CHAPTER V

.

THE DANISH CONQUEST OF ENGLAND.[464] 975–1016.

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

FOR THE DELEGATES OF THE CLARENDON PRESS.

Æthelred the Second, the prince in whose reign England and Normandy first began to have a direct bearing on each other’s affairs, is the only ruler of the male line of Ecgberht whom we can unhesitatingly set down as a bad man and a bad King. With singularly few exceptions, [Sidenote: Character of Æthelred the Second; his degeneracy.] the princes of that house form, as we have seen, one of the greatest lines to be found in the annals of any kingly house. With regard to one or two members of the family the evidence is so contradictory, they were cut off so young or reigned so short a time, that we have no certain knowledge what they really were. But Æthelred stands alone in giving us the wretched sight of a long reign of utter misgovernment, unredeemed, as far as we can see, by any of those personal virtues which have sometimes caused public errors and crimes to be forgotten. Personal beauty and a certain elegance of manners, qualities consistent with any amount of vice and folly, are the highest merits attributed to a prince, who, instead of the Unconquered, the Glorious, the Magnificent, or the Peaceful, has received no nobler historical surname than that of the Unready.[465] His actions display a certain amount of energy, perhaps rather of mere restlessness. It was at any rate an energy utterly unregulated and misapplied, an energy which began enterprises and never ended them, which wasted itself on needless and distant expeditions while no effective resistance was made to the enemy at the gates. Æthelred’s reign of thirty-eight years displays little but the neglect of every kingly duty, little but weakness, impolicy, cowardice, blind trust in unworthy favourites and even in detected traitors. It is full of acts of injustice and cruelty, some of which are laid to the charge of the King himself, while others, if he did not himself order them, he at least did nothing to hinder or to punish. In that age almost everything in the history of a nation depended on the personal [Sidenote: Importance of the personal character of rulers.] character of its ruler. One great King could raise a kingdom to the highest point of prosperity; one weak or wicked King could plunge it into the lowest depths of degradation. So it was with England in the tenth century. The fabric of glory and dominion which was built up by the labours of Ælfred, Eadward, Æthelstan, Eadmund, and Eadred, the fabric which was firmly welded together by the strong and peaceful rule of Eadgar, now seems to fall to pieces at the first touch of a vigorous and determined enemy. And yet it was not wholly so. The work of so many conquerors and lawgivers from Ecgberht [Sidenote: The English needed only leaders worthy of the people.] onwards was not wholly fruitless. England passed into the hands of a foreign master; but England passed into his hands as a single kingdom, retaining too her old dominion over her vassal principalities. And it should not be forgotten how completely the whole evil was due to incompetent, cowardly, or traitorous leaders. The heart of the English people was still sound. Wherever a brave and honest man was in local command, local resistance was as vigorous as it could have been under Ælfred himself. And in the last agony, when valour and wisdom seemed all too late, Eadmund, the glorious son of the wretched Æthelred, stood forth like one of the old heroes of his house, to win back half the land from the invader, and to lose the rest far more through guile and treason than through open warfare. The thing which is utterly inexplicable throughout the reigns both of Æthelred and of Eadmund is the strange and incomprehensible treason of two or three Englishmen in high command. It is equally strange how their treachery could repeatedly paralyse the efforts of a whole nation, and how, after their repeated treasons, the traitors were again taken into favour and confidence by the princes whom they had betrayed. Our facts are minute and explicit; but we often need some explanation of their causes which is not forthcoming. A few of those private letters of which we have such abundance two or three centuries later would give us the key to many difficulties which chronicles, laws, and charters leave wholly insoluble.

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

[Sidenote: Death of Eadgar. 975.]

Eadgar was succeeded by his eldest son Eadward, whose treacherous murder, though he did not die in any cause of religion or patriotism, gained him the surname of the Martyr. But he did not succeed without an interregnum, without a disputed election, or even without something approaching to a civil war. It shows how thoroughly we are now standing on the firm ground of contemporary history that we can recover a distinct portraiture of many [Sidenote: Movement against the monks, headed by Ælfhere of Mercia;] of the actors in these scenes. The moment Eadgar was dead, a reaction took place against the monastic party, which was met by as powerful a movement on their behalf. Ælfhere, the Ealdorman of the Mercians and a kinsman of Eadgar,[466] headed the movement against the monks, and drove them out of several churches into which Eadgar’s favour had introduced them. But the monks found powerful supporters in the eastern part of the kingdom, where their cause was strongly supported, it would seem even in arms,[467] by two remarkable men who then held the governments [Sidenote: and resisted by Æthelwine of East-Anglia and Brihtnoth of Essex.] of East-Anglia and Essex. Æthelwine of East-Anglia, one of the founders of Ramsey abbey, is chiefly known for his bounty to monastic foundations, to whose gratitude he doubtless owed his singular surname of the Friend of God.[468] Alongside of him stood his maternal uncle Brihtnoth, Ealdorman of the East-Saxons,[469] whose lavish gifts to Ely, Ramsey, and other monasteries, won him well nigh the reputation of a saint, and whom we shall soon find dying a hero’s death in the defence of his [Sidenote: Disputed election to the crown.] country against heathen invaders. More interesting however in a constitutional point of view than these ecclesiastical disputes is the controversy as to the succession to the crown. The election of a minor is in any case a thing to be noticed, and a dispute between two minors is more remarkable still. Eadgar had left two sons, Eadward, aged about thirteen, the child of his first wife Æthelflæd, and Æthelred, aged seven years, the child of his second wife Ælfthryth, the daughter of Ordgar and widow of Æthelwold, who, under the Latinized name of Elfrida, has been [Sidenote: State of the succession; a minority unavoidable.] made the subject of so much strange romance.[470] Had Eadgar left a brother behind him, there can be no doubt that he would, like Ælfred and Eadred, have been placed on the throne by universal consent. But there was no son of Eadmund living; indeed it is not clear that there was any male descendant of Ælfred living. There were indeed men, like Æthelweard the historian,[471] who were sprung in the male line from Æthelwulf and Ecgberht; but in such distant kinsmen some unusual personal merit would probably have been needed to bring their claims on the crown into any notice. At this moment there was no grown man among the immediate members of the royal family, and there was no one, either among strangers or among more distant kinsmen, who possessed that predominant merit and predominant influence which marked out Harold for the crown ninety years later. The evils of a minority had therefore to be risked. Yet it seems strange that, if a minor King was to be accepted, there could be any doubt as to which minor was to be chosen. Eadward is said to have been distinctly recommended by his father, and with good reason. He was the elder son, and though primogeniture gave no positive right, yet it would surely be enough to turn the scale, even in a doubtful case, and this case, one would have thought, was not doubtful. The election of Eadward would have the unspeakable gain of bringing the minority to an end six years sooner than the election of his brother. Yet we read on good authority[472] that there was a distinct division of sentiment among the electors, and that a strong party supported the child Æthelred against the boy Eadward. In this we can hardly fail to see the influence of the widowed Lady[473] Ælfthryth, [Sidenote: Party of Ælfthryth and the monks.] in alliance with one of the two parties in the state. And there is every reason to believe that the party of Ælfthryth was the party of the monks. She was, by her first marriage, the sister-in-law of Æthelwine, and we find several signs that neither Dunstan nor the monks were so powerful under Eadward as they had been under his [Sidenote: Patriotic conduct of Dunstan,] father. It was therefore a distinct sacrifice of their party to their country, when Dunstan and his fellow Archbishop [Sidenote: and election of Eadward.] Oswald settled the controversy by a vigorous appeal on behalf of Eadward, urging the will of the late King, and no doubt enlarging also on the manifest expediency of the choice. Eadward was accordingly elected, crowned, and anointed. But that his short reign was not wholly favourable to the monastic party may be inferred by the continuance of the controversy, and the holding of several [Sidenote: Banishment of Earl Oslac.] synods to discuss the points at issue.[474] We may see a similar influence at work in the banishment of Earl Oslac, a special favourite of Eadgar, whose punishment and its injustice are bitterly lamented by our best authorities.[475] It will be remembered that, when the last Northumbrian [Sidenote: 954.] King was overthrown by Eadred, the government of the country was entrusted to an Earl of the King’s choice. [Sidenote: 966.] Oswulf, thus appointed by Eadred, ruled over all Northumberland, till Eadgar again divided the old kingdoms of Bernicia and Deira, giving the northern province to Oswulf and the southern to Oslac.[476] On Oslac’s banishment, the whole seems to have been again united under Waltheof, who was probably of the family of Oswulf, and of whose own descendents we shall often hear again.

§ 2. _From the election of Æthelred to the first dispute with Normandy._ 979–1000.

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

Eadward, after a four years’ reign, was cruelly murdered. There is little doubt that this foul deed was done by the instigation, if not by the personal order, of his step-mother Ælfthryth,[477] whose son Æthelred was now elected at the age of ten years.[478] For thirty-seven years England was governed [Sidenote: Death of Dunstan. 988.] by him or in his name, and after Dunstan was gone, the reign of Æthelred meant only the reign of his unworthy favourites. The world soon learned how great was the change when the Imperial sceptre of Britain was no longer grasped by the hand of Eadgar the Peaceful. Æthelred had not been two years on the throne when the Danish invasions began again. The whole interest of the history so completely gathers round this fearful scourge that we may pass swiftly by the few, and mostly unlucky, events of [Sidenote: London burned. 982. (Chron. and Flor. Wig.)] internal history which are handed down to us. In one year London was burned, seemingly by one of those accidental fires which, then and long after, were so common and so destructive in cities where the buildings were mainly [Sidenote: Siege of Rochester. 986.] of wood. In another year, owing to some internal sedition the cause of which is not explained, Æthelred, then a youth of seventeen, besieged the town of Rochester, and being unable to take it, ravaged and alienated some of the [Sidenote: 987.] lands of the bishopric.[479] In another year we hear of an epidemic fever, and of a murrain among beasts, seemingly the forerunner of the modern cattle-plague, which raged through the whole of England in a way unknown to former times.[480] Besides these misfortunes of different kinds, [Sidenote: Death of Ælfhere. 983.] Ælfhere of Mercia died, and was succeeded in his ealdormanship by his son Ælfric, who was banished some years afterwards, we are not told for what cause. The first marriage [Sidenote: Banishment of Ælfric. 986.] of Æthelred to the daughter of one of his nobles, whose name and parentage are uncertain, and the birth of his sons Æthelstan and Eadmund, afterwards the renowned Ironside, must also be placed within this period.[481]

[Sidenote: The Danish invasions renewed;]

From these obscure domestic events we turn to the terrible drama of the Danish wars. This new series of invasions, which led in the end to the submission of all England to a Danish King, form the third and last period of Danish warfare. But the third period, after so long an interval, is as it were ushered in by a kind of repetition of the two earlier periods. Before the great attack on the [Sidenote: first, with mere plundering incursions, [980–982];] kingdom of England by a King of all Denmark, we find a short period of mere plunder and a short period of attempted settlement. During the first years of Æthelred the Danish invasions once more become mere piratical incursions. Then for a few years they cease altogether. [Sidenote: then attempts at settlement, [988–993].] Then they begin a second time, in a shape which seems to imply intended settlement, and which presently grows into [Sidenote: Characters of Swegen of Denmark and Olaf of Norway.] regular political conquests. The leading spirit of all these invasions was Swegen,[482] the son of Harold Blaatand, the Danish King who played so important a

