Chapter V · THE DANISH CONQUEST OF ENGLAND.[464] 975–1016. (continued 2)

Exploits of Ulfcytel of East-Anglia. 1004.

322The events of the next year form the exact converse of the tale which I have just told. We have seen the spirit of a gallant army foully damped by the malice of a single traitor. We shall now see the efforts of a single hero, boldly struggling against every difficulty, feebly backed by those who should have supported him, and winning, in a succession of defeats, a glory as pure as that of the most triumphant of conquerors. This man was Ulfcytel, who is said to have been a son-in-law of the King, and who was at this time Earl, or at least military commander, of the East-Angles.^[618] His name proclaims his Danish origin, but it was in him that England now found her stoutest champion in her hour of need. This next summer Swegen took his course towards a part of England which was largely peopled by men of his own race, to the old kingdom of |Swegen surprises and burns Norwich.| Guthrum. His coming was sudden; he sailed to the mouth of the Yare; he pushed his way up the stream, and stormed and burned the town which had arisen near the point of its junction with the Wensum, and which, at least in later times, has spread itself on both sides of the smaller |History of the city.| river. Norwich was in East-Anglia what Exeter was in the Western shires. But the city itself could not boast of the same antiquity as the Damnonian Isca. The changes of the waters in that region had caused the British and Roman site to be forsaken; the Icenian Venta survived only in the vague description of Caistor, a description common to it with many other Roman towns whose distinctive names have been forgotten. At some distance from the Roman site, where the hills slope down to the right bank of the Wensum, the East-Anglian Kings had reared one of those vast mounds which form so marked a feature in the Old-English system of defence, and had crowned it doubtless with a fortified dwelling. This home 323of native kingship was to be the forerunner of one of the |Norwich Castle.| stateliest of Norman castles, one which immediately suggests a name than which few in our history are more illustrious. The castle of Norwich became the stronghold of the earls of the house of Bigod, one of whom lived to |1297.| wrest the final confirmation of the liberties of England from the hands of the great Edward himself. As at Exeter, as at Salisbury, the Norman castle had already a rude forerunner, |Norwich not yet a Bishop’s See.| but the Norman minster had none. The Bishop of the East-Angles still had his seat at Elmham. A twofold translation of the see towards the end of the century, first to Thetford and then to Norwich, points out those two towns as being at this time the most considerable in the district, and we accordingly find them the principal objects |Importance of the town.| of hostile attack. Norwich was now one of the greatest seats of commerce in England; the city had been greatly favoured by several successive Kings, and it |Norwich burned by Swegen.| enjoyed the privilege of a mint. A place thus rich and flourishing was naturally marked as a prey by the invaders, who harried and burned it, seemingly without resistance. The blow was so sudden that even a guardian |Ulfcytel and the Witan of East-Anglia make peace with the Danes.| like Ulfcytel was unprepared. He now gathered together the provincial council, the Witan of East-Anglia,^[619] whose mention shows how much of independence the ancient kingdom still retained. Peace was patched up with the invaders, who seemingly returned to their ships. But, |The Danes break the peace and march on Thetford.| three weeks afterwards, the Danes broke the peace, and marched secretly to Thetford, the town in the district next in importance to Norwich. This march seems to have led them to a greater distance from the coast than any Danish army had ventured since the old invasions in Ælfred’s time. Their movement did not escape the watchful eye 324|Plans of Ulfcytel.| of Ulfcytel,^[620] and the plan which he formed, though not wholly successful, seems to vouch for his generalship. He at once gathered his forces together as secretly as he could, and sent a detachment to the coast to destroy the ships of the invaders. In this latter part of his scheme he wholly failed; those whom he sent on that errand proved |Thetford plundered and burned.| either cowardly or unfaithful. And, even with the force under his own command, he was unable to save Thetford. The town was entered by the Danes, who plundered it, stayed there one night, and in the morning set fire to it |Drawn battle between Swegen and Ulfcytel.| and marched away towards their ships. But they were hardly clear of the burning town when Ulfcytel came upon them with his army. That army was comparatively small; had the whole force of East-Anglia been there, so our authors tell us, never would the heathen men have got back to their ships. As it was, the Danes themselves said that they never met in all England with worse handplay than Ulfcytel brought upon them.^[621] It seems to have been a drawn battle. The Danes so far succeeded that they were able to accomplish their object of reaching their ships; but the fighting was hard, and the slaughter great on both sides, and we do not hear of either side |Severe loss among the English leaders.| keeping the field. As at Maldon, as at Æthelingadene, the slaughter on the English side fell most heavily on those who were high in rank or command.^[622] No doubt, in all these battles, just as in the battles of Homer, the 325chief stress of the fight fell on the thegns of the King or Earl in command, especially on the high-born youths who were personally attached to him and his service. We have seen that it was so at Maldon, where we know the details; it is equally clear that it was so at Thetford, where we |Illustrations supplied by Ulfcytel’s campaign.| know only the general result. This East-Anglian campaign is also a good illustration of the general conditions of warfare at the time. It shows the difficulty with which the force either of the whole kingdom or of a single earldom could be got together, and how much was lost through mere slowness of operations. Even with a vigorous chief at the head, the two chief towns of the earldom were surprised and burned. But the story shows no less plainly how much a single faithful and valiant leader could do to struggle with these difficulties. A shire under the government of Ulfcytel was in a very different case from a shire under the government of Ælfric. Nay, could Ulfcytel, instead of holding a mere local command, have changed places with the boastful Emperor of all Britain, we can well believe that the whole story of the Danish wars would have had a very different ending.

Year of respite and of famine. 1005.

The resistance of Ulfcytel, though not wholly successful, seems to have had at least a share in winning for England a momentary respite. We hear of no further ravages after the battle of Thetford, and in the next year King Swegen, instead of attacking any part of England, sailed home again to Denmark. A famine, the most fearful ever remembered in England, was most likely the result of his ravages, but it no doubt also helped to send him away for a while from the wasted land. The Witan met in the course of the year, but we have no record of any proceedings more important than the usual grants to monasteries |Events of the year 1006.| and to the King’s thegns.^[623] But the next year is crowded with events of all kinds. We now come to the rise of a 326man who was to be even more completely the evil genius of the later years of this unhappy reign than Ælfric had |Rise and character of Eadric.| been the evil genius of its earlier years. This was Eadric, the son of Æthelric,^[624] surnamed Streona, who is described as a man of low birth, of a shrewd intellect—which he used only to devise selfish and baleful schemes—of an eloquent tongue—which he used only to persuade men to mischief—as proud, cruel, envious, and faithless. From elaborate pictures of this sort we instinctively make some deductions; still the character of Eadric is written plainly enough in his recorded crimes. That such a man should rise to power was the greatest of evils for the nation; still his rise illustrates one good side of English society at the time. |Illustrations supplied by his advancement.| In England the poor and ignoble still could rise; on the continent they had nearly lost all chance. Eadric rose to rank and wealth by his personal talents, talents which no writer denies, though they all paint in strong colours the evil use which he made of them. And he really rose; he did not merely, like many low-born favourites of other princes, exercise a secret influence over a weak master. He was advanced to the highest dignities of the realm; he stood forth in the great council of the nation among the foremost of its chiefs; he commanded the armies of his sovereign; and, what would most of all shock modern prejudices, he was allowed to mingle his blood with that of kings. Now, if a bad man could thus rise by evil arts, it clearly was not impossible that a good man might also rise in a worthier way. Instances of either kind were doubtless unusual; the general feeling of the time was strongly aristocratic; still there was no legal or even social hindrance to keep a man from rising out of utter obscurity to the highest places short of kingship. Eadric, like most favourites, seems to have made his way to power through the ruin of an earlier favourite. A man named Wulfgeat 327had been for some years the chief adviser of Æthelred. It |Fall of Wulfgeat.| is not clear whether he had ever risen above thegn’s rank. But he clearly exercised some functions which clothed him with a good deal of power, for, among his other offences, unjust judgements are spoken of.^[625] Wulfgeat was now, doubtless through the influence of Eadric, deprived of all his offices, and his property was confiscated, a sentence which would seem to imply the authority of a Witenagemót. The sentence may have been a righteous one; but at all events the degradation of Wulfgeat opened the way for the elevation of a worse man than himself. Wulfgeat is at least not described as an open traitor and murderer. |Eadric the chief favourite.| Eadric, who had probably been rising in position for some years, now appears as the reigning favourite and as the |Earl Ælfhelm murdered at Shrewsbury.| director of all the crimes and treasons of the court. A monstrous crime was now committed. Ælfhelm, a nobleman who had been for some years Earl of a part of Northumberland, probably of Deira,^[626] was present, seemingly at the court or at some Gemót, at Shrewsbury. There Eadric received him as a familiar friend, entertained him for some days, and on the third or fourth day took him out to a hunting-party. While others were intent on the sport, the executioner of the town, one Godwine, surnamed Porthund,^[627] whom Eadric had won over by large gifts and promises, started forth from an ambush at a favourable moment and put the Earl to death.^[628] The sons of Ælfhelm, 328Wulfheah and Ufegeat, were soon after blinded by the King’s order at Cookham, a royal seat in Buckinghamshire. |Ælfheah Archbishop of Canterbury. 1006.| Amidst all these crimes, Archbishop Ælfric died, and Ælfheah of Winchester, who was before long to take his place beside Dunstan as a canonized saint, succeeded to the metropolitan throne.

Scottish inroad. 1006.

