Some were killed and many suffered grievous bodily harm. Apparently almost the only one who escaped quite unhurt was the Archbishop Dunstan, “who stood up upon a beam”. Naturally, so remarkable an escape brightened the halo which shone round the archbishop’s name. In later legends the accident was magnified into a kind of heavenly judgment between the monks and their opponents; while some modern historians, remembering Dunstan’s great mechanical skill, have seen in it a cunning device for ridding himself of his enemies. Happily we are not constrained to adopt either hypothesis, and the last suggestion is certainly inadmissible. It would probably tax the ingenuity of the ablest engineer of modern times to contrive such an apparent accident so as to kill part of the assembly. Miracle and fraud may therefore both disappear from the discussion. The event, which undoubtedly happened, is only one of several indications of the unsoundness of Anglo-Saxon building. There seems reason to suspect that in the tenth century the political and the domestic architecture of England were both equally insecure, and that the apparent glory of the reign of Edgar the Peaceful rested on many rotten timbers which made easy the collapse of the kingdom under Ethelred the Unready. Perhaps, also, we may conjecture that the deaths of so many of England’s chief men and wisest counsellors left the field open for meaner, weaker, more treacherous statesmen.
In the same year (978) Edward’s short reign came to a bloody end. The circumstances of his death are somewhat obscure, though there can be no doubt that he was foully murdered on March 18 at Corfe in Dorsetshire. We have no contemporary evidence directly connecting his step-mother with the crime, but this silence, as all chroniclers for the next thirty years would be somewhat in fear of Elfrida and her son, cannot be counted strong evidence in her favour. On the other hand, there is some evidence that Corfe, the scene of the murder, was the place where Elfrida was at the time dwelling with her boy, and all the later historians speak unhesitatingly as to the quarter from which the blow came, though, unfortunately (as we so often find to be the case), the further removed they are from the date of the event, the more they profess to know about its details. Thus the biographer of St. Oswald, who wrote about thirty years after the murder, tells us that a conspiracy was formed against the king by Ethelred’s thegns, and carried into effect when the young king, “desiring the consolation of fraternal love,” paid an evening visit to the house where his brother was residing with the queen. The partisans of Ethelred gathered round Edward, who was alone and unguarded. The butler came forward “ready to serve in his lowly office”; one of the thegns seized the king’s right hand as if to kiss it; another grasped his left hand and inflicted on him a mortal wound. The king called out in a loud voice: “What are you doing, breaking my hand,” and then fell dead from his horse, which was also mortally wounded by the conspirators. “No chant was raised; no proper rites of burial performed; the renowned king of the whole country lay covered with a cheap garment, awaiting the resurrection day. After the lapse of a twelvemonth, the glorious duke Elfhere [of Mercia] came to Wareham, found the body lying there naked but incorrupt, and transferred it to Shaftesbury, where it received honourable burial.” This account looks a little more like a political conspiracy and less like a mere private assassination than the story told in the twelfth century by William of Malmesbury, according to which the kingly boy returning from the chase, tired and thirsty, called at his step-mother’s abode, asked for wine, and while drinking the stirrup-cup was treacherously stabbed by one of Elfrida’s henchmen; fell from his horse, and with one foot in the stirrup was dragged along by the frightened steed, a long track through the forest being marked by the blood of the dying king. This, which is in some respects the more romantic version of the story, is that which has found its way into the received text of English history. The feelings of the people concerning this tragedy may be gathered from the ballad which was embodied in the Chronicle.
Never was worse deed done by Englishmen Than this, since first they sought the British land. Men murdered him, but God him magnified. In life Eadward was an earthly king; Now after death he is a saint in heaven. His earthly kinsmen durst not him avenge, But grievous vengeance wrought his Heavenly Sire. On earth his foes his memory would efface, But the Supreme Avenger spread abroad In earth and heaven remembrance of that crime. They who in life refused him reverence, Now bow on bended knee before his bones. Thus may we see how wisdom of mankind, Their clever counsels, their persuasive words, Are but as nothing ’gainst the thought of God.