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

side another rover of the North, whose career was, if possible, stranger than his own, the famous Olaf Tryggvesson of Norway. But it is hard indeed to force the entries in the English Chronicles, which hardly ever touch upon the internal affairs of Scandinavia,[483] into agreement with the half fabulous narratives in the Danish historians and in the Norwegian sagas. Swegen, baptized in his infancy, and held at the font by an Imperial godfather, had received the name of Otto, as Guthrum received the name of Æthelstan.[484] But he cast away his new name and his new faith, and waged war against his Christian father on behalf of Thor and Odin.[485] The life of Olaf, as told in the sagas of his country,[486] is one of the most amazing either in history or in romance. The posthumous child of a murdered King and a fugitive Queen, he is sold as a slave in Esthonia, he flourishes through court favour in Russia, he wins principalities by marriage in Wendland and in England, and is converted to Christianity by an abbot in the Scilly Islands. The early life of Swegen is likewise connected by tradition with England; he is said to have been driven from Denmark, to have sought for shelter in England, and, when repelled by Æthelred, to have taken refuge for a time at the more hospitable court of Kenneth of Scotland.[487] It is highly probable that Swegen took a part as a private wiking in the first three years of piracy, which chiefly laid waste the shores of Wessex and Kent. The presence of Olaf in England may also be inferred from the statement that Cheshire was ravaged by enemies who are distinctly pointed out as Norwegians.[488] That Swegen indeed had a hand in the earlier incursions is almost proved by an interval [Sidenote: Cessation of inroads. 982–988.] of peace succeeding them. This interval doubtless answers to the time of Swegen’s parricidal war with his father, which is quite enough to account for the cessation of [Sidenote: They begin again.] his attacks upon England. After six years’ intermission, [Sidenote: Battle at Watchet. 988.] the invasions began again with an attack on Watchet on the western coast of Somerset, in which several English thegns were killed, but the Danes were at last beaten off.[489] Three years later, a much more serious attack was made on the east of England, seemingly with the intention [Sidenote: Norwegian invasion. 991.] of making a settlement. This seems to have been a Norwegian expedition; the leaders were Justin and Guthmund, sons of Steitan, and there seems every reason to believe that Olaf Tryggvesson himself was present also.[490] [Sidenote: Plunder of Ipswich.] They plundered Ipswich and thence advanced into Essex, where the brave Ealdorman Brihtnoth met them in battle [Sidenote: Battle of Maldon and death of Brihtnoth.] at Maldon. The hero of the monks was also the hero of the soldiers, and the exploits and death of the valiant Ealdorman were sung in strains which rank among the noblest efforts of Teutonic poetry.[491] It is a relief to turn from the wretched picture of misgovernment and treachery which the reign of Æthelred presents, and to hear the deeds of one of the few righteous who were left told in our own ancient tongue in verses which echo the true ring of the battle-pieces of Homer. The fight of Maldon is the only battle of the days of Æthelred of which any minute details are preserved, and every detail throws light on something in the manners or the military tactics of the age. The battle took place near the town of Maldon, on the banks of the tidal river Panta, now called the Blackwater. The town lies on a hill; immediately at its base flows one branch of the river, while another, still crossed by a mediæval bridge, flows at a little distance to the north. The Danish ships seem to have lain in the branch nearest to the town, and their crews must have held the space between the two streams, while Brihtnoth came to the rescue from the north. He seems to have halted on the spot now marked by the church of Heybridge,[492] having both streams between him and the town. He rode to the spot, but when he had drawn up his army in order, he alighted from his horse and took his place among his own household troops.[493] These were men bound to him by the traditional tie of personal fidelity handed on from the earliest recorded days of the Teutonic race. Like Harold at Senlac, Brihtnoth fought on foot; an English King or Ealdorman used his horse only to carry him to and from the field of battle; in the actual combat the first in rank was bound to share every danger of his lowlier comrades.[494] The wikings now sent a herald, offering to withdraw and go back to their ships, on payment of money to be assessed at their own discretion. Brihtnoth of course indignantly refused any such demand; steel and not gold was the only metal that could judge between him and them. The two hosts now stood on the two sides of the water, a deep and narrow channel, which, as the tide was coming in, could not be at once crossed. The bridge, a still older predecessor doubtless of that which still remains, was held, at Brihtnoth’s order, by three champions whose exploit reminds us, like some other incidents of the battle, of one of the most famous tales in the poetical history of Rome. The dauntless three who kept the bridge at Maldon were Wulfstan the son of Ceola, Ælfhere, and Maccus, the name of which last champion may suggest some curious inquiries as to his origin.[495] Till the tide turned, the two armies stood facing each other, eager for battle, but unable to do more than exchange a few flights of arrows. At last the turn of the tide made the ford passable; the Northmen began to cross, and Brihtnoth, perhaps with a kind of chivalrous feeling which was doubtless utterly thrown away upon such enemies, allowed large numbers of them to pass unhindered.[496] And now the fight began in earnest. The English stood, as at Senlac, in the array common to them and their enemies, a strong line, or rather wedge, of infantry, forming a wall with their shields. As in the old Roman battles, the fight began with the hurling of the javelins, and was carried on in close combat with the broadsword.[497] Brihtnoth was wounded early in the battle, and his sister’s son Wulfmær was disabled. But the brave old chief went on fighting, and, after slaying several wikings with his own hand, he was cut down, and two gallant followers who fought at his side were slain with him. One of these was another Wulfmær, the young son of Wulfstan, who fought by his lord while his father was guarding the bridge. After the death of the valiant Ealdorman, the thoroughly Homeric character of the story comes out more strongly than ever. The fight over the body of Brihtnoth sounds like the fight over the body of Patroklos,[498] or like that later day when

“Fiercer grew the fighting Around Valerius dead.”

Two caitiffs, the only faithless ones among the body-guard of the fallen hero, two brothers whose names are handed down to infamy as Godric and Godwig, the sons of Odda, forgot their duty to their lord who had shown them such favours, and fled from the field, leaving his body in the hands of his enemies. Godric even added the further treason of mounting the horse on which Brihtnoth had ridden to the field, so that many thought that it was the Ealdorman himself who had fled.[499] The English were thus thrown into confusion; the fortress of shields was broken.[500] The enemy had thus time to mangle the body of Brihtnoth, [Sidenote: Faithfulness of the _comitatus_ of Brihtnoth.] and to carry off his head as a trophy.[501] But the fight was renewed by Brihtnoth’s special comrades, whose names and exploits are handed down to us in verses which breathe the true fire of the warlike minstrelsy common to Greek and Teuton. There fought Ælfwine the son of Ælfric, of a lordly house among the Mercians;[502] there fought Æseferth the son of Ecglaf, a Northumbrian hostage who had escaped from the enemy;[503] there fought Brihtwold, old in years but valiant among the foremost; there fought Eadward the Long, and Leofsunu, and others whose names live only in the nameless poet’s verse, but among whom one must not be forgotten, one whose tale shows that, deep as were the corruptions of English life under this wretched reign, there was at least room left for lowly merit to raise itself to honour. This was Dunnere, a churl by birth, but whose rank is spoken of without the least shadow of contempt, and whose words and deeds placed him on a level with the noblest of his comrades. In short, the whole personal following of the East-Saxon Ealdorman seems to have fought and fallen around his body.[504] The heathen had the victory;[505] but the defeat of the English seems to have been by no means decisive. We do not read that the Danes were able to spoil or burn the town, according to their usual custom, and the body of Brihtnoth was carried off in [Sidenote: His burial at Ely.] safety and found a worthy resting-place. On an island in the great fen land between Mercia and East-Anglia, on a height which in that part of Britain passes for a considerable hill, the virgin Queen Æthelthryth (the Etheldreda of hagiology) had, three centuries before, forsaken every duty of royal and married life, to rule over a sisterhood which proved fruitful in saints of royal birth.[506] Thus arose the great monastery of Ely; but, like many other religious houses, it was utterly destroyed in the Danish invasion of the ninth century. When the monks were in the height of their power under Eadgar, Bishop Æthelwold, their great patron, chose the forsaken site for a new foundation; a church was built, and a body of monks took possession of the former home of sainted princesses. Among the benefactors of the new house the Ealdorman of the East-Saxons was one of the foremost. The first Abbot, whether from kindred or from accident, bore the same name as his benefactor the Ealdorman. He, according to the legend, died a martyr’s death, through the practice of the Lady Ælfthryth, the unworthy niece of the pious chieftain.[507] The second Abbot Ælfsige was bound to Brihtnoth by the tie of mutual benefits. He now hastened to the place of slaughter, and carried off the body of so great a benefactor of his house. The remains of Brihtnoth were buried in the newly hallowed minster, the humble forerunner of the most stately and varied of England’s cathedral churches. Under its mighty lantern the brave and pious Ealdorman slept in peace, till, under pretence of restoration, his bones were disturbed by the savages of the [Sidenote: Gifts of his widow Æthelflæd; the Ely Tapestry.] eighteenth century. His widow Æthelflæd shared his devotion to the house of Saint Æthelthryth. She added to his gifts of lands; she offered a bracelet of gold, perhaps part of the badges of his office; and she adorned the minster with one gift, which, if it survived, would rank among the most precious monuments of the history and art of the age. Ely once could rival Bayeux; among the choicest treasures of Ely under her first Bishop, a hundred and twenty years later, was the tapestry on which the devotion of Æthelflæd had wrought the glorious deeds of the hero of Maldon.[508]

At Maldon the invaders had gained a victory, but it was a victory which showed what Englishmen could still do when they had men of the old stamp to lead them. But the dastardly flight of the sons of Odda showed that England also contained men of another temper. And unhappily the policy of Æthelred was now guided by men of the stamp of Godric, not by men of the stamp of Brihtnoth. The shameful payment of money, which the brave old Ealdorman had so indignantly refused, was the only means of safety which suggested itself to a King in the first vigour of youth and to his chief counsellors in Church and State. [Sidenote: The Danes first bought off. 991.] The year which beheld the fight of Maldon beheld also, for the first time, the Lord of all Britain stoop to buy peace from a few ship-crews of heathen pirates.[509] This was the beginning of that senseless and fatal system of looking to gold to do the work of steel, of trusting to barbarians who never kept their promises, and who of course, as soon as they had spent one instalment of tribute, came back again to seek for more. But this plain lesson was one which Æthelred and his advisers seemed never able to learn. The spirit of the nation, which under men like Brihtnoth was ready for vigorous resistance, was thus [Sidenote: Advisers of the measure;] quenched, and its energy frittered away. The evil counsellors who stand charged with the infamy of first suggesting this unhappy measure were men of the highest rank in the nation. The great Dunstan was dead; he was taken away from the evil to come in the very year in which the invasions began again. After a momentary occupation of [Sidenote: Sigeric, Archbishop of Canterbury, [990–994];] the metropolitan throne by Æthelgar, Bishop of the South-Saxons, who died the next year, the primacy fell to the lot of Sigeric, Bishop of Wiltshire or Ramsbury. The first act of this prelate was to drive out the secular priests from the metropolitan church, where Dunstan himself had let them abide.[510] If Sigeric was at all versed in the fitting lore of his office, the history of the Old Testament might have supplied him with many precedents to show the fatal nature of his policy. No Jewish King had ever gained anything by buying off the Assyrian, and an English King was not likely to fare any better by buying off the Dane. But Sigeric joined with the Ealdormen Æthelweard and Ælfric in gaining the King’s leave to purchase peace for their own districts at the hands of the invaders by the [Sidenote: Ealdorman Æthelweard,] payment of ten thousand pounds.[511] Æthelweard, “Patricius Consul Fabius Quæstor Æthelwerdus,”[512] was a man of royal descent, who is memorable as our only lay historian of this age, but who would have been more worthy of honour in his literary character, had he, like his kinsman Ælfred, stooped to write in his native tongue, instead of [Sidenote: and Ealdorman Ælfric.] clothing a most meagre record in most inflated Latin. As for Ælfric, his identity and his actions form one of the standing difficulties of this time. His doings, as favourite [Sidenote: Peace purchased of the Northmen. 991.] and as traitor, are spread over several years of the reign of Æthelred. Having bought a respite for their own districts,[513] the Primate and the two Ealdormen next persuaded the King and his Witan to buy a general peace for the whole land.[514] The terms of the treaty show that, if the invaders were not actually to settle in the land, they were at least not expected to make a speedy departure. They engage to help King Æthelred against any fleet which may come to invade England; neither party is to receive the enemies of the other; and various provisions are made, which would be quite out of place if the Northmen had been expected to sail away at once. And the events of the next [Sidenote: Fleet assembled at London. 992.] year clearly show that they did not sail away, and they seem also to imply that the peace was broken. For in that year Æthelred and his Witan[515] gathered together a fleet at London, which was placed under the command of two Bishops, Æscwig of Dorchester and Ælfric[516] of Wiltshire, and of two lay chiefs, Thored the Earl, of whom we have already heard, and who, according to one account, was the King’s father-in-law,[517] and, unluckily for the enterprise, Ælfric the Ealdorman. We have now reached the first of that long series of utterly inexplicable treasons, which were, in a way no less utterly inexplicable, always forgiven by those against whom they were wrought. One can understand the wretched policy which buys off an enemy or the sheer cowardice which flees from an enemy. Contemptible as both of them are, neither of them implies any deliberate treachery or any positive perversion of heart. But what human motive could induce an English Ealdorman deliberately to betray his country to the heathen invaders? Yet so to do now becomes the regular course on the part of the royal favourites, a class who form a strange contrast to the brave men, chiefs and people alike, whose patriotic efforts [Sidenote: Treason of Ælfric.] were so often thwarted by them. Ælfric now first sent word to the Northmen to beware lest they should be surrounded by the English fleet, and then actually joined them [Sidenote: Naval victory of the English. 992.] with his own contingent. The English, among whom the East-Angles and the citizens of London were the foremost, pursued and gave battle; the Danes were defeated with great slaughter; the traitor’s ship was taken with all [Sidenote: Ælfgar blinded. 993.] that was in it, but he himself narrowly escaped. Æthelred took a base and cowardly revenge by blinding Ælfric’s son Ælfgar, against whom there is nothing whatever to show that he had any share in his father’s crime. Yet, strange to say, within a few years Ælfric himself was again in favour, and again in a position to command and to betray English armies.