These events seem to have taken up the earlier part of the year. In the summer a new Danish invasion began, and there seems reason to believe that it took place at the same time as a Scottish inroad, which was perhaps planned in concert.^[629] It is now a long time since we have heard |Death of Kenneth. 994.| of any disturbances on the part of Scotland proper. King Kenneth, the faithful vassal of Eadgar, had died in |Accession of Malcolm. 1004.| the year of the great invasion of Olaf and Swegen. But his son Malcolm did not obtain quiet possession of the Scottish crown till ten years later. He was now, it would 329seem, determined to revenge the wrong which he had |[1000.]| suffered at the hands of Æthelred in the devastation of |Malcolm besieges Durham.| Cumberland. He is said to have invaded Northumberland and to have laid siege to Durham. The new seat of the Bernician bishopric^[630] was growing into an important city, and it had already become an important military post. But the government of the country was in feeble hands. |Cowardice of Earl Waltheof.| Waltheof,^[631] the reigning Earl, was old and dispirited, and, instead of meeting the invaders, he shut himself up in |Victory of his son Uhtred.| King Ida’s castle at Bamburgh. But he had a son, Uhtred, whose name we shall often meet in the history of the time, and whose career is a strangely chequered one. When his father failed in his duty, he supplied his place, he gathered an army, rescued Durham, and gained a signal victory over the Scots.^[632] Towards the city which he thus saved Uhtred stood in a relation which we should have looked for rather in the eighteenth than in the tenth century. He was married to a daughter of Ealdhun, the Bishop who had just removed his see to Durham, and in the character of episcopal son-in-law he held large grants of episcopal |He unites both the Northumbrian Earldoms.| lands. Uhtred’s behaviour gained him the special favour of Æthelred, who—doubtless by the authority of one of the Gemóts of this year—deposed Waltheof from his earldom, bestowed it on his son, and also added the earldom of Deira, now vacant by the murder of Ælfhelm.^[633] |His marriages.| Uhtred, thus exalted, seems to have had no further need of episcopal leases; for he sent the Bishop’s daughter back to her father, honestly returning the estates which he had received with her. He then married the daughter of a rich 330citizen, whom he held by quite another tenure, that of killing her father’s bitter enemy Thurbrand. This he, unluckily for himself, failed to do, and this failure would seem to have set aside the second marriage also, as we presently find him receiving the hand of King Æthelred’s daughter Ælfgifu.^[634] If all this is true—and the genealogical and local detail with which it is given seems to stamp it as true—the ties of marriage must have sat quite as lightly on a Northumbrian Earl as ever they did on a Norman Duke. The tale indeed suggests that even the daughters of Bishops, a class whom we should hardly have expected to find so familiarly spoken of after Dunstan’s reforms, may have been sometimes married Danish fashion. But the fact that an Earl did not disdain the daughter of a rich citizen at once shows the importance which some even of the northern English cities—for either York or Durham must be meant—had already reached, and it also shows that no very broad line as yet separated the different classes of society in such matters. The story again marks the ferocious habits of the Danish parts of England. It seems the most natural thing in the world for a man on his marriage to undertake to kill his father-in-law’s enemy. We shall find that this engagement of Uhtred to kill Thurbrand was the beginning of a long series of crimes, of an hereditary deadly feud, which went on till after the Norman Conquest.

Such was the Scottish inroad and its results. It is wrongly placed, and some of the details may be suspected, but the outline of the story may, I think, be admitted. |Danish invasion of the year 1006.| But of the Danish invasion there is no doubt at all. In the month of July a vast fleet appeared off Sandwich, and Kent and Sussex were ravaged without mercy. Æthelred for once seems to have seriously thought of personal action 331against the enemy.^[635] He gathered together an army from |An English army raised, but in vain.| Mercia and Wessex, which was kept throughout the whole autumn in readiness for an engagement. But nothing came of this unusual piece of energy. The old causes were still at work, and the enemy, perhaps remembering the reception which they had met with at the hands of Ulfcytel, seem now to have avoided a battle.^[636] They plundered here and there, and went backwards and forwards to their ships, till, as winter approached, the English army dispersed, and the King returned to his old quarters at Shrewsbury. There is a vein of bitter sarcasm in the way in which the tale is told in the Chronicles. The writers keenly felt the incapacity of their rulers, and the degradation of their |The Danes go back to Wight. November, 1006.| country. The Danes went back to their “frith-stool”^[637]—their safe asylum, their inviolable sanctuary—in the Isle of Wight. Presently, at Christmas, when no resistance was likely, they went forth to their “ready farm,” to the quarters which stood awaiting them, as it were to gather in their crops and to enjoy the fat of their own land.^[638] |Great plundering expedition in the winter of 1006–7.| That is to say, they went on a plundering expedition which carried them further from their own element than they had ever yet ventured. They marched across Hampshire to Reading, and thence up the valley of the Thames, “doing according to their wont and kindling their beacons”—that is, no doubt, wasting and burning the whole country. They thus dealt with Reading, with Wallingford, with Cholsey. They were now in the midst 332of a land where almost every step is ennobled by memories of Ælfred. Out of mere bravado, it would seem, they climbed the neighbouring height, the long ridge of Æscesdún, which looks down on the spot where, |871.| in the great King’s first campaign, victory had for a moment shone on the West-Saxon banners. They marched along the ridge till they reached the vast barrow which, under the corrupted form of Cuckamsley,^[639] still preserves the name of Cwichelm, one of the two West-Saxon |636.| Kings who first submitted to baptism. This was a spot where, in times of peace, the people of that inland shire had held their local assemblies, and some unknown seer had risked the prediction that, if the Danes ever got so far from the sea, they would never see their ships again. The falsehood of the prophecy was now shown. The Danes crossed the range of hills; they marched down on the other side, and went on to the south. At Kennet, now Marlborough, an English force at last met them, but it was speedily put to flight. The Danes then turned homewards. They passed close by the gates of the royal city of Winchester, displaying in triumph to its inhabitants the spoils of the inland shires of Wessex, now become the defenceless prey of the sea-rovers.^[640]

This was the most fearful inroad which England had yet seen, one which showed that the parts furthest from the sea were now no more safe from Danish ravages than 333the exposed coasts of Kent and Sussex. The King kept |Witenagemót of Shrewsbury. 1006–7.| his Christmas at Shrewsbury, and there the Witan met. All heart and hope seemed to be gone; no one could devise any means of withstanding the force which had now harried every shire in Wessex. Nothing could be thought of but the old device; the broken reed was again to be leaned upon; ambassadors were sent, once more offering |Tribute again paid to the Danes. 1007.| money as the price of the cessation of the ravages. The offer was accepted; but the price was of course again raised; thirty-six thousand pounds was to be paid, and the Danish army was to receive provisions. They were fed during the whole winter at the general cost of England, and early in the next year the sum of money demanded was paid.

Two years’ respite. 1007–8.

We can never speak or think of these wretched attempts to buy peace without a feeling of shame, and yet, in this case at least, the payment may not have been such utter madness as it appears at first sight. Of course nothing more than a respite was ever gained; when the Danes had spent the money, they came again for more. And it would seem, from the example of Ulfcytel, that a respite could be as easily won by a manful, even if not perfectly successful, resistance. Still this payment did gain for the country a breathing-space at a time when a breathing-space was absolutely needed. We hear nothing of any more invasions for two years, and there was at least an attempt made to spend the interval in useful legislation and in putting the country into a more efficient state of defence. Æthelred and his favourites, as usual, spoiled everything; but we need not attribute their cowardice and incapacity to all the Witan of England. As far as we can see, the schemes of the legislature were well considered; a respite was needed in order to devise any scheme at all, and humiliating as it was to buy that respite, such a course may have been absolutely necessary. 334But in this reign everything was thwarted by executive misconduct. Æthelred first laid on his Witan the necessity of consenting to all this degradation, and he then frustrated their endeavours to make such degradation needless for the future.

Eadric made Ealdorman of the Mercians. 1007.

Meanwhile the reigning favourite attained the height of his greatness. He was made Ealdorman of the Mercians,^[641] dishonouring the post once held by the glorious daughter of Ælfred. It was most likely at this time that he received the King’s daughter Eadgyth in marriage. We have now to repeat the same comments which we made in the case of Ælfric. That old enemy, after his last treason |1003.| four years before, now vanishes from history, and his place |Inexplicable treasons of Eadric.| as chief traitor is taken by Eadric. The history of Eadric from this moment is simply a catalogue of treasons as unintelligible as those of his predecessor. Why a man who had just risen to the highest pitch of greatness, son-in-law of his sovereign and viceroy of an ancient kingdom, should immediately ally himself with the enemies of his King and country, is one of those facts which are utterly incomprehensible. But that it is a fact there is no good reason to doubt. Our best authorities for this period, the writers nearest to the time, those least given to exaggeration or romantic embellishment, distinctly assert that it was so, and we have nothing but ingenious guesses on the other side.

Legislation of the years 1008–1009.

