XXII. ETHELRED THE REDELESS
The story of the long reign of Ethelred consists of little else than the details of Danish invasions, large payments of ransom to the raiders, and the king’s dealings with the Dukes of Normandy, at whose court he was at last obliged to take refuge.
Though many historical verdicts have been reversed in our day, Ethelred the Redeless, the man devoid of counsel--this rather than “the Unready” is the best translation of his distinguishing epithet--still remains unchampioned under the stigma of incompetence as great as was ever displayed by any occupant of the English throne. When we read the record of his disastrous reign, when we see how systematically he left undone the things which he ought to have done, and did, with fitful and foolish energy, the things which he ought not to have done, we are inclined to ask, “Was this man bereft of reason?” If he had been absolutely insane we should probably have had a distinct statement to that effect in the Chronicle, but it may, perhaps, be suggested that there was some hereditary weakness in his family which in his case affected the fibre of his brain. Royal families not renewed by any admixture of plebeian blood have sometimes shown a tendency to become worn out. We must remember that the descendants of Cerdic had now been reigning for five hundred years. As compared with the young and parvenus dynasties which were coming up into power from the ranks of sailors and huntsmen and tillers of the soil; as compared with the Norman dukes, the Capetians and the Angevins, the Kings of Wessex were an old and apparently a weakening stock. There was certainly brain-power enough in an Alfred, an Edward and an Athelstan, but perhaps even with them physical hardly kept pace with mental energy. Alfred the Great was a life-long sufferer from disease. If he and his son completed each his half century of life, that was more than was attained by most of their immediate descendants. Athelstan lived but to the age of forty-six; Edred, a chronic invalid, died at thirty; Edwy probably under twenty; even Edgar, whose reign seemed a long one, at thirty-two. Edmund and Edward the Martyr died violent deaths, and therefore they do not come into this calculation. Ethelred himself, though he lived long enough to inflict untold misfortunes on his country, died at the age of forty-eight. All this looks like a decay of physical power in the house of Cerdic, which may in some degree account for the fatal “redelessness” of Ethelred. It is true that there was a revival of the old heroic energy in his son Edmund Ironside, but even that is coupled with a very short life (we cannot be sure that his death was due to foul play); and in his half-brother, Edward the Confessor, though he lived to the age of sixty-two, there is a sort of anæmic saintliness which marks him out as the fitting son, intellectually though not morally, of his “redeless” father.
The story of the reign of Ethelred is given us in the Chronicle with a minuteness of detail such as we have not found there since the days of Alfred. It is evidently the work of a contemporary, of one who saw and groaned over the calamities of his people, and who was moved to passionate indignation by the mingled folly and wickedness of the rulers of the land. This part of the Chronicle is then a document of the highest value for the historian, and yet it is one which requires to be used with some caution on account of the motive by which it is unconsciously inspired. That motive is the strong tendency which always leads a beaten army or a beaten nation to argue that the enemy did not fight fairly, or that “the pass was sold” to them by some traitor in the camp. It is quite possible that all the accusations brought by the chronicler are true, especially that the inexplicable treasons of Elfric and Edric were as monstrous as he describes them; but it is also possible that they may have been magnified by a patriotic scribe, looking round for some scapegoat to bear his people’s sins; and in any event what we have to remember is that we are here reading what are virtually the articles of an opposition journalist. It is just possible, therefore, though hardly probable, that in some cases Ethelred’s ministers and generals, or even Ethelred himself, if they could be heard in their own defence, might somewhat mitigate the severity of the sentence passed upon them. A few of these criticisms are here inserted, but even these will hardly give a sufficient idea of the tone of condemnation which pervades the whole long reign of Ethelred in the pages of the Chronicle.[189]
998. “The Danes came to the mouth of the Frome and ravaged Dorset at their will. The fyrd was often gathered together against them, but as soon as they should have all got together, then ever for some cause was flight determined on, and so the Danes in the end always got the victory. So they quartered themselves for the second time in the Isle of Wight, drawing their provisions from Hampshire and Sussex.”
999. “The army again came round into the Thames and moved thence up the Medway to Rochester. Then came the Kentish fyrd against them and there were they firmly locked in fight. But, alas! the Kentish men too quickly gave way and fled, because they were not supported as they ought to have been. Thus the Danes held the place of slaughter, and took horse and rode far and wide as they chose, and ravaged well-nigh the whole of West Kent. Then the king took counsel with his witan, and decided that they must go against the enemy with ship-fyrd and also with land-fyrd. But when the ships were ready, then some one delayed from day to day and harassed the poor folk who were on board the ships, and ever, when things should have been forwarder they were later, from one time to another, and so they let the army of their enemies grow, and they were always retiring from the sea and the Danes were ever following hard after them. Thus at the end the great ship-fyrd accomplished nothing but oppression of the people and waste of money and the emboldening of their foes.”
1006. “The Danish fleet came to Sandwich, and the crews did as they had ever done, harrying, burning, murdering wheresoever they went. Then the king called out all the people of Wessex and Mercia, and they lay out all the autumn, arrayed against the enemy, but all availed nothing as so often before; for in spite of all this the Danish army marched just where they pleased, and the fyrd itself did the country folk every harm, while neither the home army (inn-here) nor the foreign army (ut-here) did them any good. As soon as the weather grew wintry, the fyrd went home, and the Danish army after Martinmas, November 11, came to their resting-place in the Isle of Wight and helped themselves to all that they wanted from every quarter. Then in mid-winter they sallied forth through Hants and Berks to their comfortable quarters at Reading, and there did as they pleased, kindling their beacons [blazing villages] wherever they went. Thus fared they to Wallingford which they burned down, and they then went along Ashdown to Cwichelms-law,[190] and there abode, out of pure bravado, because it had been often said that if once they got to Cwichelms-law they would never get back to the sea. They then went home by another way. The fyrd was assembled at Cynete (?), and they there joined battle, but soon was that [English] army put to flight, and afterwards they carried their booty down to the sea. Then might the people of Winchester see the invading army, insolent and fearless, marching past their gates to the sea; and they spread over fifty miles from the sea, gathering food and treasure.”
It would be tedious to follow the chronicler’s example and relate in detail all the events of these successive raids, which recur with melancholy monotony through thirty years. The reader is therefore referred to the accompanying table for the list of the districts successively ravaged by the invaders.
Year. 982 Portland, by three ships’ crews landing in Dorsetshire. (London burnt; possibly an accidental fire.)
988 Watchet in Somerset. Goda, a Devonshire thegn slain.
991 Ipswich ravaged. Battle of Maldon. Brihtnoth slain. First payment of gafol (tribute) to the Danes.
993 Bamburgh stormed. Great booty taken. Both banks of the Humber ravaged.
994 Brave defence of London, attacked by Olaf and Sweyn. Essex, Kent, Sussex, Hampshire. Second payment of gafol.
997 Cornwall, Devon, Wales, Watchet, Lydford, Tavistock.
998 Mouth of the Frome, Dorset, Isle of Wight. Sussex and Hants forced to supply provisions.
999 Rochester: Kent.
1001 Battle at Alton in Hampshire. Devonshire. Taunton burnt. Exmouth defended. Penhoe and Clist (in Devon). Bishops Waltham in Hampshire burnt.
1002 Marriage of Ethelred with Emma of Normandy. Massacre of St. Brice’s Day. Third payment of gafol.
1003 Exeter stormed and looted. Wilton, Sarum.
1004 Norwich, Thetford. Brave defence of Norfolk by Ulfkytel.
1005 Great famine throughout England.
1006 Sandwich, Isle of Wight, Reading, Wallingford, Cwichelms-law.
1007 Fourth payment of gafol.
1008 Ships ordered to be built all over England.
1009 Failure of the new navy. Canterbury, Isle of Wight, Sussex, Hants, Berks, both banks of the Thames, Oxford. London vainly attacked. Local payment of gafol by East Kent.
1010 Ipswich, Thetford, Cambridge, Oxfordshire, Bucks, Bedford, Tempsford (in Bedfordshire), Northampton, Canning Marsh (in Somerset).
1011 Canterbury.
1012 Martyrdom of Archbishop Alphege. Fifth payment of gafol.
1013 Mouth of the Humber, Gainsborough. King Sweyn at Sandwich. Northumbria and all the country north of Watling Street submit to him. Oxford, Winchester, Wallingford, Bath, Devon and London submit to Sweyn. Flight of Ethelred and his family to Normandy.
1014 Death of Sweyn (Feb. 3), Ethelred recalled. Canute, son of Sweyn, King of the Danes, occupies Lindsey. Mutilation of Northumbrian hostages by Canute. Sixth payment of gafol.
1015 Dorset, Wilts, Somerset ravaged.
1016 Warwickshire, Buckinghamshire, Bedfordshire, Huntingdonshire; along the fens to Stamford. Lincolnshire, Nottinghamshire, York, submission of Northumbria, London repeatedly attacked. Death of Ethelred (April 23). Edmund Ironside king. Battle of Assandune. The kingdom divided between Canute and Edmund. Death of Edmund Ironside (Nov. 30). Canute sole king.
Dreary and depressing as is the general course of the narrative of these successive invasions, we have in the early years of the war, not from the chronicler but from an unknown contemporary poet, a graphic account of a battle in which the Northmen were valiantly met and all but defeated. The hero of the battle was Brihtnoth, ealdorman of Essex, brother-in-law of the half-king Athelstan, and champion of the monks against Elfhere of Mercia. The scene was laid at Maldon in Essex, where the dark stream of the Blackwater begins to discharge itself into its broad tidal estuary. The date was 991, the thirteenth year of Ethelred. The poet brings before us the ealdorman Brihtnoth arraying his men-at-arms on the shore of the Blackwater. He rides up and down their ranks, bidding them hold their shields with firm grasp and fear naught. He alights from his horse and stands beside “his friends, his own hearth-warriors,” of whose staunch service he has often made proof. While he is standing on the bank a Viking herald shouts forth his threatful message: “The bold sailors have sent me to thee to say that thou must forthwith send to them a ransom of golden rings. It will be for your profit by this payment to forego the flight of spears; and you shall then have peace with the men of the sea.” At this Earl Brihtnoth gripped tight his shield and shook his slender ashen spear and poured forth his words of wrath: “The tribute we will give you is naught but flying spears, the edge of deadly iron, the old and trusted sword. Go back and tell the folk who sent thee, that here stands an earl with his warriors who will defend this country, the land of noble Ethelred, to the uttermost. Now that you have visited our land you shall not depart all softly to your homes bearing no marks of battle on your bodies. Rather shall point and edge settle our differences: grim will be the sword-play ere we pay you tribute.”
After this interchange of defiances, the troops on either side were drawn up in battle array, but it was some hours before they could close in conflict. The estuary of the Blackwater was still filled by the flowing tide, and one bridge over the narrower part of the stream, by which the enemy might have crossed, was valiantly defended by three Saxons. “Finding these bridge warders all too bitter,” the Northmen moved up stream to find a ford. The earl, in the pride of his soul, allowed many of the hateful people to come to land, shouting aloud: “Listen, warriors! Free space is now granted you to come quickly to us. Come as warriors to the war. God only knows who shall hold the field of slaughter.” “The wolves of rapine” tramped through the water, holding high their shields over their heads, and found, when they reached the shore, Earl Brihtnoth waiting to receive them. He had bidden his men “to weave the war-hedge with their shields” (that is to make the shield-wall) and hold it firmly against the foe. Then rose high the war of battle, the ravens gathered together at the sound, and with them came the eagle, greedy for his prey.
With true Homeric fervour the poet describes the incidents of the battle that followed. Brihtnoth was wounded early in the fight by the spear of a Viking, but succeeded in giving his antagonist a death-wound by his javelin.
Blithe was then the chieftain, Laughed the moody man: “I thank Thee, Lord of heaven, For this glorious day’s work Thou to me hast given”.
Soon, however, he received another more deadly wound from a Norse arrow, and though for a little space he still fought on, ere long “to earth fell the golden-hilted sword, nor might he longer hold the hard knife or wield the well-loved weapon”. But still the hoary warrior bade the youths fight on and show a bold front to the foe, and as he lay he looked toward heaven and said:--
Thankful I remember, Lord of Nations, All the joys I in this world have tasted. Now this one thing do I crave in dying From Thy hands, O merciful Creator!-- That Thy grace be on my parting spirit, That my soul in peace to Thee may journey, To Thy presence, O Thou Lord of Angels, And that of the Hell-crew none may harm her.
Uttering these words he died, and his corpse was barbarously hacked by the bands of the heathen. Soon were his two squires, Elfnoth and Wulfmaer, lying dead beside him, having freely given their lives for their lord. And now was seen the difference between the brave men and the infamous (nithings). Now fled from the battle those who loved it not. First in flight was Godric, to whom his good lord had in past days given many a noble steed, but who now leapt on his master’s horse and fled fast from the battle, spreading panic among the soldiers, who thought when they saw the well-known steed that it was Brihtnoth himself who was thus fleeing from the encounter. Offa, a thegn of Brihtnoth, upon whom the command of the remnant of the army seems now to have devolved, had said only the day before when they were holding gemot (whereat Godric had probably been speaking loud and boastful words):--
Many speak valiant words in council hall, Who in the time of need from honour fall.
And now Godric’s cowardice made vain his words. Then did a young warrior named Elfwine, grandson of an ealdorman of Mercia, speak heart-cheering words to his fellows, reminding them of all the brave old times that they had shared together in Brihtnoth’s banquet-hall, drinking mead and talking of hard-won victories.
Now shall not the brave thegns, my countrymen, upbraid me, That I from this day’s fighting have shamefully departed, And sought my home unwounded, when there my chieftain lieth, Hacked by the hostile broadswords. That were my worst disaster. Alas! that there my kinsman, my dead lord, lies before me. Then many of the sailor host Offa laid low in battle, But all too soon the chieftain brave himself received his death-blow, Redeeming thus the promise he to his lord had given, “Either we twain to castle triumphant ride together Safe to our homes, or elsewise we both in battle perish, Sore wounded, life out-bleeding upon the field of slaughter”. So lay the noble Offa all thegn-like by his master.
The poem both begins and ends abruptly, and is evidently a fragment, but we know from the Chronicle that the valour of Brihtnoth’s henchmen was vain to restore the battle, and that Maldon was a Northmen’s victory. The chief interest of the poem lies in the fact that it so vividly brings before us the devotion of the thegns to their “dear lord” (wine drihten), reminding us forcibly of the words of Tacitus concerning the ancestors of these men nine centuries before. “The man is disgraced for the rest of his life who leaves the battle-field having survived his chief. The chiefs fight for victory, the ‘companions’ for their chief.” Also, unfortunately, the poet reveals to us the existence of treachery and cowardice in the Saxon host. We shall soon come upon notorious instances of men who imitated the panic-breeding flight of the base Godric rather than the noble stand of Brihtnoth and his henchmen.
We may gather from the lay of Brihtnoth some notions of the manner of fighting in use among the Saxons. The battle was evidently fought on foot, horses being merely used to convey some of the warriors to the field of battle. The chief weapon seems to be the spear (gar or franca), and next to it the dart (dareth), though of course the sword (sweord) and dagger or knife (mece) are also used. The use of the bow and arrow (boga and flan) seems still to be rather exceptional, at any rate on the Saxon side. The chief arms of defence are the byrne or ringed coat of mail and the bord or shield made of linden wood. To “weave the war-hedge” (wyrcan thone wighagan) with closely interlocked shields is the first duty of an army on the defensive; to break the shield-wall (brecan thone bordweall) is the highest act of assailant valour.
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At the outset of the battle of Maldon we heard the messenger of “the sea men” suggesting the terms on which they were ready to sell an ignominious immunity from ravage. It was in 991, the very year of that battle, that the first payment of what is generally called Danegeld was made.[191] “And in that year,” says the chronicler, “it was first decided that men should pay gafol to the Danish men on account of the many terrible things which they wrought on the sea coast. That was at first 10,000 pounds. This was the counsel of Archbishop Siric” (Sigeric of Canterbury, 990–94).[192] Of course this easy and ignominious remedy for the miseries inflicted by the invaders was only a palliative, not a cure, and the short breathing-time purchased by the payment not having been utilised as it was by Alfred to put the country in a better state of defence, when the importunate beggars came again, they had to be bought off at a higher figure. The following table shows the dates and amounts of the successive payments of gafol:--
991 | First payment | 10,000 pounds (of silver) 994 | Second „ | 16,000 1002 | Third „ | 24,000 1007 | Fourth „ | 36,000 (in two MSS. 30,000) 1009 | Local payment, East Kent | 3,000 1012 | Fifth „ | 48,000 1014 | Sixth „ | 21,000 |-------- | 158,000 pounds of silver. |--------
This sum, if we take the pound weight of silver at fifty-four shillings, would be equivalent in intrinsic value to £426,600 sterling, or if we take the “purchasing power” of money in the tenth century at twenty times its present amount, it would be equivalent to a drain of £8,532,000 from a thinly peopled and exhausted country. Probably, as the drain went on, the purchasing power of the silver that remained would be enormously increased and the above estimate may therefore be too small. The chronicler in most cases simply records the fact that the king and his witan promised gafol to the army (sometimes gafol and food) on condition that they should cease from evil; but under the year 1011, after enumerating the districts of England, equivalent to sixteen of our present counties, all of which they had ravaged in that one year, he adds: “All these misfortunes befel us through evil counsel (un-raed) because people did not choose either to pay them gafol in time or else to fight with them; but when they had done about as much evil as they could possibly do, then people made truce and peace with them.... And nevertheless for all this truce and peace and payment of gafol, they went everywhere in bands and harried the country and captured and slew our poor people.”
In order to meet these terrible demands upon the treasury, Ethelred imposed the tax called Danegeld, which was possibly the first tax paid in money and not in kind. The amount of this tax in Saxon times does not seem to be clearly stated. Abolished by Edward the Confessor in 1052, it was revived and made much more oppressive by the Conqueror long after all fear of Danish invasion had ceased, and though its discontinuance was frequently talked of, it does not finally disappear from the treasury rolls till the year 1163.[193] So persistent is the clutch of the tax-gatherer when he has once fastened his claws upon his victim.
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In 992 we have the first of the long series of “inexplicable treasons”[194] of Elfric, ealdorman of Hampshire and Berkshire. The king and all his witan had decided that all the ships that were of any value should be collected in London. The command of this naval armament was entrusted to Ealdorman Elfric, with three colleagues, two of whom were bishops, and they were ordered to intercept the invading host while still upon the high seas. But Elfric gave private warning to the Danish leaders, and on the evening before the day on which the battle was to have been fought, he stole away by himself from the fyrd, to his great disgrace. The result was that the Danish fleet escaped, all save one ship, the crew of which was slain; and the Danes in their turn caught the ships of East Anglia and London at a disadvantage, and wrought a mighty slaughter among them, capturing the very ship, all armed and equipped, in which Elfric had been. As a punishment apparently either for this or for yet another treason, his son Elfgar was next year blinded by order of the king. And yet ten years later (1003), when a great fyrd had been collected out of Wiltshire and Hampshire, Ealdorman Elfric was again placed in command of it. “But,” says the chronicler, “he was again at his old tricks. As soon as the two armies were so near together that they could look into one another’s faces, he feigned himself sick and began retching and spewing, and called out that he was suddenly taken ill. Thus did he betray the folk that he should have led to battle. For when the general is cowardly, then is all the army terribly hindered.” This is the last time that Elfric is mentioned as in command of an army; but we hear of him (or another ealdorman of the same name) thirteen years later (1016) falling at the battle of Assandune. We may, perhaps, doubt whether he was really a deep-dyed traitor or only a man of weakly and nervous constitution, unable to face “the flight of spears” and quite unfit to be put in command of the smallest detachment of soldiers.
In 994 a united effort for the conquest of England was made by a Norwegian and a Danish chieftain. The Norwegian was Olaf Tryggvason, great grandson of Harold Fair-hair, hero of a hundred romantic stories, “fairest and strongest of all men and in prowess surpassing all men talked of by the Northmen”. He had already visited England as a foe and had borne a chief part in the battle of Maldon. The Dane was Sweyn, son of Harold Blue-tooth, whose early career has been already described. In the autumn of 994 the two comrades with ninety-four ships sailed up the Thames and fiercely attacked the city of London on September 8, the Feast of the Nativity of the Virgin Mary, thinking to set it on fire. “But there,” says the Chronicle, “God be thanked, they experienced more harm and mischief than they ever thought that any citizens should do unto them. For the holy mother of God showed her mild-heartedness unto those burghers and delivered them from their enemies.” The marauding bands then departed and “wrought the most ill that any man could do in burnings and harryings and man-slayings by the sea coast of Essex, in Kent, in Sussex and in Hampshire,” and after “they had worked indescribable evil,” the king and his witan decided to make the second great gafol payment of £16,000, and “the army” after once mustering at Southampton, was billeted through the whole land of Wessex while the silver was being collected. The terms of peace being thus settled, Ethelred sent a solemn embassage to Olaf, consisting of Elfheah and Ethelweard. Both these were in their different ways men worthy of note. Elfheah or Alphege, who was at this time bishop of Winchester, became twelve years later archbishop of Canterbury, and as we shall see suffered cruel martyrdom at the hands of the Danes. Ethelweard, an ealdorman of Wessex, seems to be clearly identified with the chronicler generally known as Ethelweard, who was of royal blood (being descended from Alfred’s elder brother, Ethelred I.), and whose turgid and obscure narrative occasionally sheds a glimmer of light on the dark places of Anglo-Saxon history. The English ambassadors conducted Olaf to Andover; and there he was led “with much worship” into the presence of Ethelred, who bestowed upon him kingly gifts and received him from the bishop’s hands, when the baptismal rite had been performed. Under the spell of these new religious influences, Olaf promised that “he would never again come against the English race in unfriendly guise,” a promise which, as the chronicler says, he well fulfilled. Next year (995) he made himself master of the Norwegian kingdom, and succeeded in inducing all the Norwegian chiefs, north and south, to become converts to Christianity. After a reign of five years full of romantic adventures,[195] the Norwegian hero fell in a great sea-fight against the combined forces of his former ally, Sweyn of Denmark, and his namesake, Olaf of Sweden. For fourteen years (1000–14) Norway lay under the yoke of the confederate kings. The increase of power thus obtained by Denmark may have had something to do with the success of Sweyn’s schemes for the conquest of England.