[Sidenote: Military and commercial importance of London.]

The storm was thus turned away from London. The importance of that great city was daily growing throughout these times. We cannot as yet call it the capital of the kingdom; but its geographical position made it one of the chief bulwarks of the land, and there was no part of the realm whose people could outdo the patriotism and [Sidenote: Comparison with Paris.] courage of its valiant citizens. London at this time fills much the same place in England which Paris filled in Northern Gaul a century earlier. The two cities, in their several lands, were the two great fortresses, placed on the two great rivers of the country, the special objects of attack on the part of the invaders and the special defence of the country against them. Each was, as it were, marked out by great public services to become the capital of the whole kingdom. But Paris became a national capital only because its local Count grew into a national King; London, amidst all changes within and without, has always kept more or less of her ancient character as a free city. Paris was merely a military bulwark, the dwelling-place of a ducal or a royal sovereign; London, no less important as a military post, had also a greatness which rested on a surer foundation. London, like a few other of our great cities, is one of the ties which connect our Teutonic England with the Celtic and Roman Britain of earlier times. Her British name still lives on, unchanged by the Teutonic conquerors. Before we first hear of London as an English city, she had cast away her Roman and Imperial title; she was no longer Augusta;[518] she had again taken her ancient name, and through all changes she clave to her ancient character. The commercial fame of London dates from the early days of Roman dominion.[519] The English Conquest may have caused an interruption for a while, but it was only for a while. As early as the days of Æthelberht the commerce of London was again renowned.[520] Ælfred had rescued the city from the Dane; he had built a citadel for her defence,[521] the germ of that Tower which was to be first the dwelling-place of Kings, and then the scene of the martyrdom of their victims. Among the Laws of Æthelstan none are more remarkable than those which deal with the internal affairs of London and with the regulation [Sidenote: Commerce of London.] of her earliest commercial corporations.[522] During the reign of Æthelred the merchant city again became the object of special and favourable legislation.[523] Her Institutes speak of a commerce spread over all the lands that bordered on the Western Ocean. Flemings and Frenchmen, men of Ponthieu, of Brabant, and of Lüttich, filled her markets with their wares and enriched the civic coffers with their tolls. Thither too came the men of Rouen, whose descendants were, at no distant day, to form no [Sidenote: Privileges enjoyed by the “Men of the Emperor.”] small element among her own citizens. And, worthy and favoured above all, came the sea-faring men of the Old-Saxon brother-land, the pioneers of the mighty Hansa of the North, which was in days to come to knit together London and Novgorod in one bond of commerce, and to dictate laws and distribute crowns among the nations by whom London was now threatened. The demand for toll and tribute fell lightly on those whom English legislation distinguished as the men of the Emperor.[524] The manifest advantages of their trade, perhaps some feeling or memory of their common blood and speech, gained privileges for them to which the Gaul and the Norman had no claim, privileges which did not extend to the kindred Fleming, vassal as he was of the Parisian King, or to the Lorrainer, still a vassal of Cæsar, but already exposed to the contagion of foreign influence and language. The chief seat of their enterprise was indeed as yet not open to them, and the chief seat of their dominion was as yet not in being. Queenly Lübeck had not yet begun to cover her peninsula with her stately spires, her soaring gateways, the rich and varied dwellings of her merchant-princes, and the proud pile of that council-house which was to become the centre of the commerce and policy of Northern Europe. The Baltic, one day to be an Hanseatic lake, was still surrounded throughout its coasts by savage or piratical tribes to whom all Christendom alike was hostile. But, if the Trave was not yet reached, the Elbe and the Weser were already occupied. The fame of Hamburg and of Bremen was as yet ecclesiastical rather than commercial; still we may well believe that, among the continental brethren whom London welcomed, there were some who had ventured forth from their infant havens. And the Rhine at least was still open; the ancient Colony of Agrippina was already a chief mart of Teutonic commerce; as early as the days of Charles and Offa, commerce between England and the Empire was a matter of special interest on both sides;[525] and now, in the days of Æthelred, the men of the Emperor, alone among the natives of foreign lands, were emphatically spoken of as “worthy of good laws, even as we ourselves.”[526]

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

The great merchant city was thus saved, mainly, as we shall often find it in these wars, by the valour of her own citizens. The Northmen, baffled in their attack on London, turned their course northward; they stormed King Ida’s fortress of Bamburgh, the earliest seat of Northumbrian kingship; they then turned back to the mouth of the Humber, and ravaged the country on both sides of that river. The men of Lindesey and Deira were no less ready to defend their country than the men of London and East-Anglia; but they had less worthy leaders. [Sidenote: Treason of Fræna, Frithegist, and Godwine.] Just as the battle was beginning, the English commanders set the example of flight. Their names were Fræna, Frithegist, and Godwine, two of them at least old servants of Eadgar, and it is distinctly implied that the cause of their cowardice and treachery was that they were themselves of Danish descent, and that they therefore sympathized with the invaders rather than with those whom it was their duty to defend.[527]

[Sidenote: Affairs of Wales.]

Our narrative is thus far, on the whole, straightforward and intelligible; but two difficult questions now present themselves. Were these Scandinavian invasions accompanied by any efforts on the part of the Celtic inhabitants of Britain to shake off the English supremacy? Was Æthelred, while thus attacked by foreign invaders, himself engaged in foreign disputes and wars, perhaps in [Sidenote: Border warfare with the Welsh.] actual invasion of a foreign land? As far as the Welsh are concerned, it would be alike impossible and unprofitable to try to trace out every detail of the border warfare which was always going on along the Mercian frontier. The English Chronicles scarcely ever condescend to speak of the ups and downs of these endless skirmishes, while [Sidenote: Scandinavian incursions in Wales.] the Welsh Chronicles are full of them. They tell us of a good many incursions of the “Saxons,” but they are far fuller of the ravages of the “Black Pagans,” who were probably much oftener Northmen from Ireland and the Western Islands than actual Danes from Denmark. And it is small honour to the Emperor of all Britain that his plan of buying off the heathen ravagers had perhaps been [Sidenote: 988.] forestalled by a vassal prince of Wales.[528] This prince, Meredydd, son of Owen, seems to have spread his dominion over the greater part of the modern principality,[529] and in the year of the battle of Maldon we distinctly find him, not only at war with the English, but in league with the Northmen. A prince of Gwent and Morganwg,[530] [Sidenote: War with Meredydd. 991.] in company with an English commander whose name appears to have been Æthelsige, ravaged the kingdom of Meredydd as far as Saint David’s. In return for this, Meredydd, with an army of heathen mercenaries,[531] ravaged Morganwg, the dominion of the Welsh ally of England. One would be more anxious to know what was the position of Scotland at this time. The reception of Swegen by Kenneth, if it be historical, might seem to point to an unfriendly feeling towards England; but we have no notices of Scottish affairs till some years later.

[Sidenote: Æthelred’s relations with Normandy.]

A more important question still now presents itself. As far as we can gather from most imperfect and contradictory accounts, it seems that it was during these years that the first direct intercourse between England and Normandy took place, and that that intercourse was [Sidenote: Disputes arising from the shelter given in Normandy to Danish vessels.] of an unfriendly, if not a directly hostile, kind.[532] The quarrel seems to have arisen out of the hospitable reception which was given in the Norman ports to the piratical fleets which were engaged in the plunder of England. The old connexion with Denmark, the good services which had been rendered by King Harold, were not forgotten in Normandy. The kind reception thus due to the Danes in general may have extended itself even to those who were in fact Harold’s rebellious subjects, warring against the champion of the faith common to Normandy and England. The Norman havens lay most conveniently open for the sale of the plunder of Wessex; it is even possible that some of the inhabitants of those parts of Normandy where the old Danish spirit still lingered may have joined their heathen kinsmen in incursions on the opposite coast.[533] Considering the chronology, it seems most [Sidenote: 988.] likely that the invasion of Somerset which took place in the year of Dunstan’s death was aided and abetted by Richard’s subjects in one or other of these ways. A dispute thus arose between Æthelred and the Duke; whether it led to open war is uncertain. At any rate it assumed importance enough to call for the intervention of the [Sidenote: Reconciliation brought about by Pope John the Fifteenth. 991.] common father of Christendom. The reigning Pope, John the Fifteenth, stepped in to reconcile two Christian princes who were weakening one another in the presence of threatening, if not triumphant, heathendom. A prelate named Leo, described as Bishop of Trier, was sent by the Pontiff to the court of Æthelred on a message of peace. He thence went to Duke Richard at Rouen, accompanied by an English embassy, consisting of Æthelsige, Bishop of Sherborne, and two thegns named Leofstan and Æthelnoth, who are not otherwise distinguished, but whose names are attached to many of the charters of the time. Peace was concluded on the terms that neither party should receive the enemies of the other, nor even each other’s subjects, unless they were provided with passports from their own sovereign.[534]

[Sidenote: Increasing connexion between England and Normandy]

There can be no doubt that in these transactions we may see the germs of much that came to pass in later years. The first recorded intercourse between the courts of Rouen and Winchester paved the way for that chain [Sidenote: from this time.] of events which was at last to establish a descendant of Richard in the royal city of Æthelred. Each country now began to feel the importance of the other, whether as a friend or as an enemy. As we go on in the reign of Æthelred, we shall find intercourse of all kinds with Normandy growing more frequent at every step. And for the first and the last time in the common history of the two countries, the Roman Bishop appears in his fitting character of a common peacemaker and father. The next Pontiff who mingles in a strife between a King of the English and a Duke of the Normans shows himself in quite another light.

§ 3. _From the first dispute with Normandy to the Massacre of Saint Brice._ 991–1002.

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

We must now again come back to the consecutive narrative of the Danish wars. In the year after the sack of Bamburgh and the ignominious flight of the thegns of Lindesey, the invasions began again on a more terrible scale. They were no longer the plundering expeditions of private wikings, or of the sons of Kings spending their hot youth in this wild warfare against their neighbours. They were no longer the expeditions of adventurous chieftains seeking to better their fortunes by winning themselves new homes at the point of the sword. The two mightiest powers of the North were now joined together in a momentary league to compass the utter subjugation of England. Instead of the sea-rovers of a few years back, the invaders are now two powerful Kings with royal fleets and armies at their disposal. Olaf, King of the Norwegians, and Swegen, King of the Danes, joined their forces in a greater expedition than any that Brihtnoth had ever met with steel or Æthelred with gold. The pretext for war on the part of Olaf is not clear; Swegen gave out that he came to revenge the inhospitable treatment which he had received from the King of the English in the days of his adversity.[535] At the head of a fleet of ninety-four [Sidenote: Attack on London defeated by the citizens. 994.] ships, the two Kings of the North sailed up the Thames and laid siege to London—the first, but not the last, siege which the great city was to undergo in this fearful warfare. For the first, but not for the last time, the valiant burghers, who had already learned to grapple with the Dane on his own element, beat back the invaders from their walls. The fire of twelve years back had doubtless been a mere passing blow; it could have done little to lessen the strength of the Roman rampart and of the tower of Ælfred. But it was not only to such worldly bulwarks that the defenders of London trusted; on that day the Mother of God, of her mild-heartedness, rescued the Christian city from its foes.[536] An assault on the wall, coupled with an attempt to burn the town, was defeated with great slaughter of the besiegers, and the two Kings sailed away the same day in wrath and sorrow.[537] Here was another triumph of English valour; but in this reign valour and counsel were always local; cowardice and utter incapacity reigned at head-quarters. Under Ælfred or Æthelstan, such a check as the invaders had met with before London would have been followed up by some crushing defeat, and the slain of Maldon would have been avenged in the glories of another Brunanburh. Under the wretched Æthelred the very valour of the Londoners only led to the more fearful desolation of other parts of [Sidenote: Ravages in the South-East of England.] the kingdom. The enemy were allowed to ravage the coast at pleasure; at last, meeting with no resistance, they seized on horses, and rode through the eastern and southern shires, pillaging, burning, murdering, without regard to age or sex.[538] These horrors were carried on without interruption throughout the whole range of Essex, Kent, and Sussex; at last the invaders crossed the West-Saxon frontier, and by their presence in Hampshire threatened the royal city and the royal person. London and Essex might have been forgotten, but it was now clearly time to do something. But what was to be done? Æthelred and his Witan could think of nothing but their [Sidenote: Æthelred again buys peace.] old wretched expedient. The invaders were again bought off; they were allowed to winter at Southampton; a special tax was levied on Wessex to supply the crews with food and pay, and a general tax was levied on all England to raise the sum of sixteen thousand pounds as a payment to the two Kings.[539] For once this policy, favoured [Sidenote: Embassy of Ælfheah and Æthelward to Olaf.] by special circumstances, was partly successful. The union of Denmark and Norway was broken, and one of the invading Kings was won over to lasting peace and neutrality. Both the leaders of the heathen fleet were baptized men. Swegen indeed, the godson of Cæsar, had denied his faith, and had waged war against his own father on behalf of heathendom. But the baptism of Olaf was more recent and more voluntary. His later history sets him before us as a zealous Christian, who evangelized his kingdom at the point of the sword, and who, in the name of the religion of mercy, paid back upon the heathen all that Christian confessors and martyrs had suffered at their hands. A faith which shows itself in such works as these may indeed be far removed from the true spirit of the Gospel; but such fiery zeal at least implies the firmest belief in the dogmas which it is ready to force upon all men at all hazards. We can then well understand that Olaf, already a Christian, might easily be led to repent of the wrongs which he was dealing out on a Christian land, whose sovereign and people had never wronged him. He willingly listened to an English embassy which came to win him over more completely to the side of his brethren in the faith. One of the ambassadors sent was Ælfheah—the Alphege of hagiology—then the Bishop of the diocese in which Olaf was wintering, but who was some years later to ascend the metropolitan throne and to win the crown of martyrdom at the hands of the still heathen Danes. His colleague was the literary Ealdorman, Patricius Consul Fabius Quæstor Ethelwerdus, again more vigorous in negotiation than in warfare. The Norwegian King exchanged hostages with Æthelred; he was led “with mickle worship” to the court at Andover; he was received with every honour and enriched with royal gifts. [Sidenote: Olaf’s confirmation and adoption.] Already baptized, he received the rite of confirmation[540] from Bishop Ælfheah, and was adopted by Æthelred as [Sidenote: He departs for Norway. 995.] his son. The royal neophyte promised never again to invade England; and, as soon as summer appeared, he sailed away to his own country and faithfully kept his [Sidenote: His later days and death. 1000.] promise. The later days of this prince, who fills so large a space both in the history and in the romance of his country, were spent in the forcible introduction of Christianity into his own kingdom, and in a war with his momentary ally of Denmark, in a sea-fight against whom he at last perished.