Here we can perceive, deep in the heart of the writer, a smouldering fire of indignation against some persons highly placed and beyond the reach of man’s revenge, by whom the deed of wickedness was wrought. The misery which fell upon the nation in the long and dreary reign of Elfrida’s son is heaven’s answer to the cry of the innocent blood. Without the Church’s sanction, without any strict warrant for the epithet, the instinct of the people gave to the victim of Corfe the name which he has ever since borne in history, “Edward the Martyr”.
The new king, ETHELRED, a boy of ten years old, was crowned at Kingston-on-Thames a fortnight after Easter, the two archbishops and ten bishops taking part in the ceremony. Dunstan addressed to him, as he had done to his father before him, a sermon on the duties of his kingship, and is said, but on somewhat doubtful authority, to have uttered at the same time foreboding words as to the calamities coming upon the kingdom, in punishment for the crime which had given Ethelred the crown. It seems clear that he withdrew more and more from a share in the civil, perhaps even in the ecclesiastical, government of the realm, and spent the ten years of life which yet remained to him chiefly in religious retirement; in preaching to the crowd of unlearned persons, lay and clerical, male and female, who gathered round him “to be fortified day and night with the heavenly salt”; in practising those mechanical arts which he had loved from boyhood; and in sitting on a bench in the scriptorium correcting some of the manuscripts which formed part of the treasure of Canterbury.
In the year 986, however, Dunstan was roused from his meditations by the extraordinary conduct of young Ethelred, who “on account of certain dissensions besieged Rochester, and being unable to take it, invaded and laid waste the patrimony of St. Andrew”. Some light is thrown on this remarkable entry by a document[187] issued twelve years later, in which Ethelred laments that his youthful simplicity was imposed upon by a certain Ethelsin, an enemy of God and man, and that by his advice he violently abstracted from the church of Rochester a rural property at Bromley, which he now restores. Dunstan, we are told, warned the king of the punishment which waited on such crimes, and eventually induced him by a ransom of 100 pounds of silver to raise the siege of Rochester. Hereupon he prophesied that “such a king who preferred money to God, silver to the apostle, the gratification of his avarice to the earnestly expressed desire of his spiritual father, would draw down on himself and on his kingdom such calamities as the English nation had never yet experienced. But he himself, as he had been told by the mouth of the Lord, should not live to see this righteous retribution.” And so it proved. Two years later, on May 19, 988, Dunstan expired, probably in the sixty-fourth year of his age.
That Dunstan was a great saint and a great statesman cannot be doubted. No small man could have produced the impression which he produced on his own and on later generations. But what were his own actual achievements in Church and State it is not easy to discover through the veil of turgid obscurity woven by his biographers, who are more intent on recording childish miracles than on painting for us a truthful and vivid portraiture of the great archbishop. Doubtless the alleged miracles of the saint were not all the accumulation of later ages. Partly on account of his mechanical skill and partly from the peculiarities of his own temperament, a certain thaumaturgic atmosphere seems to have surrounded Dunstan even in his lifetime. With this we can now dispense; but while we closely study his life, some of the old misconceptions as to his character fall away. He was evidently not the grim and crafty ecclesiastic whom in our childish days we used to fancy him. On the contrary, with all his enthusiasm for monkhood, his influence was in fact a moderating one on the party of monastic reform. Far from being of a cruel nature, he seems, from such indications as are furnished us, to have been a man of genial and lovable disposition. He is now generally regarded as a great administrator, and a man of wide and statesmanlike views; though, as was before remarked, strict proof of this has hardly yet been adduced. But he seems also to have been through life a man of nervous, perhaps even of hysterical, temperament, renowned and envied for his power of shedding copious floods of tears; a man who saw visions and dreamed dreams; and, above all, a man who believed himself to be engaged in a perpetual personal encounter with the Prince of Darkness, who was to him as real and familiar a presence as the ealdorman of Mercia or the canonici of Glastonbury.