The next year is one memorable in the annals of our early legislation, and the year which followed it is still more so. The civil functions of the King and his Witan were in full activity during the two years of respite. The laws of Æthelred form several distinct statutes or collections of clauses, most of which are without date; but, of the few dated ordinances, one belongs to the former of 335these two years, while another may, on internal evidence, |Laws of 1008.| be safely set down as belonging to the same period. The former statute^[642] deals mainly with ecclesiastical matters, but it also contains provisions both of a moral and of a political kind. On these points however we get much more of general exhortations than of really specific enactments. The whole reads like an act of penitence on the part of a repentant nation awakened by misfortune to a sense of national sins. Heathenism is to be cast out, an ordinance which shows what had been the effect of the Danish invasions. Such a precept would have been needless in the days of Ine or Offa. But now, not only were many heathen strangers settled in the land, but we may even believe that some native Englishmen may have fallen off to the worship of the gods who seemed to be the stronger. Some of the clauses are vague enough. All laws are to be just; every man is to have his rights; all men are to live in peace and friendship—excellent advice, no doubt, but hard to carry out in any time and place, and hardest of all when Æthelred and Eadric were to be the chief administrators of the law. Punishments are to be mild; death especially is to be sparingly inflicted; Christian and innocent men are not to be sold out of the land, least |Laws against the slave-trade.| of all to heathen purchasers.^[643] This last prohibition is one which is constantly repeated in the legislation of this age, showing at once how deeply the evil was felt, and how little legislation could do to get rid of it. We must never forget that slavery was fully established throughout England, though the proportion of slaves varied greatly in 336different parts of the country. The slave class was recruited from two sources. Englishmen were reduced to slavery for various crimes by sentence of law, and the children of such slaves followed the condition of their fathers.^[644] Welsh captives taken in war formed another class, and the proportion of slaves to freemen was unusually large in the shires on the Welsh border. Slaves of both classes were freely sold to the Danes in Ireland, and the words of the statute seem to imply that the kidnapping of persons of free condition was not unknown.^[645] Both these practices our present statute endeavours to hinder. The same prohibition was re-enacted under Cnut,^[646] but the practice survived all the laws aimed against it, and we shall see, as we go on, it was in full force a few years after the Norman Conquest. The intention in this enactment is as good as it could be; but the enactment is vague, no definite penalty is attached to breaches of the law, and we are not surprised to hear that it had little practical effect. Some of the other precepts are even vaguer. We may sum up the whole by saying that all virtues are to be practised and all vices avoided; all church-dues are to be regularly paid, and all festivals are to be regularly kept, especially the festival of the newest English saint, the martyred King Eadward.^[647] The whole is wound up with a pious and patriotic resolve of real and impressive solemnity. The nation pledges itself to fidelity to God and the King. It will worship one God and be true to one royal lord; it will 337manfully and with one accord defend life and land, and will pray earnestly to God Almighty for his help.^[648]

In all this we see a spirit of real reform and real earnestness thoroughly suited to the time. And if some of the ordinances of the Witan are somewhat vague and dreamy, we find one at least of a more definite and practical kind. |The formation of a fleet decreed.| The happy days of Eadgar are to be restored, when yearly after Easter the royal fleet of England sailed forth, and when no enemy dared approach the land which it guarded.^[649] Under the wretched advisers of his son this regular order had doubtless been neglected. Ships had sometimes been assembled, but certainly not as a matter of regular yearly course. It is singular how seldom, in dealing with an enemy so essentially sea-faring, we hear of any attempt at |992.| action by sea. The gallant sea-fight of sixteen years earlier^[650] stands almost alone. But now the good old practice was to be renewed, and the royal fleet was to assemble yearly |Ordinances against desertion from the land-force.| after Easter.^[651] Nor was the efficiency of the land-force forgotten. It was secured by heavy penalties against deserters. A fine of one hundred and twenty shillings was incurred in ordinary cases; but when the King was present in person, desertion placed the life and estate of the culprit at the royal mercy.^[652] The contributions for the repair of forts and bridges were to be strictly discharged,^[653] and generally everything to do with the defence of the land was to be put on the best footing that might be.

Decrees of Enham,

The decrees of the undated Council of Enham^[654] are marked as belonging to the same period, by the repetition 338of nearly the same enactments, often in nearly the same words. They contain much the same moral and religious exhortations, and much the same ordinances for the mustering of the land and sea-force, for the repair of the forts and bridges, for the punishment of deserters and of those |drawn up in the name of the Witan only.| who damage a ship of war. But the most remarkable thing about this statute is that it is drawn up in the name of the Witan only, without any mention of the King.^[655] But there is no need to infer that there was in this case any departure from the usual legislative process. The Witan only are mentioned; but the action of the Witan implies the action of the King, just as in many places in the Chronicles, where the King only is mentioned, the action of the King implies the action of the Witan. We may indeed fairly suppose that both these statutes were more distinctly the work of the Witan, and less distinctly the work of the King, than in most other cases. The laws of Ælfred were the work of the King, which he submitted to the Witan for their approval.^[656] So, we may be sure, was the case with the laws of the other great Kings who came after him. But we may well believe that the laws of Æthelred were the work of Æthelred only in the sense in which the Great Charter was the work of John. Both statutes breathe the 339same spirit, a spirit widely different from anything likely to come forth from Æthelred or his immediate counsellors. They clearly sprang from the best elements of wisdom that the Great Council of the nation could still supply. They show a real desire to mend the ways of the nation, to make satisfaction to God and man for the past, and for the future to work manfully alike for national reformation and for the national defence. The whole tone is at once pious and patriotic; and the piety is of a kind which, while it strictly enforces every ecclesiastical observance, by no means forgets the weightier matters of the law, judgement, mercy, and truth. In all this we can hardly fail to trace the hand of good Archbishop Ælfheah.

The fleet raised by contributions of districts.

A fleet then was to be raised, a fleet such as guarded the land in the days of Ælfred and Eadgar. But how was the fleet to be raised? This question leads us to a most remarkable statement in our authorities, the details of which are puzzling in the highest degree, but as to the general bearing of which there can be no doubt.^[657] The cost of the fleet was to be borne by the nation at large, individuals or districts being made to contribute according to their means and extent. In those days land was of course taken as the only standard of property on which the assessment could be made. It does not appear that either individuals or districts were called on to make any contributions in money to the royal treasury. They were to contribute in kind, according to a scale laid down by the Witan, in the shape of ships, or of things needful for the ships or their crews. There can be no doubt that, in the reign of Æthelred, this was a much wiser arrangement; money which had to pass through the hands either of the King or of his favourite would most |The system not a new one.| likely not have appeared again in the form of ships. The practice was not one which was invented for the nonce. 340There is evidence to show that a contribution of ships in |995–1005.| kind was the ancient custom. In the will of Archbishop Ælfric, which must of course have been drawn up a few years before this time, that prelate bequeaths a ship to his flock in Kent and another to his former flock in Wiltshire.^[658] This gift must have been intended to relieve the people of those shires from some part of their share in this doubtless heavy impost. It is hardly possible that the bequest can have any other object; one can think of no other motive which could lead an Archbishop or any one else to leave |The contribution made by shires.| a ship to a shire, especially to an inland shire. This evidence seems to show that the contribution was made by shires, that each shire had to furnish a certain number of ships according to its extent, the assessment on individuals or on smaller districts being doubtless settled in the Scirgemót. This was most likely the old and regular way of raising a fleet, the way in which the great fleets of Ælfred |This assessment the origin of ship-money.| and Eadgar had been raised. But this vote of King Æthelred’s Witenagemót does not only look backward; it looks forward. There can be no doubt that, in this ancient way of gathering together a fleet, we have the germ of the famous ship-money of the seventeenth century.^[659] The writs discovered by Noy calling on maritime, and sometimes on inland, counties and places to furnish ships, and |1634–5.| the writs issued by Charles the First in pursuance of the precedents thus discovered, undoubtedly take their root in the statute of the thirtieth year of King Æthelred. They are the degenerate successors of that great vote of the Witenagemót of 1008, just as that vote was the more lawful successor of earlier votes in the days of England’s greatest Kings. There is of course one all important difference between the two cases. The contributions levied 341by Charles were levied by an usurping stretch of the royal prerogative; the contributions levied by Ælfred, Eadgar, and Æthelred were granted, in due form of law, by the Great Council of the nation. But the impost was the same, though the authority by which it was raised was lawful in the one case and unlawful in the other. The earlier writs of ship-money under Charles demanded actual ships, just as in the case before us. And there was a call for special heed to the fleet in the days of Charles, just as much as there was in the days of Æthelred. To say nothing of the general complications of Europe, the Algerine corsairs, though not quite so formidable as Swegen’s Danes, did serious damage to English commerce, and they sometimes actually landed and plundered on the English and Irish coasts. The objection was to the illegal shape in which the demand came. And the later writs, which, under pretence of a composition for the actual ships, levied a tax by royal authority over the whole country, were a further abuse. Money came into the King’s clutches, not only without any lawful right, but without any kind of guaranty that it would be applied to the purposes for which it professed to be raised. This was the very evil against which the ancient mode of contributions in kind effectually guarded.

Embassy to Normandy. 1009?