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

One enemy was thus changed, if not into a friend, at least into a neutral; and the other, perhaps weakened by the conversion of his ally, seems to have remained comparatively inactive for several years. Of Swegen himself we hear nothing in English history for nine years, and when he did come again, he had a terrible reason for coming. The Danish fleet however stayed on the English coast, but for a while we hear of no further ravages. It would seem that the interval was partly employed in attacks both on the vassals and on the continental kinsmen of England. In the year of Olaf’s departure, Swegen is said to have ravaged the Isle of Man,[541] and there is no doubt that these years were a time in which both Danes and Swedes were busily employed in attacks on the land of the continental Saxons.[542] In England this short respite was largely devoted to the work of legislation, and to the carrying on of the ordinary business of [Sidenote: Meetings of the Witenagemót. 995.] government. Meetings of the Witan were frequent. More than one such took place during the year of Olaf’s departure,[543] a year of some importance in ecclesiastical history. [Sidenote: Ælfric elected Archbishop by the Witan.] Archbishop Sigeric died, and the vacant office was given, by the election of the Witan assembled at Amesbury in Wiltshire,[544] to the Bishop of the diocese in which they were met, Ælfric of Ramsbury, a prelate whose name is still remembered as the author of various contributions to our early theological literature. In the same year also one of [Sidenote: Bishopric of Lindisfarn. 635–883.] the greatest and most famous of English bishoprics found its permanent resting-place. The bishopric of Bernicia or Northern Northumberland, one originally planted by Scottish missionaries, had its first seat in the Holy Island of Lindisfarn, where, for a short time during the later part of the seventh century, the lonely see was made illustrious by the monastic virtues of its sixth Bishop [Sidenote: Saint Cuthberht. 685–687.] Saint Cuthberht.[545] He became the patron of the see, and his body was looked on as its choicest possession. In the great Danish invasion of the ninth century, the Bishop and his clerks fled from their island, and carried the body of the saint hither and thither, till it found a resting-place [Sidenote: The See removed to Chester-le-Street; 883;] at Cunegaceaster or Chester-le-Street.[546] Here the bishopric remained for more than a century, till, in the year which we have now reached, Ealdhun, the reigning prelate, removed [Sidenote: thence to Durham, 995.] it once more to the site which his successors have kept ever since. This translation was not exactly a forestalling of that general removal of bishoprics from smaller to more considerable towns, which we shall find carried out systematically soon after the Norman Conquest. Ealdhun removed his see to a spot which he was the first to make into a dwelling-place of men. As in after days the Wiltshire bishopric was translated from the hill of the elder Salisbury to the plain which has been covered by the younger, so, by an opposite process, Ealdhun now moved his chair from Cunegaceaster to a site nobler than that occupied by any other minster in England. The body of Saint Cuthberht and the episcopal throne of his successors were placed by the happy choice of Ealdhun on that height whence the abbey and castle of Durham still look down upon the river winding at their feet. He found the spot a wilderness;[547] but a town soon grew up around the church; Cunegaceaster was before long outstripped by Durham, and we shall in a few years see the new city acting as an important military post. And as the city grew, its prelates grew [Sidenote: Greatness and temporal authority of the See of Durham.] also. In process of time the successors of Ealdhun came to surpass all their episcopal brethren in wealth and in temporal authority. The prelate of Durham became one, and the more important, of the only two English prelates whose worldly franchises invested them with some faint shadow of the sovereign powers enjoyed by the princely churchmen of the Empire. The Bishop of Ely in his island, the Bishop of Durham in his hill-fortress, held powers which no other English ecclesiastic was allowed to share. Aidan and Cuthberht had lived almost a hermit’s life among their monks on their lonely island; their successors grew into the lords of a palatinate, in which it was not the peace of the King but the peace of the Bishop which the wrong-doer was, in legal language, held to have broken. The outward look of the city at once suggests its peculiar character. Durham alone among English cities, with its highest point crowned, not only by the minster, but by the vast castle of the Prince-Bishop, recalls to mind those cities of the Empire, Lausanne or Chur or Sitten, where the priest who bore alike the sword and the pastoral staff looked down from his fortified height on a flock which he had to guard no less against worldly than against ghostly foes.[548] Such a change could never have taken place if the see of Saint Cuthberht had still lingered in its hermit-island; it could hardly have taken place if his body had ended its wanderings on a spot less clearly marked out by nature for dominion. The translation of the see to Durham by Ealdhun is the turning-point in the history of that great bishopric. And it is something more; it is worthy of notice in the general history of England as laying the foundation of a state of things which in England remained exceptional, but which, had it gained a wider field, would have made a lasting change in the condition of the country. The spiritual Palatine of Durham and the temporal Palatine of Chester stood alone in the possession of their extraordinary franchises. The unity of the kingdom was therefore not seriously endangered by the existence of these isolated principalities, especially as the temporal palatinate so early became an apanage of the heir to the Crown. But had all bishoprics possessed the same rights as Durham, had all earldoms possessed the same rights as Chester, England could never have remained an united monarchy. It must have fallen in pieces in exactly the same way in which the Empire did, and from essentially the same cause.

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

Another meeting of the Witan was held the next year at Cealchyth,[549] and a more important one the year after at Calne, which after a few days transferred its sittings to Wantage.[550] Here, besides the usual business of confirming the King’s grants of lands or privileges to churches or to [Sidenote: [997].] private men, a code of laws was drawn up. At an earlier Gemót, held at Woodstock in an uncertain year, a code had been published,[551] designed mainly for the purely English parts of the kingdom; the labours of the Witan at Wantage, remarkable as it seems in a spot so purely Saxon, seem to have had a special reference to the country which had been occupied by the Danes.[552] These laws, like so many other of our ancient codes, are chiefly devoted to the administration of justice and to the preservation of the peace. Neither in them nor in the earlier laws of Woodstock can we discern any distinct allusion to the special circumstances [Sidenote: Renewed ravages of the Danes, 997–998.] of the times. But in the very year of the Gemót of Wantage the Danish ravages began again. For two years they were confined to the coasts of Wessex and its immediate dependencies. In the first year the invaders set out, seemingly from their old quarters near Southampton, they doubled the Land’s End and ravaged Cornwall, Devonshire, Somerset, and South Wales,[553] plundering, burning, and slaying everywhere, and, what is specially noticed, burning the monastery at Tavistock. The next year they cruelly ravaged Dorset and Wight, and at last took up their quarters in that island, whence they wrung [Sidenote: Witenagemót of London. 998.] contributions from Hampshire and Sussex. During this last year a Gemót was held at London.[554] Whether any measures were taken to resist the Danes does not appear; but it seems that Wulfsige, Bishop of the Dorsætas, took measures to substitute monks for canons in his cathedral church at Sherborne,[555] and the King restored to the church [Sidenote: Ravages of the Danes in Kent. 999.] of Rochester the lands of which he had robbed it in his youth.[556] The gift, however valuable to the bishopric, did little towards protecting the citizens of Rochester. The next year the Danes sailed up the Thames and the Medway, and besieged the town. The men of Kent went forth to battle, but they were defeated after a hard struggle, and the Danes horsed themselves and ravaged the whole western [Sidenote: The Witenagemót collects a fleet and army.] part of the shire. The Wise Men then met again, this time to devise means for carrying on the war. They voted, and actually got together, a fleet and army; but nothing came of it. Both in this year and in the former year everything went wrong. Armies were often gathered together; but time was wasted in all manner of delays, and meanwhile the soldiers who were assembled did nearly as much damage as the enemy. If things ever got on so far that they met the enemy in battle, either ill luck or treachery always [Sidenote: Their inefficiency, and general misery of the country.] gave the victory to the heathen. And when the ships were gathered together, there was only delay from day to day; the crews were harassed grievously; when things should have been forward, they were only the more backward; they let the enemy’s army ever increase; and ever they went away from the sea, and the enemy followed them; and in the end there was nothing for either the land-force or the sea-force, but grieving of the folk and spending of money and emboldening of their foes.[557]

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

Such is the picture of the times which is given us by our best authorities. And it is clear that, to bring about such a state of things, there must have been causes which lay deeper than the mere incapacity or carelessness of Æthelred or than the treachery of a few chiefs of Danish descent.[558] On the other hand, it is perfectly clear that there was no lack of zeal or courage on the part of the people in any part of the country where the invaders landed. This is shown by the valiant resistance which the invaders always met with whenever local power was in worthy hands. It is not unlikely that the forms of the English constitution of that day were partly in fault. The power of resistance was perhaps weakened by the very amount of freedom, general and local, which the English already enjoyed; it was certainly weakened by the still very imperfect nature of the union which existed between the different parts of [Sidenote: General question of the action of constitutional states.] the kingdom. We have in our own times often heard the complaint that a free government is less able than a despotism to carry on a war with vigour. This charge is refuted, if by nothing else, by the result of the great civil [Sidenote: 1861–5.] war in America. But the experiences of that civil war, and many experiences of our own, combine to show that a free country has greater difficulty than a despotism in the mere setting about of a war. No free state could expect to rival the readiness, vigour, and daring with [Sidenote: 1866.] which Prussia opened the wonderful campaign which made her the head of Germany. The very institutions which secure national, local, and personal freedom, sometimes form a temporary, though most certainly only a temporary, hindrance, especially in the case of civil war or of sudden invasion. The old free institutions of England threw difficulties in the way of national resistance, difficulties which the genius of Ælfred, his son, or his grandson, would have overcome, but which were utterly overwhelming to Æthelred [Sidenote: Imperfect union of the parts of the kingdom.] and his advisers. Most likely too, while the kingdom was still so imperfectly united, one part of the country did not greatly care for the misfortunes of another. The devastation of Kent and Wessex would not cause any very deep sorrow or alarm to the Danish people of Northumberland. Local resistance was always possible. A valiant Ealdorman might, with comparative ease, get together his own personal following and the able-bodied men of his shire. But even this process took time. While the English were arming, the Danes were plundering; and when a battle took place, the Danish force, which a general national movement would have crushed at once, commonly proved [Sidenote: Difficulties caused by English constitutional forms.] too strong for the array of any one district. A general national resistance was of course still more necessarily a work of time. The King had no standing army; he could at all times demand the services of his personal following, but even they could not be assembled in a moment; and no real national step could be taken, no national army or fleet could be brought together, no money could be gathered or expended, without the consent of the Witan. And when the Witan met, we can well understand that personal jealousies and still more local jealousies, to say nothing of the causes which always affect all assemblies, would often hinder, or at least delay, the adoption of any vigorous resolution. And when the Witan had passed their vote, they had to go back to their shires and hundreds to announce the determinations of the national council,[559] and to gather together the forces of their several districts. One shire would be ready perhaps months before another, while all the while there was the most pressing need for immediate action. Such an army would become dispirited and demoralized before it had really come together. The difficulty of subsistence too, when it was not likely that regular pay could be given, would often drive the defenders of the country to become almost as destructive as its invaders. [Sidenote: Effect of the personal character of the King.] Even when there was no actual treason or cowardice, all these things would be difficulties in the way of the greatest of princes; under such a prince as Æthelred they were found to be simply unsurmountable. Ælfred had carried England through dangers as great as those which threatened her now; but it needed an Ælfred to do such a work. Under Æthelred nothing was done; or, more truly, throughout his whole reign he left undone those things which he ought to have done, and he did those things which he ought not to have done.