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Powerless as Ethelred was to defend our island from her foes, he could at least imitate their ravages in that portion of it which was not under his immediate rule. “In the year 1000 he marched into Cumberland and harried very nearly the whole of it.” Even here, however, his unrivalled genius for failure showed itself. His ships--the remnant probably of those collected in the previous year--were to have met him at Chester and co-operated in his campaign. This they failed to do, but “they sailed to the Isle of Man and ravaged there”. These last words throw a little light on what is otherwise not only an obscure but an utterly purposeless proceeding. We know from other sources that Man was an island stronghold of the Norse pirates, and there are, as we have seen, indications that from thence a stream of Scandinavian settlers passed into Cumberland towards the close of the tenth century. It is true that Norse rather than Danish seems to have been the character of the settlement in the Isle of Man, but as the Scandinavian sea-rovers were still acting generally in concert against the English, this fact need not prevent us from seeing in this Cumbrian raid an act of energy on Ethelred’s part against the Danish invaders.
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Two strangely contrasted events, a marriage and a massacre, fill up the record for 1002. There had been apparently some desultory warfare between Ethelred and Richard the Good, son of Richard the Fearless, duke of Normandy. An expedition against the Cotentin, the western horn of Normandy, had proved, like many of Ethelred’s undertakings, unsuccessful, and now the English king, his first wife being dead, in order to strengthen himself by a foreign alliance, sued for and obtained the hand of Richard’s sister Emma in marriage. The bride was brought over to England with much pomp in the spring of 1002 by the magnates of the realm who had been sent to escort her. An attempt was made to change her name to the Saxon Aelfgyfu (Elgiva), but the Norman “Emma” is that by which she has ever been known in history. She bore to Ethelred two sons, Alfred and Edward (the Confessor). Queen Emma, who was known as the “gemma Normannorum,” was probably beautiful after the fair type of her Scandinavian ancestors, but her character is not an attractive one, and indirectly her connexion with the royal family of Wessex wrought much harm to England. Henry of Huntingdon (writing of course after the Norman conquest) makes the extraordinary statement that “from this union of an English king with the daughter of a Norman duke, the Normans justly, according to the law of nations, challenged and obtained possession of the English land”. He goes on to say, however, that a certain man of God had prophesied that because of the enormous crimes of the English people, their addiction to murder, treason, drunkenness, and neglect of the house of the Lord, “an unlooked-for dominion should come upon them from France, and even the nation of the Scots, whom they held most vile, should also rule over them to their deserved confusion”.
After narrating the payment of the third gafol to the Danes (24,000 pounds), the chronicler proceeds: “In that year the king ordered all the Danish men who were in England to be slain on St. Bricius’ Day, November 13, because the king was informed that they wished to plot against his life and afterwards against the lives of all his witan, and so to have the kingdom easily for themselves”. A most extraordinary statement is this, describing an event even more unintelligible than the other events in this inexplicable reign. The alleged murder of all Danish men reminds us of the Sicilian Vespers, but the historical parallel may be deceptive. The Chronicle speaks only of the murder of “Danish men”; the statements of later Chronicles extending the massacre to women and children are probably oratorical amplifications. Henry of Huntingdon gives us an interesting personal touch when he says: “In our boyhood we heard from some very ancient men that the aforesaid king sent letters to each city, according to which the English on the same day and hour, either hewed down the unsuspecting Danes with their swords or, having suddenly arrested them, burned them with fire”. Notwithstanding statements like this, it may be safely asserted that all the thousands of Danish men who were scattered over England, in the Danelaw and elsewhere, did not perish on St. Brice’s Day. Nor is this probably the Chronicle’s meaning. We learn from another version of the Chronicle that in the previous year (1001) Pallig, whom we know to have been a Danish jarl and brother-in-law of King Sweyn, “fell off from Ethelred, contrary to all the assurances that he had given him, although the king had well gifted him with villages and gold and silver”; and that he had joined the Danes who were invading Devonshire. On the somewhat doubtful authority of William of Malmesbury we are assured that this Pallig, his wife and child were killed in the massacre. This may suggest to us that the real character of the event of St. Brice’s Day was a kind of coup d’état; the summary and treacherous execution of all the Danes who of recent years had flocked into Wessex and taken service in the court and camp of Ethelred. Even so, the deed was sufficiently atrocious, but not impossible, as the murder of all the Danes on English soil would certainly have been.
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Passing over some important events, among them the brave defence of East Anglia by its ealdorman Ulfcytel (“No worse hand-play did the Danes ever meet with from Englishmen than that which Ulfcytel gave them”), we come to the year 1008, for which the Chronicle gives us the following important but perplexing entry: “Now the king bade that through all England men should regularly build ships, that is for 300 hides ... and for 10 hides a skiff, and for 8 hides a helmet and coat of mail”.
There is evidently something omitted in this sentence, and it is generally agreed that the “Worcester” version of the Chronicle which fills up the lacuna with the words “one great ship” has much to recommend it, though the scribe himself may not have understood correctly the meaning of the passage. We may perhaps draw from it this conclusion, that in each county every unit of three hundred hides was called upon to furnish one large warship; the owner of ten hides (1,200 acres?) a light skiff not much bigger than a boat, the owner of eight hides (960 acres?) a helmet and a coat of mail. Whatever difficulty there may be in this obscure passage, it is interesting to note that we have here the origin of “ship-money”. The great case of Rex v. Hampden in the Exchequer Chamber was connected by a distinct chain of causation with the Danish sea-rovers’ movements in the early years of the eleventh century. As usual, these large preparations came to nothing, although (says the chronicler) “as the books tell us, never in no king’s day were so many ships seen in England as were now gathered together at Sandwich”. But domestic dissension and one man’s treachery ruined all (1009).
The new traitor who now emerges from obscurity, and for the next ten years exercises a malign influence on England’s fortunes, is Edric Streona, who was in 1007 set over Mercia as ealdorman. Florence of Worcester ascribes to him the murder of Elfhelm, ealdorman of Northumbria, in a forest near Shrewsbury, and thus draws his general character: “The aforesaid Edric, son of Ethelric, was a man of low origin, whose tongue had procured for him riches and rank, clever in wit, pleasant in speech, but one who surpassed all the men of his time in envy, faithlessness and cruelty”. We have here a more dangerous type of man than his predecessor Elfric; a man who will not be afraid to lead armies to battle, though it may be to their deliberately planned ruin; a man who will have the courage to plot and execute crimes which would have been too much for the delicate digestion of Elfric. Edric had a large band of brothers, who no doubt shared the profits and the enmities which attended his sudden elevation. One of these named Brihtric accused a nobleman named Child Wulfnoth to the king, evidently hoping to profit by the forfeiture of his estates. Thus driven into rebellion, Wulfnoth took to piracy, persuaded twenty ships’ crews out of the king’s fleet to join him, and ravaged the southern coast like a Dane. Brihtric with eighty ships went forth against him, boasting that he would bring back Wulfnoth, alive or dead, but he was overtaken by a terrible storm which battered and thrashed the ships and drove many of them on shore. These Brihtric burned; the others were with difficulty conveyed up the Thames to London. Thus, through the intrigues of one man, Edric’s brother, did the great naval force waste its energies on an inglorious civil war, “and we had not,” says the chronicler, “the happiness nor the honour that we hoped to derive from an efficient navy any more than in previous years”. Of course now, when “the immense hostile army came to Sandwich, there were no ships to meet it”. The Danes landed in Kent, besieged Canterbury, were bought off by a special local gafol of 3,000 pounds, and marched on into Berkshire, harrying and burning. For once Ethelred showed some energy, made a levy en masse of his people, outmarched the Danes and was on the point of cutting off their retreat to their ships. The English peasant soldiers of the fyrd were keen to attack them and avenge the burning of their homesteads and the slaughter of their brethren, “but it was all hindered, now as ever, by Edric the ealdorman”. In November the invaders took up their winter quarters in Kent, drawing their supplies from the counties on both sides of the Thames, “and many a time they attacked the town of London. But God be thanked, she yet stands sound and well, and they have ever fared ill before her walls.”
* * * * *
The years 1011 and 1012 were made sadly memorable by the successful siege of Canterbury and the murder of its archbishop. The siege lasted from September 8 to 29, and it is hinted that it would not so soon have ended but for the treason of Elfmaer, Abbot of St. Augustine’s, whose life had once been saved by the archbishop whom he now betrayed. This archbishop was Elfheah or Alphege, whom we met with seventeen years before when he was sent, as bishop of Winchester, to negotiate with Olaf Tryggvason. He had been for six years archbishop of Canterbury, when he had to witness the capture of the hitherto inviolate city of St. Augustine by the pagans. Besides the archbishop, other great persons, a king’s reeve, a bishop and an abbess were taken prisoners, but these latter seem to have been allowed to ransom themselves. “Abbot Elfmaer”--significant entry--“was suffered to depart.” The Danes searched the city through and through; and the spoil collected and the ransoms paid doubtless made this raid one of the most profitable of their speculations. The archbishop, however, was a perplexing prize. His captors had formed extravagant ideas of what an archbishop’s ransom ought to be, and when they named their price, the archbishop would not hear of his flock being subjected for his sake to such a terrible exaction; and not only would do nothing himself, but positively forbade all the faithful to take any steps towards procuring his ransom.
Seven months was the venerable captive kept in the Danish camp, while the fruitless negotiations went on. At last on April 19, 1012, when the Danes were all excited by the arrival of the largest gafol that Ethelred had yet paid them, a gafol amounting to 48,000 pounds weight of silver; and when their hearts were also merry with wine brought from the shores of the Mediterranean, the archbishop was brought forth from his prison. The rude tribunal before which he was brought bore a name long afterwards well known in England: it was called “the hustings”. The time was Saturday evening, the eve of the first Sunday after Easter; the scene strangely dissonant with the many peaceful vespers of the archbishop’s past. The drunken barbarians, singing perchance some of their fathers’ rude war-songs, began to pelt the aged prisoner with the bones left over from their banquet, with the skulls of the oxen which they had slaughtered. Even so in Valhalla, according to the Viking mythology, had the gods amused themselves by pelting the invulnerable Balder with stones and other missiles, until the blind Hoder, inspired by mischief-working Loki, hurled the fatal mistletoe, which alone had power to deprive him of life. The brutal game went on and the air was filled with the drunken laughter of the barbarians at the old man’s misery. At last one of their number named Thrum, who had been confirmed by the archbishop only the day before, with kind cruelty clave his head with a battle-axe. “He fell down dead with the blow and his holy blood was spilled upon the earth, but his saintly soul went forth into God’s kingdom.” The martyrdom, for such in truth it was, took place at Greenwich. Next day the barbarians suffered the saint’s body to be removed to London, where it was received with all reverence by the bishop and burghers of the city, as well as by the bishop of Dorchester, and by them deposited in St. Paul’s cathedral. “And there,” says the Chronicle, “does God now show forth the wonder-working power of the holy martyr.” The translation of the remains to Canterbury will be described in a future chapter. Under the altered form of Saint Alphege, the name of the murdered archbishop still appears in the calendar of the English Church, which commemorates the day of his martyrdom, April the 19th.
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Up to this point the Danish invasions of this period have been mere plundering and blackmailing raids, apparently with no thought of permanent conquest. Had that been the aim of the sea-rovers, all this cruel burning and slaughtering would have been beside the mark: for why should a conqueror utterly ruin a land which he meant to rule? In 1013, however, a change came over the character of the invasions. They became part of a regular scheme of conquest; and the old Danish king who brought with him Canute,[196] his son, determined to make the country his own. Sweyn landed in the estuary of the Humber: Northumbria, Lindsey and the Five Boroughs submitted to him and gave him hostages, whom he sent to the ships to be kept under his son’s guardianship. He ordered the inhabitants to feed and mount his soldiers; he restored the full Danish dominion over all the country beyond the Watling Street as it existed in the darkest years of the ninth century. He then crossed the Watling Street, harrying the midland counties. Oxford submitted, so did Winchester. He marched against London, losing many of his foolhardy soldiers in crossing the Thames. London as usual made a brave defence. Ethelred was there, and with Ethelred a strange ally, none other than Thurkill the Dane who had commanded the invading army in 1009. It was Thurkill’s men who had captured Canterbury and murderously pelted the holy Elfheah; but according to one contemporary authority Thurkill himself had tried to save him, offering the murderers all his treasures, “except only his ship,” if they would but be merciful. Possibly the remembrance of that scene, or some lessons in Christianity which he may have learned from the captive archbishop, induced him now to lower the Raven-banner and take service under Ethelred. Possibly, too, it was this notable defection which caused Sweyn to come over in person and pluck the ripe fruit, lest it should fall into the hands of one of his subjects.
The Danish king next moved westward to Bath, and received the submission of that ancient city and of all the western thegns, each one of whom had to give hostages, who were sent like the others to the Humber to be kept under Canute’s guardianship. Even the brave citizens of London saw that it was useless further to prolong the contest. They submitted, gave hostages and joined with the rest of England in acknowledging Sweyn as “full king”. There are indications that this great revolution was prompted not merely by the desire to end in any manner the dreadful period of Danish ravagings, but also by utter disgust at the character of Ethelred, who seems to have been not merely incapable but also lustful and cruel. In the years which we have been traversing, there are some strange entries in the Chronicle recording executions, blindings, confiscations, no doubt inflicted at the command of Ethelred; and William of Malmesbury, in quoting a letter from Thurkill to Sweyn, makes him thus describe the condition of England and her king. “The land is a fair land and a rich, but the king snores. Devoted to women and wine, he thinks of everything rather than war, and this makes him hateful to his subjects and ridiculous to foreigners. The generals are all jealous of one another: the country-folk are weak, and fly from the field at the first crash of battle.” This letter is probably not authentic, but its words show what was the traditional character of “the redeless king”.
Recognising that his sceptre was broken, Ethelred sent the Lady Emma and her two sons across the sea to her brother in Normandy. He himself lingered for a while, first on shipboard in the Thames; then in the Isle of Wight, where he seems to have spent his Christmas; and then he too escaped to “Richard’s Land,” as the chroniclers call the duchy of Normandy. Thus then had Sweyn, the heathen and the parricide, king of Denmark by inheritance and of England by conquest, reached the summit of his earthly ambition: and having reached it, he was speedily removed by death. According to the legend related by Symeon of Durham, his death was a punishment for his contemptuous behaviour towards St. Edmund of East Anglia. Often had he spoken in a disrespectful manner of this martyred king, declaring that his saintship was an idle tale; and, what was more serious, he had announced to the monks of St. Edmundsbury that unless by a certain day a heavy tax which he had laid upon their monastery was paid, he would march thither with his men, give the sanctuary to the flames and put its inmates to death with a variety of torments. On the very day before his threatened expedition he was sitting on his horse at Gainsborough surrounded by the armed assembly of his warriors. Suddenly he cried out, “Help me, comrades! help! yonder is Saint Edmund who is coming to slay me”. While he was thus speaking, an unseen hand transfixed him with a spear: he fell from his war-horse and died at nightfall in great agony. Such is the legend. The Chronicle records only the simple fact that “at Candlemas on February 3, 1014, Sweyn ended his days, and all the fleet chose Cnut for their king”. The dead monarch seems to have reigned as “full king” over England for barely a month after the flight of Ethelred. His death led to a sudden shifting of the scene.
* * * * *
“Then all the witan, lay and clerical, resolved that they would send for King Ethelred, and they said that no lord should be dearer to them than their natural born lord, if only he would govern more righteously than he had done aforetime. Then the king sent hither his son Edward with his messengers, and bade greeting to all his people, and said that he would be to them a gracious lord and would amend all the things of which they complained, and that everything which they had done or said against him should be forgiven, on condition that they would all firmly and loyally adhere to him. Thus was full friendship made fast between them with word and pledge on either side; and they pronounced every Danish king outlawed from England for ever. Then came King Ethelred in spring-tide home to his own people, and gladly was he received by all of them.”
It was an easy matter for the witan to declare every Danish king an outlaw; to expel the young and vigorous Canute from the kingdom was a very different affair. At this time the Dane’s strongest position was in Lincolnshire, his naval base of operations being still doubtless the estuary of the Humber. The men of Lindsey had resorted to him at Gainsborough, and had undertaken to supply him with horses and to go forth together with him and harry. But now when Ethelred with “a full fyrd” appeared in Lincolnshire, Canute who was not ready for fight, stole away to his ships and sailed forth from the Humber, leaving “the poor folk whom he had deceived” to their king’s vengeance. Ethelred then “harried and burned and slew every man who could be got at”. Evidently the long years of war had thoroughly brutalised both the combatants. Canute, enraged probably by the proceedings of the witan, sailed round to Sandwich, and there landed the luckless hostages who had been delivered to his father by the northern shires in 1013. He chopped off their hands and noses and then, apparently, let them return to their homes. This savage mutilation is the greatest piece of barbarity that stands recorded against him. Meanwhile the portion of the fleet which Thurkill commanded lay at Greenwich, and from thence, though professing to support the cause of Ethelred, ravaged the country as much as they pleased. Thus for the unhappy peasants there was little to choose between Thurkill and Canute.
In the following year, 1015, there was a great meeting of the witan at Oxford, and here Edric, of whose treasons we have lately heard but little, distinguished himself by a characteristic piece of villainy. There were two thegns, probably brothers, named Sigeferth and Morcar, men with large estates and holding highest rank in the Five, or as they were now called, the Seven Boroughs (York and Chester were perhaps the two new additions to the old group). These men Edric, when he met them at the witenagemot, invited into his chamber and there he treacherously slew them. According to the somewhat doubtful story of William of Malmesbury, he had first made their henchmen drunk, and then when they, too late, sought to avenge their lords, Edric’s followers overpowered them, chased them into the church of St. Frideswide and slew them there. The king was evidently consenting to the death of these men, and purposed to bestow their broad lands on their murderer. But now came a strange overturn. Sigeferth’s widow had been by royal order conveyed to Malmesbury, probably with the intention of immuring her in the convent. Thither also, after a short interval, went the king’s son, the Etheling Edmund Ironside, whom we now hear of for the first time, but who was to be the protagonist in the next two years’ combat. He wooed the widow of Sigeferth; he perhaps promised to take vengeance on her husband’s murderers; he married her, contrary to the king’s command, and then early in September he marched to the Seven Boroughs, presented himself as the avenger of the murdered thegns and the heir of one of them, made himself master of all their domains and received the submission of their people.
The king was now lying at Cosham,[197] stricken with mortal sickness, and could exercise little influence on the course of events. The hopes of the nation must have all rested on Edmund, who certainly showed in these two years courage and activity, though he may have inherited some of his father’s incapacity for reading the characters of men. Thus, notwithstanding the breach between them, which he should have known to be deadly, he accepted the offered help of Edric Streona who repaired to his standard in the north, only to exercise his usual paralysing influence on the army, and then deserted to Canute, inducing the crews of the forty ships at Greenwich to follow his example.
England was now, in 1016, divided in a fashion not seen before. All Wessex was submissive to Canute and gave him horses and hostages, while the district of the Seven Boroughs and probably the whole of Northumbria went with Edmund, heir by marriage of the influence of Sigeferth. He summoned the Mercian fyrd to his standard, but the men replied, curiously enough, that “it did not please them to go forth, unless the king were with them, and they had the support of the burgesses of London”. Apparently the Etheling Edmund was more than half suspected of being a rebel against his father, and in the strange confusion of the strife the approval of the brave citizens of London was the only irrefragable sign and seal of rightful lordship. With some difficulty the sick king was brought from London, where he then abode, to the northern fyrd, but being alarmed by rumours of a conspiracy against his life, he quitted the camp and returned to London. “Thus the summoning of the fyrd availed nothing more than it had ever done before.”
The junction of Edmund’s forces with those of Uhtred, earl of Northumbria, might seem to promise more effectual resistance to the foreigner. Practically, however, it resulted in nothing more than a series of harryings in Shropshire, Staffordshire and Cheshire, from which Uhtred was suddenly recalled by the tidings that Canute had marched northwards and was already nearing York. Uhtred abandoned his harrying and hastened to meet the enemy, but in presence of Canute’s superior force was obliged to submit, acknowledge the Dane as his king, and give hostages. The submission availed him naught. After this surrender he and another powerful Northumbrian named Thurcytel were put to death by Canute. This crime also was attributed to the malign influence of Edric Streona. The struggle now centred round London. There was the sick king; thither his son Edmund went to meet him. Thither was Canute sailing with his ships, but ere he arrived, an enemy stronger than he had found entrance. On April 23, 1016, King Ethelred died, and this dreariest of all English reigns came to an end. Old as Ethelred seems to us by reason of the evils which he had so long inflicted on his country, he was still only in the forty-ninth year of his age.
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“After the death of Ethelred, all the witan that were in London and the citizens chose EDMUND for king, and he boldly defended his kingdom while his time was,” which was only for seven months. Canute, who was obstinately set on the conquest of London, made a canal on the south side of the Thames and passed his ships through it, so as to bring them into the main stream above the strongly defended bridge. After two battles in Somerset and Wilts the English king came to the help of the citizens and defeated the Danes at Brentford. His army, however, was somewhat lacking in discipline, for “many English folk were drowned in the river through their own carelessness, pushing on beyond the main body of the fyrd in the hope of taking booty”. In the battles which followed on the Orwell, in Mercia, in the island of Sheppey, Edmund was generally victorious; but all such success was counterbalanced by the disastrous return of Edric to the English army and by Edmund’s acceptance of his help. “Never was worse counsel adopted than that.” The last and greatest of the long series of battles was fought at Assandune, in the flats of Essex between the Thames and the estuary of the Crouch. Here, after a long and fierce encounter, victory fell to the Danes, it is said through the treachery of Edric, who was the first to take flight and who spread panic through the English ranks by displaying a severed head, which, he shouted, was the head of Edmund Ironside. In this battle fell the old traitor Elfric and a very different man, the brave East Anglian Ulfcytel, besides many other thegns. There, in fact, fell the flower of the English manhood.
It seemed clear that neither of the opposing forces could utterly crush the other. By the mediation of Edric a meeting was arranged between the two kings at Olney, an island in the Severn not far from Gloucester. A payment, we are not told of what amount, was made to the Danish army, and the kingdom was divided between the combatants, Wessex to Edmund, Mercia and Northumbria to Canute. London, faithfully following the house of Cerdic, was included in the peace, and the now reconciled Danish mariners were allowed to take up their winter quarters in the city by the Thames. A peculiar relation, somewhat embellished by the fancy of later historians, seems to have been established between the two young partners in the kingdom. Brotherhood in arms was perhaps sworn to between them; it is alleged that the survivor of the twain was assured of the inheritance of his partner. Whatever may have been the precise nature of the tie, it was soon dissolved. On November 30, 1016, Edmund Ironside “fared forth,” and was buried by the side of his grandfather, Edgar, at Glastonbury. He was only about twenty-three years of age. A death so opportune for the purposes of Canute and his followers naturally arouses suspicion. Later historians had no hesitation in making Edric the murderer. There is also something in the after-life of Canute which looks like remorse for some great crime committed against his brother-king. On the other hand it is but justice to say that there is no hint of foul play in any contemporary authority; and the death of the young king may perhaps be accounted for by the fearful labours and anxieties of his last two years of warring and reigning.