Besides these vigorous preparations at home, there seems some reason to believe that an attempt was made at this time to strengthen England by foreign help. It was plainly felt that the peace bought from the Danes had secured only a breathing-space, that their attacks would soon begin again, and that it was necessary to employ the blessed interval in obtaining support from every possible quarter. It was not unnatural to hope that the marriage of Emma had gained for England a continental ally, and we are told, on secondary but not contemptible authority, that Æthelred now sent to his brother-in-law Duke Richard, 342asking for both help and counsel.^[660] There is nothing unlikely in the statement; but, whatever may have been given by Richard in the way of counsel, it does not appear |No Norman help given.| that a single Norman ship or Norman soldier was sent to the help of England. Hugh, the betrayer of Exeter, is the only recorded contribution which either Norman chivalry or Norman churlhood made to the defence of our shores against the Dane. Nor indeed was there any strong reason why Richard should help his brother-in-law, unless he had taken up the cause as a kind of crusade, and had stepped in as a Christian champion against the heathen invaders. But Richard and his subjects were Normans before they were Christians, and all the traditions of Norman policy tended to fraternization with their Danish kinsmen. Such fraternization with the Danes had already caused, certainly a dispute, perhaps an open war, with England. Richard the Good in no way departed from this traditional policy. |Richard’s treaty with Swegen.| According to a Norman account, told with great confusion as to time, Richard was, either now or a few years later, actually bound by a treaty with Swegen, not only to receive sick and wounded Danes in his dominions, but to allow the spoils of England to be sold in the Norman ports.^[661] This was the old ground of quarrel, but Æthelred was just now not likely to retaliate by another invasion of the Côtentin. And, according to another story, told with equal confusion as to dates, Richard, like his father, did not scruple to accept the help of two heathen Kings of the North in his warfare with his Christian neighbours.^[662] At a later time indeed he could not well refuse shelter in 343his dominions to his sister with her husband and children; |Richard keeps aloof from English affairs.| but anything like even an attempt at active interference in English affairs on the part of Normandy was delayed till the reign of his son Robert.

The fleet assembles at Sandwich. 1009.

At last the great fleet was gathered together at Sandwich. So great a fleet had never been seen in the reign of any King. No man living had seen such an one, nor was such an one spoken of in any book. There the ships were, enough and ready to guard the land against any foe.^[663] And, under Ælfred or Æthelstan, we may be sure that those ships would have kept the seas clear from every foe, or else they would have met the invaders face to face on their own element. But in the reign of Æthelred domestic treason ruined everything. The fleet raised by such unparalleled efforts was doomed to do no more for England than any other preparations which had been made during this miserable reign. The fleet was ready, but there was discord among the commanders. Eadric, in his own rise, had raised along with himself several of his brothers,^[664] of one of whom, Brihtric, we read a character quite as bad |Affair of Wulfnoth and Brihtric.| as of Eadric himself. This man, at this time or a little earlier, brought unjust charges to the King, of what kind we are not told, against a leader named Wulfnoth, described as “Child Wulfnoth the South-Saxon.”^[665] Orders were given to seize Wulfnoth; he fled, and persuaded the crews of twenty ships, most likely the contingent of his own shire, to flee with him. They presently began to plunder the whole south coast. Brihtric then followed him with eighty ships, thinking to win great fame,^[666] and to bring back Wulfnoth alive or dead. But a violent storm, such as had never before been known, beat his ships to pieces, 344and dashed them against the shore, where presently Wulfnoth |Brihtric’s ships burned by Wulfnoth.| came and burned them. A hundred ships were thus lost in one way or another; but these must have been only a small portion of so great an armament. Yet an unaccountable |Utter dispersion of the fleet.| panic seized on all men. In the emphatic words of the Chronicles, “When this was known to the other ships where the King was, how the others had fared, it was as if all were redeless; and the King gat him home, and the Ealdormen and the High-Witan, and forsook the ships thus lightly; and the folk then that were in the ships took the ships eft to London, and let all the nation’s toil thus lightly perish, and there was no victory the better that all Angle-kin had hoped for.”^[667]

The fleet was lost just when it was most needed. Æthelred, Wulfnoth, and Brihtric had, among them, |Renewed Danish invasion. 1009.| wrought the utter ruin of their country. As might have been looked for, and as evidently was looked for, the Danes, when they had spent their money, came again. First |Thurkill’s fleet.| came a fleet commanded by an Earl Thurcytel or Thurkill, who plays a great part in the history for about twelve years to come.^[668] In the month of August this detachment was followed by a still larger one, under the command of Heming and Eglaf.^[669] The treason of Wulfnoth had left neither fleet nor army to withstand them. The two fleets met at Sandwich, whither their crews marched to Canterbury |Canterbury and East-Kent buy peace.| and assaulted the city. But the citizens, in partnership with the men of East-Kent, bought them off with a payment of three thousand pounds. We may here, as 345before in East-Anglia,^[670] see the action of the local Witan, and in the distinct mention of the East-Kentish men^[671] we may see traces of the time when Kent had two Kings, as it even now has two Bishops.^[672] The Danes then went back to their ships; they sailed to their old quarters in Wight, and thence ravaged Sussex, Hampshire, and even Berkshire. Æthelred seems now to have plucked up a little heart; the spirit which had been kindled by the vigorous preparations of the last two years had not quite died away. He gathered an army from all England, and placed detachments |Efforts of Æthelred frustrated by Eadric.| at various points along the coast. At one time, when the Danes were returning, laden with booty, from one of their plundering expeditions, the King stopped their way with a large force, both Æthelred and his people having, so we are told, made up their minds to conquer or die.^[673] But, by one of those inexplicable treasons of which we have so many in this reign, Eadric dissuaded the King from the intended battle,^[674] and the Danes were allowed to |November 11, 1009.| go back to their ships unmolested. After Martinmas they took up their winter quarters in the Thames; they ravaged Essex and other parts on both sides of the river, and again |Vain attempts of the Danes on London.| made several assaults on London. But the old spirit of the city was as strong as ever; every attempt of the Danes was beaten off, to the great loss of the assailants, by the citizens themselves, seemingly without any further help. |January, 1010.| After Christmas they set out again, and plunged yet 346further into the heart of the country than they had ever |Oxford burned.| ventured before. They crossed the Chiltern hills, reached Oxford, and burned the town. They then turned back, as if intending another attack on London. They went on in two divisions, plundering on both sides of the Thames. But hearing that a force was gathered against them in London, the northern division crossed the river at Staines. They then marched through Surrey back to their ships, and passed Lent in repairing them.^[675]

Progress of the Danish ravages.

In each of these campaigns, if plundering expeditions in which no resistance is met with can be called campaigns, the ravages of the Danes become wider and more fearful, spreading every year over some portion of the land which had hitherto remained untouched. And, in the same proportion, the spirit of the English and their power of resistance |Last year of resistance.| seem to die away. We have now reached a year even more frightful than any that went before it, a year which seems to have finally crushed England. It is in this year that we meet with the last resistance that was offered to the invaders during this stage of the war. It was not till four years later, when it was too late, that the national spirit again awoke after the flight and return of |April, 1010.| Æthelred. After Easter the Danish fleet sailed forth, and this time it attacked East-Anglia. They landed near |Ulfeytel’s second battle, at Ringmere, May 18.| Ipswich, at a place called Ringmere. But there a hero was waiting for them. In this reign however a hero was commonly accompanied by a traitor to thwart his efforts. This time Ulfeytel was not taken by surprise; he stood |The battle lost by the treachery of Thurcytel.| ready for them with the whole force of East-Anglia. The battle began, and was for a while doubtful; but before long a Thegn of Danish descent, Thurcytel, surnamed Marehead, set the example of flight, which was followed 347by the whole army, save only the men of Cambridgeshire, who stood their ground and fought valiantly to the last.^[676] The slaughter was great, and, as usual, it fell heavily on the chief men, that is doubtless mainly on the comitatus of Ulfcytel. There died Æthelstan, a son-in-law of the King,^[677] the noble Thegn Oswig and his son, and Eadwig or Eadwine |[1002.]| the brother of Eafic, whose murder was recorded eight years before.^[678] There too died Wulfric the son of Leofwine a man of the stamp of Brihtnoth, at once bountiful to ecclesiastical foundations and true to his country in the |[1004.]| day of battle.^[679] Through his bounty the great monastery of Burton had been called into being six years earlier. But it is more to our purpose to note that, on the field of Ringmere, Wulfric, in noble contrast to the spirit which was so rife throughout the land, must have come as a volunteer, defending a part of the country which was not his immediate home. According to some accounts, he held the rank of Ealdorman in one of the shires of north-western Mercia, and among his vast possessions, scattered over a large part of Mercia and southern Northumberland, we find none that could have given him any special personal interest in East-Anglian warfare. The Danes kept possession of the battle-field; they harried all East-Anglia for three weeks; they burned Thetford and Cambridge, and then, partly on horseback and partly in their ships, returned to the Thames. This second burning of |[1004.]| Thetford, a town which had already been once burned six years before, shows, like so many other cases in these wars, the ease with which, when houses were almost wholly 348built of wood, a town was destroyed and again rebuilt. |Further ravages.| After a few days they set out again, ravaged Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire, where they had been before, and the districts, hitherto seemingly untouched, of Bedfordshire and Hertfordshire. The state of things which now followed cannot be so well described as in the words of |State of the country as described by the Chroniclers.| the Chronicles. “And when they were gone to their ships, then should the force go out eft against them if they should land; then went the force home, and when they were east, then man^[680] held the force west, and when they were at the south, then was our force at the north. Then bade man all the Witan to the King, and man then should rede how man should guard this land. And though man somewhat red, that stood not so much as one month. And next was there no headman^[681] that force would gather, and ilk fled as he most might, and next would no shire so much as help other.”^[682] A state of things like this, where the utter corruption of the general government paralyses all national action, gives every encouragement to local and personal selfishness. Such selfishness is at all times rife enough in the ordinary mind. In times of any local pestilence or other misfortune, the districts which are exempt are often inclined to hug themselves in their supposed safety, to be unwilling to take any active exertion for the relief of others, or even 349to take the needful precautions for their own defence. And, in the times of which we speak, war of all kinds, a Danish invasion, a border war with the Welsh or the Scots, was a scourge at least not more out of the common way than a visitation of cholera or cattle-plague is now. That the Danes should be somewhere in the land had begun to be taken for granted. Each district had thus learned to think only of its own momentary safety, and to be careless about everything else. And this would be especially the case in a country, like England at that time, where the different parts of the kingdom were still very imperfectly welded together, where the habit of common action was still new and needed the strong arm of an able King thoroughly to enforce it. Even in this wretched year we may mark three stages of degradation. The first expedition met with real resistance, resistance which, had not Ulfcytel and Wulfric been betrayed by Thurcytel, would probably have been successful. In the second stage, though it does not appear that a blow was struck after the battle of Ringmere, yet there was at least the show of calling out troops against the enemy. But before the year was out we hear of a third Danish expedition, to which it would seem that not the least shadow of resistance was offered. At the end of November the enemy set forth again. They now struck deep into the heart of the country, going much further from their own element |Northampton burned. November, 1010.| than they had ever been before. They marched to Northampton, burned the town, and ravaged the neighbourhood. They then struck southwards, ravaged Wiltshire, and by midwinter they came back to their |Extent of the ravages up to this time.| ships, burning everywhere as they went. Sixteen shires—our authorities stop to reckon them up^[683]—had now been 350ravaged with fire and sword. Northumberland and the western and northern shires of Mercia were still untouched; and the western part of Wessex, which had suffered severely in former years, seems to have seen no |[1003.]| enemy since Swegen’s march from Exeter to Salisbury. But the shires of East-Anglia (seemingly reckoned as one only), Essex, Middlesex, Hertford, Buckingham, Oxford, Bedford, Cambridge, Huntingdon, Northampton, Kent, Surrey, Sussex,^[684] Hampshire, Wiltshire, and Berkshire, had all been more or less harried by the terrible Thurkill. The spirit of the nation was now crushed, and its means of defence were utterly exhausted.