[Sidenote: Character of Æthelred; vigorous always in the wrong place.]

For the fault of Æthelred, after all, was not mere weakness.[560] The Unready King showed occasional glimpses of vigour which might for a moment remind men that he came of the same stock as Eadward the Unconquered and as Æthelstan the Glorious. But it was a vigour which came only by fits and starts, and which acted only at unfitting times and for unfitting objects. As far as we can judge by his actions, the character of Æthelred was not one of mere abject incapacity like Edward of Caernarvon. He was rather like Richard of Bourdeaux, idle, careless, governed by worthless favourites, but showing ever and anon, though always in the wrong place, signs of a strong will and a capacity for vigorous action. So now it was at this memorable crisis of his kingdom. He had at last got together a fleet and an army, and, having got them [Sidenote: The Danes sail to Normandy. 1000.] together, he would do something with them. But the Danes were gone; they had got together their plunder, and had sailed away, as before, to sell it in the Norman havens.[561] Æthelred took advantage of their absence to plunge into a needless war with one of his own vassals. [Sidenote: Æthelred ravages Cumberland in person, and his fleet ravages Man. 1000.] It does not seem that, up to this time, he had ever once thought of going forth in person to battle against the Danes; but the Emperor of Britain could trust no one but himself to lead an army against the Under-king of Cumberland. He ravaged nearly the whole of the principality by land, and he would have ravaged it by sea also, only the fleet which set out from Chester was hindered by contrary winds from meeting him at the appointed spot.[562] It did however reach Man, and harried the island. The cause of all this untimely activity is not stated by our best English authorities. Man especially, which had been harried by Swegen only a few years before,[563] must have been singularly unlucky if it contrived thus to provoke the wrath of both the contending Kings. Nor is it at all clear why Malcolm was attacked in his under-kingdom of [Sidenote: Malcolm’s refusal to pay Danegeld.] Cumberland. A Scottish writer tells us that Æthelred had called on Malcolm to contribute to some of the payments made to the Danes, probably to the great sum paid to Olaf and Swegen six years before. In short he wished to make the dependent kingdom of Cumberland liable, like an English shire, to the impost of Danegeld. Malcolm, we are told, answered with proper spirit. If King Æthelred went forth to battle, he was ready, as in duty bound, to follow his over-lord with his own forces; but he had never covenanted to pay money, and no money would he pay. The authority for this story is not of the first order; but it falls in so exactly with the relations between the two princes that it has strong internal likelihood in its favour. Malcolm was not an English Ealdorman, ruling an integral part of the English realm; he was a vassal prince reigning over a dependent kingdom, a kingdom which formed a part of the English Empire, but which had never been under the direct rule of the English crown. That kingdom Malcolm held on the terms on which it had been originally granted to his predecessor, those of military service by land and sea.[564] A money tribute had indeed been levied on some of the Welsh princes; but military service was clearly the only contribution which a King of Cumberland owed to the Emperor of Britain. But Æthelred was enraged at his refusal, which, he alleged, could proceed from nothing but good will to the enemy. He accordingly ravaged the country, but afterwards concluded peace with Malcolm. If this story be true, Malcolm was fully justified in his refusal, and the conduct of Æthelred was a gross breach of the mutual duty of lord and vassal.

[Sidenote: Second quarrel with Normandy, 1000.]

It is also likely that this untimely activity on the part of Æthelred led him also to match himself against an enemy of a very different kind from the vassal King of Cumberland. As far as probable conjecture can guide us through mazes where difficulties and contradictions meet us at every step, it was during this burst of misapplied energy that Æthelred became again involved in a dispute, most likely in an open war, with the Duke of the Normans.[565] [Sidenote: [996.]] Richard the Fearless, his former antagonist, was now dead, and the reigning prince was his son Richard the Second, surnamed the Good. Of the dealings between the two countries we have no account from any English authority, and the version which we find in the Norman writers, though doubtless containing some germs [Sidenote: Æthelred’s invasion of Normandy, as described by Norman writers.] of truth, is evidently exaggerated in detail. According to them Æthelred sent a fleet into Normandy, with orders to burn and destroy throughout the land, and to spare nothing except the Mount of Saint Michael with its revered sanctuary. As for the reigning Duke, he was to be taken prisoner, and to be brought into the presence of his conqueror with his hands tied behind his back. The English fleet crossed the Channel, and its crews landed in the peninsula of Coutances and began to carry out the [Sidenote: Defeat of the English.] royal orders. But Neal, the valiant Viscount of the district, gathered the men of the country, and smote the invaders with such a slaughter that of those who actually landed one man only escaped to the ships. The fleet sailed home with the news of its discomfiture. Æthelred is pictured as waiting for the triumphant return of his fleet with the news of the conquest of Normandy. His first inquiry is for the captive Duke. But instead of seeing Richard with his hands tied behind him, he only hears that his men have not so much as seen the Duke, that the men of one county had been enough to destroy all their host, that the very women had joined in the strife, striking down the choicest warriors of England with the staves on which they bore their waterpots. These details are of course pure romance; but the existence of such a story seems to show that some hostilities really did take place. Æthelred’s fleet may have pursued the Danish fleet when it sailed to Normandy, and in so doing it may in [Sidenote: Probable explanation of the story.] some way have violated the neutrality of the Norman coast. Or Æthelred, in his present fit of energy, may have been so indignant at the reception of the Danes in the Norman havens as to send out an expedition by way of reprisal. But the grotesque pride and folly implied in the Norman story is incredible even in Æthelred. The details are valuable only as showing the kind of tales which, as we shall see more fully as we go on, the Norman writers thought good to pass off as the English history of the time.

[Sidenote: Marriage of Æthelred and Emma; its evil results.]

Whatever was the exact nature of the mutual wrongs now done to each other by Normans and Englishmen, the quarrel did not last long. Æthelred seems now to have been a widower;[566] the peace between the two countries was therefore confirmed by a marriage between him and the Duke’s sister Emma, one of the legitimated children of Richard the Fearless and Gunnor.[567] Her beauty and accomplishments are highly extolled, but her long connexion [Sidenote: 1002–1051.] with England, as the wife of two Kings and the mother of two others, brought with it nothing but present evil, and led to the future overthrow of the English kingdom [Sidenote: The marriage of Emma opened the way for the Norman Conquest.] and nation. The marriage of Æthelred and Emma led directly to the Norman Conquest of England.[568] With that marriage began the settlement of Normans in England, their admission to English offices and estates, their general influence in English affairs, everything, in short, that paved the way for the actual Conquest. Through Emma came that fatal kindred and friendship between her English son and her Norman great-nephew, which suggested and rendered possible the enterprise which seated her great-nephew on the throne of England. From the moment of this marriage, English and Norman history are inextricably connected, and Norman ingenuity was ever ready to take any advantage that offered itself for strengthening the foreign influence in England. The former dispute between Æthelred and the elder Richard was a mere prologue; we have now reached the first act of the drama. If an English fleet really did sail to Normandy and ravage the Constantine peninsula, those ships were like the ships which Athens sent across the Ægæan at the bidding of Aristagoras—they were indeed the beginning of evils.[569]

[Sidenote: Emma comes to England. 1002.]

The marriage however did not take place for two years. According to one story Æthelred went over to Normandy to bring home his bride in person.[570] The evidence is distinctly the other way; but to go on such an errand, when the miseries of war were at their height, was perhaps in character with a prince so apt to be enterprising at the wrong moment. A like piece of vigorous courtship is the one act of energy recorded of one of Æthelred’s descendants, [Sidenote: 1589] James, Sixth of Scotland and First of England. If Æthelred really did go over to Normandy, he was the first English King, since Ælfred in his childhood, who set foot on the continent, as his son Eadmund was the last English King for several centuries who did not.[571] And [Sidenote: A foreign Lady most unusual in England.] for an English King to espouse a foreign wife was something yet more strange to Englishmen than for an English King to visit foreign lands. The marriage of the daughters of English Kings with foreign princes had been common from the days of Ælfred onwards; but a foreign Lady by the side of an English King had not been seen [Sidenote: 855.] since Æthelwulf brought home the young daughter of Charles the Bald.[572] And the marriage of Æthelwulf and Judith was most likely the first instance since the Frankish [Sidenote: 561–597.] princess whom Augustine found as the queen of the Kentish Bretwalda.[573] And the stranger wives alike of Æthelberht and of Æthelred came as the forerunners of mighty changes. The foreign marriage of Æthelberht paved the way for the admission of the Teutonic and heathen island into the common fold of the Christian commonwealth. The foreign marriage of Æthelred paved the way for the more thorough fusion of England into the general European system, by giving her a foreign King, a foreign nobility, and, for many purposes, a foreign [Sidenote: Emma changes her name to Ælfgifu.] tongue. It shows the strong insular feeling of the nation, and it curiously illustrates the history of English personal nomenclature, that the foreign Lady had to take an English name. The English stock of personal names, though made out of the same elements as the names used by other Teutonic nations, contained but few which were common to England and to the continent.[574] This Old-English nomenclature, with the exception of a few specially royal and saintly names, has gone so utterly out of use that it sounds strange to us to read that the Lady, to make herself acceptable to the English people, had to lay aside the foreign name of Emma, and to make herself into an Englishwoman as Ælfgifu.[575] So, by the opposite process, [Sidenote: 1100.] a hundred years later, when an English Eadgyth married a Norman King, she had to change herself into a Norman Matilda. And it is well to mark that the royal bride, like other Teutonic brides, had her morning-gift, a gift which took the form of cities and governments, and a gift which brought no good to England.[576] And according to some accounts, the marriage brought with it as little of domestic happiness as of public advantage. Emma bore to [Sidenote: Her children. Ælfred. 1036.] Æthelred two sons, Ælfred, who perished miserably in an attempt on the English crown, and Eadward, who lived to be at once King and saint, and to be, perhaps through his own grovelling superstition, the last male descendant of Cerdic and Ecgberht by whom that crown was actually worn.[577] But we are told that the royal parents did not agree. We can well believe that Emma showed the imperious spirit of her race, and scandal adds that Æthelred forsook her for rivals, no doubt of his own nation.[578] Of the truth of these reports nothing can be said, and the public crimes and misfortunes of Æthelred are so great as to leave little time or inclination to search into his possible private vices.