The period which we have lately traversed is one of those dreary times which a patriotic historian would gladly blot out from the annals of England, and one is half inclined to resent the exceptional fulness of detail with which it is treated in the Saxon Chronicle. Yet it is a time which the student of our social history cannot afford to overlook. If the thirty years’ war in the seventeenth century left deep scars on the face of Germany, which were still visible after the lapse of two hundred years, we must surely believe that the wounds inflicted by the incessant ravages and harryings of the Danes for more than thirty years were also deep and long lasting. The utter demoralisation of king and people, the apparent rottenness of the body politic, as manifested in the course of the struggle, abate much of our first feeling of patriotic regret for the Norman conquest, suggesting as they do the reflection that these Saxons, if left to themselves, would never have made a strong and stable nation. Much as we condemn the conduct of Ethelred, we may be inclined to conjecture that all the mischief was not wrought in his reign. We should perhaps do wisely in mistrusting a good deal that is told us about the glory and the greatness of the reign of Edgar. After all, it was in that king’s days that traitors such as Elfric and Edric were growing up into maturity. Had Edgar left the country a really strong, well-organised state, it could hardly have gone down so speedily before the assaults of the sea-rovers. Probably the new and nobler life breathed into the Saxon people by the great Alfred lasted during the reigns of Edward and Athelstan and not much longer.
XXIII. CANUTE AND HIS SONS
When in 1016 Edmund Ironside died, there could be little question that CANUTE must be sole King of England. It was true that Edmund had left two sons, Edmund and Edward, but they were mere babes and it was no time for a protracted regency. In the older generation, of the numerous progeny of the redeless Ethelred (nine sons and six daughters), there were still left only three whose claims could deserve consideration. These were Edwy, the son of his first marriage, and two boys, Alfred and Edward, sons of Emma. These latter, however, besides the disadvantage of their youth--they cannot have been more than twelve years of age--were still absent from England, at the court of their uncle Richard, Duke of Normandy. They seem therefore to have been left altogether out of the reckoning at this juncture, though one of them a generation later was to ascend the throne of England, and to be known under the name of Edward the Confessor. There remained, therefore, as claimant, of the immediate family of Ethelred, only his elder son, Edwy, who was probably in his twentieth year, or thereabouts, but who seems to have borne a high character for wisdom and prudence. But there was another shadowy competitor for the crown who also bore the name of Edwy, with the strange epithet, “King of the Churls”. In our complete ignorance of this man’s previous history we can only guess from whence he emerged. One such guess is that he claimed to be descended from his namesake, the brother of Edgar, and that, having put himself forward as champion of the free tillers of the soil (a class doubtless sorely suffering from thirty years of anarchy), he was called in derision “King of the Ceorls”. However this may be, neither Edwy could stand for a moment against the might of the young Dane, already the acknowledged sovereign of all England north of the Thames, and with the terrible “army” at his back, ready at the giving of a signal to break loose from their winter quarters and resume their terrible harryings of the land. Canute had apparently no difficulty in decreeing that both the Edwys should be banished the realm, nor shortly after in putting the son of Ethelred to death.
The two infant sons of Edmund Ironside were sent by Canute to the King of Sweden, it is said with a request that they might be quietly put out of the way. The Swedish king, however, declined to make himself the Dane’s executioner, and passed the children on to the King of Hungary. Forty years after our present date, one of them having returned to England became, not indeed himself a king, but father of a Scottish queen, and ancestor, through her, of many generations of English sovereigns. As to the manner in which Canute acquired the power of dealing thus summarily with the descendants of Cerdic, there is some uncertainty. One version of the Chronicle says that he was “chosen to be King of all England,” and so far confirms the elaborate account of Florence of Worcester. This author says that there was a great meeting of the witan in London, and that Canute interrogated them as to the nature of the agreement made between him and Edmund Ironside at Olney, whereof they had all been witnesses. “Was anything then said about the right of brothers or sons to succeed Edmund in Wessex, if he should die in Canute’s lifetime?” Thus interrogated, they said that they knew for certain that Edmund destined no portion of his kingdom for his brothers, either in his lifetime or after his death, but that he looked to Canute as the future helper and protector of his sons till they should reach the age of kingship. “But herein they called God to witness of a lie,” hoping to win the king’s favour thereby. According to this story, Canute’s election to the throne by the witan of London was the result of hard swearing; but the Scandinavian authorities assert, and some modern historians believe, that the exclusion of Edmund’s brothers from the succession was really part of the compact of Olney. The question must probably be left unsettled. What is not doubtful is the full and undisputed power which the young Danish conqueror ever thereafter wielded in England, and the peace and comparative prosperity which for near twenty years she enjoyed under his sway. Wisely distrustful of his own ability to direct personally the details of government throughout the whole kingdom, Canute at once divided it into five districts, four of which he placed under rulers with delegated power. East Anglia he placed under the government of Thurkill the Dane, once the ally of Ethelred, but now his own henchman. What was once Deira was assigned to Yric or Eric, also a Dane, who seems, as before, to have made York his capital. In old Bernicia English lords of the family of Uhtred still held sway. Mercia was handed over to the notorious Edric Streona, while Wessex, the heart and centre of Anglo-Saxon monarchy, was reserved for Canute’s own especial rule. Here, and not in any of the Scandinavian lands across the sea, he resolved to make his home for the remainder of his life. All these great lords-lieutenant (as we should call them) were probably called earls, a title copied from the Danish jarl which was now gradually supplanting the old English ealdorman.
Two of these newly appointed earls did not long enjoy their dignities. In 1017 the old traitor Edric Streona was put to death by Canute: “most justly,” says the latest recension of the Chronicles. Florence of Worcester asserts that “Canute ordered him to be killed within the palace, because he feared that he might one day be circumvented by his plots, as had often been the fate of his former lords, Ethelred and Edmund”. He may have been, as he is depicted in the Chronicle, one of the vilest of men, or he may have been merely a great opportunist, the Talleyrand or the Sunderland of a shifting and difficult period; but even so, it is hard for a man of that stamp to convince his new employer that he has really changed front for the last time. Thurkill of East Anglia fell into disgrace in 1021 and was banished. After two years he was restored to favour, yet not brought back to England, but entrusted with the regency of Denmark. There is some evidence that he, like Edric, had married a daughter of Ethelred; and there is reason to suppose that not only the sons, but even the sons-in-law, of the late king were viewed with suspicion by Canute.[198]
In the first year of his reign, on July 31, 1017, the young Danish king, now about twenty-two years of age, took to wife Emma of Normandy, widow of Ethelred, and probably thirteen years his senior. As to the motives for this somewhat surprising marriage we have no sufficient information. It may have been due to a politic desire to secure the friendship of Normandy; it may have been Canute’s wish to present to his English subjects an appearance of continuity in the domestic life of the palace of Winchester; or there may have been--who knows?--a romantic passion engendered when the future bride and bridegroom met during the negotiations after the siege of London.[199] The new queen certainly seems to have faithfully complied with the spirit of the Scriptural precept about the bride’s forgetting of former ties, but need she also have forgotten the children of her former marriage? The son whom she bore to Canute, and who was named Harthacnut, was the object of her fondest affection. Canute evidently ousted the memory of the inglorious Ethelred, whose sons Alfred and Edward lingered on at their uncle’s court, apparently forgotten by their mother, and with no effort on her part to bring about their return from exile.
It was perhaps only a coincidence, though an unfortunate one, that the second marriage of Emma, like her first, was accompanied, if not by a massacre, by a considerable sacrifice of human life. In 1017 Canute ordered the execution not only of Edwy, of the seed royal, and of Edric the traitor, but of “Northman, son of Leofwine the ealdorman, and Ethelweard, son of Ethelmaer the Fat, and Brihtric, son of Elfheah in Devonshire”. The last name is for us meaningless: Ethelweard is interesting as denoting the grandson of Ethelweard the Chronicler, the “Patrician,” as he calls himself; the man of royal descent and of pompous diction. The name of Northman, son of Leofwine, deserves further notice as being our first introduction to a family which was to play an important part in the next half-century of English history. For five generations, since the very beginning of the eighth century, the family of Leofwine had borne a high place in the kingdom of Mercia. This Leofwine himself in 997 signed charters as dux, that is ealdorman, of the province of the Hwiccas. It was his son Northman who now, we know not on what pretext or under what cloud of suspicion, was put to death by Canute. The king’s wrath seems not to have extended to the other members of Northman’s family; for his father Leofwine at once received the earldom of Mercia, vacated by the death of Edric, and there are some indications that his son Leofric received a minor earldom, possibly that of Chester, which may have been previously held by the slain Northman.[200]
About the same time as the family of Leofwine, a rival family, one which was to engrave its name yet more deeply on the pages of English history, begins to make its appearance, not yet indeed in the Chronicles, but in those invaluable charters which show us by the names of the attesting witnesses who at any given period were the most prominent personages in the English court. Godwine, son of Wulfnoth, is a man over whose ancestry there hangs a cloud of mystery, the result partly of the poverty of Anglo-Saxon nomenclature, which makes it often difficult to identify the particular Wulfnoth or Edric or Ethelweard of whom we are in quest. There are stories about him of a romantic kind, according to which he, as a cowherd’s son, had the good fortune to meet a king or an earl who had lost his way after one of the battles between Canute and Edmund; gave him a night’s shelter, and was rewarded by patronage which enabled the future Earl Godwine to get his foot planted on the first rung of the official ladder. For these stories, which we find chiefly in chroniclers of a much later age, there appears to be no sufficient foundation. On the whole it seems probable that he was the offspring neither of a thegn nor of a theow, but sprang from some middle stratum of Anglo-Saxon society. Whatever his origin may have been, he was evidently a man of energy and capacity, and he rose rapidly in the favour of Canute, who was perhaps glad to obtain the services of new men, neither suspected of too strong an attachment to their former master, Ethelred, nor branded with the shame of his betrayal. Already, in 1018, he had the rank of earl, of what district we are not informed. He is said to have accompanied Canute in 1019 on a visit which he paid to Denmark; and to have distinguished himself in a war against the Wends, probably in Pomerania, and on his return to England he was raised to the high and novel position of Earl of the West Saxons. Up to this time the kings of Cerdic’s line, while ruling other parts of England by ealdormen or earls, had kept Wessex, the cradle of their dynasty, under their own personal control: and their example was followed by Canute himself at the beginning of his reign. He had now, however, by the death of his obscure and contemptible brother Harold (1016), become the wearer of the Danish crown; and possibly cherishing visions of other and more widely reaching Scandinavian conquests, he determined to keep his hands free from the mere routine of government even in royal Wessex, and therefore handed that province over to the administration of his young and loyal henchman, Godwine. About the same time he further secured the new earl’s attachment to the Danish dynasty by marrying him to Gytha, daughter of his cousin, Thurgils Sprakalegg, and sister of his own brother-in-law, Ulf the Jarl. Such a connexion brought the new man, Godwine, very close to Danish royalty. It is possible[201] that, during all the earlier part of his career, Earl Godwine seemed to the English people almost more of a Dane than a Saxon.
The country was now so tranquilly settling down under Canute’s rule that he felt himself able to dispense with the presence of “the army”. To him, as the chosen and anointed ruler of England, the marches and counter-marches, the harryings and the burnings of these fierce “sea-people” would be as little agreeable as to Alfred or Ethelred. One last and fearfully heavy gafol, no less than 72,000 pounds of silver, the equivalent probably of £1,500,000 sterling in our day, had to be raised and paid them, besides a further sum of 10,500 pounds, paid by the citizens of London alone. The army then, in 1018, returned to Denmark, only forty ships and their crews remaining with their peacefully triumphant king. Everything showed Canute’s desire to banish the memories of rapine and bloodshed which for so many years had been gathering round his father’s name and his own. He is said by one writer to have erected churches on all his battle-fields: he certainly did so (in 1020) on the bloodiest of them all, on Assandune. Earl Thurkill (not yet fallen into disgrace) with the archbishop of York, and many bishops, abbots and monks, joined in hallowing the minster there erected, a ceremony in which some have seen not only a commemoration of Canute’s “crowning mercy” but also an act of reparation for some share, direct or indirect, in the death of his Iron-sided rival. Another object of his devotion was East Anglian Edmund, who had been so barbarously done to death by Ingwar and Hubba. To this saint, it may be remembered, old Sweyn was said to have had a particular aversion, and from his ghostly apparition he was believed to have received his death-stroke. To appease the spirit of this royal martyr was now one of Canute’s most cherished desires. He reverenced his memory with a devotion as especial as his father’s hatred, and he, apparently, first gave to the great monastery of St. Edmundsbury that character of magnificence which distinguished it for so many centuries and gave it a place in the foremost rank of English sanctuaries.
In the seventh year of the new reign, 1023, Canute made the greatest of all reparations, that to the memory of the good archbishop whom drunken Danish seamen had brutally slain. The body of St. Alphege had been for some eleven years resting in St. Paul’s Church at London. It was more fitting that it should be laid in his own metropolitan church of Canterbury, and thither accordingly it was translated by the king’s orders. The delight with which Englishmen saw this tardy reparation to their dead countryman’s memory, rendered by a Danish king, shines forth in the enthusiastic pages of the Chronicle. The writer describes how “by full leave” of the king, archbishop Ethelnoth and Bryhtwine, bishop of Sherborne, took up the body from the tomb; how “the glorious king and the archbishop and suffragan bishops and earls and a great multitude, clerical and lay, carried on a ship St. Alphege’s holy body over the Thames to Southwark, and committed the holy martyr to the care of Ethelnoth and his companions, who then with a goodly band and with winsome joy bare him to Rochester. Then on the third day came the Lady Emma with her kingly bairn Harthacnut [aged five], and they all with great pomp and gladness and singing of psalms bare the holy archbishop into Canterbury.” The whole proceedings occupied seven days, and on June 15, 1023, the martyr’s body was finally deposited on the north side of the altar in Christ Church.
In like manner as Canute had honoured the memory of St. Edmund of East Anglia and St. Alphege of Canterbury, is he said to have dealt with the sepulchre of Edmund Ironside at Glastonbury. Towards the end of his reign he determined (says William of Malmesbury in his classical style) “to visit the Manes of him whom he was wont to call his brother Edmund. Having offered up his prayers, he placed upon the tomb a pallium inwoven with divers colours, representing figures of peacocks, which may still be seen there.” By his side stood Ethelnoth, archbishop of Canterbury, the seventh monk who had gone forth from Glastonbury to preside over the English Church. Before leaving the venerable minster in which rested the bones of so many of his predecessors, Canute gave a charter confirming to the church of the Virgin Mary in Glastonbury all its previous privileges. This charter was said to be given “by the advice of Ethelnoth, the bishops and my nobles, for love of the heavenly kingdom, for the pardon of my crimes and the forgiveness of the sins of my brother King Edmund”.
With the description of these expiatory rites our information as to the internal history of England under Canute comes to an end. This part of the Chronicle is extremely meagre, but probably its very sterility is partly an illustration of the proverb, “Happy is the nation that has no annals”. After all the agonies of the Danish invasions, now that a wise and masterful Dane sat upon the English throne, the land had rest for twenty years. In external affairs Canute played an important part, which we shall have to consider in relation to (1) Scotland, (2) the Empire and the Papacy, and (3) Norway.
(1) Events of great and lasting significance took place on the Scottish border in the reign of Canute, but to understand them we must go back into the reign of his predecessor, and take up for the last time the story of the wanderings of the incorruptible body of St. Cuthbert. For 112 years that precious relic had reposed at Chester-le-Street, but in 995 Bishop Aldhun, who had for five years presided over the diocese which still bore the name of deserted Lindisfarne, filled with fear of Danish invasions and “forewarned by a heavenly oracle,” carried the body farther inland, to the abbey of Ripon. After four months it was considered safe to re-transport it to its former home; but when the bearers reached a certain place on the banks of the Wear, called Wrdelau, the holy body became immovable as a mountain and refused to be carried an inch farther. It was revealed to a monk named Eadmer that the neighbouring hill of Dunhelm, splendidly and strongly placed in the midst of a fruitful land, and overlooking the windings of a beautiful river, was meant to be the saint’s next and final resting-place. Thither accordingly, with joy and gladness, the holy body was carried. The little wattled church which was erected over it was the predecessor of a noble cathedral, the grandest specimen of Norman architecture that our country can boast: and Bishop Aldhun, who lived for twenty-four years after the translation, was the first of the long line of bishops of Durham.
Almost at once we find the prelates of this see important factors in Northumbrian politics. Aldhun gave his daughter, Ecgfrida (born no doubt before he became an ecclesiastic), in marriage to “a youth of great energy and skilled in military affairs,” named Uhtred, who was practically taking the management of affairs out of the hands of his father, Earl Waltheof, as that aged man, self-immured in Bamburgh, was doing naught for the defence of his country. Thus, when in 1006 Malcolm II., King of Scots, taking advantage, doubtless, of the distracted state of England during the Danish invasions, collected the whole army of Scotland, entered Northumbria, laid it waste with fire and sword, and then besieged the new city of Durham, it was Uhtred who gathered troops together and went to the help of the bishop, his father-in-law. As old Waltheof still continued inactive he, on his own responsibility, summoned the fyrd of Northumberland, joined it to that of the citizens of York, and with the large army thus collected fell on the Scottish besiegers of Durham and won a complete victory. King Malcolm only escaped with difficulty, and a multitude of his followers were slain. The anonymous chronicler[202] who relates these events, tells us that “the daintier heads of the slain, with their hair inwoven according to the then prevalent fashion, were by Uhtred’s orders carried to Durham, fixed on stakes, and placed at intervals round the circuit of the walls, having first been washed by four women, to each of whom he gave a cow as the reward of her labours”. That little detail concerning the women’s payment for their ghastly toil looks like a bit of genuine tradition.
Such was the great English victory of 1006. Now for its fatal reversal twelve years later. The victorious Uhtred, who had become in the meantime Earl of Northumbria and son-in-law of Ethelred, was, as we have seen,[203] put to death by order of Canute, or rather perhaps assassinated at his instigation by a private enemy, just as the struggle between the Danish and English kings was coming to a crisis. The Danish earl, Eric, whom Canute had set over Deira, and the Englishman, Eadwulf Cutel, who had succeeded to some portion of his brother Uhtred’s power over Bernicia, were probably known by Malcolm to be inefficient men, not likely to combine for the common defence. In 1018, having made his preparations and formed an alliance with Eugenius the Bald, King of the Cymri of Strathclyde, Malcolm crossed the Firth of Forth and marched through Bernicia as far as the Tweed. The men of Northumbria were already disheartened by the appearance of a comet which for thirty nights had been hanging, ominous, in the midnight sky; and too truly were their forebodings justified. At Carham, a place on the southern bank of the Tweed, a little above Coldstream, almost within sight of the future battlefield of Flodden, the two armies met in fight. “Then were the whole people” (says Symeon of Durham) “from Tees to Tweed on one side, and there was an infinite multitude of Scots on the other.” Malcolm’s victory on this occasion was far more decisive than his defeat had been twelve years earlier. “Almost the whole English force with its leaders perished.” To Aldhun, the aged Bishop of Durham, the tidings of this defeat--all the more bitter because sustained at a place which for three centuries had formed part of the patrimony of St. Cuthbert--came as an actual death-stroke. “Me miserable!” said he, “that I should have lived so long, to behold this lamentable slaughter of St. Cuthbert’s men. Now, O Confessor! beloved of the Lord, if I have ever done aught pleasing in thy sight, repay me, I pray thee, by not suffering me any longer to survive thy people.” His prayer was granted. After a few days he died: the first but not the last Bishop of Durham to have his life made burdensome by the incursions of the Scots.
This battle of Carham, fought in the second year of Canute’s reign, deserves more attention than it has generally received from English historians. It was more important than Brunanburh, we might perhaps say only a little less important than Hastings, for by it the Border between England and Scotland, which had fluctuated through many centuries, was finally fixed at its present limitary streams and mountains. Edinburgh, it is true, seems to have been lost to the Scots some sixty years before the time that we have now reached,[204] but the rich and beautiful country of the Lothians was only now finally abandoned by the English, “surrendered” (says the anonymous chronicler) “by the very base and cowardly Eadwulf, who feared lest the Scots should revenge upon him the death of all the men of their nation who had fallen in battle against his brother. Thus was Lothian added to the kingdom of the Scots.” It was for us English a loss disastrous and irretrievable. Our only compensation is to be found in the fact that the large Anglian population thus transferred to the northern kingdom so leavened its speech, its institutions, its national character, that the Scotland of the Middle Ages was Anglian rather than Gaelic in its dominating tendencies.[205]
Towards the end of his reign--in 1031 according to the authority, here somewhat doubtful, of the Saxon Chronicle--“Canute went to Scotland, and the Scots’ king Malcolm submitted to him and became his man, but that held only a little while. Also two other kings, Maelbaethe and Jehmarc.” Of the last of these two kings we know nothing. Maelbaethe seems to be the same person as the Macbeth of Shakespeare’s tragedy.[206] He was not yet a king, but obtained the Scottish crown in the year 1040 by slaying the young king Duncan, grandson and successor of Malcolm II. It will be seen that the chronicler says nothing about fighting on Canute’s part. Malcolm II. seems to have bowed to the inevitable and quietly acknowledged the claim of Canute as English king to the homage of his Scottish neighbour, a claim which might mean anything or nothing according to the characters of him who demanded that homage and him who rendered it. It is interesting to observe that the author of the Heimskringla, in his account of the negotiations between Canute and St. Olaf, King of Norway, puts into the mouth of the latter these words: “And now it has come to this, that Cnut rules over Denmark and over England, and moreover has broken a mickle deal of Scotland under his sway”. The parleyings here described are supposed to have taken place five or six years before 1031, the actual date of Canute’s Scottish expedition, but from traditional history such as this is, minute accuracy as to dates is not to be looked for.