Peace again purchased. 1011.

The Witan met early in the next year. All notion of resistance seems to have been given up, but another attempt was made to buy off the enemy.^[685] An embassy was sent to the Danes, and another peace was patched up. The price was, of course, again raised, and it now reached forty-eight thousand pounds. But such a sum was not at once forthcoming, and it was not actually paid for a full year. This negotiation seems not to have gained for the country even that temporary repose which had been gained by earlier payments; the delay of payment may even have provoked the enemy to fresh ravages. At all events, we read that 351they went on harrying the land just as before. And the Chronicles may well say that all these evils came upon the land through lack of counsel,^[686] when we find how Æthelred and Eadric employed any momentary respite that the nominal |[1000.]| peace may have given them. It is the old story of eleven years before, when Æthelred wasted such time and strength as he had left in a needless, and probably unjust, attack |Eadric invades Wales, and ravages Saint David’s. 1011.| upon his Cumbrian vassal. So now Eadric and his master picked out this time, of all others, for an expedition into Wales. We are not told what special offence the Welsh princes had given just at this moment. Border skirmishes were no doubt always going on along the Mercian frontier; but the present expedition was clearly something much more serious, and it must have had a special cause. It is a highly probable conjecture^[687] that, just as in the case of Malcolm, the wrath of the English over-lord was aroused by a refusal on the part of the Welsh princes to contribute to the Danegeld. The expedition, at all events, made a deep impression on the Welsh, as it is the only warfare with England which their national chroniclers think worthy of record for many years before and afterwards.^[688] An English army entered South Wales, under the command of Eadric, who, as Ealdorman of the Mercians, would be the natural commander. With him was joined in command another Englishman, whose name is too hopelessly disfigured in the Welsh accounts to be recovered.^[689] They marched through 352the whole of South Wales, as far as that remote bishopric whither Saint David had fled from the face of man. There they plundered whatever rude forerunners already stood on the site of the most striking group of buildings in Britain. A force which was able to accomplish such a march must have been equally able to do some real service against the Danes; but against them not a blow seems to have been struck.

But later in the year, in September, a fearful blow indeed was struck on the other side. Perhaps it was not more fearful, there is some reason to believe that it was in itself less so, than some other events of this dreadful war; but it is clothed with special importance on account |Siege and capture of Canterbury. Sept. 8–29, 1011.| of the rank and character of a single sufferer. The Danes now again besieged Canterbury,^[690] and on the twentieth day the city was betrayed to them by a traitorous churchman, one Ælfmær, whose life had been saved by Archbishop Ælfheah on some unrecorded occasion. The Danes seem on this occasion to have been in an unusually merciful mood. This was most likely owing to the influence of Thurkill, who, if he had not already embraced Christianity, certainly did so soon afterwards. The most authentic accounts distinctly exclude any general massacre, though the later narratives give us a harrowing picture of slaughter and torture, worked in doubtless from the stock accounts of Danish barbarities elsewhere. That the metropolitan church was sacked and burned is a matter of course for which we hardly need any evidence. The number of captives was untold; the rich would doubtless be ransomed, and the rest sold for slaves. Ælfmær, the Abbot of Saint Augustine’s, was, for some unexplained reason, allowed to escape. But Ælfweard the King’s reeve, Leofrune, Abbess of Saint Mildthryth’s monastery in Canterbury, 353and Godwine, Bishop of Rochester,^[691] were all carried |Captivity of Archbishop Ælfheah.| away. And with them was another captive, whose name has made the capture of Canterbury to stand out more conspicuously than most of the events of this age, Ælfheah, Primate of all England.

Life of Ælfheah. Born, 954.

Ælfheah was a man of noble birth, who, according to the standard of piety recognized by his age, had early in life forsaken, not only his paternal estate, but his widowed mother, in order to become a monk. At Deerhurst, at Bath, perhaps at Glastonbury, he strove after all monastic perfection. According to some reports, he was first Prior of one of the two great monasteries of Somerset, and afterwards |Bishop of Winchester, 984.| Abbot of the other.^[692] But it is more certain that he was advanced to the bishopric of Winchester, by the special favour of Dunstan, at a comparatively early age. |Archbishop of Canterbury, 1009.| A few years before the present time he had, as we have seen, been raised to the metropolitan throne. The Archbishop was now led away captive by the Danes. According to the most trustworthy account, he at first promised them a ransom,^[693] in expectation of which they kept him seven months in their ships. Meanwhile, not only the ransom of Ælfheah, but the general ransom of all England remained unpaid. The forty-eight thousand pounds, the price of the pretended peace, was still |Witenagemót at London, Easter (April 13), 1012.| owing. To settle this debt, Ealdorman Eadric—the King is not named—and the other Witan met in full Gemót. The Danes meanwhile lay in the Thames near Greenwich. 354On the Saturday after Easter the Danes seem to have held some kind of festival, at which they got very drunk on wine lately brought from the south. This was no doubt one fruit of that commerce between the Danes and the Norman ports which Duke Richard and his people found so profitable. The Normans exchanged the wines of Aquitaine for the tribute-money or the slaves of England. The Danes in their drunkenness now called on Ælfheah for the payment of the promised ransom. He refused; he would pay nothing; he had sinned in promising to pay; |Murder of Ælfheah. April 19th, 1012.| no one should give anything for his life; he offered himself to them to deal with him as they pleased. They then dragged the Archbishop to their husting or place of assembly. Thurkill tried to save him, offering gold and silver, anything save his ship only, to save the holy man’s life. But the rest would not hearken, and they began to pelt the Archbishop with stones, logs of wood, and the bones and skulls of oxen,^[694] the remains of their late feast. At last one Thrim, whom Ælfheah had converted and whom he had confirmed the day before, moved by a feeling of pity, clave his head with his battle-axe. The conduct of the Danes both before and afterwards shows that this attack on the Archbishop was a mere sudden outbreak, caused half by drunkenness, half by wrath at the Archbishop’s failure to make the promised payment. Thurkill had not been able to save the Archbishop’s life, but it must have been owing to his influence, and to that of any other converts whom Ælflheah had made, that the body was allowed to be taken to London with all reverence. It was there received by two Bishops, Ælfhun of London and Eadnoth of Dorchester, and was buried in Saint Paul’s minster.

We shall read later in our story how the claim of Ælfheah 355|Was Ælfheah a Martyr?| to the title of martyr was afterwards disputed by his foreign successor Lanfranc. But the honours paid to the English Archbishop were strongly defended by the more generous Anselm, on the ground that, though Ælfheah did not die for any point of Christian belief, yet he died for Christian justice and charity, as refusing to plunder his people in order to obtain a ransom for himself.^[695] Ælfheah is not the only one in the list of our ancient martyrs whose technical claim to the honours of martyrdom may fairly be doubted. As in the case of the young King Eadward, the name was freely bestowed on any good man who died by an unrighteous death. According to the most trustworthy narrative, Ælfheah, however innocently, brought his death upon himself, by making a promise and then failing to perform it. Hagiographers have of course surrounded him with a halo of sanctity and miracle, and they have clearly exaggerated the evil deeds of his destroyers. But, putting all exaggerations aside, it is easy to see in Ælfheah a thoroughly good and Christian man, one of those men of simple, straightforward, benevolent, earnestness, of whom the English Church in that age produced many. He was undoubtedly a saint, and it seems hard to refuse him the title of martyr. He had at least as good a right to it as many martyrs of earlier times, who brought on themselves a death which they might have avoided by provoking or challenging their heathen enemies.

The money paid to the Danes.