I have spoken of the marriage of Emma slightly out of place, in order to bring it into its natural connexion with other Norman affairs. We must now go back two [Sidenote: 1000.] years. The dealings of Æthelred with Normandy and Cumberland fell in the last year of the first millennium of the Christian æra. It was no uncommon belief at the [Sidenote: Expected end of the world.] time that the end of that period of a thousand years was the fated moment for the destruction of the world. And certainly at no time were the promised signs of wars and rumours of wars, of distress of nations and perplexity, more rife throughout the world than when the second millennium [Sidenote: Condition of Europe and Asia.] opened. In the East of Europe, Basil the Second, the mightiest name in the long roll of the Byzantine Cæsars, was engaged in his fearful struggle for life and death with the Bulgarian invader. In the further East, the Turkish dynasty of Ghazni was laying the foundations of that power which, in the hands of other dynasties of the same race, was to overwhelm alike Constantinople and Bulgaria and all other realms from the Indus to the Hadriatic. In Southern Europe, Otto the Wonder of the World was running that short and marvellous career which, for a moment, seemed to promise that Rome should again become, in deed as well as in name, the seat of universal Empire. The prospects of England seemed darker than those of any other corner of Europe. In the East and in the South, if old systems were falling, new ones were rising, but our island seemed given up to simple desolation and havoc. It would appear that, though the mass of the Danish fleet had sailed to Normandy, some of the ships must have stayed in their old quarters in the [Sidenote: Danes in the English Service; Pallig.] Solent. Some at least among the Danes had taken service under the English King. Such was the case with Pallig, a Danish Earl, evidently of the highest distinction, as he was married to Gunhild, a sister of King Swegen himself.[579] His wife, and probably himself, had embraced Christianity, and he had received large gifts from the King, both in [Sidenote: Invasion of Sussex and Hampshire. 1001.] money and in land. The Danes who had stayed in England now burst into Sussex, and ravaged as far as a place called Æthelingadene.[580] They then pressed on into Hampshire, and, as so often happened, they were met by the men of the shire, and by the men of that shire only. The details of the battle are unusually minute; eighty-one of the English were killed and a much greater number of the Danes; but the Danes kept possession of the place of slaughter. Among the English dead were several men of rank,[581] among them two “high-reeves” of the King—probably the Sheriffs of Hampshire and Sussex—Æthelweard and Leofwine.[582] The Danes then went westward, seemingly in concert with the fleet which was coming back [Sidenote: Treason of Pallig.] from Normandy. But they were first met by Pallig, who had already forsaken the service of Æthelred, and who now joined them with such ships as he could bring with him. They sailed up the Teign, and burned King’s Teignton[583] and other places. After this, peace—no doubt the usual kind of peace—was made with them. But by this [Sidenote: Return of the Danes from Normandy.] time they had fallen in with their comrades. The Danes who had sailed to Normandy now came back, no doubt still further embittered at Æthelred’s doings in that country, whatever may have been their exact nature. Their fleet seems to have sailed straight from Normandy to the mouth of the Exe; they were there met by the other Danes, Pallig and the rest, and their united forces sailed [Sidenote: Importance of Exeter; early history of the city.] up the river.[584] About ten miles from its mouth lay a city[585] which held nearly the same position in the West of England which York held in the North and London in the South-east. The Roman city of Isca had not fallen into the power of the Teutonic invaders till after their conversion to Christianity; it therefore had not shared the fate which befell Anderida at the hands of Ælle and Uriconium at the hands of Ceawlin. Under the slightly changed name of Exanceaster or Exeter, the capital and bulwark of the Western shires had long formed one of the choicest possessions of the West-Saxon Kings. The city [Sidenote: 877.] had been warmly striven for between Ælfred and his Danish enemies, and, among the ups and downs of his earlier struggle with the invaders, it had been more than [Sidenote: Exeter, hitherto half Welsh, becomes purely English under Æthelstan, and is strongly fortified. 926.] once taken and lost again. Up to the time of Æthelstan Exeter had remained, as many towns in Wales and Ireland remained for ages afterwards, a joint possession of Teutonic and Celtic inhabitants.[586] No doubt there was an English and a Welsh town, an Englishry and a Welshry,[587] and we may be equally sure that the English inhabitants formed a dominant class or patriciate among their fellow-burghers. But Æthelstan, in the course of his Western wars, thought it good that so important a post should be left in no hands but such as he could wholly rely on. The Welsh inhabitants were accordingly removed; the city became altogether English; a [Sidenote: Witenagemót and Laws of Exeter.] solemn assembly of the Witan was held to commemorate and to confirm the new acquisition, and one series of the laws of Æthelstan were put forth in the now purely English city of Exeter.[588] The town was now strongly fortified; it was surrounded with a wall of squared stones,[589] a fact worthy of the attention of those who seem to think that our forefathers before the Norman Conquest were incapable of using the commonest tools, or of putting stone and mortar together in any way. The chief architectural ornament of the city had indeed no existence. [Sidenote: Exeter not yet a Bishop’s See.] The cathedral church, so strange in its outline, so commanding in its position, did not yet crown the height which, alone among the episcopal seats of Southern England, makes some pretensions to rival the temples built on high at Lincoln and at Durham, at Geneva and at Lausanne. Indeed, like Lincoln and Durham, it had not even a predecessor. Exeter was not yet a Bishop’s see; the episcopal care of West-Wales was still divided between the Bishop of Devonshire at Crediton and the [Sidenote: Municipal condition of the city.] Bishop of Cornwall at Bodmin. The history of the city at a somewhat later time seems to show that it enjoyed a large share of municipal freedom; still, as an integral part of the West-Saxon realm, it was a royal possession, and the royal authority was represented [Sidenote: Its commercial and military importance.] by a reeve of the King’s choice. Both the commercial and the military importance of the city were of the first rank. In our days the trade of Exeter has long been of small moment; commerce has long been carried on in vessels which need a deeper stream; as early as the thirteenth century the trade of the city itself began to be interfered with by the foundation of the port of Topsham nearer the mouth of the river. But the small craft of the tenth century could sail straight up to the city for [Sidenote: The Danes attack the city, but are driven off by the citizens.] purposes either of commerce or of war. The Danes now attacked Exeter, just as they had attacked London; but the citizens of the Western capital fought with as good a will, and with as thorough success, as their brethren of the East.[590] King Æthelstan’s wall stood them in good stead,[591] and the attack of the barbarians was altogether fruitless. But the result of the resistance of Exeter was much the same as the result of the resistance of London. The city was saved, but, for that very reason,[592] the ravages of the invaders fell with redoubled violence upon the surrounding country. Æthelred was as unready as ever; the host which had been prompt to ravage Cumberland and perhaps [Sidenote: Devonshire ravaged and the Defnsætas and Sumorsætas defeated at Pinhoe.] Normandy, was not at hand to aid any local efforts. The Danes spread themselves over the country, harrying, burning, killing, in their accustomed manner. The men of Somerset and Devonshire gathered their forces, and met the enemy at Pinhoe,[593] not far from the rescued city. But the force of two shires was not enough for the purpose. The Danes had the advantage of numbers,[594] and put the irregular English levies to flight. They then, as usual, took to themselves horses, and ravaged the country still more thoroughly and unsparingly than before. At last they went back to their ships with a vast booty, and sailed to their old quarters in the Isle of Wight. Thence they carried on their usual harryings, both in the island and on the coasts of Hampshire and Dorset, no man now daring to withstand them.

[Sidenote: Witenagemót of 1001.]

The Witan met in the course of this year in an assembly which confirmed a grant of the King to the abbey of Shaftesbury, a grant which is remarkable on two grounds. It distinctly sets forth the wretchedness of the times in a way rather unusual in such documents, and it shows that the King’s brother Eadward was already looked on as [Sidenote: First Gemót of 1002.] a saint.[595] Another meeting was held early the next year, [Sidenote: Charters granted at it.] in which the King granted to Archbishop Ælfric the estate of a lady which she had forfeited to the crown by her unchastity.[596] Possibly at the same meeting, or at another in the same year, Æthelingadene, the scene of one of the late battles, along with some other property, was granted by Æthelred to the monastery of Wherwell, his mother’s foundation, for the good of her soul and of that of his father.[597] It may be that in all this we hear the voice of his brother’s blood crying from the ground.[598] But the state of the nation was not altogether neglected; still the Assembly of the Wise could think of nothing better than the old wretched remedy which had so often [Sidenote: Payment again made to the Danes.] failed them. The Danes were again to be bought off at their own terms, and Leofsige Ealdorman of the East-Saxons was sent to find out what those terms were.[599] They now, fairly enough, raised their price; twenty-four thousand pounds was asked and was paid as the condition of their ceasing from their ravages. But, while the negotiation was going on, the negotiator, on what ground or in what quarrel we are not told, killed the King’s high-reeve Æfic in his own house.[600] The Witan were still in session; [Sidenote: Leofsige outlawed.] they took cognizance of the murder, and Leofsige was outlawed and driven out of the land for his crime.[601] All this [Sidenote: Emma comes over.] must have happened early in the year, as it was after these events, though still in Lent,[602] that the Norman Lady came [Sidenote: Second or Third Gemót of 1002.] over. Before the year was out, another Witenagemót was held,[603] at which Æthelred and his counsellors contrived to do what otherwise might have seemed impossible, to [Sidenote: Massacre of the Danes. November 13, 1002.] put the heathen invaders in the right. This winter, on the mass-day of Saint Brice, took place that famous massacre of the Danes which has given a wide field for the exaggerated and romantic details of later writers, but which stands out in bloody colours enough on the page [Sidenote: Plot of the Danes to kill the King and his Witan.] of authentic history.[604] According to our best authorities, tidings were brought to the King that the Danes who were in England were plotting with one consent to kill him and his Witan and to seize upon the kingdom. Except that other means of destruction must have been intended, this sounds very like a forestalling of the Gunpowder Plot. The Danes were indeed thoroughly faithless, but an intended general massacre of the whole Witenagemót when in full session, which the words seem to imply, is hardly credible. Another attack on London or Exeter, or a harrying of some district which was as yet untouched, would be much more likely. One cannot help suspecting that we have here a good deal of exaggeration, exaggeration, I mean, not in the Chroniclers but in the reports spread abroad at the time by Æthelred and his advisers. However this may be, the King, no doubt with the consent of the second (or third) Gemót of the year, ordered a general massacre of all the Danes in England, an order which could never have been carried into execution if it had not been supported by the general hatred of the whole nation. It is said that letters were secretly sent to all parts of the kingdom, ordering the bloody work to be done [Sidenote: Probable extent of the massacre.] throughout the whole land on one day. The persons slain were most likely such among those Danes who had served in the late invasions as had stayed in England on the faith of the treaty concluded in the spring. A general massacre of all persons of Danish descent throughout England is not to be thought of; such a massacre would have amounted to the slaughter of a large part of the inhabitants of Northumberland and East-Anglia. There is nothing in the earliest account to imply that any but men were slaughtered, and, among the Danes, every man was a soldier, or rather a pirate. That such men were not slaughtered without resistance is not wonderful. One instance is incidentally recorded, how such Danes as were at Oxford, flying from their English destroyers, sought shelter in the minster of Saint Frithswyth, and how they defended themselves against all the people of the borough, until their assailants betook themselves to fire and burned the Danes along with the church and its records. This one piece of detail seems to be trustworthy;[605] but the tale began very early to get improved by all kinds of romantic additions. The slaughter of actual enemies was not enough. We first hear of a massacre of Danish women; then, among an infinite variety of horrors of all sorts, we come to a massacre of English women who had become wives or mistresses of Danes, and of the children who were the fruit of such unions. It is not likely that there were many Danish women to massacre, and the notion of a general massacre of women most [Sidenote: Murder of Gunhild.] likely arose out of one particular case. That Gunhild, the wife of Pallig and sister of Swegen, was put to death is too probable, especially if it be true that she had given herself as a hostage for the good faith of her countrymen. The prince who blinded the son of Ælfric to avenge his father’s treason,[606] and who afterwards took the father himself again into favour, was capable even of so cowardly and foolish a vengeance as this. The traitor Pallig, if he was caught, would doubtless be put to death, and that with perfect justice, unless he was personally included in the last treaty. And it may be that Gunhild had to behold the slaughter of her husband and her son, and that with her dying voice she foretold the woes which her death would bring upon England. Such a prediction needed no special prophetic inspiration.

§ 4. _From the Massacre of Saint Brice to Swegen’s Conquest of England._ 1002–1013.

[Sidenote: Results of the massacre.]

The vespers of Saint Brice were not only a crime but a blunder. From this time forth the Danish invasions become far more constant, far more systematic, and they [Sidenote: Invasion by Swegen in person. 1003.] affect a far larger portion of the kingdom. The next year King Swegen came again in person.[607] He now had a real injury; the blood of his sister and his countrymen might have called for vengeance at the hands of a gentler and more forgiving prince. He did not land in any of those parts of the island where we should have most naturally looked for the opening of a campaign; he began his attack in the region which had been the chief seat of warfare for years before. Most likely he knew well where the [Sidenote: Exeter betrayed to Swegen by Hugh the Frenchman.] weakness of England lay. The Danish King sailed to Exeter, the city whose burghers had so gallantly repelled the former attack. But the state of things within the walls of the western capital was now sadly changed for the worse. The royal rights over Exeter had been granted to the Norman Lady as part of her morning-gift. Hugh, a Frenchman, whether earl or churl[608] matters not, was now the royal reeve in Exeter, the first of a long line of foreigners who, under Emma, her son, and her great-nephew, were to fatten on English estates and honours. Hugh was either a coward or a traitor, most likely both. Exeter was stormed and plundered; the noble walls of King Æthelstan were broken down from the east gate to the [Sidenote: Swegen ravages Wiltshire.] west, and the city was left defenceless.[609] Swegen returned to his ships with a vast plunder, and then went on to the [Sidenote: A battle hindered by Ælfric, again in command of the English.] harrying of Wiltshire. The men of that shire and their neighbours of Hampshire were gathered together, ready and eager to meet the enemy in battle. The people were as sound at heart as they had been three years before, but they had no longer the same valiant leaders. The battle of Æthelingadene seems to have fallen with special severity on the chief men, and we now find the force of these two shires in the last hands in which we should have looked to find them. The old traitor Ælfric,[610] who had done his best, eleven years before,[611] to betray London to the enemy, who had himself been driven from the land, and whose innocent son had paid a cruel penalty for his offence, was now, through some unrecorded and inexplicable intrigue, again in royal favour, again in command of an English army, again trusted to oppose the very enemy with whom he had before traitorously leagued himself. But, as our Chronicles tell us with a vigorous simplicity, he was again at his old tricks; as soon as the armies were so near that they could look on one another, the English commander pretended to be taken suddenly ill;[612] retchings and spittings followed as a proof of his sickness; in such a case a battle could not possibly be thought of. One wonders that some brave man, however unauthorized, did not seize the command by common consent;[613] but the paltry trick was successful; the spirits of the English were broken, and they went away in [Sidenote: Fluctuation of spirits among non-professional soldiers.] sadness without a battle.[614] In all this history, just as in old Greek history,[615] we are often surprised at the mere accidents on which the fate of battles depends, how much one man’s valour or cowardice or treason can bring about, how much turns on the mood in which the soldiers find themselves at the moment of action. In this case the English are described as having come together with the utmost good will, and as being thoroughly eager to do their duty. Yet a transparent artifice at once paralyses them, and they become wholly incapable of action. We must remember that here, just as in Greece, we are dealing, not with professional soldiers, but with citizen soldiers; we are dealing with times when every man was sometimes a soldier, and when none but professed pirates were soldiers always. Such soldiers are not mere machines in the hand of a master of the game; they do not simply do their professional duty in blind obedience; they have a real part and interest in what is going on; they are therefore liable to be affected by the ordinary feelings of men in a way in which professional soldiers are much less strongly affected. Such men are specially liable to fluctuations of the spirits; they are easily encouraged and easily disheartened; men who fight like heroes one day may be overcome by a sudden panic the next. Hence the extraordinary importance which, with troops of this kind, attaches to the personal exhortation and personal example of the general; a chief who simply stands aloof and gives orders can never win a victory. The particular speech put into the mouth of a general before battle is no doubt commonly the invention of the historian; but that generals found it needful to make such speeches, and that such speeches had a most important effect on the spirit and conduct of their armies, is clear in every history of this kind of warfare. No doubt even professional soldiers still remain men, and are liable to be in some degree affected in the same way; still habit and discipline make a great change; an army in which each man is really fighting for his hearth and home is liable to these influences in a tenfold degree. Before long we shall see England possessed of an army combining the merits of both systems, an army uniting discipline and patriotism; but as yet the country had no standing force, and had to depend solely on the enthusiasm and the sense of duty of the general levies of each