(2) Towards the end of the year 1026[207] Canute made his memorable pilgrimage to Rome, a journey which certainly was an important event in itself, and is almost unique in the history of English royalty. It is true that Ceadwalla, Ine and Ethelwulf had made the same pilgrimage, but after Canute the next crowned English king to visit Rome was His now reigning Majesty, Edward VII. We have, unfortunately, no details of Canute’s journey, but we know from foreign sources that he was present at a ceremony of high political importance, the crowning of the “Roman” Emperor Conrad II. and his Empress Gisela on Easter day, 1027.
The line of Saxon emperors, made memorable by the great deeds of the three Ottos, came to an end in 1024 on the death of the ascetic emperor, St. Henry II. The dukes, counts and bishops of the empire, assembled under the open sky on the meadows of Kamba, after some debate chose as his successor Conrad the Salic, a nobleman of Franconia, that beautiful land watered by the Main which now forms the northern half of the kingdom of Bavaria. The dynasty inaugurated by his election lasted for another century (1024–1125), and then gave place to the nearly allied Hohenstauffens of Swabia. This Franconian dynasty it was which, under three emperors bearing the name of Henry, fought with the Papacy the stubborn fight of the Investitures, which “went to Canossa” and warred with Hildebrand. Conrad, the new emperor, was a strong, masterful, knightly man. The pope who crowned him and before whom Canute kneeled in reverence, was John XIX., one of the series of cadets of the house of Tusculum whom the counts of that little hill-fortress intruded for half a century on the chair of St. Peter. But though this pope’s elevation was sudden and irregular--the same day saw him a layman, prefect of the city, and pope--he seems to have borne a respectable character, quite unlike that of his nephew and successor, the dissolute lad who took the name of Benedict IX. (1033–1046). No doubt the aristocratic count-pope bore himself with becoming dignity in the solemn ceremony of the emperor’s coronation, which was graced by the presence of two sovereign princes, our own Canute (the splendour of whose retinue and the liberality of whose almsgiving excited general admiration) and Rudolf III., descendant of Charlemagne and last king of Burgundy. There were, however, troubles and disorders in the somewhat anarchic capital of Christendom. The archbishops of Milan and Ravenna had a dispute about precedence, which ended in a street-brawl between their followers and in the flight of him of Ravenna. Worse still, the German soldiers of the emperor had a fight with the people of Rome, in which many lives were lost, and by which Conrad’s wrath was so fiercely kindled that it could only be appeased by the appearance of the Roman citizens barefooted and disarmed before the German Augustus, abjectly entreating his forgiveness. All this Canute must have witnessed, but nothing seems to have weakened the impression of awe and reverence for the apostolic city, made by his residence in Rome.
In a letter to his people, written from Rome and preserved for us by two of the twelfth century historians, William and Florence, Canute sends greeting to the two archbishops, the bishops and nobles, and all the English people, gentle and simple. He informs them that his long-cherished desire to visit Rome, there to pray for the forgiveness of his sins and the welfare of his people, has at length been gratified. He has visited the sepulchres of Peter and Paul and every other sanctuary within or without the city. At the great Easter festival he has met not only Pope John and the Emperor Conrad, but all “the princes of the nations,” from Mount Garganus (in Apulia) to the Tyrrhene Sea, and has received gifts from all, especially from the emperor; vessels of silver and gold, mantles and robes exceeding precious. Further, from the emperor and from King Rudolf, he has obtained an assurance that none of his subjects, whether English or Dane, shall any longer be harassed with the heavy payments at the mountain passes or the exorbitant customs-duties with which they have been hitherto afflicted. Nor shall future archbishops, visiting Rome in quest of the pallium, pay the immense sums which have heretofore been demanded of them. Finally, the king assures his loving subjects of his desire to administer equal justice to all. Let no shire-reeve or bailiff think to curry favour with him by the oppression of his subjects. “I have no need that money be accumulated for me by unjust exactions.” “But let all the debts which according to ancient custom are due from you [to the Church] be regularly paid; the penny for every carucate ploughed; the tithe of the increase of your flocks and your herds; the penny for St. Peter at Rome; the tithe of corn in the middle of August, and the Church-scot at the feast of St. Martin. If all these dues are not regularly paid, I shall on my return to England execute unpitying justice on the defaulter.”
The new emperor was evidently struck by the statesmanlike character of the Anglo-Danish king, and thought it good policy to draw closer the relations between them. Canute’s daughter, Gunhild, was betrothed to Conrad’s eldest son, and in 1036, when she had attained a suitable age, the marriage was consummated. She died, however, after two years of wedlock, leaving an infant daughter who afterwards became Abbess of Quedlinburg. A year after her death her husband ascended the imperial throne under the title of Henry III. Conrad the Salic also ceded to Canute such rights--perhaps even then vague and ill-defined--as the empire claimed to possess over the frontier province of Sleswick, thus making the river Eider the acknowledged boundary between Germany and Denmark. Hence, and from the later union between the provinces of Sleswick and Holstein, sprang in the course of ages that bitter controversy which was cruelly solved in our own day (1864) by the cannonade of Düppel.
(3) The pilgrimage to Rome came midway between two expeditions to Norway, one, a failure, in 1025–1026, the other, in 1028, triumphantly successful.
The most renowned King of Norway in Canute’s time, and the great champion of her newly recovered independence, was that strangely compounded man who was known by his contemporaries as Olaf the Thick, but whom after ages have reverenced as Saint Olaf (1015–1031). “In stature scarce of the middle height, but very thick-set and strong of limb: with light-red hair, broad-faced, bright and ruddy of countenance, fair-eyed and swift-eyed, so that it was terrible to look him in the face when he was angry,” this energetic descendant of Harold Fair-hair, after many reverses, succeeded in establishing himself on the throne of Norway, and at once set to work to destroy the lingering remains of heathenism in the north of his kingdom, smashing idols, making diligent inquiry into the secret “blood-offerings” of horses and oxen, slaying, banishing, fining all who still persisted in idolatrous practices. To strengthen himself against the inevitable revival of the Danish claim of sovereignty, Olaf wooed the elder, and married the younger daughter of his namesake the King of Sweden, and formed a fairly stable alliance with that neighbour state. In the early years of his reign, according to the story of the Heimskringla (in which much fiction is, doubtless, blended with fact), Canute the Rich sent an embassy to Olaf, calling upon him peacefully to submit to his claims, to become his man, and thus save him the necessity of coming with war-shield to assert his right. To this demand Olaf sent an indignant negative. “Gorm the Old thought himself a mighty king, ruling over Denmark alone. Why cannot his descendant be satisfied with Denmark, England and a mickle deal of Scotland? Is he minded to rule alone over all the Northlands, or does he mean, he alone, to eat all the kale in England?”
For the time Canute had to be satisfied with this bold reply; but in 1025 he set forth with a great naval armament from England. A great battle followed, at the mouth of the Holy River, at the extreme south of what is now Sweden.[208] Here, by a clever manœuvre of the allied Kings of Norway and Sweden, Canute’s great ship, The Dragon, was caught in mid-stream and well-nigh sunk by an avalanche of suddenly unloosed floating timbers. He was delivered by the timely appearance of Jarl Ulf with his squadron of ships, but the battle was lost. “There fell many men,” says the Chronicle, “on the side of King Canute, both Danes and Englishmen. And the Danes held the place of slaughter.”
Soon after this unsuccessful expedition came the event which has left perhaps the deepest of all the stains on the memory of Canute, the murder of his brother-in-law and deliverer, Jarl Ulf, “the mightiest man in Denmark after the king”. At a noble banquet which Ulf had prepared for his kinsman, the king sat scowling gloomily. To lighten his mood Ulf suggested a game of chess, in the course of which one of the king’s knights was placed in jeopardy. “Take back your move,” said Canute, “and play something else.” Indignant at this style of playing, Ulf knocked over the chess-board and rose to leave the room. “Ha!” said the king, “runnest thou away now, Ulf the Craven?” He turned round in the doorway and said: “Craven thou didst not call me when I came to thy help at the Holy River, when the Swedes were barking round thee like hounds”. Night fell: both slept: but next morning Canute said to his page: “Go to Jarl Ulf and slay him”. The page went, but returned with bloodless sword, saying that the Jarl had taken refuge in the church of St. Lucius. Another man, less scrupulous, slew him in the church-choir and came back to boast of the deed. After this desecration the monks would fain have closed their church, but Canute insisted on their singing the Hours of divine service there, as if nothing had happened. As usual, his penitence took the form of liberality. So great were the estates with which he endowed the church, that far and wide over the country-side spread the fame of St. Lucius.
When Canute recommenced operations in 1028 after his pilgrimage to Rome, not war but internal revolution gave him the victory. He seems to have had a superiority in naval forces over both the allied kings. The Swedes, being home-sick, scattered back to their own dwellings. Olaf fled to Russia, and a Thing, summoned by Canute at Trondhjem, proclaimed him king over all the land of Norway. It is evident that Olaf’s forceful, sometimes even tyrannical, proceedings had alienated many of his subjects; but moreover Canute the Rich had, we are told, for years been lavishing gifts on the Norwegian nobles. “For it was indeed the truth to say of King Cnut that whenever he met with a man who seemed likely to do him useful service, such a man received from him handfuls of gold, and therefore was he greatly beloved. His bounty was greatest to foreigners, and especially to those who came from furthest off.” This description, given us in the Heimskringla, of Canute’s practisings with the subjects of St. Olaf, suggests the question whether similar arguments had not been used with Edric Streona, and whether the decision of the Saxon Witenagemot in Canute’s favour may not have been bought in the same manner as that of the Norwegian Thing.
We must not further follow in detail the fortunes of the dethroned King of Norway. Two years after Olaf’s expulsion from the kingdom he returned (1030), but fell in battle with his own hostile countrymen. When the inevitable reaction in favour of his memory set in, his body was carried to Trondhjem and buried under the high altar of the cathedral church. Miracles soon began to be wrought by his relics: there was a tide of pity and remorse for their fallen hero in the hearts of his people, who found themselves harshly dealt with by their Danish rulers. Before long Norway recovered her independence, and then Olaf was universally recognised as not only patriot but saint. The Church gave her sanction to the popular verdict, and St. Olaf, or St. Olave, as he was generally called in England, was accepted as one of the legitimate saints in her calendar, July 29 being set apart for his honour. Though not to be compared for holiness of character with our own St. Oswald, or even with Edwin of Deira, he soon became an exceedingly popular saint, especially with his old Danish antagonists. More than a dozen churches were dedicated in his name in England, chiefly in the district where Danes predominated. The most celebrated of these was St. Olave’s in Southwark, which gave its name, corrupted and transformed, to the “Tooley Street” of inglorious memory.
Of the closing years of the reign of Canute little is recorded. There are stories, uncertain and mutually contradictory, of hostilities between England and Normandy, arising out of Duke Robert’s championship of the claims of the English Ethelings, sons of his aunt Emma. Whatever truth there may be in these narratives, they must be referred to the latter part of Canute’s reign, as Duke Robert did not come into possession of the duchy till 1028. We may, if we please, assign to the same period the well-known story of his vain command to the sea to retire, a story which is told us for the first time by Henry of Huntingdon, about 120 years after the death of Canute. As Henry tells it, the courtiers, the blasphemous flatterers of the monarch, disappear from the scene, and it almost seems as if Canute himself, in one of those attacks of megalomania to which successful monarchs are liable, really thought that he could command Nature as if she were one of his own thegns. Learning better doctrine from the voice of the sea, he thenceforth abjured the vain ensigns of royalty and hung his crown on the cross of the Redeemer. To the same peaceful years we may assign the equally well-known incident of Canute being rowed in his barge over the fens in the cold days of early February, and hearing the song of the monks of Ely as they celebrated the Purification of the Virgin Mary:--
Cheerly sang the monks of Ely As Cnut the king was passing by. “Row to the shore, knights!” said the king, “And let us hear these churchmen sing,”
--an interesting ditty for us, as showing that the word “knights” still kept that meaning of “servants” or “retainers” which it had when the New Testament was translated into Anglo-Saxon. In the Gospels the disciples of Christ are always called His “leorning-cnichtas”.
King Canute died at Shaftesbury on November 12, 1035, and was buried at Winchester in the Old Minster where rested so many of the descendants of Cerdic. Owing to his early appearance on the scene and the various parts which he had played, we unconsciously attribute to him a greater age than he actually attained. He was probably little, if at all, over forty years of age when he died. The transformation of character which he underwent, from the hard, unscrupulous robber chieftain to the wise, just and statesmanlike king, is one of the most marvellous things in history. Perhaps the nearest approach to it is to be found in the change wrought in the character of Octavian. Both Canute and Augustus were among the rare examples of men improved by success.
He left four children, Sweyn and Harold Harefoot by a wife or concubine named Elgiva of Northampton; Harthacnut and Gunhild by Emma of Normandy. The gossip of the day alleged that Sweyn and Harold were not really Elgiva’s children, but the sons of ignoble parents foisted by her on her credulous husband. This tale, however, though echoed by the Chronicle, may have been an invention of the partisans of their rivals. What is certain is that both Elgiva and Emma survived Canute. Either, therefore, the former was no legally married wife, or else she was divorced to make room for the Norman “Lady”. But the marriages of these Scandinavian princes, Norse and Norman, were regular only in their irregularity.
Whatever may have been the testamentary intentions of the dying Canute, the practical result of his death was to divide his great empire in the following manner: Norway to Sweyn (who died a few months after his father), Denmark to Harthacnut, and England to HAROLD HAREFOOT. Of the latter, the Peterborough text of the Chronicle says: “Some men said that Harold was son of King Canute and Elgiva, daughter of Ealdorman Elfhelm; but this seemed very incredible to many men”. Of the two surviving sons of Canute who now for a few years fill the chief place in English history, it must be said that they represent only the first and worst phase of their father’s character, displaying none of the nobler, statesmanlike qualities of his later years. We sometimes see in modern life a man who has struggled upwards from the lowest ranks of society, acquiring a refinement and a culture which he fails to transmit to a wealthy but coarse-fibred son. So was it with the sons of Canute, two dissolute young barbarians who degraded by their vices the ancient throne which they were permitted to occupy.
The events which immediately followed the death of Canute, obscure in themselves, are variously stated by our different authorities; but it seems clear that the old division between Mercia and Wessex again made itself manifest and was connected with another division, that between the two great houses of Godwine and of Leofwine. An assembly of the witan was held at Oxford, at which “Earl Leofric (son of Leofwine) and nearly all the thegns north of the Thames and the sailors in London, chose Harold as king over all England,” leaving to Harthacnut the rule over Denmark, in which country he was then living and reigning. There was apparently no talk of a reversion to the old line, to the sons of Ethelred or Edmund. The dynasty of Canute represented peace with the Danes, a respite from the terrible ravages of the previous generation; and it was probably valued and clung to for this reason, even as, 500 years later, English parliaments clung to the house of Tudor, notwithstanding all the flaws in their title, as a security against the revival of the Wars of the Roses.
This conclusion, however, was not unanimous. The witan at Oxford had to reckon with the opposition of Wessex, under its powerful earl Godwine, with that of “the Lady” Emma, surrounded by a strong body of her dead husband’s house-carls or body guards (an organisation of which the Chronicle now first makes mention); and with such force as the lad Harthacnut from distant Denmark might be able to bring to bear for the vindication of his claims. A compromise was arranged, which amounted in substance, though perhaps not in form, to a division of the kingdom. “It was decided that Emma, Harthacnut’s mother, should sit at Winchester with the house-carls of the king, her son, and hold all Wessex under his authority, and Earl Godwine was her most devoted servant.”
This arrangement had in it no element of permanence and might at any moment be upset by the arrival of Harthacnut. He was, however, but a lad of eighteen, much involved apparently in the cares of his Danish kingdom. To Harold Harefoot, the Norman exiles, sons of Ethelred and Emma, full-grown men, with a hope of possible support from their cousin, the great Duke of Normandy, might well seem the most dangerous competitors for his crown. In order to entice these rivals into his power, Harold is said to have caused a letter to be forged, purporting to come from “Queen Emma, a queen only in name,” and complaining of the daily growing strength of the usurper, “who is incessantly touring about among the cities and villages, and by threats and prayers making for himself friends among the nobles”. “But they would much rather,” said the letter, “that one of you reigned over them, than he to whom they yield enforced obedience. Wherefore I pray that one of you will come to me swiftly and secretly to receive wholesome counsel from me, and to learn in what way the thing upon which I have set my heart can be accomplished.”[209] On the receipt of this message Alfred, the younger of the two brothers, betook himself to the friendly coast of Flanders and thence to England, accompanied by a small band of followers, recruited from among the inhabitants of Boulogne, instead of the large body of troops which Baldwin of Flanders offered him. Finding one part of the coast occupied by a hostile force, he sailed to another, probably nearer to Winchester; and set forth to meet his mother, thinking that he had now escaped from all danger. He had not reckoned, however, with the astute Earl Godwine, who was now no longer the zealous adherent of the queen-dowager, but was prepared to make his peace with Harold by the sacrifice of her son.[210] He met the young Etheling, swore to become his “man,” guided him to Guildford, billeted his followers about in various inns, caused them to be supplied with meat and drink--especially the latter--in great abundance, and so left them, promising to return on the morrow.
That night, while they were all sleeping the deep sleep of well-plied banqueters, the men of Harold came upon them, stealthily removed their arms, and soon had them all fast in handcuffs and fetters. The cruel vengeance which followed, taken upon disarmed and helpless prisoners, excited the deep indignation of Englishmen, and found vent in a ballad, some lines of which have made their way into that manuscript of the Chronicle which is attributed to Abingdon:--
Some they blinded; some they maimed; Some they scalped, some bound with chain; Some were sold to grievous thraldom; Many were with tortures slain, Never was a bloodier deed done Since to England came the Dane.
There is a persistently repeated story that a cruel parody of the Roman decimation was inflicted on these unfortunates. By that old custom lots were cast, and every tenth man so selected was handed over to the executioner. Now nine out of ten were slain and only the tenth survived, nor was even he certain of life; for after the massacre it seemed to the tyrant’s agents that too many still survived and the sword devoured anew. As for the unhappy Etheling himself, he was taken round by sea to the Isle of Ely and there imprisoned. An order having been received for his blinding, he was held down by four men while the cruel deed was done. He seems to have survived for some weeks or months, and moved about, a saddening figure, among the once cheery monks of Ely; but ere long he died, either from the shock of the operation, or, as one author hints, from insufficiency of food. It seems clear that these cruelties were not perpetrated by Godwine himself, who judiciously disappeared as soon as he had left the slenderly guarded prince at his supper table at Guildford; but neither the judgment of his contemporaries nor that of posterity, with one eminent exception,[211] has acquitted the great Earl of Wessex of complicity in the crime.
The abortive expedition of Alfred, and the defection of Earl Godwine, left the dowager-queen in a precarious position. Moreover, the hearts of Englishmen had begun to turn away from Harthacnut who, as they thought, tarried too long in Denmark, and towards Harold, who was, after all, the son of a Saxon mother (whether gentle or base born), and who, notwithstanding the cruelty and craft which he had shown in the affair of the Etheling Alfred, had qualities of physical strength and fleetness which gained for him a sort of rude popularity with his subjects. Thus it came to pass that in 1037 “Queen Emma was driven out of the country,” as the chronicler laments, “without any tenderness of heart, against the raging winter”. She went to the court of the hospitable Baldwin, her nephew by marriage, who assigned to her a dwelling in the city of Bruges and a princely maintenance. Of this, however, she took only a small part, sufficient for her absolute needs, and gratefully refused the rest, saying that she could do without it. So says the Flemish priest, who doubtlessly met her about this time, and who, in gratitude for favours received, composed the Encomium Emmæ, on which, in the absence of better sources, we have to rely for many details of her history.
The election of Harold as king of the whole of England, which now took place, did not pass without some opposition, especially from the archbishop of Canterbury, Ethelnoth. When ordered to perform the ceremony of consecration, he flatly refused, declaring that at Canute’s command he had vowed to recognise only Emma’s son as his lawful successor. He would not presume to keep, in defiance of the king, the crown and sceptre, which had been committed to his charge, but, laying them on the altar he left them to Harold to deal with as he would, only declaring that none of his suffragan bishops should presume, on pain of excommunication, to crown this king or to grant him episcopal benediction. How the dispute ended Emma’s partisan does not inform us. Probably Harold, like Napoleon, crowned himself; but we are told that the refusal of the episcopal benediction so rankled in the young king’s breast that he relapsed into something like paganism. When others in Christian fashion were silently gliding into church for Divine worship, he (the swift-footed hunter) would be surrounding the woods with his dogs and cheering them on to the chase, or sometimes indulging in less innocent occupations. Clearly, here was a monarch who had little love for the Church, and whose character may therefore have been painted a little too darkly by ecclesiastical chroniclers.
After making an ineffectual appeal for help to Edward, her surviving son by Ethelred, Emma at last succeeded in inducing Harthacnut to leave his beloved Denmark and attempt the invasion of England. He arrived at Bruges, probably towards the end of 1039, with sixty-two ships, and having no doubt made other large preparations for a hostile expedition, but none of these were needed. Harold Harefoot died on March 17, 1040, and was buried at Westminster. On his death a deputation was sent to Bruges to invite HARTHACNUT to assume the crown, “and men deemed that they did well in doing so”. Sore, says the encomiast, was the lamentation of the widows and orphans of Bruges, who deemed that by the departure of the Lady Emma they were losing their best friend; but she of course accompanied her son.
Too soon the men of both nations found that they had not done so well as they supposed, in inviting the lad from Denmark to reign over them. The crews of his ships were clamouring for money, and to appease them the new king laid upon his subjects a heavier Danegeld than had been exacted all through the reigns of Canute and Harold. Then the Danegeld had been for sixteen ships, at the rate of eight marks for each rower; now Harthacnut claimed the same rate of pay for his whole fleet of sixty-two ships. It was indeed “a stern geld,” and the attempt to levy it caused violent popular commotions. A terrible hurricane had blown the previous year, probably injuring the harvest, and the high price of corn resulting therefrom caused the gafol to be felt the more bitterly. “Thus all men that had before yearned after Harthacnut became unfriendly to him. He devised no kingly deed during all his reign, and he caused the dead body of Harold to be taken up and shot into the marsh.” Worse than this, he took a cruel revenge on the whole of Worcestershire for the murder of two of his house-carls whom he had sent to exact the “stern geld” from the citizens of Worcester. An insurrection had broken out; the house-carls had taken refuge in a turret of the minster, but had been discovered, dragged forth and slain. Hereupon, the enraged king ordered Godwine, Leofric and all the great earls, to assemble their forces; and sent them, six months after the murder, with orders to harry both city and shire. The inhabitants, forewarned, took refuge on an island in the Severn, and made so vigorous a defence that their lives were of necessity spared; but the minster was burnt, the country was laid waste and the house-carls of the king, with the followers of the earls, returned laden with booty to their homes.