* * * * *
Before entering on that dreary period of Danish desolation which now lies before us it will be well to say something as to certain events which had been happening in France, Denmark and Norway, and which were about to exercise an enormous influence on the next stages of development of the English nation. The dukes of Normandy, the French kings of the race of Capet, the Angevin ancestors of our Plantagenet monarchs, all date their origin, or at least their greatness, from the tenth century, from the period between the death of Alfred and the accession of Ethelred. It is necessary also to take note of the immediate ancestors of the Danish kings who were about to make themselves actual sovereigns of England.
The Scandinavian invasions, which tended indirectly towards the consolidation of England, wrought powerfully towards the disintegration of the Frankish empire. The ignominious treaty which the last emperor of the direct line of Charlemagne, his great grandson Charles the Fat, made with the Danes to induce them to desist from the siege of Paris, and which had to be paid for by a large ransom, was one of the causes which led to his deposition from the imperial throne (887). A younger branch of the Carolingian house continued for just a century longer to wear the title of Kings of Francia, but their personal domain became gradually restricted to a little tract of territory surrounding the city of Laon, and they were ever more overshadowed by the greatness of the family of Robert, rightly called the Strong, who, though himself a Saxon alien of somewhat obscure origin, had shown conspicuous valour in the Danish wars, and whose two sons, Odo and Robert, both crowned as Kings of France, were the heroes of the mighty siege of Paris. For thirty-three years (923–56) Hugh the Great, son of this second Robert and grandson of the first, was far the most powerful man in France: Duke of Francia, Burgundy and Aquitaine, Count of Paris and Orleans, Lay Abbot of St. Martin of Tours. But though a kingmaker, son and nephew of kings, he always refused to be king himself. His son, Hugh Capet, more ambitious or less scrupulous, in 987 pushed aside the last powerless descendant of Charlemagne, and ascended that glorious throne which was uninterruptedly occupied by his descendants, Valois, Plantagenet, Bourbon, till the awful day of August, 1792, when the Swiss Guards fell fighting in front of the Tuilleries.
The Norman dukes, who also in this tenth century climbed up into all but regal state, bore an important part in this revolution. The hitherto received story of the settlement of the Northmen under their leader Rolf or Rollo in the fair province to which they gave their name has been subjected of late to much adverse criticism,[188] and has been so seriously shaken that hardly anything but the bare fact survives indubitable, that there was such a settlement in the early part of the tenth century; that either in 911 or, as is rather more probable, in 921, Rolf “commended” himself to the French king Charles the Simple; and that he became his “man” in return for the cession of a large district on the Lower Seine. This transaction resembled in some respects the arrangement made a generation before, between Alfred and Guthrum. It was the surrender of part of the kingdom to ensure the safety of the remainder, the change of a pertinacious enemy into a fairly faithful friend. The cession of Normandy to Rolf was, however, in some ways a more signal success than Alfred’s cession of East Anglia to Guthrum. Though the Frankish historians persisted for generations in calling Rolf’s people pirates, the new-comers soon assimilated all and more than all the civilisation of their Frankish neighbours; and Norman literature, Norman chivalry, Norman architecture became the envy of Europe.