Soon after the Archbishop’s murder, the forty-eight thousand pounds, the ransom of England, was paid, oaths |Thurkill enters the English service. 1012.| were sworn, and the Danish fleet dispersed. But Thurkill, whose whole conduct had shown a distinct leaning to Christianity, now entered the English service.^[696] As we afterwards find him a zealous Christian, he was doubtless baptized now, if he had not been already baptized by 356Ælfheah. He brought with him forty-five ships, the crews of which were to receive food and clothing from the King, and they engaged in return to defend England against every enemy.

Character of Thurkill.

Thurkill is a character of much interest, as he in many points resembles, on a smaller scale, his wonderful countryman Cnut. He came to England on an errand of destruction, and he was gradually won over to be the stoutest defender of the land which he came to ravage. He was not a mere Pallig,^[697] to accept English wealth and honours, and then to go over to the enemy at the first opportunity. When he swore oaths to Æthelred, he honestly devoted himself to the master whose bread he ate. He fought valiantly for England, and his ships for a while were the only refuge where the native King of the English could find shelter. If we find him at a later time once more on the Danish side, it was probably not till death had set him free from all personal ties to his first master, certainly not till English Ealdormen had set him the example of acknowledging the foreign King.

Swegen’s last invasion of England. July, 1013.

It would seem that Thurkill’s change of side hastened the last act of this stage of the Danish invasions. We have now not heard anything of Swegen personally for nine years. He had meanwhile been busily engaged in warfare nearer home; but as regards England, he clearly was only biding his time. On the one hand, the country was thoroughly weakened and disheartened, and seemed to stand ready for him to take possession. On the other hand, as far as material help went, England had gained greatly by the accession of the valiant Thurkill and his followers. To chastise Thurkill, at least to guard against the possible consequences of his conduct, seems to have been the 357immediate occasion of Swegen’s last and greatest invasion.^[698] But this motive can have done little more than hasten a purpose which was already fully determined. Swegen had no doubt long resolved on the complete conquest of England; but he may well have seen that Thurkill’s new position rendered his own presence immediately necessary, lest his schemes should be supplanted by the establishment of a rival Danish dynasty in the country. However this may be, Swegen set forth, accompanied by his son Cnut, |Magnificence of Swegen’s fleet.| afterwards so famous, and reached England in July. The magnificence of his fleet is described in the most glowing colours.^[699] There is no doubt that, savages as they appear in warfare, the Northern nations of that age had made no small progress in many of the arts. The fact is fully proved by the antiquities of that time and of earlier times which still remain. And the adornment of the ships which were so dear to the heart of every Northern warrior^[700] was a favourite form of splendour.^[701] There may doubtless be some exaggeration, but there is also doubtless a certain measure of truth, in the account of Swegen’s splendid fleet, of the birds and dragons on the tops of the masts which showed the way of the wind, of the figures of men and animals in gold, silver, and amber, which formed the signs of the ships, the lions, the bulls, the dolphins, and, what we should hardly have looked for, the centaurs. With this fleet, armed with the whole force of Denmark, Swegen crossed the sea, and came first to |Swegen sails up the Humber.| Sandwich. He then changed his course, and sailed to the mouth of the Humber, to a country among whose 358population the Danish element was large. The work of so many valiant Kings, of Eadward, of Æthelstan, of Eadmund, was undone in a moment. The North of England was again severed from the West-Saxon monarchy. The Danish King sailed up the Trent, he pitched his camp at Gainsborough, and all the country on the Danish side of Watling-street submitted without resistance. Embassies |Northumberland, Lindesey, and the Five Boroughs submit. 1013.| came in from all parts of the North. The Northumbrians first submitted under their Earl Uhtred, the King’s son-in-law. We have seen him acting vigorously before,^[702] and we shall see him acting vigorously again; but just now he did nothing to check the panic, even if he was not the first to be carried away by it.^[703] Next came the men of Lindesey, and, somewhat later, the men of the Five Boroughs. The conquest of that famous confederacy |920–22. 942.| had been reckoned among the most renowned exploits of Eadward and of Eadmund;^[704] but their mention now shows that they must still have kept up some measure of independence and of connexion with each other. Before long, all the population north-east of Watling-street had acknowledged Swegen. From all these districts he took hostages, whom he entrusted to his son Cnut, who was left in command of the fleet. He also demanded horses and food for his army, and, more than this, the contingents of the shires which had submitted had to follow him, willingly or unwillingly, |Swegen enters Mercia;| in his onward march.^[705] With this force he then crossed Watling-street, and struck south-west, into the strictly 359English districts of Mercia, into the one part of England |his horrible ravages.| which had as yet escaped ravage, some districts of which could hardly have seen war since the days of Ælfred. The distinction between the Danish and English districts was clearly marked in his treatment of the two. Hitherto we have heard of no ravages; but, when he was once within the purely English border,^[706] his cruelties became fearful, and they were carried on in the most systematic way. He “wrought the most evil that any host might do;” he is even charged with directly ordering, as his rule of warfare,^[707] the ravage of fields, the burning of towns, the robbery of churches, the slaughter of men, and the rape of |Submission of Oxford and Winchester.| women. In this fashion he passed through the country to Oxford, which had already risen from its ashes. The town was saved by speedily submitting and giving hostages. Winchester itself did the like. Swegen then |Swegen repulsed from London.| marched upon London; but here his fortune was very different. He had to encounter not only a valiant resistance, but also ill luck of a different kind.^[708] Many of his men, unable to find either ford or bridge, were drowned in the Thames. At last he assaulted the city. But the |[994.]| heart of the citizens was as strong as when they beat off both Swegen and Olaf Tryggvesson nineteen years before. The presence of King Æthelred within the city was not likely to add much to the vigour of the defence,^[709] but the 360brave Dane Thurkill was there, faithfully discharging the |992, 994, 1009, 1013.| duties of his new service. For the fourth time during this reign, the invaders were beaten back from the walls of the great merchant city, the only resistance that Swegen seems to have met with during this fearful march. He then turned back into Wessex, first to Wallingford, then to Bath, destroying in his former fashion as he went. |Swegen marches to Bath; the West-Saxon Thegns submit.| At Bath the terrible drama was brought to an end. Æthelmær, Ealdorman of Devonshire, with all the thegns of the West, came to him, submitted, and gave hostages. Putting the language of the different accounts together, there can be little doubt that this was, or professed to be, a formal act of the Witan of Wessex, deposing Æthelred and raising Swegen to the throne. Northumberland had already acknowledged him; and, considering that Swegen brought the contingents of the North of England with him, it is possible that there may have even been enough of the chief men of different parts of the kingdom present to give the assembly something like the air of a general Witenagemót. An election of Swegen was of course an election under duresse in its very harshest shape, and would in no way express the real wishes of the electors. |Swegen is acknowledged King. 1013.| But that some approach to the usual legal formalities were gone through seems implied in the significant way in which we are told that Swegen was now looked upon as “full King” by the whole people.^[710] Whether he was crowned is a much more doubtful matter; the nominal religion of Swegen at this moment is a great problem, and we may doubt whether, if the apostate sought the Christian rite, any prelate would have been found to admit him to it. But that Swegen was acknowledged as King is perfectly plain. He now went northward to his fleet, seemingly for the purpose of attacking by sea the one city which still held out. But now the spirit even of the 361Londoners at last gave way; out of sheer fear of the |London submits.| threatened cruelty of the new King, they submitted and gave hostages. By a strange turning about of events,^[711] all England was now in the hands of Swegen, while the cause of Æthelred was still maintained by Thurkill and |Æthelred takes refuge in Thurkill’s fleet.| the Danish fleet in the Thames. The monarchy of Cerdic was now confined to the decks of forty-five Scandinavian war-ships. The fleet still lay at Greenwich, the scene of the martyrdom of Ælfheah. Thither, immediately after the submission of London, Æthelred and Thurkill betook |Emma and her sons sent to Normandy. August, 1013.| themselves. The Lady Emma went over to her brother in Normandy, in company with Ælfsige, Abbot of Peterborough, and she was presently followed by her two young sons, the Æthelings Eadward and Ælfred, with their tutor Ælfhun, Bishop of London.^[712] Æthelred himself stayed some time longer with the fleet, but at midwinter he went to the Isle of Wight, the old Danish quarters, which the adhesion of the Danish fleet now made the only part of his lost realm accessible to the English King.^[713] He there 362|Æthelred takes refuge in Normandy. January, 1014.| kept the feast of Christmas, and in January he joined his wife and his young children in Normandy, where his brother-in-law Duke Richard could hardly refuse him an honourable welcome. We seem to be reading the history of James the Second before its time. Eadric, according to some accounts,^[714] had already gone over with the Lady. Of Æthelred’s sons by his first marriage, the gallant Æthelings Æthelstan and Eadwig and their glorious brother Eadmund, we hear nothing. As far as we can see, Swegen was the one acknowledged King over the whole realm. If the West-Saxon banner was anywhere displayed, it could have been only on the masts of Thurkill and his sea-rovers. During the whole winter, Swegen on his side, and Thurkill on his, levied contributions and ravaged the land at pleasure.^[715]

§ 5. From the Conquest of England by Swegen to the Death of Æthelred. 1013–1016.

Importance of Swegen’s Conquest as introductory to William’s Conquest.