Now at last, during the short reign of Harthacnut, a brighter day dawned for the banished son of Ethelred. Edward was invited over from Normandy and was “sworn in as king”; that is, probably, associated in some way with Harthacnut as ruler of the land, and recognised as his destined successor in the event of his early death, which seems to have been considered not improbable. The only other event recorded of the reign of Harthacnut, “the king who devised nothing kingly,” is his complicity in the murder of Eadwulf,[212] earl of Bernicia, who had possibly made himself conspicuous as one of Harold’s partisans. He seems to have been invited to court that he might be formally reconciled to the new king, but on his way he was murdered by his nephew, Siward the Strong, who was already earl of Deira, and now, receiving as the reward of his crime his victim’s earldom of Bernicia, ruled once again as the kings of Northumbria had ruled aforetime, over the whole wide region from Humber to Tweed.
Harthacnut’s end was worthy of his life. On a day of June, 1042, a great feast was given by a Danish nobleman, Osgod Clapa, in honour of the marriage of his daughter. To this banquet the king was, of course, invited, and “as he stood at his drink he suddenly fell to the ground and was seized with dreadful convulsions. Those who were near took him up, but he never after spake a word. He died on the 8th of June, and all the people accepted Edward as their king, as was his right.” Harthacnut died in the twenty-fifth year of his age, having not quite completed the second year of his reign. Like the old Saxon kings, and like Canute his father, he was buried in the Old Minster at Winchester.
XXIV. LEGISLATION OF THE LATER KINGS
In the period which followed the Norman Conquest “the laws of good King Edward” was a phrase often on the lips of Englishmen; yet it was but a phrase, for Edward the Confessor, on the threshold of whose reign we are now standing, added, as far as can be ascertained, no laws to the Anglo-Saxon collection. Danish Canute, on the other hand, holds an honourable place in our legal history; for his Dooms, which fill one hundred pages in Liebermann’s volume, show somewhat of the instinct of a codifier as well as a genuine desire to deal equal justice to the Danish and the English inhabitants of the land.
From the death of Alfred--the last king whose laws have been specially dealt with--till the death of Canute, an interval elapsed of more than 130 years or about four generations, and in almost every reign some fresh Dooms received the sanction of the reigning king and his witan. It will be well for us briefly to survey the course of this legislation and to see what light it throws on the social condition of the country, and what changes it reveals in political institutions. When we consider the laws of this period from a social and economic point of view, one fact stands out at once in strong relief. The immense majority of these laws relate to one crime, theft, and to one form of that crime, the theft of cattle. We have before us a population of herdsmen and sheep-masters whose chief concern it is to guard their live stock from the sly, roving cattle-lifter, and to recover them when thus purloined. Herein these tenth-century laws bear a striking resemblance to the border laws,[213] the code according to which, in the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries, rough justice was administered between cattle owners and cattle raiders on both sides of the Scottish border.[214] Sometimes, too, the grievances which we hear of in these laws and the rough redress of those grievances which they contemplate, seem to carry us into the same world of which we have read in stories of the Wild West of America only one generation ago. It seems probable that the immense importance thus assigned to the possession and the theft of cattle is partly due to the fact that, owing to the settlement of Danes on the north-east of the Watling Street, a large part of England had now become like Northumberland and Roxburgh, a “border country,” and was subject to all the insecurity of that position.
In order to give greater assistance to the owner of cattle, Edward the Elder ordained that every landowner should have men in readiness on his land to guide those who were seeking to recover their lost property; and these men were straitly warned not for any bribe to divert the owner from his quest, nor give shelter to any convicted thief. Athelstan directed that if any one claimed a beast as his rightful property, he should get one out of five persons nominated by the judge to swear “that it is by folk-right his”; and the defendant must get two out of ten persons similarly nominated, to swear the contrary. But, perhaps, the most interesting of all this class of ordinances is that contained in the Judicia Civitatis Lundoniæ, framed by the chief officers of Church and State, the bishops and reeves (or representatives of the king), not without the consent of all the citizens. We have in these ordinances, under the sanction of Anglo-Saxon royalty, some wonderfully modern devices for the interposition of the community, to lessen the loss inflicted by robbery on the individual.
The document begins: “This is the decision which the bishops and the reeves who belong to London, have made and secured with pledges in our peace-guild, whether of nobles or of commonalty” (eorlisce or ceorlisce), “to supplement the enactments made at various meetings of the witan”. The first chapter ordains that the punishment of death shall be inexorably inflicted on any thief over twelve years of age stealing goods to the value of more than twelve pennies, and that any one endeavouring by force of arms to rescue a thief shall pay a fine of 120 shillings to the king.
The second chapter introduces us to a curious arrangement between the citizens, in the nature partly of a Trade Protection Society and partly of a Society for Mutual Insurance against Theft. “Each one of us shall pay four pennies to a common stock within twelve months, in order to indemnify the owner for any animal which may have been stolen after that time, and we will all join in the quest after the stolen animal. Every one who has a beast worth thirty pennies shall pay his shilling, except poor widows who have no patron or land.” It may be said, Why is the prescribed payment four pennies at the beginning of the law and a shilling at the end? The answer no doubt is that London still adhered to the currency of Mercia, in which only fourpence went to the shilling. The contributors were to be arranged in ten groups of ten each, the oldest of whom was to serve notices and keep the accounts; and these ten seniors with “an eleventh man” whom they were to choose, were to form a sort of governing board, keeping the money and deciding as to contributions into, and payments out of, the common fund. Every man who heard the summons must join in the quest after the stolen animal so long as the trace remained. The quest was to be continued either on the northern or southern march till every member of the guild who had a horse was riding it. He who had no horse of his own must go and work for a lord who should ride in the quest instead of him. Then comes the question at what rate were the stolen beasts to be valued. The ordinary tariff of compensation is as follows:--
For a horse 10 shillings. „ an ox 30 pennies or 7½ „ „ a sheep 5 „ or 1¼ „ „ a stolen slave (theow), half a pound = 30 shillings.
Apparently if the thief was captured and compelled by a court of law to refund a higher price than any of the above, if, for instance, he was made to pay for a valuable ox ten shillings instead of seven shillings and a half, the surplus was divided among the members of the guild, the owner receiving only the sum to which he was entitled under the tariff.
The ordinance continues: “Whosoever takes up that which is the common cause of all of us shall be our friend. We will all be one, in friendship and in enmity. The first man to strike down a thief shall receive twelve pennies from the common purse for having made so good a beginning. The owner of a stolen animal is not to relax his diligence” (because of the insurance), “but must pursue it to the end, and he shall be reimbursed for the expenses of his journey out of the common fund.... We will meet once a month if we have leisure ... with filling of casks and everything else that is suitable, and we must then see which of our decisions have been complied with, and the twelve men shall have their food together, and eat as much as seems good to themselves and dispose of the food that is left [to the poor] according to the will of God.”
The state of society here presented to us is one of peculiar interest. We seem to see these cattle-owning citizens of London, whose flocks and herds were grazing outside the walls of the city in Smithfield or Moorfields. They follow the track of their stolen beasts across the wilds of Middlesex or Surrey (“the Northern and the Southern March”). When the cattle are caught, fierce vengeance is taken on the depredator. If the pursuit fails, the luckless owner can, after all, console himself with the tariff price which he receives from the guild treasury. And then once a month they meet to settle the affairs of their guild, “with filling of casks and everything else that is suitable,” and so a vista is opened, at the end of which after the lapse of centuries, we behold the stately banquets of the Guild-hall of London.
It is possible that to this need of grappling with agrarian crime we owe the institution of the Hundred which was a prominent feature in the organisation of medieval England, after as well as before the Conquest, and exists, though now little more than a survival, even in our own day. It is at least worthy of notice that the first clear mention of the Hundred-court, which is in the reign of Edgar, occurs in close connexion with the theft of cattle, and we might almost be justified in saying that this is the main business which in those beginnings of its existence was thought likely to come before it.
There has been much discussion as to the kind of unit, five-score of which made up the Anglo-Saxon Hundred, but on the whole the prevailing opinion seems to be that it was composed, in theory at least if not invariably in practice, of a hundred hides or households.[215] The charter, if we may so call it, of the Hundred-court is furnished us by a document which is believed to date from the reign of Edgar and which begins: “This is the arrangement, how men shall hold the Hundred. First, that they always gather themselves together once in four weeks: and that each man shall do right to the rest. Second, that they set forth to ride after thieves. If occasion arise, let a man [whose beast has been stolen] give notice to the Hundreds-man, and he then to the Tithing-men, and let them all fare forth as God shall point the way, that they may arrive there [at the place where the beast is hidden]. Let them do justice on the thief as was before ordained by [King] Edmund, and hand over the price to him who owns the animal and divide the rest [of the fine] half to the Hundred and half to the lord.”
We observe that we have here a regular local court, armed with very summary powers and able to inflict fines, probably heavy fines, after it has restored the value of the stolen property to the rightful owner. Of these fines, however, the Hundred-court may retain for itself only half, the other half going to “the lord”. The assumption that there will be in every case a lord, who will thus share in the profits of the criminal jurisdiction exercised by his neighbours of the Hundred, seems to mark a step towards the manorial jurisdiction of later centuries and strikes a somewhat different note from that sounded in the laws of Ine. It would seem that there was a tendency among powerful and lawless men to treat the Hundred-court with contempt and ignore its jurisdiction. “If any one shall put difficulties in the way and refuse to obey the decision of the Hundred and this is afterwards proved against him, he shall pay 30 pennies to the Hundred: and for a second offence 60 pennies, half to the Hundred and half to the lord. If he do it the third time he shall pay half a pound (120 pennies), and for the fourth offence he shall forfeit all that he has and be outlawed, unless the king allow him to remain in the land.” By the time that Canute took the matter in hand[216] sharper remedies had been found to be necessary. He who refused the judgment of the Hundred was fined--apparently for the first offence--30 shillings, not pennies. For a similar contempt of the Earl’s court he had to pay a fine of 60 shillings, and twice that amount for despising the judgment of the king.
Before passing from the subject of the Hundred, it should be observed that the corresponding institution in most of the Danish counties of England was called the wapentake, a name which is said to be derived from that clashing together of their weapons whereby the Scandinavians, like their Teutonic predecessors in the days of Tacitus, were wont to signify their assent to the propositions laid before them by the masters of their assemblies. The counties in which the Wapentake generally took the place of the Hundred were York, Lincoln, Nottingham, Derby, Leicester and Rutland.[217]
“And let men seek the Hundred-gemôt in such manner as was arranged aforetime, and three times in the year let them hold the Burh-gemôt and twice the Shire-gemôt, and there let the bishop of the shire and the ealdorman be present, and there let both of them expound God’s law and the world’s law.” By these words of King Edgar[218] we are brought into contact not only with the Hundred, but also with two other organisations still very prominent in the political life of England, the Borough and the Shire.
The Burh or Burg, in the sense of a fortified town, first comes into notice about the beginning of the tenth century and is evidently the offspring of the Danish invasions. Not that the word was not before that time in familiar use among the Anglo-Saxons,[219] but that it seems rather to have denoted the walled enclosure round the dwelling of a great landowner, than the close-packed streets of a medieval borough. The breaking of such a burh (burh-bryce), the forcible entry into the precincts of a dwelling, was punished by the laws of Ine and Alfred with fines carefully graduated according to the rank of the owner. “A king’s burh-bryce is 120 shillings; an archbishop’s, 90; another bishop’s or an ealdorman’s, 60; a twelf-hynd man’s, 30; a six-hynd man’s, 15 shillings. The breaking down of a ceorl’s hedge (edor-bryce) is 5 shillings.”[220] The meaning of the law evidently is, that “the man whose wer is 600 shillings will probably have some stockade, some rude rampart round his house; he will have a burh, whereas the ceorl whose wer is 200 shillings will not have a burh, but will only have a hedge round his house”.[221]
It was into a country full of unwalled tuns or villages, and scattered country houses calling themselves burhs, but poorly protected by moat and stockade, that the Danes came pouring in the reigns of Egbert, Ethelwulf and Alfred. Winchester itself, as we have seen, was “broken down” by them. York and London were taken, and apparently in this, the first stage of their invasion, no town which they seriously attacked was able to resist their onslaught. But then the invaders gave their victims a lesson in self-defence. As soon as they had taken up a position in town or country they fortified themselves by erecting a strong “work” (the word is of constant occurrence in these pages of the Chronicle), and the hardest part of Alfred’s task was often the capturing of these hastily reared Danish fortifications. In the years of peace between the invasions of Guthrum and of Hasting, Alfred, imitating his opponents, reared many burhs which he filled with armed men. The establishment of these forts which stood up as islands out of the hostile sea, had evidently much to do with the deliverance of the land from the flood of Danish invasion in the terrible years between 892 and 896. The entry of the Chronicle for the year 894 tells us how a portion of the invading army was attacked “by bands of Englishmen, almost every day and night, both from the fyrd and also from the burhs; for the king had divided his fyrd into two parts so that they were always half at home and half out, except the men whose duty it was to hold the burhs”. And a little farther on we hear of the valorous deeds of the burh-ware of Chester and of London, which had an important influence on the successful issue of the war.
We have seen, in a previous chapter, how the stalwart brother and sister, Edward and Ethelfled, reconquered central England for the English, and how they secured their conquests by the great line of forts which they planted everywhere along and sometimes far within the frontier which had divided the two nations. Chester, Shrewsbury, Bridgnorth, Stafford, Warwick, Bedford, Huntingdon, Manchester and many more, were burhs which owed their foundation or renewal to the stout-hearted Lady of the Mercians and her brother. It must not be forgotten, however, that the bulk of the population around, and even in some of these burhs, must have remained Danish. Leicester, Stamford and Nottingham are included in the list of forts founded by Edward and his sister, yet they with Lincoln and Derby made up that Danish confederation of the Five Boroughs with which Edmund had to fight in 942 and which went over so readily to Sweyn in 1013.
In the main, however, we may no doubt consider these new, strongly fortified burhs or, as we may now venture to call them, “boroughs” as the homes of loyal Englishmen, keen for resistance to an invading foe, but also keen for commercial enterprise. Very early the kings perceived the importance of insisting on internal peace and orderly life within the limits of the borough. Thus Edmund claims for it the same right of inviolate sanctuary as for the church itself. “If any man seek refuge in a church or in my burh and any one thereafter assault him or treat him ill, he who does this shall be liable to the same punishment as is aforesaid.” Where security was thus provided for, against external enemies by thick walls and deep ditches, against internal strife and anarchy by the proclamation of the king’s peace, wealth was sure to accumulate. Markets were fixed in boroughs, and in order to guard against the ever-dreaded theft of cattle it was ordained with increasing stringency that purchases and sales should take place within their limits. By a law of Edgar[222] it was directed that in every [large] borough thirty-three men should be chosen as “witnesses”; in the smaller boroughs and the hundreds twelve would suffice; and from these we must suppose a smaller number were chosen to attest the validity of every sale by which cattle changed hands. Judging from the example of Londonburh, the greatest of all the boroughs, we may conclude that in these trading, fighting, debating communities much of the most vigorous life of England was to be found in the tenth and eleventh centuries.
We have to note in passing that the obligation to assist in the maintenance and repair of these national defences was one of those which pressed upon all free Englishmen. Fyrd-fare, burh-bote and bridge-bote, the duty of serving in the national army, the duty of building or repairing fortresses, and the like duty in respect of bridges, constituted the triple obligation, the often-mentioned trinoda necessitas, from which no estate of thegn or of ceorl, with whatever other immunities it might be favoured, was ever, except in very rare cases, allowed to be exempt.
* * * * *
Returning to the consideration of King Edgar’s law about local government we observe that it ordains that the shire-gemôt shall be held twice a year under the presidency of the bishop of the shire and the ealdorman. The question of the origin of the existing forty counties into which England is divided is an extremely interesting one, but it can hardly yet be said to have received its final solution. We can see at a glance that some of our counties such as Kent, Essex, Middlesex, Sussex, Surrey, represent old kingdoms or sub-kingdoms of the early “Heptarchic” period. Norfolk and Suffolk are but the two divisions of East Anglia. Yorkshire and Northumberland may stand fairly well for Deira and Bernicia, the generous endowment of St. Cuthbert’s tomb being interposed between them in the shape of the county of Durham. The formation of the three counties of Cumberland, Westmorland and Lancashire out of Celtic Strathclyde and its adjoining territory is a late and somewhat obscure piece of history; while on the other hand the emergence of Cornwall, Devon, and perhaps we may add Somerset, out of the former kingdom of West Wales, is pretty easily understood by what the Chronicle tells us of the successive victories of West Saxon kings. Wessex itself, as we see from the Chronicle, must have been at an early period, at any rate in the course of the eighth century, divided into its four often-mentioned shires, Hampshire, Berkshire, Wiltshire and Dorset. When, however, all these older counties have been dealt with, there yet remains before us an interesting question as to the formation of the counties which are still known colloquially as “the shires,” the score of counties which lie between the Thames and the Humber, between Wales and East Anglia, and which evidently represent pretty fairly the old kingdom of Mercia. These, as a rule, cluster each one round some borough which has given its name to the county. One half of these are called after strong places which, as we are distinctly told, owed their foundation or their renewal to Edward and Ethelfled; these ten being Cheshire, Shropshire,[223] Staffordshire, Nottinghamshire, Leicestershire, Huntingdonshire, Bedfordshire, Hertfordshire, Warwickshire and Herefordshire, and we may reasonably conjecture that the remaining shires were carved out nearly at the same time and on a similar plan. There is a great and obvious distinction between all these midland shires named after one central burh, and counties which recall the name of a tribe such as the Sumorsaetan or the South Saxons. The reason for that distinction is evidently that the Mercian shires were made as part of a definite political organisation, after the repulse of the Danish invaders by whom many of the old landmarks had been overthrown.[224] It is probable that many territorial divisions which would have become counties, had Mercia kept the peaceful tenor of her way through the ninth and tenth centuries, districts such as those of the Pecsaetan in the county of the Peak and the Gyrwas in the county of the Fens, may have disappeared from the map of central England owing to the ravages of the Danes. That map is in fact, as remarked by Maitland, a palimpsest, under whose broad black county-names many erased characters lie hidden.[225]
We have seen that a law of King Edgar’s ordains that the ealdorman shall sit by the side of the bishop at the meeting of the shire, and shall expound worldly law while the bishop gives utterance to the divine. In the early period of the West Saxon monarchy, when there was an ealdorman to every shire, this enactment causes no difficulty; but it is clear that during the course of the ninth century there was a constant tendency to lessen the number of ealdormen and increase the size of their dominions, and we can then no longer say that every shire had its own ealdorman. Some men like Ethelred, brother-in-law of Edward the Elder, ealdorman of Mercia; like Athelstan the half-king of East Anglia; and like all the later Northumbrian earls, ruled over territories as large as the old Anglo-Saxon kingdoms. In the reign of Canute we have seen that three earls--as the ealdormen were now called--ruled over three-fourths of England. If the law of Edgar still continued in force, we must imagine these great officials travelling from shire to shire, and holding the gemôt in each. It is a probable suggestion, however, that when the power of the ealdorman was thus widely extended, new officers, the shire-reeves, from whom our modern sheriffs derive their title, were called into being, in order to administer the counties under the ealdorman. This suggestion can hardly, however, be yet spoken of as more than a conjecture.[226]
The ealdorman, as was just now remarked, changed his title in the eleventh century for that of earl. There can be no doubt that this change was due to Danish influence and was an imitation of the word jarl, by which the chiefs of the Danish host were often designated. Eorl was, however, also a word known to the Anglo-Saxons, and by its use in the laws of Ine and elsewhere it seems to have been very nearly equivalent to thegn. In the laws of Ethelred of Kent, of Alfred and of Athelstan, it is frequently used as the antithesis to ceorl, “no man whether eorl or ceorl” being used in the same way that “gentle or simple” was used in the middle ages. Between this generic use of the word, however, and the title of powerful rulers like Leofric and Godwine there was a wide and important difference; and to avoid confusion it seems better to use the word earl only in its later signification, in which it replaces the term ealdorman and is equivalent to the Danish jarl and the Latin comes. One important point to notice is that never before the Norman Conquest does the title of earl become absolutely hereditary, though there are certain great families which seem to have had practically an overwhelming claim to share the earldoms among them. No earl, however, even in the latest days of the Anglo-Saxon kingdom, seems to have had a recognised right of transmitting his earldom to his son.[227]
We have several incidental evidences of the social changes wrought by the two unquiet centuries between Egbert and Canute. The tendency of all those marches and counter-marches, those harryings and hardly held “places of slaughter,” to depress the peaceful cultivator and raise the mere fighting man, is shown by a curious document called “The Northern People’s Laws” (North-leoda laga) and supposed to date from the tenth century. In this document we have the most complete table of wergilds that is anywhere to be found in Anglo-Saxon law.[228] In the following table they are, for convenience of comparison, converted into West Saxon shillings of five penings each:--
The Wergild for the king is 18,000 shillings. Archbishop and Etheling 9,000 „ Bishop and ealdorman 4,800 „ Hold and king’s high-reeve 2,400 „ Mass-thegn (priest) and secular thegn 1,200 „ Ceorl 160 „
Here we see that the ceorl, the free agriculturist, has sunk in the social scale. He was a two hundred, he is now only a hundred and sixty man. The wergilds in the upper ranks of society are, perhaps, unaltered, but, as before remarked, we have very imperfect information about these till we come to this very document. The important thing to observe is the position of the hold. This is a Danish word and signifies properly a fighting man. Here, however, this simple Danish warrior, possibly without any large landed possessions, has only by his sword carved his way up into a position in which he boasts a wergild fifteen times as great as that of the honest Saxon ceorl. He is half as big a man as a bishop or ealdorman, and twice as big as an ordinary thegn.[229]
* * * * *
Another interesting document which dates probably from the reign of Canute is that which is called the Rectitudines singularum personarum,[230] and is a compendium of the whole duty of man, or at least of the services which he is bound to render to those above him in the social order. The thegn has his obligations--in the language of a much later age, “property has its duties as well as its rights”--he must be “worthy of his book-right,” that is, observe the conditions of his charter and do three things on account of his land, serving with the fyrd, burh-building and bridge-work. Also on many estates other obligations accrue at the king’s behest: such as making the fence for the game on the king’s demesne; the equipment of a war-ship; keeping watch on the coast, at the royal headquarters or in the fyrd; alms-giving; Church-scot, and many other payments of various kinds.