On Rolf’s death or abdication in 927 his son, William Longsword, became duke and reigned for fifteen years. He was a man of keen and polished intellect, with many noble, even with some holy, aspirations, but with a strange duality in his nature, perhaps the result of the mingled strain of Viking and Romanised Frank that was in his blood, for his mother is said to have been a Frankish lady of noble birth. A conflict had begun between two sections of his subjects, between the men of Rouen and its neighbourhood, who were fast becoming Frenchmen, and the men of the district round Bayeux, who remained obstinate Danes; and in this conflict William veered first to one side, then to the other. Moreover in the confused welter of French politics he played an eminently inconsistent and unwise part, showing that amidst the intriguing, grasping but adroit counts of Northern Gaul he never felt himself completely at home, but was uneasily conscious that he was still looked upon by them as dux piratarum. He would fain have been faithful to the royal line, to which his father owed his legalised position in the country; and in 936 he heartily co-operated with Hugh the Great in bringing back Athelstan’s nephew, Louis IV. d’Outremer, from his English exile and crowning him king; but, changeable as a weather-cock, he was almost as often found among the enemies of Louis IV. as in the ranks of his friends. Unfaithfulness begat unfaithfulness; the man who had been on each side in every quarrel made himself enemies all round, and in 942, having been treacherously invited to a conference on an island in the Somme, he was there foully murdered by a band of noble conspirators, among whom we regret to find Arnulf of Flanders, grandson of our own Alfred, first and foremost.
On the death of William Longsword, his little son Richard, though not born in lawful wedlock--this was almost the rule in the Norman line--was unanimously accepted as his successor. The boy, only ten years old, was soon plunged into a whirlpool of troubles, from which even his father’s old and faithful counsellors could hardly have extricated him, had he not himself shown that cool, patient, self-sustained courage which earned for him his historical surname, “the Fearless”. Though the Norman historians may have somewhat embroidered the romantic history of his captivity and escape, there can be little doubt that two dangerous neighbours, King Louis IV. and Count Hugh the Great, coveted the orphan boy’s inheritance; nor that, but for the loyalty of the Norman warriors to the son of their dead chieftain, and the astute management of two or three of his father’s old friends, they would have succeeded in making it their own. Soon after the death of William Longsword King Louis came to Rouen, ostensibly as the friend and protector of the little duke. He seems, however, to have practically taken the government of the country into his own hands, while the boy Richard, who was transferred to the court of Laon “that he might be there educated as beseemed a Christian prince,” found the school of knighthood every day becoming more like a prison. However, Richard’s faithful guardian, Osmund, succeeded in smuggling him out of the castle, according to the legend, “in a truss of hay”. The Normans, tired of the financial exactions of the ministers of Louis, rose in open revolt and gathered round their just recovered prince; the invasion of Louis with a formidable army was neutralised by that of Harold, a chieftain from Scandinavia, who, in 945, on the urgent appeal of Richard came to the help of his brother-Northmen. A battle followed, the battle of the Dive, in which Louis was utterly defeated, and he was soon after taken prisoner. Thus were the tables now turned, Louis who was of late the jailer being now the captive; nor did he regain his liberty till he had surrendered the rock fortress of Laon, almost his last remaining possession, to the omnivorous Count Hugh the Great, and had--so say the Norman writers--formally released Duke Richard from all ties of feudal dependence. Whether this be literally true or not, there is no doubt that Richard “commended” himself to the count of Paris. Thus even before Hugh Capet became King of France, the duke of Normandy was already his most powerful vassal. This fact, coupled with the steady and effectual help which Richard gave to the younger Hugh in his patient upward progress to the throne, deserves to be remembered when in later ages we have to deal with the relations, more often hostile than friendly, between the Norman-English vassal and the French lord paramount.
At the period which we have reached in English history, the date of the death of Dunstan (988), Richard the Fearless was a middle-aged man of fifty-five years. He had been reigning for forty-five years, and was the father of a numerous progeny--not born in wedlock--by a Danish woman named Gunnor, whom he married after the death of his lawful wife Emma, sister of Hugh Capet. His marriage with Emma was childless. In the year 996 he died and was succeeded by his son Richard the Good.