## particular district. In this case, the spirit of the men of Wiltshire

and Hampshire was all that a leader could wish for; if some brave man had stepped forward, had cut down the traitor Ælfric, and had called on the English to follow him against the enemy, a battle would have been certain and a victory probable. But no man had the energy to do this; therefore the base trick thoroughly succeeded, the spirit of the troops was damped, and the English host went away without striking a blow. But even in retreat it must have been formidable, as it seems to have been left quite unmolested by the enemy. Still the whole shire was left defenceless. The town of Wilton was sacked and burned. [Sidenote: Swegen sacks and burns Wilton and Salisbury.] Swegen then marched to Salisbury. The Salisbury of [Sidenote: Old Sarum.] those days was not the modern city in the plain, which circles, with but little of beauty or interest in itself, around the most graceful of West-Saxon minsters. The object of Swegen’s march was still the old hill-fortress,[616] where the Briton and the Roman had entrenched [Sidenote: 552.] themselves, and at whose foot Cynric had won one of those great battles which mark the western stages of the Teutonic invasion. After the days of Swegen a Norman castle and a Norman minster rose and fell on that historic spot, and the chosen stronghold of so many races lived to become one of the bye-words of modern political discussion. Like Exeter, Salisbury was not yet a Bishop’s see; the prelate of Wiltshire had his lowly cathedral church in the obscure Ramsbury; but the choice of Salisbury at the end of the century as the seat of the united sees of Wiltshire and Dorset shows that it must already have been a place of importance according to the standard of the time. Yet one would think that its importance must always have been mainly that of a military post; one can hardly conceive Old Sarum being at any time a place of trade or the home of any considerable population. Whatever the place consisted of at this time, Swegen sacked and burned it, and returned to his ships with great spoil.[617]

[Sidenote: Exploits of Ulfcytel of East-Anglia. 1004.]

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

[Sidenote: Year of respite and of famine. 1005.]

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

[Sidenote: Scottish inroad. 1006.]

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

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. [Sidenote: 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 against the enemy.[635] He gathered together an army from [Sidenote: 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 [Sidenote: 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] [Sidenote: 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 of 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, [Sidenote: 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 [Sidenote: 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 the exposed coasts of Kent and Sussex. The King kept [Sidenote: 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 [Sidenote: 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.

[Sidenote: 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. But 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.

[Sidenote: 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 [Sidenote: 1003.] four years before, now vanishes from history, and his place [Sidenote: 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.

[Sidenote: 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 these two years, while another may, on internal evidence, [Sidenote: 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 [Sidenote: 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 different 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 manfully 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. [Sidenote: 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 [Sidenote: 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 [Sidenote: 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.

[Sidenote: Decrees of Enham,]

The decrees of the undated Council of Enham[654] are marked as belonging to the same period, by the repetition of 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 [Sidenote: 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 same 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.

[Sidenote: 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 [Sidenote: 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. There is evidence to show that a contribution of ships in [Sidenote: 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 [Sidenote: 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 [Sidenote: 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 [Sidenote: 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 by 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.

[Sidenote: 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, asking 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 [Sidenote: 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. [Sidenote: 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 his dominions to his sister with her husband and children; [Sidenote: 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.

[Sidenote: 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 [Sidenote: 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, and dashed them against the shore, where presently Wulfnoth [Sidenote: 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 [Sidenote: 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, [Sidenote: 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 [Sidenote: 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 [Sidenote: 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 before 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 [Sidenote: 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 [Sidenote: 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 [Sidenote: 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. [Sidenote: January, 1010.] After Christmas they set out again, and plunged yet further into the heart of the country than they had ever [Sidenote: 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]

[Sidenote: 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 [Sidenote: 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 [Sidenote: April, 1010.] Æthelred. After Easter the Danish fleet sailed forth, and this time it attacked East-Anglia. They landed near [Sidenote: 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 [Sidenote: 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 by 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 [Sidenote: [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 [Sidenote: [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 [Sidenote: [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 built of wood, a town was destroyed and again rebuilt. [Sidenote: 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 [Sidenote: 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 to 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 [Sidenote: 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 [Sidenote: 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 ravaged 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 [Sidenote: [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.

[Sidenote: 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 they 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 [Sidenote: [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 [Sidenote: 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 the 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 [Sidenote: 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, and Godwine, Bishop of Rochester,[691] were all carried [Sidenote: 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.

[Sidenote: 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 [Sidenote: 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. [Sidenote: 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 [Sidenote: 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. On 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; [Sidenote: 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 [Sidenote: 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.

[Sidenote: The money paid to the Danes.]

Soon after the Archbishop’s murder, the forty-eight thousand pounds, the ransom of England, was paid, oaths [Sidenote: 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 Ælfheah. 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.

[Sidenote: 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.

[Sidenote: 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 immediate 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, [Sidenote: 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 [Sidenote: Swegen sails up the Humber.] Sandwich. He then changed his course, and sailed to the mouth of the Humber, to a country among whose population 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 [Sidenote: 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 [Sidenote: 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, [Sidenote: Swegen enters Mercia;] in his onward march.[705] With this force he then crossed Watling-street, and struck south-west, into the strictly English districts of Mercia, into the one part of England [Sidenote: 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 [Sidenote: 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 [Sidenote: 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 [Sidenote: [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 brave Dane Thurkill was there, faithfully discharging the [Sidenote: 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. [Sidenote: 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. [Sidenote: 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 Londoners at last gave way; out of sheer fear of the [Sidenote: 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 [Sidenote: 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 [Sidenote: 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 [Sidenote: 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.

[Sidenote: 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 a 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 [Sidenote: 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 [Sidenote: 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 the 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. [Sidenote: 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 [Sidenote: 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 prefer to call him, Tyrant[718]—over all England. But it [Sidenote: 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 [Sidenote: 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 [Sidenote: 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 [Sidenote: 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 passed 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 [Sidenote: 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 luxury.[724] But that he, and not Cnut, was in actual possession [Sidenote: 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 [Sidenote: 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, [Sidenote: 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 [Sidenote: 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 submit in all things to the advice of his Witan.[727] Promises were thus exchanged on both sides; Æthelred was again [Sidenote: Outlawry of all Danish Kings.] acknowledged, and a decree was passed proclaiming every Danish King an outlaw from England.[728] The expression [Sidenote: 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.

[Sidenote: 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, [Sidenote: 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 understand 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 [Sidenote: 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 picture 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.

[Sidenote: 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 Cnut 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. [Sidenote: 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 [Sidenote: 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. [Sidenote: 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]

[Sidenote: Great inroad of the sea.]

In the same year, as if to illustrate the law that political and natural misfortunes generally come together, the [Sidenote: 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]

[Sidenote: 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 the beginning of the short and glorious career of the hero [Sidenote: 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 [Sidenote: 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, [Sidenote: 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 the 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 [Sidenote: 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 [Sidenote: 1007.] he destroyed Ealdorman Ælfhelm at Shrewsbury nine [Sidenote: 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 Eadric’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 [Sidenote: 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. [Sidenote: 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] He 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 [Sidenote: 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 whose 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 [Sidenote: 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 [Sidenote: 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, [Sidenote: 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.

This defection of Eadric—perhaps of Thurkill—settled [Sidenote: Wessex submits to Cnut.] the fate of Southern England. All Wessex now submitted to the invader; hostages were given and horses were furnished. The kingdom was now practically divided; but—owing mainly to the romantic marriage and settlement of Eadmund—it was divided in a manner exactly opposite from that which might have been naturally looked for. The Thames is, as usual, the boundary; but the English Ætheling reigns to the north, the Danish King to the south, of that river; the Mercians and Northumbrians are arrayed under the Dragon of Wessex, while the West-Saxons themselves serve, however unwillingly, under the Danish Raven. On these strange terms the war began again early in the next year, the last year of [Sidenote: Cnut and Eadric invade Mercia. January, 1016.] this long struggle. Just before the Epiphany, Cnut and Eadric, with their mixed force of Danes and West-Saxons, crossed the Thames at Cricklade,[757] and entered Mercia. They harried Warwickshire in the usual fashion, ravaging, [Sidenote: Vain attempts of Eadmund to keep an army together.] burning, slaying, as they went. The Ætheling now gathered an army in Mercia, but his troops refused to fight, unless King Æthelred and the Londoners joined them. The army then dispersed in the wonderful way in which armies did disperse in those days. Presently the Ætheling put forth proclamations, summoning every man to join his standard, and denouncing the full penalties of the law against all who held back.[758] By these means he gathered a larger army; he then sent to his father, who was in London, praying him to join him with whatever forces he could gather. Æthelred did so, and joined his son’s muster with a considerable body of troops. But the old ill luck was at work; the only thing that can be said is that Æthelred was most likely dragged to the field from his death-bed. The two divisions had hardly joined when the King found out, or professed to find out, treacherous plots against his person. These he made an excuse for disbanding the whole army and going back to London. [Sidenote: Eadmund and Uhtred join forces.] With such a King what could be done? Eadmund withdrew to Northumberland, the government of his brother-in-law Uhtred. That Earl, it will be remembered, had been, to say the least, somewhat hasty in submitting to [Sidenote: [1013.]] Swegen, but he now gladly joined Eadmund. All men deemed that the Ætheling would raise a third army in [Sidenote: Ravages of the two armies.] Northumberland, and would march against Cnut. But he and Uhtred contented themselves with ravaging three Mercian shires which had refused to help them against the Danes,[759] namely Staffordshire, Shropshire, and Cheshire. Cnut meanwhile went plundering on his side through the shires of Buckingham, Bedford, Huntingdon, Northampton, then by Stamford, through Lincolnshire and Nottinghamshire, on towards York. The ravaging of his country and the danger of his capital caused Uhtred to [Sidenote: Northumberland under Uhtred submits to Cnut.] cease his own ravages and to hasten homewards. He found further resistance useless;[760] he submitted to Cnut and gave hostages. The Dane was now again lord of all England,[761] save only London and whatever extent of country could be held in obedience from London. But now the vengeance of the old feud came upon Uhtred. Thurbrand, whom he had before engaged and omitted to [Sidenote: Murder of Uhtred.] kill, was now allowed to kill him. As Uhtred came to pay his homage to his new prince at a place called Wiheal, a curtain was drawn aside, and armed men stepped forward, who slew the Earl and forty of his companions, among whom one Thurcytel son of Navena is specially mentioned.[762] This evil deed also was attributed to Eadric, [Sidenote: Eric made Earl of the Northumbrians.] the common author of all evil. The earldom of Northumberland was given by Cnut to a Dane named Eric, who had married his sister Gytha, and had held the government of Norway under Swegen.[763] But it seems that Eadwulf Cutel, the brother of the murdered Uhtred, either was allowed to hold Bernicia under the supremacy of Eric, or else succeeded to the whole when Eric was banished some years later. The whole North was thus lost; it was again as thoroughly under Danish rule as it had been before the conquests of Eadward. And, worse still, Wessex was under Danish rule too, and it had even outrun Northumberland in its submission. But London still held out; Cnut therefore hastened to subdue the last stronghold of the national life. Events had followed fast upon one another. Christmas had passed before Cnut crossed the [Sidenote: Cnut prepares to attack London.] Thames, and Easter had not come when he crossed it again. He hastened with all speed to his fleet in the Dorset haven, and prepared to sail with his whole force against the still faithful city. Eadmund, either now or earlier,[764] hastened to join his father in its defence. Cnut was on his voyage, but he seems to have gone more leisurely than might have been expected after the speed [Sidenote: Death of Æthelred. April 23, 1016.] of his march from Yorkshire.[765] He had only reached Southampton, when tidings were brought of the death of Æthelred. He died on Saint George’s day, probably of the same sickness of which we read the year before, and was buried in Saint Paul’s Minster.