The Geneat seems to have belonged to a class dependent on a lord, but in a certain sense superior. He had “to pay rent (land-gafol) in money or in kind, to ride and guide, lead loads, reap and mow, cut the deer-hedge and keep it in repair, build and fence round the fortress, make new roads to the tun, keep ward and go errands far and near just as one may order him about”. It is evidently supposed, however, that he has a horse, probably several horses of his own, although he has to be thus submissive to the bidding of a lord. We may, perhaps, see in these geneats the descendants of ceorls who, under the pressure of the times, have lost their absolutely independent position and have been fain to “commend” themselves to the protection of some great thegn or religious house.[231]
The cottager (cotsetla) is personally free and does not pay rent, but he has to render a certain amount of service to his lord in return for his holding, the normal size of which is five acres. The amount of service varies according to the custom of different estates; but a very usual arrangement is that he shall work every Monday throughout the year for his lord and three days every week in harvest time.
“The Gebur’s duties,” says the document, “are various; in some places they are heavy, in others they are quite moderate.” He seems, however, to have somewhat less of personal freedom than the men belonging to either of the two previous classes. His minimum of work is for two days in the week; he has to put in three days, not only in harvest time, but from the beginning of February to Easter; and all the time from Martinmas (Nov. 11) till Easter he may be called upon, in rotation with his fellows, to lie out at night beside his lord’s fold keeping watch over the sheep. On some lands the gebur pays gafol of honey, on some of meat and on some of ale. The lord provides him with implements for his work and utensils for his house, but then, per contra, when his time has come to take the journey (of death) his lord takes all that he leaves behind. Evidently the gebur is, if not yet actually a serf, in a condition much nearer serfdom than either the geneat or the cotsetla.
After this follow descriptions of the duties of the bee-keeper, the pork-butcher, the swine-herd, the sower, the shepherd, the wood-ward and many other agricultural labourers; the whole forming a most interesting picture of a large and well-managed English estate in the eleventh century.
* * * * *
In studying the laws of Alfred’s successors throughout the tenth century, we are struck by the evident desire of the royal legislators to draw tighter the reins of government and to combat the tendencies towards disintegration and anarchy which they found in the body politic. Under Edward the Elder the great pact between Alfred and Guthrum was the corner-stone of the social fabric and to deal out equal justice between Englishman and Dane was the chief aim of a righteous ruler, but, unfortunately, the king found that he had much cause to complain of timid, corrupt and inefficient servants. The offence of oferhyrnesse, contempt of the royal word and commandment, is one which is now first mentioned, and of which we often hear afterwards from Edward and his descendants. Of this offence, punishable by a fine of 120 shillings, any gerefa (“reeve” or magistrate) was guilty who failed to administer justice according to the testimony of the sworn witnesses, or to hold his gemot once in every four weeks for the administration of justice. Oferhyrnesse was also the offence of any person who presumed “to cheapen except in a port,” that is, to conduct any process of bargain and sale except within the limits of a market town and in the presence of a port reeve, to whose testimony he could afterwards appeal to prove that he was not dealing in stolen goods.
Strong and vigorous ruler as Athelstan was, he needed to put forth all his powers in order to repress the growing tendency to anarchy and injustice. “If any of my gerefan,” says he, “disobey this edict or be more slack concerning this matter than I have ordained, he shall pay the penalty of his oferhyrnesse, and I will find some one else who will attend to what I say.... I have learned that our peace is worse held than I like, and my witan say that I have borne it too long. I have therefore ordered that all such peace-breakers shall get out of my kingdom with wives and children, and all that they have, and shall go whither I direct. If they return to this realm they shall be treated like thieves caught in the act.” King Athelstan’s influence, however, was not always exerted on the side of increased severity. The citizens of London record that he conveyed to the archbishop his opinion, that it was a lamentable thing that so young a man as one between the ages of twelve and fifteen should be put to death for any offence, or any man for stealing a chattel of less value than twelve pennies, and that he altered the law accordingly, raising the limit of age and of value in both cases.
In order to make the punishment of crime, especially of the one most common crime, cattle-stealing, more certain, it was ordered by Edward the Elder[232] that every man should have his geteama, a person doubtless of known character and position, who would act as his advocate or guarantor in any transactions of purchase and sale. It was probably a development of the same idea when Edgar ordained as follows: “This then is what I will, that every man shall be under a borh whether he be within boroughs or without them and that witnesses be appointed in every borough and in every hundred”.[233] The law was repeated and strengthened by Canute who thus announced his decision: “And we will that every free man if he be over the age of twelve years shall be included in a hundred and a tithing, that he may have right to clear himself from accusation and right to receive wer if any one assail him. Otherwise he shall have none of the rights of a free man be he householder (heorth-faeste) or follower. Let every one then be brought into the hundred and have a borh, and let the borh hold him and bring him at all times to judgment. Many a powerful man wishes by hook or crook to protect his man and thinks that he can easily do it, whether he be free or theow. But we will not tolerate this injustice.”[234]
Of this institution of the tithing, whereby the poorer class of free men were grouped together in clusters of ten, we heard among the citizens of London in the reign of Athelstan. That grouping was for purposes of mutual protection; this seems rather to be in order to enforce mutual responsibility. It is not to be wondered that organisms, so low down in the social system, have not made much mark in the Anglo-Saxon law-book; but it seems to be generally agreed that from them was derived that institution of frank-pledge which, under the Norman kings, was so efficient a machine for the repression of disorder.
* * * * *
In the laws of the later Anglo-Saxon kings we seem to hear less about oath-helping and much more about ordeals than we heard in the laws of their predecessors. Does this change betoken the growth of superstition or a decay of honesty and public spirit and a diminished confidence in the veracity of the oath-helpers? The chief modes of ordeal among the Anglo-Saxons were three, and an accused person seems to have had his right of choosing between them. In all there was a direct appeal to the Almighty to show by the ordeal the innocence or guilt of the accused; and the Church by solemn services, prayers and fastings gave her sanction to the appeal. (1) If the ordeal was by cold water, the accused person was hurled into a vessel of water, after a prayer had been uttered that “the creature, water” might reject this person if he were guilty or receive him if innocent, according to the course of nature, into her bosom. In this ordeal to float was fatal, to sink was salvation. (2) In the ordeal of fire the accused must carry a mass of red-hot iron weighing one pound a distance of nine feet, or must plunge his hand up to the wrist into a vessel of boiling water to pick out of it a stone. After either of these trials the hand was bandaged and sealed up. If, after the lapse of three days, when the bandages were removed, there was raw flesh visible, the man was guilty, if the hand showed clean skin he was innocent. If the crime laid to his charge were that of conspiring against the king’s life, then the ordeal must be of threefold severity; the mass of hot iron must weigh three pounds, or the arm of the accused must be plunged in up to the elbow. (3) The ordeal of the test-morsel (corsnaed) was chiefly practised upon ecclesiastics and consisted in the obligation to swallow a piece of bread or cheese upon which a solemn anathema had been pronounced for any but an innocent partaker. As Ethelred said in one of his laws:[235] “If an accusation is laid against a servant of the altar who has no friends and who cannot call upon any oath-helper, let him go to the corsnaed and there fare as God shall will”.
* * * * *
The judicial processes even in the ordinary courts of the realm certainly seem to us sufficiently blundering and barbarous; but at the end of the period which we are now considering, other courts of private jurisdiction were coming into being, and whether they administered better or worse justice who shall say? In the reign of Canute we first find a clear case of a grant of sake and soke to the Archbishop of Canterbury, a kind of grant which was given with lavish hand by the king whose reign lies next before us, Edward the Confessor.[236] Without entering upon the question whether the Danish king was really the first to bestow this special privilege upon his courtiers, lay or ecclesiastical, we may safely assert that, at any rate in the eleventh century, our kings were freely attaching judicial functions to the ownership of lands. For this is, undoubtedly, what is meant by these words sake and soke, or sac and soc. The first probably means a “matter” or “cause”;[237] the second, “a seeking out” or “inquiry”. The meaning in any case is clear. The abbot or wealthy thegn who “had sake and soke” had, merely in right of the king’s grant, and generally as appurtenant to the land which the king had given him, the right to try causes of dispute arising in his district. Apparently that right included both what we should call civil and criminal causes; and, of course, the right must have carried with it power to enforce his decisions, and also--no unimportant matter--the right to receive the fines and other profits arising from the administration of justice.
What may have been the limits of this jurisdiction--for there must surely have been some causes too grave for any mere holder of sake and soke to meddle with--and how it may have impinged upon the sphere in which shire-mot and burh-mot exercised their powers, are questions the answer to which is not yet before us. It is evident, however, that we have here judicial tribunals which might very easily grow into the manorial courts which flourished under the Norman and Plantagenet kings and the survivals of which exist among us to this day. And altogether the whole effect produced on our minds by a comparison of the laws of these later kings with the laws of the heptarchic kings is, that during the three centuries which elapsed from Ine to Canute the distinction between classes had been growing broader, that the eorl was mightier and the ceorl much weaker than in that older stratum of society; that, though certainly feudalism was not yet materialised in England, the spirit which prompted it was in the air; and that, possibly, even without any Norman Conquest, something like the Feudal System might have come, by spontaneous generation, in our land.
XXV. EDWARD THE CONFESSOR
(1042–1066.)
EDWARD, son of Ethelred, last visible scion of the old royal West Saxon stock, seems to have succeeded, on Harthacnut’s death, without opposition, to the throne of his forefathers. If the most powerful man in the kingdom, Earl Godwine, had any reason to fear the accession of the brother of the murdered Alfred, he determined to run all risks, and by actively co-operating in the new king’s election to establish a claim on his gratitude which might outweigh the remembrance of the deeds done by the zealous adherent of Harold Harefoot. The large influence of Godwine in the king’s counsels did not imply, as it would have done some years before, the continuance in power of the king’s mother. On the contrary, in the very next year after Edward’s accession, and seven months after his coronation at Winchester, the king, with his three most powerful subjects, Godwine, Leofric and Siward, rode from Gloucester to Winchester (November 16, 1043), and coming suddenly upon “the Lady” Emma, deprived her of all the vast treasures that she had accumulated, “her lands, her gold, her silver and her precious things untellable,” and ordained that she should live thereafter, unimprisoned indeed, but deprived of all her ancient state, in the royal city of Winchester. Thus she lived on for eight years longer, till her death on March 14, 1052; but in all the stirring scenes which preceded that event the busy, managing “Old Lady”[238] seems to have taken no part. Her party, if she had one, struck down by that hasty ride of the king and his three nobles, never after raised its head. The reason assigned by the chronicler for this harsh procedure toward the widow and mother of two kings, seems to bear the stamp of truth. “This was done,” he says, “because she was, before, very hard on the king her son, and she did less for him than he would, both before he was king and afterward,” meaning no doubt both before and after his association with Harthacnut. In other words, the queen-dowager, who evidently disliked her first husband and gave all her pent-up love to her second, had become so complete a Dane at heart that she would not lift a finger to help the surviving son of Ethelred, and for this unfriendliness she was sorely punished when he had power to avenge his wrongs.
Soon after Emma’s downfall, the place of “Lady” in the palace of Winchester was again filled, by the marriage of Edward to Edith, daughter of Earl Godwine (January 23, 1045). It was a marriage only in name; for the king, to the admiration of his monastic biographers, retained through life the virgin purity of his saintliness; but the daughter of Godwine undoubtedly exercised some influence on the counsels of her royal spouse, though in what direction that influence was exerted is one of the not fully solved riddles of this difficult reign. The reign is difficult, chiefly because of the singular nullity of the sovereign’s character. Religious and kindly natured, Edward (who received after his death the half canonisation conveyed in the title of “Confessor”) seems to have had scarcely a will or mind of his own. He is always under the dominion of some stronger nature, Saxon earl, or Norman bishop, or wedded queen: and it is rarely possible to discover what were his own true sympathies and antipathies. We have constantly to guess to which of his councillors we must attribute the praise or the blame of the actions which were nominally his own.
To avoid confusion, it will be well to describe the events of this reign under four heads: foreign relations; internal troubles; wars with the Scots; and wars with the Welsh.
To us, who judge after the event, the dissolution of the splendid Anglo-Scandinavian Empire of Canute seems a natural and inevitable consequence of the death of its founder; but in all likelihood it was not so regarded by contemporary observers. Both Magnus of Norway and Sweyn of Denmark may well have aspired to rule England as heirs or quasi-heirs of Canute the Rich, and in order to guard against their attacks, the new King of England was compelled to keep a large fleet in readiness, which was generally assembled at Sandwich.
Magnus of Norway was a bastard son of St. Olaf’s, whose very name bore witness to the irritable temper of his father. His mother, Alfhild, when in travail, was brought nigh unto death, and when the child was born the by-standers were for long in doubt whether it were alive. But the king was asleep, had given strict orders that he should never be roused from his slumbers, and none, not even his favourite minstrel Sigvat, dared to disobey. Fearing lest the child, dying unbaptised, should become “the devil’s man,” a priest hastily baptised it, the minstrel standing god-father, and giving it the name Magnus in honour of Carolus Magnus, “the king whom he knew to be the best man in all the world”. (And this was full two centuries after the death of Charlemagne.) The anger of the awakened king, when he learned what had happened during his slumbers, was charmed away by the smooth-tongued Sigvat. Thus did the name Magnus enter not only into the dynastic lists, but into the common family nomenclature of Norway and Iceland.
The child Magnus, grown to man’s estate and succeeding to his father’s kingdom, vindicated the unconscious prophecy of his name, and was for a time the greatest monarch of the North. Whereas in the previous generation, Denmark had conquered Norway, it now seemed probable that Norway would conquer Denmark, so hard was the king of the latter country pressed by Magnus. This Danish king was Sweyn, not, of course, the son of Canute, who had died some years before, but Sweyn Estrithson, son of the murdered Ulf (of the overthrown chess-board) and of Canute’s sister, Estrith. As Ulf’s sister was Gytha, wife of Earl Godwine, Godwine’s many sons and daughters were of course first cousins to the King of Denmark.
In the year 1047 Sweyn Estrithson, vigorously attacked by Magnus, sent an earnest petition to England that fifty ships might be despatched to his succour. “But this seemed an ill counsel to all people, because Magnus had great sea-power, nor was it adopted.” Unhelped, Sweyn was expelled from his kingdom. The Danes had to pay money to their conquerors--a new and bitter experience for them--and to own Magnus for their king. There, however, the career of Norwegian conquest stopped. In that very year, Magnus, when riding through the forest, was thrown violently by his shying steed against the trunk of a tree and received an injury from which he died. His uncle, Harold Hardrada, who succeeded him, and who will be heard of again in the history of England, could not prevent Denmark from reverting to its former ruler, Sweyn Estrithson, who founded there a dynasty which endured for 300 years.
Though schemes of conquest, such as are attributed to Magnus, died with him, there was some renewal of the old piratical raids. In 1048 two Norse buccaneers came with twenty-five ships to Sandwich, were repelled from Thanet, but successfully raided Essex, and sailing thence to “Baldwin’s land” (Flanders), found there a ready market for the fruits of their cruel industry. The shelter given by Flanders to these and other depredators, induced Edward to acquiesce the more willingly in a proposal made to him by his kinsman, the Emperor Henry III., that he should help to guard the narrow seas against Baldwin, who had broken out into rebellion against the empire, had demolished the palace reared by Charlemagne at Nimeguen, and had done many other ill turns to his sovereign lord. To punish these despites Henry had gathered a large army, and Edward helped him by keeping guard with a fleet at Sandwich. No naval engagement followed, but the pressure thus effected by land and sea was effectual, and before long “the emperor had of Baldwin all that he would”.
The Emperor Henry III., who thus drew Edward into the circle of European politics, was chiefly memorable for the beneficial influence which he exerted on the papal court, procuring the election of bishops of high character, generally Germans, instead of the dissolute lads who had been too often of late intruded into the papacy. One of the best of Henry’s German popes was Bruno of Toul, who ruled as Leo IX. from 1048 to 1054. To him in the year 1049 Edward, by the advice of his witan, sent as ambassadors the Bishops of Sherborne and Worcester, to pray for absolution from a vow of pilgrimage to the Holy Land, which he had made in his years of poverty and apparently hopeless exile. The Witenagemot represented to him with good reason that the fulfilment of such a vow would now be inconsistent with his higher duties to his country and his subjects; and the aid of the pope was sought to cut the casuistic knot. In the following year the two bishops returned, bringing the papal absolution from the vow of pilgrimage, coupled, it is said, with an injunction to build or restore a monastery in honour of St. Peter, and fill it with monks who should spend their days in prayer and psalmody. The condition was one in itself delightful to the heart of the pious king. From the unfulfilled vow of pilgrimage, from the journey of the two bishops to Rome, and from the reply of the venerable Leo, sprang that noble sanctuary, the name of which will endure as long as men speak the English language, the great Abbey of Westminster.
* * * * *
The internal history of England during the twenty-two years of Edward’s reign is chiefly a record of the struggles of two or three great nobles for supremacy in his councils. It is true that some measures were taken for lightening the burdens of the people. “In the year 1049,” says the Abingdon chronicler, “King Edward paid off nine ships and they went away with their ships and all: and five ships remained, and the king promised them twelve months’ pay. In the next year he paid off all the shipmen.” The result is told us by his brother chronicler: “In 1052 [1051] King Edward took off the army tax (here-gyld) which King Ethelred formerly instituted. It was thirty-nine years since he began it: and this gyld oppressed the English people during all that time. This tax ever claimed priority over all the other gylds by which the people were in various ways oppressed.” As has been pointed out,[239] the tax here spoken of is not the Danegeld, a levy of money to be paid as blackmail to foreign invaders, but it is here-gyld, “army tax,” or rather, in strictness, “navy tax,” a levy of money to be paid to the naval defenders of the country, an imposition therefore which may be fittingly compared to the ship money of the Middle Ages. But the previously quoted entry concerning the exactions in the reign of Harthacnut shows how easily the here-gyld might be increased till it became an intolerable burden, and we can thus the better understand the joy of the nation at its removal.
The position of Edward appears during the whole of his reign to have been not unlike that of the later kings of the two first Frankish dynasties. If he were not a mere roi fainéant, a puppet in the hands of an all-powerful Mayor of the Palace, he was at any rate like a Carolingian Louis or Lothair, with large theoretical claims, with little real power, and quite overshadowed by a few great earls, who had not indeed yet made their offices hereditary; who were still in theory removable officers of the crown; but who ruled wide provinces, raised considerable armies among their own house-carls, and above all, possessed wealth probably much exceeding any that could be found in the treasure-house of the king. One of these great French nobles, Hugh the Great, had so played his cards as to prepare the way for the elevation of his own son to the actual seat of royalty, when the time should come for its relinquishment by the descendants of Charlemagne. It seems not improbable that the example of Hugh the Great was much before the eyes of Godwine, and that through life he kept steadily in view the possibility that sons issuing from his loins might one day sit upon the English throne, now after five centuries about to be left vacant by the dying dynasty of Cerdic.
Godwine, Leofric and Siward: these were the three greatest names in the English Witan when Edward came to the throne, and all three should be still memorable to Englishmen; Godwine, by reason of his great place in history, and the other two by reason of their renown in English poetry; Leofric being commemorated in the Godiva of Tennyson, and Siward in the Macbeth of Shakespeare.
The kingdom of England, imperfectly welded together by Egbert and Alfred, and since then modified by the large infusion of Scandinavian blood into its northern and eastern districts, showed throughout this period a strong tendency to split up again into its three old divisions, Northumbria, Mercia and Wessex. Northumbria, as we have seen, was reconstituted as one earldom by the bloody deed of Siward the Strong, who slew his uncle Eadwulf, and so joined Bernicia to Deira. A strong, stern, unscrupulous Dane, whose martial character is attested by the well-known story of his death (hereafter to be related), he nevertheless seems to have ruled well his great province and was apparently a loyal subject of King Edward.[240]
Leofric, son of Leofwine, was sprung, as has been said, from a family which for more than two centuries had been eminent in Mercia, and it is probable that he and his offspring bore with unconcealed dislike the overshadowing competition of the great upstart house of Godwine. He is often spoken of as Earl of Mercia, and perhaps had some sort of pre-eminence over other earls in that district, but his immediate jurisdiction seems to have been confined to the three counties of Cheshire, Shropshire and Staffordshire. Godwine’s nephew by marriage, Beorn, son of Ulf and Estrith, was quartered on his eastern flank in Derby, Nottingham, Leicester and Lincoln. Sweyn, Godwine’s eldest son, ruled the Mercian counties of Hereford, Gloucester and Oxford, besides a part of Wessex. Well might the proud Mercian noble feel that his title was but a mockery, while such large slices of Mercia were given to his rivals. Both Leofric and his wife Godiva were munificent benefactors to the Church. Whatever may be the foundation for the beautiful legend of Godiva’s absolute surrender of herself for the lightening of her people’s burdens, we certainly should not, from his record in history, have inferred that her husband Leofric was an avaricious or close-fisted lord.
We turn to the earldoms which throughout the greater part of Edward’s reign were subject to the family of Godwine. He himself held, of course, that great and enriching office, the earldom of Wessex, which had been long ago conferred upon him by Canute, and which practically included all the lands south of the Thames; excepting that Somerset and Berkshire appear to have been carved out of them, to form what in later times would have been called an appanage for his eldest son, Sweyn, in addition to the three Mercian counties which, as we have already seen, were included in his earldom. His second son, Harold, called Earl of the East Angles, ruled not only the two strictly East Anglian shires, but also Huntingdon, Cambridge and Essex, which probably included Middlesex.[241] The three sons who came next in order, Tostig, Gyrth and Leofwine, were but boys at the time of Edward’s accession and were as yet unprovided with earldoms; but even so, it is evident if we look at the map, that more than half, and that the fairest half, of England was subject to Earl Godwine and his family.