* * * * *
The origin of the house, which in after ages bore the name of Plantagenet and which held in the tenth century the countship of Anjou, is hidden in clouds of legend; but the legend itself does not dare to say that their forebears were always noble, nor to assign to them, as to so many of their princely contemporaries, a descent from the great Emperor Charles. The legendary ancestor of the Counts of Anjou is a certain Tortulf or Tertullus, a Breton forester to whom a doubtful Carolingian king, probably Charles the Bald, is said to have assigned a woodland district known as the Blackbird’s Nest (Nid de Merle), on condition of repelling the Danish attacks on the valley of the Loire. The special interest attaching to the history of the Angevin counts, in addition to the fact that they were the ancestors of so many of our English sovereigns, lies in the tenacity of purpose with which they pursued their policy of aggrandisement, gradually converting their little marchland on the east of Brittany, a small and precarious possession, into an extensive and powerful state in one of the fairest regions of France. With their Breton neighbours on the west, with Maine and Normandy on the north, they were frequently at war, but their most bitter and enduring conflicts were with the Counts of Blois on the east, and it was at their expense that the most important of the Angevin conquests was effected. This is a fact which it will be well to bear in mind when we find Henry of Anjou and Stephen of Blois, heirs of a feud which had already lasted in France for two centuries, contending on English soil for the crown of England.
* * * * *
The history of Denmark during the first century and a half of the Viking raids is involved in great obscurity; but about the time when Edward the Elder was reigning in England we emerge into clearer light, and find a king named Gorm the Old reigning over a united Denmark, with, however, some obligations of vassalage towards the German king, Henry the Saxon. On his death or abdication towards the middle of the tenth century began the long and prosperous reign of Harold Blaatand (Blue-Tooth), which lasted for about fifty years and was the great period of consolidation for the Danish kingdom. In 977 Harold, in conjunction with two Norwegian allies, made an expedition to Norway by which he obtained possession of a considerable part of that country and acquired a sort of feudal supremacy over the whole. In his relations with the German emperors Harold was less fortunate. He was apparently compelled to submit to Otto I., and as one of the conditions of peace, he and his son Sweyn were forced to receive Christian baptism. The conversion of the son at any rate was not sincere, and dissensions broke out between him and his father. The old king was defeated and fled the country. He was restored for a short time, again attacked by Sweyn, and died of his wounds received in battle.
Thus, in the fourteenth year of Ethelred’s reign, the throne of Denmark was occupied by the stern pagan Swegen or Sweyn. No tenderness will he show to Christian churches or monasteries in any land that he may invade; and any king or people that shall do him wrong may expect to receive terrible retribution.
The early, doubtless in large measure legendary, history of Norway, as told in the Heimskringla Saga, is full of romantic interest, but is beside our present purpose. The great unifier of the Norwegian kingdom was Harold Fair-hair, whose long reign ended before the middle of the tenth century. In the eleventh year of his age he found himself lord of a small kingdom between Lake Wener and the Dovrefield Mountains. When he came to manhood he wooed the fair Gytha for his wife, but the damsel declared that she would marry no man who did not rule the whole of Norway, as Gorm ruled all Denmark and Eric the whole of Sweden. Hereupon Harold, having vowed not to cut his hair till he had accomplished the prescribed task, began a series of expeditions northwards, which did in the course of years make him master of the whole of what we now call Norway. He married Gytha, but she was only one of many wives and concubines by whom he begat countless children, whose wars and alliances, whose rivalries and reconciliations, fill Norwegian history in the tenth century as English history in the fifteenth is filled by the broils of the Plantagenets. This is that Harold who sent the infant Hakon to be educated at the court of Athelstan; and Hakon, as has been said, having been educated by his great foster-father in the Christian religion and trained in all arts that became a Saxon Etheling, went back to his fatherland, reigned there after his father’s death as Hakon the Good, and vainly endeavoured to Christianise his people. Another Harold and another Hakon followed in quick succession, sometimes owning, sometimes rejecting, the over-lordship of Denmark. At the period which we have now reached, the rising star is that of Olaf Tryggvason, great-grandson of Fair-hair, not yet king of Norway but a great and popular Viking, whose name will be heard with terror in Essex and in Kent, in Sussex and in Hampshire.