This conquest of England by Swegen forms an important stage in our history. It was, for the moment at least, the completion of the Danish invasions in their third and final shape of actual Danish conquest. And it was more than this. The Danish conquest by Swegen was, so to speak, the precedent for the Norman Conquest by William. Swegen’s own possession of England was indeed but momentary; but he at least held the kingdom as long as he lived, and he handed on his mission to his son. The result of Swegen’s invasion showed that the crown of England, of England so lately united into 363a single kingdom, could be transferred by the event of war from the brow of a native sovereign to that of a foreign invader. It was Swegen’s conquest which made the conquests both of Cnut and of William possible. Cnut’s conquest was of course only the completion of Swegen’s. It was Swegen who conceived the idea, and |Distinction between Swegen’s Conquest and the earlier Danish invasions.| who actually for the first time carried it out. That idea was something very different from anything which had been set before the eyes of any earlier Scandinavian invader. Hitherto England had been largely ravaged, and had even been partly occupied. But mere ravages were in their own nature temporary; and the Danes who had settled in England had been gradually brought into a greater or less degree of submission to the English King, into a greater or less degree of amalgamation with the English people. The third stage of the Danish wars, that which had now for a moment accomplished its object, aimed at something of quite another kind. It sought, as I have before shown,^[716] not merely to ravage or even to occupy, but to transfer the crown of all England, the rule of all its inhabitants, English and Danish alike, into the hands of the King of all Denmark. This object Swegen had now accomplished. Succeeding events indeed called for the work to be done over again by his son Cnut. But the example was set; the establishment of a foreign King in England, his willing or unwilling acknowledgement by the English nation, were things which had now become familiar. What Swegen had done Cnut might do, and |Circumstances in favour of Swegen,| what Cnut had done William might do. Swegen now, like William afterwards, was singularly favoured by fortune. But the good luck of the two invaders took quite different shapes. Swegen found an incapable prince on the throne, under whom no effective resistance was possible. He was thus able to wear out the strength and spirit of 364the nation by a series of successful, though partial, attacks. He was thus able, at the end of a long series of years, to obtain possession of the whole land without ever having put his forces to the risk of a decisive engagement. |and of William.| William found a hero on the throne; he had therefore, at the very beginning, to stake all his chances on a single battle. But in that single battle England lost her hero, and with him she lost her hope. Swegen and William were thus equally lucky, but William ran a far more |Character of Swegen.| terrible hazard. Swegen is apt to be forgotten in a cursory view of English history, because he is overshadowed by the fame of his son. But Swegen was no ordinary man. If greatness consists in mere skill and stedfastness in carrying out an object, without regard to the moral character of that object, he may even be called a great man.^[717] His purpose was doubtless fixed from the beginning; but he knew how to bide his time, how to mark and to seize his opportunities. Of that species of glory which is won by steady and skilful destruction of one’s fellow-creatures, the glory of an Attila or a Buonaparte, the first Danish conqueror of England is entitled to a large share. Of the high and generous purposes which well nigh justify the ambition of Alexander and of Charles, even of that higher craft of the ruler which goes some way to redeem the crimes of the Norman Conqueror, we see no trace in his career. He was so constantly occupied in aggressive warfare that he had hardly time to show himself as a beneficent prince, even in his native kingdom, and in England, if he had the will, he never had the opportunity, of showing himself in any light but that of a barbarian destroyer.

Swegen then was King—or, as the national writers 365prefer to call him, Tyrant^[718]—over all England. But it |Death of Swegen. February 3, 1014.| was only for a very short time that he enjoyed his ill-gotten dominion. Early in the year after his conquest, about the feast of Candlemas, he died at Gainsborough. The Danish writers bear witness to the Christianity of |His religion.| his later years. During one of his seasons of adversity, he was won back again to the faith from which he had apostatized; he became a zealous believer, a founder of churches and bishoprics. But the German and English writers seem to know nothing of his piety or of his reconversion, unless indeed the denial of the claims of one particular Christian saint can be held to be evidence of |Legend of the death of Swegen.| Christian belief in general. That denial, we are told, was punished by a strange and horrible death. For such an enemy as Swegen could hardly be allowed to go out of the world without some accompaniment of wonder and miracle. For once the discreetest of our Latin chroniclers opens his pages for the reception of a legend. Swegen, he tells us, had a special hatred for the martyred |870.| King Saint Eadmund, the famous victim of Danish cruelty at an earlier time. He denied him all power and holiness; he demanded a heavy tribute from his renowned minster; he threatened, if it were not paid, to burn the town and the townsfolk, to destroy the minster, and to put the clergy^[719] to death by torture. All this is likely enough; we can well believe that Swegen did thus threaten the church of Saint Eadmund, and that he died suddenly while preparing to set out to carry out his threats. The special reverence which Swegen’s son Cnut showed to Saint Eadmund almost amounts to a proof that his father was held to have specially sinned against that martyr. Swegen had held an assembly of some kind which most likely 366passed for a Witenagemót of his new realm.^[720] He was on his horse, at the head of his army, seemingly on the point of beginning his march from Gainsborough to the threatened minster. He then saw, visible to his eyes only, the holy King of the East-Angles coming against him in full harness and with a spear in his hand. “Help,” he cried, “fellow-soldiers, Saint Eadmund is coming to slay me.” The saint then ran him through with his spear, and the tyrant fell from his horse, and died the same night in horrible torments.^[721] This is a legend of the simplest class. If Swegen died just as he was about to wreak his sacrilegious wrath on Saint Eadmund’s minster, his sudden death would naturally be attributed to the vengeance of Saint Eadmund. The details of the legend are nothing more than a poetical way of expressing this supposed fact. Swegen thus ended his days;^[722] as to the fate of his soul our authorities differ |Swegen’s body taken to Denmark.| widely.^[723] But the body of the departed tyrant is said to have been taken to Denmark, and buried at Roskild, so long the place of coronation and burial of the Danish Kings.

By the death of Swegen his two kingdoms of Denmark and England became vacant. In Denmark he was succeeded by his son Harold, a prince whose name has passed altogether out of English, and almost out of Danish, history. His reign was short; we are told that he was deposed by his subjects on account of his sloth and 367luxury.^[724] But that he, and not Cnut, was in actual possession |Swegen succeeded in Denmark by Harold. 1014.| of the Danish crown for some time after their father’s death there seems no reason to doubt. As for the English crown, the crews of the Danish fleet assumed |Double election in England; Cnut chosen by the Danish fleet.| the right of disposing of it, and elected Swegen’s other son Cnut, who was present at Gainsborough. This prince, afterwards so famous, was now a stripling of about nineteen,^[725] and the English, who had bowed to his father, had no mind to bow to him without a struggle. The Witan, |The English Witan decree the restoration of Æthelred.| clerical and lay, assembled in due form, and voted, not the election of one of the Æthelings, but the restoration of Æthelred. The words of the formal documents exchanged between the Witan and the absent King peep out in the language of the Chronicles. They sent to say that no lord could be dearer to them than their cyne-hlaford—their lord by birth—if he would only rule them more righteously than he did before.^[726] Æthelred then sent over ambassadors, accompanied by young Eadward, his son by Emma—the nobler offspring of his |Interchange of messages between Æthelred and the Witan.| first marriage are again unnoticed. He promised by their mouths to be good lord to his people, to amend all that had been wrong in his former reign, to forgive all that had been said and done against him, if only they would be faithful and obedient to him. Another version adds the very important engagement that he would 368submit in all things to the advice of his Witan.^[727] Promises were thus exchanged on both sides; Æthelred was again |Outlawry of all Danish Kings.| acknowledged, and a decree was passed proclaiming every Danish King an outlaw from England.^[728] The expression |Import of the expression.| is singular, unless we look at it in connexion with the actual acknowledgement of Swegen as King. We can hardly conceive a proclamation of outlawry against a foreign invader, if he were a mere foreign invader and nothing else. But if we look on Cnut as a son of the late King and a candidate for the crown, his outlawry by the opposing party is natural enough. Nor is all this a mere legal subtlety. Cnut then, like William afterwards, was fully aware of the advantage of getting, as far as he could, every legal form on his side.

Æthelred’s return and legislation. Lent, 1014.

In the course of Lent Æthelred came back to England, and met with a joyful welcome in London. It was most likely in a Gemót held on his return that the King and his Witan passed the laws which bear the date of this year.^[729] They relate mainly to ecclesiastical matters, but they contain the same pious and patriotic resolutions as the codes of former years, and they also contain some clauses of a special and remarkable kind. They expressly approve the conduct of certain earlier assemblies, held under Æthelstan, |Illustration of the relation of Church and State.| Eadmund, and Eadgar, which dealt with ecclesiastical and temporal affairs conjointly, and they seem to deplore a separation between the two branches of legislation which had taken place in some later assemblies.^[730] It is not very easy to 369understand the grounds of this complaint, as in most of the earlier statutes of Æthelred’s reign we certainly find both classes of subjects dealt with. But, whatever was the immediate ground of censure, the expression is remarkable, as illustrating a whole class of feelings which were peculiarly strong in that age, and which afterwards lost |Identification of the Church and the Nation before the Norman Conquest.| much of their power. Under our native Kings the Church and the nation were far more truly one than they were at any time after the Norman Conquest. The nation was deeply religious; the Church was deeply national. The same assemblies and tribunals dealt alike with ecclesiastical and with temporal affairs, without the least idea that either power had thrust itself into the proper province of the other. Bishops and Ealdormen were appointed and deposed by the same authority; they sat side by side to judge and to legislate on matters which, after the Norman Conquest, would have been discussed in distinct assemblies. The laws of this year again proclaim that one God and one King is to be loved and obeyed, that heathenism and treason are alike to be eschewed; that all moral duties are to be discharged by one countryman to another. Such is the general summary of the last recorded legislation of Æthelred, conceived in exactly the same tone as the laws of earlier assemblies.