Of the character of this man, certainly the most powerful and probably the ablest Englishman of his time, very varying judgments were formed, even in his lifetime; and after his death the antipathy of the Norman and the regretful sympathy of the Saxon writers, naturally led to very divergent estimates concerning it. Nor is the controversy even yet ended; for the enthusiastic championship of the great historian of the Norman Conquest has not unnaturally provoked an equally vigorous storm of censure. To the present writer he does not appear a high-minded patriot, nor yet, considering the age in which he lived, a detestable villain. Hard, grasping, capable, remorseless, intent on the aggrandisement of his family, and by no means successful in forming their characters, he nevertheless may be credited with a certain amount of love for his country, and for the Anglo-Danish race which now peopled it. Himself English by birth and Danish by marriage and by all his early official training, he was determined that, if he could help it, no third element should be imported by the Norman sympathies of the king, to oppress the common people and to snatch away the prizes of government from the nobles. It is when he risks life and dearly loved treasure in maintaining this contention, that he seems to us almost a patriot.
The first shock to the stately edifice of Godwine’s power was given by the disordered passions of his eldest son. In 1046, after a successful campaign in Wales, “when Sweyn was on his homeward journey, he ordered that the Abbess of Leominster [named Edgiva] should be fetched unto him, and he had her as long as he pleased and afterwards let her go home”. Such is the short dry record by the chronicler, of a deed which shocked the not too sensitive conscience of the eleventh century, and which appears to have led to the dissolution of the nunnery of Leominster, the outlawry of Sweyn and the allotment of his earldom to others. It seems, however, from later allusions to the matter, that it was not the forcible abduction but the lascivious seduction of a consecrated virgin of which the son of Godwine was guilty. Sweyn betook himself in 1047 to that refuge of all English outlaws, “Baldwin’s land,” and from thence after a time went to Denmark, where by some crime or immorality of the nature of which we are not informed, he “ruined himself with the Danes”. In 1049 he returned to England, and began to hover about the coasts of Kent and Sussex, off which the king was lying with a fleet, operating against Baldwin of Flanders and watching the proceedings of another outlaw, Osgod Clapa. This man, who had once been in high favour at the English court, had held the office of Staller or Chamberlain, and had been honoured by the presence, the ill-omened presence, of Harthacnut, at his daughter’s marriage feast, but had now fallen into disgrace, and led for some years the life of a buccaneer, imitating the ravages of the old Vikings and requiring the manœuvres of a royal fleet to keep him at bay. The Chronicle has much to tell us about Osgod Clapa’s and his wife’s movements, but he possesses for us no political significance, and we have only to note his death which happened “suddenly in his bed,” as the chronicler tells us, in the year 1054.
Returning to the tempestuous career of the outlawed Sweyn, we find that his petition for forgiveness was at first rejected by the king, influenced as it was supposed by the criminal’s brother and cousin, Harold and Beorn, who were averse to surrendering his forfeited earldom. Then some change seems to have come over the more generous Beorn, who, on Sweyn’s entreaty that he would intercede for him to the king, consented to do so, and set off with him to march along the Sussex shore, making for the king’s station at Sandwich (1049). Many were the oaths which Sweyn had sworn to him, and “he thought that for his kinship’s sake he would not deceive him.” Thus beguiled he fared forward, putting himself ever more completely in the outlaw’s power; and even when his cousin proposed that instead of journeying eastwards to Sandwich, they should go westwards to the little town of Bosham, a favourite haunt of the Godwine tribe, off which his ships were lying at anchor, the unsuspecting earl consented. “For my sailors,” said Sweyn, “will desert me, unless I show myself speedily among them.” But when they had reached the place and Sweyn proposed that they should go together on board of his ship, Beorn, whose suspicions were by this time aroused, stoutly refused to do so. Resistance was now too late. Sweyn’s sailors forcibly laid hold of Beorn, threw him into the boat, and tightly bound him. They then rowed him to the ship, spread sail, and ran before the wind to Exmouth, where the prisoner was slain and buried in a deep grave, from which his friends afterwards lifted his body, that they might carry him to Winchester and bury him beside his uncle, King Canute. After such an atrocious and dastardly crime, one would have expected that Sweyn, if he could not be laid hold of and brought to justice, would at least have been banished from the society of all honourable men. And for the moment, though he escaped as usual to Baldwin’s land and dwelt at Bruges, he was solemnly proclaimed a nithing or vile person (the most ignominious term in the Teutonic vocabulary) by the whole host, with the king, his brother-in-law, at their head. Yet with that fatuous facility in wrong-doing which seems to mark the conduct of all leading Englishmen in this bewildering century, by the mediation of Ealdred, Bishop of Worcester (afterwards Archbishop of York, and by no means the worst of the ecclesiastics of the period), Sweyn was brought back from his exile in 1050, his outlawry reversed, and his old earldom, which involved the rule over five counties, restored once more to his own keeping. The only thing that can be said in his favour is that he does seem to have felt some remorse for his many crimes. When next year he shared the general downfall of his house and was once more driven into banishment, instead of scheming for his return and restoration to power, he went on pilgrimage to Jerusalem, visited the sacred shrines, and died on his homeward journey at Constantinople (Michaelmas, 1052).
The history of the Godwine family is now modified by events at King Edward’s court, which gave them the opportunity of assuming the character of national champions against the dominion of foreigners. We hear a good deal about the Norman favourites who flocked to Edward’s court, but it is not easy to ascertain how numerous these were, or how far a king, all whose nearest relations were Normans, and who had spent the best years of his life in a foreign land, exceeded the limits of moderation and good policy in bestowing lands and offices on his friends of foreign birth. Among these were the kinsfolk of his own sister, Godiva, whom it would be hard to blame him for having invited to his court, though one of them, her second husband, Eustace, Count of Boulogne, when he came sorely offended the Saxons by his insolent demeanour. Another, Ralph, sometimes called Ralph the Timid, Godiva’s son by her first husband, was entrusted by his uncle with the earldom of the Magasaetas, corresponding to the modern county of Hereford. A feebly arrogant man, he too probably added not a little to Edward’s unpopularity, and he appears to have gathered round him a number of his countrymen, whom the Chronicle calls sometimes Frenchmen (Frencysce) and sometimes Welshmen.[242] These men seem to have been already anticipating the baronial oppressions of a later century, and building their strongholds to overawe the common folk. Of one such fortress the patriotic chronicler writes that the foreigners had erected a castle in Herefordshire in the district of Earl Sweyn, and there wrought all the harm and disgrace that they could do to the king’s men.
The ecclesiastically minded Edward, however, seems to have chosen his chief friends from among the Franco-Norman churchmen whom he had known in his youth. Chief among these was Robert Champart, formerly Abbot of Jumièges on the Lower Seine, whom Edward made Bishop of London near the beginning of his reign, and who, according to an often-quoted story, obtained such an ascendency over the feeble mind of his patron that “if he said that a black crow was white, the king would rather trust his mouth than his own eyes”. Owing to the feeble health of the Archbishop of Canterbury, Robert of London probably had from the first a controlling voice in the affairs of the southern province, and when at last, in October, 1050, the aged Eadsige was gathered to his fathers, Edward desired to make his favourite ecclesiastic archbishop. There was, however, an undercurrent of opposition; the chapter met in haste without the royal mandate and elected one of their number, Aelfric, archbishop. The monastic candidate was a relation of Earl Godwine’s, who put forth all his influence to procure the confirmation of his election, but in vain. The Norman’s power over the king was too great; at the Witenagemot held in London at Midlent, 1051, Robert Champart was appointed Archbishop of Canterbury. He went speedily to Rome and returned with the indispensable pallium. This rebuff to Earl Godwine was perhaps the first indication of the precarious tenure of his power. At any rate from this time onward, if not before, the influence of the king’s clerical master was thrown heavily into the scale against him.
Such apparently was the state of affairs at the English court, and such the smouldering fires of jealousy and distrust, when in the summer of 1051 Eustace of Boulogne came on a visit to his brother-in-law. The visit paid, he and his retinue took the homeward road through Kent, and after baiting at Canterbury, made for Dover as their resting-place for the night. When the little troop were still some miles short of Dover, he and his men dismounted, put on their coats of mail and thus rode on, martial and menacing. When they reached Dover they showed at once their intention to take up their quarters wherever it pleased them. They were probably not without some legal justification for what seems to us a somewhat high-handed procedure, for Count Eustace was son-in-law and brother-in-law of English kings, and royal personages in the west of Europe seem to have possessed in the eleventh century some rights of compulsory hospitality similar to those of which we hear so much in later centuries under the name of “purveyance”. It was therefore probably not so much the claim itself as the insolent manner in which it was urged by armed foreigners, which exasperated the citizens of Dover. A quarrel arose between one of the Frenchmen and the householder upon whom he was quartered. The householder received a wound which he repaid by a mortal blow. Thereupon the count and his men mounted their horses, and attacked the householder, whom they slew on his own hearthstone. A general mêlée followed, the result of which was that twenty of the citizens were slain, and nineteen of the strangers, many of whom were also wounded. Count Eustace, with the survivors of his train, made his way back to the king, and in angry tones, concealing his own followers’ misconduct, called for vengeance on the men of Dover. Hereupon Earl Godwine was summoned to the royal presence and ordered to execute the king’s wrath against the citizens. This command he absolutely refused to obey. The men of Dover belonged to the county which he had longest ruled and with which he was most closely connected,[243] and he would have nothing to do with that which he considered to be their unjust chastisement. It was then decided (apparently under the Norman archbishop’s influence) that a Witenagemot should be held at Gloucester, at which the old charge of complicity in the death of the Etheling Alfred was to be brought against Godwine. The great earl, moreover, had at this time on foot an expedition against the “Wealas” (that is Frenchmen), who were distressing the inhabitants of Herefordshire, from the castle which they had there erected. That matter, and the counter-accusations brought by the “Wealas” against Godwine, were apparently to be also discussed at the Gloucester meeting of the witan.
Things seemed to be gathering up towards a civil war, in which Godwine and his sons would have had against them, not only the king and his French favourites, men like Robert of Jumièges and Ralph the Timid, but also Siward of Northumberland and Leofric of Mercia, who were hastening with their armies to the help of the king. This last fact seems to show that the tyrannical conduct of Edward’s Norman kinsmen was not the sole question at issue in this summer of 1051. Jealousy and dread of the overmastering power of the house of Godwine also had their share in the great debate, nor perhaps were the old rivalries between the one southern and the two northern kingdoms altogether absent. It seemed as though a collision between the fyrds of Northumbria and Mercia, and those of Wessex and East Anglia was inevitable; but even at the eleventh hour wiser counsels prevailed. To some of the leaders on the king’s side the thought occurred, that the impending battle would be a grievous mistake, “inasmuch as almost all that England had of noblest was in the two armies, and a battle between them would but bring one common ruin and leave the land open to invasion by the enemies of both”. On Godwine’s side also there was great unwillingness “to be compelled to stand against their royal lord”. Thus a peace--as it proved only a precarious peace--was patched up, and all subjects in dispute were referred to a great national meeting of the witan, which was to be held in London at Michaelmas.
By consenting to this delay, and by changing the venue from Gloucester to London, the Godwine party seem to have thrown away their chances. The earl and his sons came to his dwelling at Southwark with a great multitude of West Saxons, “but his army ever waned, and all the more the longer he stayed”. The magic of the king’s name was still too mighty to be resisted. The thegns who were in subjection to Harold were told to transfer their allegiance to the king himself; Sweyn the seducer was once more outlawed; the negotiations soon became a mere desperate appeal from the Godwine party for hostages and safe conduct, and at last they received the royal ultimatum: “Five days in which to clear out of the country, or judgment against you,” probably on the old charge of complicity in the murder of Alfred, combined with new charges of treachery against the king. Hereupon the whole family took their departure. Godwine with his wife and three of his sons, Sweyn, Tostig and Gyrth, went to the patrimonial Bosham, “shoved out their ships, betook them beyond sea, and sought the protection of Baldwin, with whom they abode the whole winter”. There was especial fitness in those exiles seeking shelter in “Baldwin’s land,” for immediately before the downfall of the Godwine family Tostig had become the bridegroom of Judith, sister of Baldwin V., the reigning Count of Flanders. The other two sons, Harold and Leofwine, rode hard to Bristol, vainly pursued by Ealdred, Bishop of Worcester, whom the king had ordered to capture them. Much buffeted by storms, they beat out from Avonmouth, and at last arrived on the coast of Ireland, where they spent the winter as guests of Diarmid, King of Leinster. To complete the ruin of the family, Godwine’s daughter Edith, “who had been hallowed to Edward as queen, was forsaken by him; all her property in land, in gold, in silver and in all things was taken from her,” and she was committed to the care of her husband’s half-sister, the Abbess of Wherwell in Hampshire. Well may the chronicler who records these events say: “It must have seemed a wonderful thing to any man that was in England, if any man had said beforehand that so it should happen, inasmuch as he was so high uplifted that he ruled the king and all England, and his sons were earls and the king’s darlings, and his daughter [now sent to a nunnery] was wedded and married to the king”.
Soon after the expulsion of Godwine and his sons a memorable event occurred: the landing in England of William the Norman, who came on a visit to the king in 1051. In 1035, the year of the death of Canute, Robert Duke of Normandy, King Edward’s first cousin, had died at Nicæa in Bithynia on his way home from the Holy Land. Before starting on this pilgrimage he had presented to the nobles of Normandy his illegitimate son, William, child of Herleva, the daughter of a tanner of Falaise, and called upon them to recognise him as his successor. The child was only about seven years old, but as his father said, “He is little but he will grow, and if God please he will mend”. Moreover, his lord paramount, the King of France, had promised to maintain him in his duchy. The nobles were loath to accept as their future ruler one whose illegitimacy for various reasons was considered more disgraceful than that which tarnished the shield of many of his ancestors, but being in some degree constrained, perhaps surprised, by the sudden action of their masterful duke, they consented and acknowledged themselves the “men” of the little bastard. When the tidings of Duke Robert’s death in the distant Orient arrived, no rival candidate was set up, and the plighted faith of the Norman nobles was not formally violated, but there seems to have been a general relapse into anarchy. Private wars between noble and noble were waged continually. Three guardians of the boy-duke were slain, one after another, and two attempts were made to kidnap, perhaps to murder him. But out of this welter of warring ambitions and treasons sometimes fomented by the liege-lord in Paris who had sworn to protect him, the young duke gradually grew up a bold, athletic, soldierly man; chaste and clean-living, though himself the child of illicit love; devout, though when occasion arose he could defy the thunders of the Church; beyond everything self-centred and capable of holding on through long years to an ambitious project once formed with infinite patience, and of carrying it into bloody effect without a shadow of remorse. Four years before his visit to England, in 1047, William, with the help of his liege-lord, Henry of France, had defeated the rebellious nobles of his duchy in the great battle of Val-es-dunes, a few miles east of Caen. In 1048 he took the two strong castles of Domfront and Alençon on the frontier between Normandy and Maine, thus preparing the way for the conquest of the latter country which followed six years later (1054), and which made him without question the most powerful of all the vassals of the French king.
Even as it was, however, he was already a mighty prince when he came, probably in the autumn of 1051, to visit his elderly cousin, a man in all respects as utterly unlike himself as it is possible to imagine. A fateful visit indeed was that, though its details are passed over in provoking silence by all the chroniclers and biographers both of host and guest. When we remember that the man who thus came as a visitor to our land was he from whose loins have sprung all the sovereigns who have ruled over us for eight centuries, how gladly would we have heard some circumstances of this peaceful invasion: of his first sight of the white cliffs of Dover; his voyage up the Thames; his intercourse haply with some of the merchants of the rising city of London; his talks with his temporarily widowed cousin in his palace in the west of London, near the island of Thorney; but for all this we have only imagination to draw upon. The strangest thing is that though during this visit some promise was almost certainly made, or some expectation held out by Edward, that William should be the heir of his kingdom, even this though constantly alluded to by the Norman writers is never by them definitely connected with this visit. Of one thing we may be tolerably sure that the visit indicates the high-water mark of Norman influence at Edward’s court. Robert of Jumièges, the all-powerful archbishop of Canterbury; William, the king’s chaplain, bishop of London; Ulf, another chaplain, and a scandal to his profession, bishop of the vast diocese of Dorchester--all these were Normans, while Godwine, the Englishman, and his progeny of earls were all absent from the kingdom. Are we wrong in conjecturing that but for that absence the visit had never been paid? However, after a stay probably of a few weeks, William returned to his own land, and shortly after another member of his house, that one to whom all his claims to interfere in English politics were indirectly due, set forth on a longer journey. “On March 14, 1052, died, the Old Lady, mother of King Edward and Harthacnut, named Imme [Emma], and her body lies in the Old Minster [Winchester] with King Canute.”
There can be no doubt that dislike of the arrogance of Edward’s Norman favourites was one cause, though possibly not the sole cause, of the remarkable revolution which took place in the year 1052. All through the winter of 1051–52 Godwine in “Baldwin’s land” and Harold in Ireland were preparing their forces, in order to compel a reversal of the decree of exile against them. Edward’s counsellors were also on the alert, and prepared at Sandwich a fleet of such strength that when Godwine with his ships issued forth at midsummer from the neighbourhood of Ostend he found the royal armament too strong for him and declined battle. Then followed three months of indecisive action, in which, curiously enough, the chief events recorded are the raiding expeditions against certain districts of England, made by the men who professed to come as her deliverers. “Earl Godwine hoisted sail with all his fleet and went westwards right on to Wight and harried the country there so long until the people paid them as much as they ordered them to pay.” This sounds more like Vikings extorting gafol than like the patriot statesman coming to deliver his country from foreign oppression. “Then did Harold return from Ireland with nine ships and landed at Porlock, and much folk was there gathered against him, but he did not shrink from procuring him food. He landed and slew a good lot of people[244] and helped himself to cattle and men and property as it came handy,” and then sailing round the Land’s End, joined his father at the Isle of Wight, and so they sailed together to Pevensey. Meantime the royal fleet was weakened by continual desertion. The old Kentish loyalty to Earl Godwine revived in full force, and “all the butse-carlas (common sailors) of Hastings and all along by that coast, all the east end of Sussex and Surrey and much else thereabouts came over to Godwine’s side and declared that they would live and die with him.”
Thus Godwine’s fleet rounded Kent, reached the northern mouth of the Stour and sailed up towards London; some of the ships, however, improving the occasion by sailing inside the Isle of Sheppey and burning the town of King’s Milton. On September 14 Godwine was at his old home at Southwark, his troops drawn up in array on the Surrey bank of the Thames, his ships waiting for a favourable tide to pass through the bridge and encompass the king’s dwindling fleet. Battle, however, between Englishmen and Englishmen, now as in the previous year, was felt to be a terrible thing. The men of London were decidedly favourable to the cause of the banished earls, and when their humble petition to the king for the renewal of his favour to them met with stern refusal, it was all that Godwine could do to prevent the popular discontent from breaking out into some sudden act of mutiny. This state of tension did not last long. The foreign favourites saw that their cause was lost; they scattered, some to the west, some to the north; Robert of Canterbury and Ulf of Dorchester rode out of the eastern gate of the city, and after slaying and otherwise maltreating many young men (who probably sought to stay their flight) reached the Naze in Essex and there got on board a crazy ship, which crazy as it was, seems to have borne them in safety over to Normandy. “Thus,” says the chronicler, “did he, according to the will of God, leave his pallium here in this land, and that archiepiscopal dignity which not according to God’s will he had here obtained.”
The Frenchmen gone, peace was easily negotiated between the cipher-king and his powerful ministers. To Earl Godwine, his wife, his sons and his daughter, full restitution was made of all the offices and all the property of which they had been deprived. “The Lady” was fetched back from her convent and again installed in the palace. “Friendship was made fast between Godwine’s family and the king; and to all men good laws were promised, and outlawed were all the Frenchmen who before perverted law and justice,[245] and counselled ill-will against this land, save those (few) persons whom the king liked to keep about him, because they were loyal to him and to his people.” At a great meeting of the witan, held outside of London, Earl Godwine appeared and made his defence, clearing himself, we are told, before his lord King Edward and before all the people of the land, of all the things that were laid to his charge and to that of his sons.
The chief agent in these negotiations was Stigand, Bishop of Winchester, a very noticeable figure in the ecclesiastical history of the times, a busy, diplomatising person who had been a keen partisan of the Lady Emma’s; had shared her downfall and had afterwards been appointed to the bishopric of Winchester, which he now exchanged for the archiepiscopal see of Canterbury, practically, though not canonically, vacant by the flight of Robert of Jumièges. His position, which was already in the eyes of strict churchmen a doubtful one so long as his predecessor lived, was not improved by his tardy journey to Rome in the year 1058 in quest of his pallium, for he had the misfortune to receive it from the hands of a Pope, Benedict X., who, though apparently chosen in a regular manner, did not second Hildebrand’s reforms, and being deposed in favour of Nicholas II., bishop of Florence, figures in ecclesiastical history as an anti-pope. A pallium conferred by such hands was held to bring with it no blessing; on the contrary, by committing the English metropolitan to the losing party, which opposed the famous Gregory VII., it had a very important influence on subsequent events, and gave to the buccaneering expedition of William the Bastard something of the character of a religious crusade.
To the great earl himself the revolution of 1052 brought no long enjoyment of power. Godwine fell sick soon after his landing in England, and though he recovered for a time, his health was evidently much shaken. In the following year, when King Edward was keeping Easter at Winchester with Godwine, Harold and Tostig for his guests, as they sat at meat, the earl “suddenly sank down by the king’s footstool, bereft of speech and strength. They carried him into the king’s bower, hoping that the attack would pass off, but it was not so. He continued so, speechless and powerless, from Easter Monday till the following Thursday [April 15, 1053], when he died. He lieth there within the Old Minster; and his son Harold took to his earldom (Wessex), resigning that which he had hitherto held (East Anglia), which was given to Elfgar,” son of Leofric and Godiva. In the face of this perfectly straightforward and circumstantial account given by the Saxon chronicler, of the death of an elderly statesman, after a hard and laborious life, from a stroke of apoplexy or paralysis, it is unnecessary to reproduce the idle legends of Norman historians two generations later, who represented that death as the fulfilment of a blasphemous imprecation of the divine vengeance on himself if he had had part or lot in the murder of the Etheling Alfred.
Earl Harold succeeded not only to the earldom but also to the political predominance of his father, and for the remaining thirteen years of Edward’s reign we may safely consider him as the real ruler of the kingdom. Only it must be observed that though Harold was the king’s efficient man of business, the chosen companion of his sports and of his leisure was another brother, Tostig, who in the year 1055 received the earldom of Northumbria. This peculiar position of favour in the palace and absenteeism from his province led to complications which will be related hereafter. For the present our notice of the internal affairs of the kingdom may close with the fact that in the year 1057 the Etheling Edward, son of Edmund Ironside, came to England accompanied by his wife, Agatha, a kinswoman of the Emperor Henry III., and by what a Saxon ballad-maker quaintly calls “a goodly team of bairns”. Probably it was the intention of the older Edward that his namesake should succeed him on the throne, though he may have at times vacillated between the more remote but known kinsman in Normandy and the nearer stranger from Hungary. But whatever the king’s intentions may have been, they were foiled by sickness or some less innocent agency. “We know not,” says the chronicler, “for what cause that was done that he might not see his kinsman, King Edward. Woe was that wretched mishap, and harmful to all this people that he ended his life so soon after he came to England, for the unhappiness of this poor folk.” There is a mystery in all this which it is vain now to try to penetrate. Only one cannot help again remarking the lack of virility in these latest scions of the house of Cerdic. Assuredly neither William the Bastard nor Harold Godwineson, would have been content to linger out forty years of life in exile, nor when returned to their native land would have been so easily snuffed out of existence as was this prince, the descendant of fifteen generations of West Saxon kings.
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We pass from the internal affairs of England to the notices, scanty, but possessing for us a peculiar interest, concerning wars with Scotland in the reign of Edward. We have seen that in 1018 the Scottish king, Malcolm II., by his victory at Carham wrested from Northumbria all its territory north of the Tweed. This king died in 1034, the year before the death of Canute. His own death seems to have been a violent one, but he had certainly murdered the man who, according to the complicated law of succession then prevailing, had the best right to succeed him on the throne, and had thus secured the succession for his grandson, a lad named Duncan. The short reign of this young man--it lasted only six years--was marked by some exciting events. In the year 1035 he led “an immense army” across the Border and laid siege to the new city of Durham. The siege lasted a long time, but in a successful sally of the besiegers the greater part of the Scottish cavalry was destroyed, and in the disordered flight of the army the infantry were also cut to pieces, and their heads being collected and brought within the walls were stuck upon stakes to adorn the market place of the city of St. Cuthbert. Then followed war, on the whole unsuccessful war, between Duncan and his cousin Thorfinn, the Scandinavian earl of Orkney and Caithness. Duncan was driven southward, and in August, 1040, he was murdered by the general who had hitherto been fighting his battles, Macbeth, Mormaer or Earl of Moray. There was nothing in this event to take it out of the ordinary category of royal murders in Scotland at this time. It took place not under Macbeth’s own roof but on neutral ground, at a place called Bothgowanan or the Smith’s bothie; the victim was not the venerable greybeard whom Tragedy brings before us, but a young man still “of immature age,” whose grandfather had not many years before killed the brother of Macbeth’s wife and ousted her family from the royal succession. In fact, we may almost say, looking to the vicissitudes of the two families who at this time alternately ruled Scotland, that it was Duncan’s turn to be murdered. Macbeth, who reigned from 1040 to 1058, seems to have been on the whole a good king, though reigning by a more than doubtful title. It is possible that he imitated his contemporary Canute by going on pilgrimage, as a chronicler tells us that in the year 1050 Macbeth, king of Scotland, scattered silver broadcast among the poor of Rome.
Such was the man against whom, in 1054, Siward the Strong, earl of Northumbria, moved with a large army accompanied by a fleet. Siward being himself brother-in-law of the murdered Duncan was uncle of the young Malcolm Canmore, who was now seeking to recover his father’s throne. We have also a hint from a later historian that there were Normans in the Scottish army. It is suggested, on rather slender evidence, that these were some of Edward’s favourites, displaced by the revolution of 1052, who had taken refuge at the court of Macbeth; and it is possible that their presence there may have had something to do with Siward’s expedition. However this may be, it is clear that a battle was fought on July 27, in which the Northumbrian earl was victorious, but at a heavy cost. His own son, Osbeorn, was slain (“with all his wounds in front,” as his father rejoiced to hear), and his sister’s son, Siward, as well as many of his own and the king’s house-carls. Some of these house-carls, we are expressly told, were Danes as well as Englishmen. There was a great and unprecedented capture of booty, but Macbeth himself escaped. He reigned, though probably with broken power, for four years longer, till 1058, in which year he was finally defeated and slain by Malcolm III. This prince, who is generally known by his epithet of Canmore (the Large-headed), is he who by his marriage with Margaret, daughter of the Etheling Edward, brought the blood of the old Saxon kings into the veins of the royal family of Scotland and indirectly into that of England also. Matilda, wife of Henry Beauclerk, daughter of Malcolm Canmore and Margaret, is the link which connects the Saxon with the Norman dynasty, Alfred with Victoria.
The year after his invasion of Scotland (1055) old Siward the Strong died of dysentery. Of him is told the well-known story that when he found his death drawing nigh, he said: “What a shame it is that I, who could not find my death in so many battles, should now be reserved for an inglorious death like that of a cow. At least arm me with coat of mail, sword and helmet: place my shield on my left arm, my gilded battle-axe in my right hand, that I, who was strongest among soldiers, may die a soldier’s death.” His command was obeyed, and thus honourably clad in armour he breathed out his soul. The great earldom of Northumbria, made vacant by the death of Siward, was bestowed on the king’s favourite brother-in-law, Tostig, who, however, held it not for long. Siward’s son, Waltheof, seems to have been little more than a child at his father’s death, but, though now passed over in the distribution of earldoms, he received, ten years after, the earldom of two southern counties, Northampton and Huntingdon, which had once formed an outlying portion of his father’s dominions, and he had a great share in the events which followed the Norman Conquest.
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The affairs of Wales, during the reign of Edward the Confessor, centred chiefly round the person of Griffith ap Llewelyn, “the head and shield and defender of the Britons,” as he is called by a Welsh chronicler; a terrible thorn in the side of England, as he must have appeared to his Saxon contemporaries. This man, whose father, Llewelyn, died in 1021, soon after achieving the supremacy in Wales, had been for sixteen years throneless and probably an exile. In 1039 Griffith slew the King of Gwynedd (North Wales), and being himself of a North Welsh house became practically supreme over all the Britons. And not over the Britons only did he win victories. “During his whole reign,” says the Chronicle of the Princes, “he pursued the Saxons and the pagan nations and killed and destroyed them and overcame them in a multitude of battles.” The life of a Welsh king at this time was necessarily one of continual turmoil. There was the ever-present rivalry between Gwynedd and Dyved (North and South Wales), barely held in check from time to time by the strong hand of such an one as Griffith. There were “the pagans,” the Danes of Dublin and Wexford, always ready to cross the narrow seas and harry the Welsh coast. Apparently the Christian Irish must sometimes have shared in these raids, for “the Scots” (which doubtless still means the Irish) are frequently alluded to as enemies of Griffith. In addition to this there was the long feud with Mercia, which had lasted for so many centuries, but which was now occasionally interrupted when it served the purpose of both Wales and Mercia to combine against Wessex.
In 1039, in the first year of Griffith’s reign, he won a great victory over the Mercians at “the Ford of the Cross” by the river Severn, slaying Leofric’s brother, Edwin, “and many good men besides,” as the Saxon chronicler admits. Then there was a check to Griffith’s career of victory. In 1042 he was taken prisoner by the pagans of Dublin, but two years later we find him at the head of his forces, defeating the Danish invaders with great slaughter. A namesake and rival, Griffith, son of Rhyddarch, whose father had reigned in South Wales, stirred up rebellion against him in 1046, but he was defeated by a joint expedition of Griffith, son of Llewelyn, and Earl Sweyn, son of Godwine. This co-operation of Wales and Mercia is memorable for more reasons than one, since it was on his return from this expedition that Sweyn Godwineson sinned that great sin with the Abbess of Leominster which ruined his career and, for a time at least, blighted the fortunes of his father.
There were some smaller skirmishes between Welshmen and Englishmen, but, omitting these, we pass on to the year 1055, when a war broke out which was partly caused by the discords and rivalries of English nobles. Godwine was now dead, and Harold was all-powerful. Leofric of Mercia, Godiva’s husband, still lived, but must have been an old man, since we find his grandsons, only ten years later, men in the vigour of manhood. For some reason or other--it is difficult not to see the hand of the great rival family in the affair--a charge of treason was brought against Leofric’s son, Elfgar, who had, we may remember, received the earldom of East Anglia when it was resigned by Harold on succeeding to Wessex. A general Witenagemot was now summoned to London, before which “Earl Elfgar was charged with being a traitor to the king and to all the people of the land, and he confessed this before all who were gathered there, though the words shot forth from him against his will”. So says the Peterborough chronicler, a strong partisan of the Godwine family. The Abingdon chronicler, who disliked them, says that “The Witenagemot in London outlawed Earl Elfgar without any guilt on his part”. The Worcester chronicler vacillates and says, “almost without guilt of his”. It is hopeless now, after the lapse of eight centuries and a half, to retry a cause which excited such differences of opinion among contemporaries. What is undoubted is that Elfgar’s earldom was given to Tostig Godwineson, who had just received the great earldom of Northumberland, and that the outlawed Elfgar betook himself to Ireland, raised there a fleet of eighteen ships and sailed across to Wales, where he threw himself on the hospitality and help of Griffith ap Llewelyn. With a great force of Irishmen and Welshmen Griffith marched against Ralph, the timid Earl of Hereford. This man, the king’s nephew, had collected a large number of the militia, but, in order probably that he might follow the French fashion of fighting, had mounted them on horses, the consequence of which was that “ere a single spear had been thrown, the English people fled, forasmuch as they had horses, and a good lot of them were slain, about four or five hundred, and not one on the other side”. Thus was Hereford laid at the mercy of the invaders, among whom there were probably some of the “pagans”. They carried the city by storm, burned both it and the minster, thereby breaking the heart of the good Bishop Athelstan, its builder; slew the priests in the minster and many others besides, and carried off all the treasures.
A proclamation went throughout almost the whole of England for the gathering of a fyrd at Gloucester, and Harold took the command. But then “people began to speak about peace”: a conference was held at Billingsley in Shropshire; and, as the Worcester chronicler sarcastically remarks, “when the enemy had done all the harm that was possible, then people took counsel that Earl Elfgar should be inlawed again and receive once more his earldom”. But though peace and friendship were supposed to have been “fastened” at Billingsley, war with Wales broke out again next year (1056), apparently in part owing to the martial ardour of Harold’s mass-priest, Leofgar, who succeeded the good old Athelstan as Bishop of Hereford. This extraordinary person, to the amazement of the chronicler, had worn his moustaches all through his priesthood until he was bishop;[246] and now “he abandoned his chrism and his rood, his ghostly weapons, and took to his spear and his sword after he had become bishop and so joined the army against the Welsh king, and was there slain and his priests with him; Elfnoth the sheriff also and many other good men; and the others fled away” (June 13, 1056). A dreary campaign followed, with much waste of horses and men, but at last old Leofric, with Harold and the universal pacificator, Bishop Ealdred, succeeded in making a peace, one of the conditions of which was Griffith’s oath that he would be King Edward’s loving and loyal under-king. Two years after, however, Elfgar, now Earl of Mercia and the head of his family (old Leofric having died the year before), was again expelled and again restored by the help of his Welsh friend, co-operating apparently with a certain Magnus, who brought ships from Norway, but about whom our information is very unsatisfactory.
It was probably about this time that the union between Wales and Mercia was made yet closer by the marriage of Griffith to Aldgyth, the beautiful daughter of Elfgar. His career, however, was drawing to a close. Successful as his expeditions had generally been, his people seem to have grown tired of the constant fever of strife with their neighbours. In 1063 war again broke out, and this time Harold was determined to deal a crushing blow. A sudden march to Griffith’s castle at Rhuddlan, on the north coast of Wales, failed to accomplish the arrest of the king, but was marked by the burning of the town and all the ships in the harbour with their tackle. In May, Harold sailed from Bristol all round Wales, receiving hostages and promises of obedience from the people; and Tostig meanwhile operated with a land force in the interior of the country. On August 5 Griffith was slain by some of his own followers, “because of the war which he waged against Earl Harold,” and his head, with the prow of his ship and the ornament thereon, was brought as a trophy to the conqueror. Thus, as a Welsh chronicler says, “The man who had been hitherto invincible was now left in the glens of desolation, after taking immense spoils and after innumerable victories and taking countless treasures of gold and silver and jewels and purple vestures”.
The kingdom was handed over to two brothers of Griffith on the usual conditions of oaths of fealty, hostages and tribute: but how little such promises availed in the disordered condition of the country, was seen two years after when a hunting lodge, which Harold, hoping to have the king there as his guest, began to build at Portskewet in Monmouthshire, was destroyed (August 24, 1065) by Caradoc, son of another Griffith, who was ruling in South Wales. Nearly all the men who were engaged on the work were slain, and the ample stores there collected were carried away. “We do not know who first counselled this piece of folly” (the building of a hunting-lodge in an enemy’s country) is the dry remark of the Worcester Chronicle.
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From these border wars we must now return to watch the course of events at Edward’s court during the closing years of his reign. The year 1064, which is an absolute blank in the Saxon Chronicles, is generally chosen for an event, undated, perplexing and mysterious, namely, Harold’s visit to the court of William the Norman, and his oath of fealty to that prince. About this oath, his subsequent breach of which figured so largely in the indictment preferred against him on the battlefield of Hastings, Norman writers have much to say, Saxon writers nothing, nor does the witness even of the Normans always agree together. It is impossible to doubt the truth of the main outlines of the story, but unfortunately it is equally impossible to fill in the details. Did Harold go to Normandy with express purpose to assure William of his nomination by Edward as the successor to his throne? Did he go thither in order to obtain the liberation of two of his kinsmen, hostages once given to the English king and transferred to the keeping of the Norman duke? Or was his visit to Rouen involuntary and accidental, the result of shipwreck and felonious detention by a lawless count? All of these versions of the story have been given, and though the last is the one which is generally received and on the whole the most probable, to speak with any certainty on the question seems impossible. All that will be attempted here will be to describe some of the chief scenes of the fatal journey as they are depicted in that all-but contemporary record, the Tapestry of Bayeux.
We see Harold taking leave of the aged king who, white-bearded, and adorned with crown and sceptre, is seated on his throne. With hawk on hand, preceded by his dogs and followed by his squire, Harold rides to the family property at Bosham and enters the church at that place to worship. He embarks, and crosses the channel with a favouring breeze filling his sails. There is no suggestion in the pictures of storm or shipwreck, though these seem to be almost required by the course of events. Whatever the cause may have been, Harold, when he lands in the territory of Guy, Count of Ponthieu, is arrested by the count’s orders, and is conducted, still with the hawk on his hand, but with dejected countenance and with spurless heels, to Beaurain, where he is imprisoned. Parleys (no doubt as to the amount of ransom demanded) follow with his captor: but at this point William of Normandy’s messengers arrive, who vigorously plead the cause of Harold and press for his liberation. The result of the negotiations and of the payment by the Norman duke of a heavy ransom (as to this the Tapestry is silent) is that Guy conducts his prisoner to William, who receives him in his palace as an honoured guest. William and Harold undertake together a campaign in Brittany under the shadow of Mont St. Michel. The soldiers are seen crossing the river Couesnon (the boundary between Normandy and Brittany), and holding high their shields above their heads as they wade the water breast-high. Some of the men are in danger of being swallowed up by the quicksands, from which they are drawn by the strong arm of the tall-statured Harold. At the close of this campaign Harold is knighted by Duke William, who with one hand places the helmet on his head, and with the other fastens the straps of his coat of mail.
Then follows at Bayeux the fateful scene of the oath-taking. The duke, attended by his courtiers (a full assembled parliament according to the poet Wace), sits on his throne, and Harold stands before him between two great coffers, which (as we know from other sources) were filled with the bones of some of the greatest saints in Normandy. He puts a hand on each coffer-lid and swears; but what is the purport of the oath? The Tapestry itself simply says that he makes his oath to Duke William. Of the Norman writers some represent him as swearing that he will marry William’s daughter, Adela (a little damsel not half his age); others, as becoming in the fullest sense of the word William’s vassal; others as undertaking to hand over to him the Castle of Dover; but almost all give us the impression that in some way or other Harold was cognisant of William’s determination to assert his claim as heir to his cousin of England, and promised to aid him therein when the occasion should arise. What burden an oath thus exacted under duress should have laid upon the conscience of the swearer, and how the contract was affected by the undoubted fact that the consent of the witan was necessary for any disposal of the crown either by Edward or by Harold, are questions of casuistry on which much has been said, but which need not be discussed here. We note, however, that the Tapestry gives no support to the often-repeated story that Harold was beguiled into taking the oath on relics of greater and more awful sanctity than he was aware of. Whether the whole episode were mere misadventure or the failure of some cunningly devised scheme on Harold’s part, one cannot but marvel at the lightness of heart with which he threw himself into the power of the most dangerous of all his rivals, at a time when he needed all his vigilance and all his ability in order to secure the splendid prize for which he had so long been labouring.[247]
The year following that usually assigned to Harold’s visit to Normandy (1065) witnessed another revolution in the fortunes of one member of the Godwine family. Tostig, Earl of Northumbria, was, as has been said, an especial favourite at court, and seems to have been the best beloved brother of the royal “Lady,” Edith. He was, not, however, by any means equally popular with the men of his own Northumbrian earldom, who seem to have complained both of his frequent absences and of the stern, almost bloodthirsty, character of his government when he did appear among them. There was a general rising of all the thegns in Yorkshire and Northumberland; they decreed in some tumultuous assembly the outlawry of their earl, then hunting in Wiltshire with the king; they massacred all the men of his household, whether English or Danes, upon whom they could lay their hands, and seized his weapons stored up in the arsenal at York, his gold, his silver and all his money about which they could obtain information. These massacres and robberies seem to have taken place both at York and Lincoln; and the insurgent thegns then proceeded to elect a new earl to reign over them. This was the young Morkere, grandson of Leofric. Elfgar, the twice-banished Earl of Mercia, was now dead; his eldest son, Edwin, had succeeded him in Mercia, and to Edwin’s younger brother, Morkere, was given the splendid but difficult office which had been wrested from Tostig. In support of their rebellious acts--for they were nothing less--the northern thegns marched to Northampton, where Morkere was joined by his brother, Edwin, at the head of the Mercian fyrd and--ominous conjunction---of many Welsh auxiliaries. Once more civil war seemed inevitable, but the good offices of Harold were sought for as mediator between the insurgents and the king. He failed, however, to reconcile the Northerners and his brother; and after two gemots held at Northampton and at Oxford the negotiations ended in an entire surrender to all the demands of the rebels (October 28, 1065). The outlawed Tostig went over sea with his wife and followers to his brother-in-law, Count Baldwin; the grant of his earldom was confirmed to Morkere, and the insurgent army at last returned northward, not, however, till they had so wasted Northamptonshire with fire and sword and carried off such quantities of cattle that it was years before that county recovered from their ravages.
What was the precise part taken by Harold in this revolution, which implied in some degree the depression of the house of Godwine and the elevation of the rival house of Leofric, it is very difficult now to discover. Everything that he did may be fully accounted for and justified by a patriotic abhorrence of civil war, a recognition of the fact that his brother’s government had been arbitrary and unpopular, and a noble willingness to place the welfare of England before the private advantage of his own family. On the other hand, there are curious traditions as to an enmity subsisting from boyhood between the two brothers, Harold and Tostig, and some even of their contemporaries averred that the whole revolution was planned by Harold for the overthrow of his brother. This suggestion seems most improbable, but it is evident that, whether as a cause or consequence of the disgrace of Tostig, Harold does from this time forward unite himself more closely to the house of Leofric, whose granddaughter, Aldgyth, widow of the Welsh king, Griffith, and sister of Edwin and Morkere, he seems to have married about this time. This marriage, which rendered it impossible for him to fulfil one at least of the articles of his covenant with William of Normandy, may have been the first intimation to his great rival that Harold regarded the promise made to him as of none effect.
Whatever may have been Harold’s feelings as to his brother’s disgrace, there can be no doubt that it cut King Edward to the heart, and probably, as one of his biographers hints, hastened his end. He was now apparently a little over sixty years of age, a man of moderate stature, with milk-white hair and beard, with broad and rosy face, white and slender hands and a certain royalty of aspect. Already perhaps that belief in the healing efficacy of his touch had begun to spread among the multitude, which engendered the mass of miracles wherewith his memory was afterwards loaded. These miracles being strangely supposed to be in some way specially connected with the royal office, led to the practice of “touching for the King’s evil,” which was continued till the reign of the last Stuart.
Through all these later years of his reign he had been intently watching the progress of his great church in the Island of Thorney by the Thames. Its foundations of large square blocks of greystone, its apsidal end, its central tower and two towers at the west end with their beautiful bells, and the long rows of its columns with their richly adorned bases and capitals, are enthusiastically described by his biographer. He came to Westminster on December 21, 1065, “and caused the minster to be hallowed which he had himself built to the glory of God and St. Peter and all God’s saints, and the hallowing of this church was on Childmass day” (December 28), but he was not himself present at the hallowing, and his death took place on Twelfth night (January 5, 1066).
The death-bed sayings of the old king, as reported by his biographer, are perhaps best known in Tennyson’s poetical version of them, but have, even unparaphrased, a poetical beauty of their own. After describing the vengeance of God which was coming upon England for her sins, and his pitiful prayer to the Most High that this punishment might not endure for ever, he repeats the words which he has heard from the saints whom he has seen in vision: “The green tree which springs from the trunk, when it has been severed thence and removed to a distance of three acres, shall return to its original trunk and shall join itself to its root whence first it sprang. Then shall the head again be green and bear fruit after its flower; and then may you certainly hope for better times.” Most of the bystanders listened with awe and wonder to the dying king’s prophecy, but Archbishop Stigand, with his hard worldly wisdom, said: “The old man is in his dotage”.
But Edward not only uttered this perplexing prophecy; he also, there can be little doubt, uttered some words which amounted to a bequest of his crown, as far as he had power to bequeath it, not to William but to Harold. There seems no reason why we should reject the story told in the quaint verses of the Chronicle--
Nathless, that wisest man, Dying made fast the realm To a high-risen man, Even to Harold’s self, Who was a noble earl: He did at every tide Follow with loyal love All of his lord’s behests, Both in his words and deeds: Naught did he e’er neglect Whate’er of right belonged Unto the people’s king.
“And now was Harold hallowed as king, but little stillness did he there enjoy, the while that he wielded the kingdom.”