The spirit which breathes in the decrees of the assembly breathes also in a remarkable specimen of the pious oratory of the age, namely the famous address of Archbishop Wulfstan to the English nation.^[731] Somewhat of exaggeration is always to be looked for in compositions of this kind, but, after making all allowances, we find a frightful 370picture both of national wretchedness and of national corruption. Since the days of Eadgar everything had gone wrong; sacrilege and unjust judgements, lust and rapine, the neglect of every natural and artificial tie, had stalked unpunished through the land. One King had been murdered; another had been driven into banishment. The abuses of the slave-trade are specially noticed; men even went so far as to sell their nearest kinsfolk. The English, in short, had become worse than the Britons whom they had conquered, even as the Britons were painted by their own Gildas. For all this the judgement of God had come upon the land; the enemy wrought his will upon England without let or hindrance; ten Englishmen would flee before one of the invaders; the last excesses of cruelty and outrage had to be endured without resistance. The speaker exhorts to repentance and amendment; he speaks indeed only of repentance and amendment, and says nothing of the human means of valour and counsel; otherwise one might conceive that the address was in fact a speech delivered in the Gemót which passed the laws of this year.

Æthelred marches against Cnut and drives him out of Lindesey.

The nation now seemed to be thoroughly kindled with the spirit expressed in the discourse of the Primate and in the resolutions of the Witan. And for one moment the burst of patriotism reached even to the King. For the first and the last time during his long reign, we see Æthelred engaged in righteous and successful warfare.^[732] Cnut was still at Gainsborough, where he had agreed with the men of Lindesey, a district in which the Danish element was large, to furnish him with horses and to join him in a plundering expedition. But before they were ready, Æthelred came up with his full force, and drove 371Cnut away to his ships. The defeat must have been decisive, as Cnut sailed away altogether from that part of England,^[733] and steered his course southwards to Sandwich. |Cnut mutilates his hostages.| There he put on shore the hostages who had been given to his father from all parts of England, having first subjected them to various mutilations, as the loss of hands, ears, and noses. He then sailed away to Denmark. Æthelred had thus for once shown real spirit and vigour, and had done a real service to his country. For a moment England |Æthelred ravages Lindesey.| was free from the invaders. But the King disgraced his victory by ravaging Lindesey—no doubt in revenge for its submission to Cnut—as cruelly as Swegen or Cnut could have done. The land was harried with fire and sword, and the people, as far as might be, were slaughtered. |Payment to Thurkill’s fleet.| Lastly, the King levied a tribute of twenty-one thousand or, as some say, thirty thousand,^[734] pounds, for the payment of Thurkill’s fleet which still lay at Greenwich. This fleet, which had so lately been Æthelred’s sole refuge, remained in his service.^[735]

Great inroad of the sea.

In the same year, as if to illustrate the law that political and natural misfortunes generally come together, the |1014.| sea—in what part of England we are not told—broke in upon the land, and swallowed up many towns and a countless multitude of people.^[736]

Great Witenagemót at Oxford. 1015.

In the next year we again come across the name of the infamous Eadric, of whom we have so often heard before, and who now begins a new career of treason even viler and more fatal than anything that has hitherto been recorded of him. On the other hand we have now reached 372the beginning of the short and glorious career of the hero |First appearance of the Ætheling Eadmund.| Eadmund. This prince seems to have been the third son of Æthelred;^[737] one at least of his elder brothers seems to have died before him; but, if he was not the eldest of the royal house by birth, he soon won for himself the first place by merit. A great Witenagemót was held this year at Oxford, a city whose renown as the seat of a great University belongs to later times, but which the whole course of these wars shows to have been already a place of |History of Oxford.| considerable importance. Its importance however would seem to have been comparatively recent. The well-known legend of Saint Frithswyth^[738] cannot be accepted as historical; but it may be taken as some presumption that Oxford had already become a habitation for man early in the eighth century. But there is no certain historical mention of the place till the early years of the tenth century, |912.| when it appears as one of the chief acquisitions of Eadward the Elder. As it was a frontier town of Mercia and Wessex, we might have expected to find it playing a historic part in far earlier days; but in those times the now utterly insignificant Bensington^[739] seems to have been the chief military post of the frontier. So the now no less insignificant Dorchester was the ecclesiastical capital of a vast diocese, of which the diocese of Oxford, as it stood before recent changes, formed only a small portion. Oxford however was now a place of note; in the new nomenclature of Mercia it had given its name to a shire; and it must have derived some further importance from the presence of the minster which bore the name of the heroine of the local legend. That minster, after an unusual number of changes in its foundation, has at last settled down into the twofold office of the cathedral church of the modern diocese and 373the chapel of the largest college in the University. The town is mentioned in several charters of the tenth century, one of which, as we have seen, records the burning of the minster in the general massacre of the Danes.^[740] It had |1009–1013.| been, as the course of our story has told us, taken, retaken, and burned in the wars of Swegen. In this year the town, so lately rebuilt after its burning, was the scene of an assembly which was evidently attended by a more than usually numerous body of the Wise Men.^[741] Eadric was now guilty of a crime of the same kind as that by which |1007.| he destroyed Ealdorman Ælfhelm at Shrewsbury nine |Murder of Sigeferth and Morkere by Eadric.| years before. Among the assembled Witan were Sigeferth and Morkere, the sons of Earngrim, two of the chief thegns in the Danish Confederacy of the Seven Boroughs.^[742] These chiefs were invited by Eadric to his own quarters,^[743] where he slew them at a banquet. Æthelred, if he had not ordered this villany, at any rate made himself an accessory after the fact; he confiscated the property of the murdered thegns, and ordered Ealdgyth, the widow of Sigeferth, to be led as a prisoner to Malmesbury. All this would seem to imply some co-operation on the part of the Witan; it may even imply some real guilt in 374Eadric’s victims; but it in no way lessens the guilt of Eadric and Æthelred. When such things were done, we can understand that men may have thought the rule of the Dane at least not worse than the rule of such Englishmen. A gleam of romance now flashes across the |Marriage of Eadmund and Ealdgyth.| dreary tale of crime and misfortune.^[744] The Ætheling Eadmund had seen the fair widow of Sigeferth, and was smitten with a sudden passion for her. There was no time to be lost; he followed her to her retreat and married her against the will of his father.^[745] The marriage was not without political consequences. Eadmund seems to have looked upon himself, and to have been looked upon by his wife, as the lawful heir of her former husband. Possibly the wealth and dignities of Sigeferth, or some part of them, may have come through his marriage. At any rate Eadmund, at Ealdgyth’s suggestion, demanded the lordships of Sigeferth from his father,^[746] and was refused. |His establishment in the Five Boroughs. August, 1015.| He then went to the Five Boroughs, took possession of the estates of Sigeferth and Morkere, and received the submission of the men of the confederacy.^[747] 375He thus secured for himself a kind of principality in the North of England, a fact which, in the war which was about again to break out, led to some singular inversions of the usual military geography.

For Cnut had sailed away to Denmark only to sail back to England on the first opportunity.^[748] He is said to have proposed to his brother Harold, the reigning King, to make a division of Denmark and to share in a joint expedition to England.^[749] The former proposal at least was rejected; whether Harold accompanied his brother to England is less certain;^[750] but in any case he was utterly overshadowed by the fame of Cnut, and he soon vanishes from history altogether. According to one account, the voyage was undertaken at the express suggestion of Thurkill, who sailed to Denmark and there made his peace with Cnut.^[751] Thurkill was certainly on Cnut’s side in the war of the next year; he may have thought himself absolved from his duty to Æthelred by that prince’s flight; but on the whole it is more likely |Cnut invades England. Summer, 1015.| that his change of sides happened later. At any rate, Cnut set sail with a fleet whose numbers are variously stated at two hundred ships^[752] and at a thousand,^[753] and of 376whose stateliness we read as brilliant an account as of those of his father. Moreover we are told that the whole of the crews consisted of men of noble birth in the flower of their age.^[754] With this splendid company, Cnut sailed first to Sandwich, and thence steered along the south coast to Fromemouth; that is to the harbour of Poole and Wareham, the common mouth of the Dorsetshire |He ravages Wessex.| Frome and the Dorsetshire Trent. He then harried the shires of Somerset, Dorset, and Wiltshire, while King Æthelred lay sick at Corsham in the last-named shire. The Ætheling Eadmund now began to levy an army in his new principality,^[755] and Eadric seemingly did the same in his old Mercian government. But the traitor was still |Plans of Eadmund hindered by Eadric.| at his old tricks. When the two divisions came together, Eadric made several attempts to destroy his brother-in-law, the result of which was that the two armies separated, |Eadric rebels, seduces the Danish fleet, and joins Cnut.| leaving the field open to the enemy. Eadric now openly rebelled; he seduced the crews of forty Danish ships in the royal service, those doubtless which were left from Thurkill’s fleet, and joined Cnut. This may have been the time when Thurkill himself took service under his native prince. Or it may have been after Æthelred’s death and the election of Cnut by a large body of the English Witan.^[756] In the latter case, at all events, his allegiance to his old master was no longer binding; the war between Cnut and Eadmund might seem to him a struggle between two candidates for the English crown, in which he, as a Dane, might honourably take the side of the candidate of his own nation.