§ 6. _The War of Cnut and Eadmund._ 1016.

The throne was now again vacant; England was at last set free from the worst and weakest of her native Kings. Æthelred had misgoverned his kingdom till the rule of heathen invaders was felt to be at least not worse than his. He had been deposed and driven out; his kingdom had been reduced to the decks of a few hired Danish ships. He had been restored; adversity had wrought no lasting reform; he had thrown away every advantage, and his kingdom was again confined within the walls of London. That true-hearted city was once more the bulwark of England, the centre of every patriotic hope, the special object of every hostile attack. Beyond its walls, all was either actually in the hands of the invader or exposed to his power. The Witan of England, Bishops, Abbots, Ealdormen, [Sidenote: Double election to the crown of Cnut and Eadmund. April, 1016.] Thegns, all who were without the walls of London, met in full Gemót, and chose Cnut to the vacant throne. They may well have deemed that further resistance was hopeless, and it should not be forgotten that the full glory of the character of Eadmund had not yet displayed itself. He had shown a gallant spirit, but he had as yet achieved no signal success; the harrying of the three Mercian shires was, to say the least, a very harsh measure; and he may have shown somewhat of turbulence and self-will in the affair of his marriage and settlement in the Five Boroughs. The assembly therefore passed him by; they chose—perhaps they could hardly help choosing—the Conqueror; they hastened to Southampton, they abjured the whole house of Æthelred, they swore oaths to Cnut and received oaths from him that he would be a good and faithful lord to them before God and before the world. It was perhaps at this time that he received baptism or confirmation at the hands of Æthelnoth the future Archbishop; but he does not seem to have received the ecclesiastical rite of coronation.[766] And even his election did not represent the voice of all England. We now meet with, what is so common in German, and so rare in English, history, a double election to the crown. Cnut was chosen at Southampton, but the citizens of London, with such of the other Witan as were within the city, held a counter Gemót—no doubt the earlier of the two in date—and with one voice[767] elected the Ætheling Eadmund. His coronation at the hands of Archbishop Lyfing followed. The town which had been of late the usual place for the consecration of Kings, Kingston in Surrey, was probably in possession of the enemy; at all events the rite was done within the walls of the city, no doubt in the minster of Saint Paul, where the late King had just been buried. Whether Eadmund was the eldest surviving son of Æthelred is uncertain;[768] there could be no doubt as to [Sidenote: Short and glorious reign of Eadmund.] his being the worthiest. Now, after the long and dreary reign of his father, England had once more at her head a true King of Men, a hero worthy to wield the sword of Ælfred and Æthelstan. The change came at once; with her new King England received a new life; after twenty-eight [Sidenote: 988–1016.] years of unutterable weakness and degradation, we now come to seven months of almost superhuman energy. [Sidenote: Change wrought by a single worthy leader.] We see that all that had been wanting through that long and wretched time was a worthy leader; we see that, without such a leader, the English people were helpless; we see that, under such a leader, even after all that they had gone through, they were still capable of exertions which, twenty or even ten years before, would have driven back the invaders for ever. Everything that could weaken and demoralize a people, everything that could thoroughly weigh down and dishearten them, had fallen on the English nation during the long misgovernment of Æthelred. A generation had grown up which had been used from its childhood to see invaders land and ravage at pleasure. They had seen the noblest local efforts thwarted by incompetence and treachery at head-quarters. They had seen a King and his counsellors incapable of any better device than that of buying off the heathen invader for a moment. They had seen the strength of the nation, while the enemy was preying on its vitals, wasted on distant, bootless, and unrighteous enterprises. They had seen the basest of traitors basking in the royal smiles, while the true and valiant defenders of their country were left unrewarded and unnoticed. Such had been the unvaried course of English history for eight and twenty years. But, even after all this, the heart of the English people still was sound. The wretched Æthelred had ended his days, and under his glorious son hope and courage woke to life again. In the days of the father, one shire would no longer help another; in the days of the son, the most distant parts of the land sent their contingents to the national armies of England. Those armies, instead of flying at the first blow, instead of disbanding before a blow was struck, could now face the enemy in pitched battle after pitched battle. The standard of England again waved over fields on which the English arms were often crowned with victory, and where defeat at least never was disgrace. Once only in the course of his long reign had Æthelred dared to meet a Danish King in open fight. Now six great battles in seven months showed what Englishmen could still do under a King worthy of his people. The year of the battles of Eadmund is worthy to [Sidenote: 871.] be placed alongside of the year of the battles of Ælfred. But the traitor still lived to thwart the noblest efforts of the hero; Eadric still remained the evil genius of the reign of Eadmund no less than of the reign of his father.

[Sidenote: Eadmund acknowledged in Wessex.]

Eadmund, surnamed Ironside,[769] was now King in London; but Cnut, by virtue both of his election and of military possession, was King over at least the whole of Wessex, Mercia, and Northumberland. The first act of Eadmund was to go forth from London to try to win back the immediate realm of his forefathers, the kingdom of the West-Saxons. He was at once acknowledged, and English troops flocked to him from all quarters.[770] Meanwhile the rival King, having received the homage of the Witan at Southampton, continued his voyage towards London. He [Sidenote: Cnut besieges London, May 7, 1016.] halted at Greenwich,[771] and prepared to form the siege of the city. The course of the ships up the river was checked by the bridge—a wooden forerunner, no doubt, of that London bridge which lasted down to our own times, and which was no doubt made the most of as part of the defences of the city. But Cnut dug a deep ditch to the south of the river, so that the ships evaded the obstacle, and sailed round to the west side of the bridge.[772] He then dug another ditch round that part of the city which was not washed by the Thames, so that London was again hemmed in on every side. But every attempt on the walls was again baffled by the valour of the citizens, and at last Cnut found it more to his interest to check the progress of his rival in the West than to go on with an [Sidenote: He raises the siege.] undertaking which seemed utterly hopeless. He raised the siege, and marched after Eadmund. The English King was now collecting troops on the borders of the three shires of Somerset, Wiltshire, and Dorset. Cnut had followed so fast that Eadmund had had time to gather only a small force; still he did not fear to meet the enemy in battle.[773] The armies met at a point near the border of the three shires, but just within the bounds of Somerset, on the edge of the high ground covered by the forest of Selwood. The place is spoken of as the Pens, a Celtic name which describes the lofty position of the ground, and which is appropriately found in the immediate neighbourhood of large traces of præ-Teutonic [Sidenote: _First battle_, at Pen Selwood; victory of Eadmund.] antiquity.[774] Here, on a spot which perhaps had been the scene of West-Saxon victories over an earlier enemy, did Eadmund, with his small force, formed mainly no doubt of the levies of the district, venture to give battle to the tried troops of his rival. He put his trust in God; he boldly attacked the enemy, and he defeated [Sidenote: _Second battle_, at Sherstone (July 1016); victory doubtful.] him. Eadmund then collected a larger army, and on Monday in July[775] he again engaged the enemy in another border district, at Sherstone in Wiltshire, just on the marches of Wessex and Mercia. Of this battle fuller details have been preserved. The eastern shires of Wessex were in the possession of Cnut, so that the men of Hampshire and part of Wiltshire fought on the Danish side. With the Danes also were, not only the traitor Eadric, but at least two other English Ealdormen, Ælfmær, surnamed Darling,[776] and Ælfgar the son of Meaw. With Eadmund were the men of Devonshire, Dorset, and part of Wiltshire—those of Somerset are not mentioned, but they can hardly fail to have been on the English side. At any rate, while the pure Saxons of Hampshire were arrayed on the side of Cnut, the army of Eadmund must have largely consisted of men of Welsh descent. The King placed his best troops[777]—no doubt mainly his own followers—in front, and the inferior part of his army in the rear. He exhorted them in a speech setting forth the motives obvious at such a time, and led them to the place of action. The trumpets sounded; the battle began; the javelins were hurled at the onset, and the close combat was still carried on, as at Maldon, with the sword.[778] King Eadmund fought in the front rank, doing the duty alike of a general and of a private soldier.[779] The two hosts fought for a whole day, without any marked advantage on either side. The next day the fight began again; the English had now plainly the better, when a new act of treachery on the part of Eadric for a while threw their ranks into disorder. Smiting off the head of a man whose features were much like those of the English King, he held it up, calling on the host of Eadmund to flee. The English wavered, and some were on the point of flight, when Eadmund, like William at Senlac, tore off his helmet, showed himself alive to his army, and hurled a spear at Eadric. He unluckily missed the traitor, and slew another soldier who was near him.[780] The English then took heart again; they attacked the Danes with still greater vigour, and kept up the battle till twilight, when the two hosts again separated. Neither side had gained any decided success; neither host, it would seem, kept possession of the place of slaughter. But if neither side could claim the formal honours of victory, the practical advantage was [Sidenote: Cnut again besieges London.] clearly on the side of the English. For in the night Cnut marched stealthily away from his camp, went back to his ships, and again began the siege of London. Eadmund [Sidenote: Eadmund reconciled with Eadric.] then crossed into Wessex to gather fresh troops; and now his faithless brother-in-law Eadric came to him, as to his natural lord,[781] made his peace with him, and swore oaths of future fidelity. Eadmund, unconquered by the arms of Cnut, was not proof against the kind of warfare in which Eadric was so skilful. The hero had the weakness again to admit the traitor to his favour and confidence. [Sidenote: Eadmund wins the _third battle_, and delivers London; he] At the head of his new troops,[782] Eadmund marched towards London, and in a third battle he drove the Danes to raise the siege and go back to their ships. Two [Sidenote: then wins the _fourth battle_, at Brentford.] days afterwards he fought his fourth battle at Brentford, where the Danes were again defeated, but many of the English were lost in trying to ford the river without due heed. Eadmund now returned to Wessex to gather [Sidenote: Cnut besieges London in vain the third time.] fresh troops, and meanwhile Cnut sat down, for the third time within these few months, before London. The city was again attacked on every side; but again all attacks by land and by water were in vain. Almighty God, say the Chroniclers, saved the city.

[Sidenote: Great plundering expedition of the Danes.]

King Eadmund was now gathering a greater force than ever from all parts of England.[783] Meanwhile the Danes, finding all their attempts on London fruitless, set out on a plundering expedition on a great scale. They sailed away from London, they coasted along the shores of Essex; they then entered the Orwell, and thence they marched across East-Anglia and spread themselves over Mercia, plundering, burning, slaying, according to their wont. Then, gorged with plunder, those who were on foot went back to their ships, and sailed up the Medway, the fierce and swift-flowing stream which washed the fair walls of Rochester.[784] Those who had horses seemed to have reached the same trysting-place by land. But King Eadmund followed them with his fourth army, which must have been partly at least levied in Mercia, as he was [Sidenote: _Fifth battle_, at Otford; victory of Eadmund.] now north of the Thames. He crossed the river at Brentford, the scene of his last success, he followed the Danes into Kent, met them at Otford, and gained an easy victory. The Danes fled with their horses into Sheppey—the [Sidenote: 855.] corner of England in which a Danish host had first wintered.[785] The King pressed on and slew as many as he could; but his evil genius Eadric now again appeared [Sidenote: Further treasons of Eadric; he saves the Danes from destruction.] in his old character. By the same incomprehensible means of which we have so often heard, Eadmund was hindered from following up his victory. The traitor contrived to detain the King at Aylesford, and the Danish army was saved from utter destruction.

The last act of this great drama was now drawing near. Since the end of April, Eadmund had gathered four armies; he had fought five pitched battles; he had been decidedly victorious in four of them, and he had, to say the least, not been decidedly defeated in any. Never had the efforts of one man been greater or more successful; Ælfred himself, in his most hard-fought campaigns, had not worked for England with a truer heart [Sidenote: Eadmund collects a fifth army from all England.] than his valiant descendant. Eadmund again marched westward, he gathered a fifth army, and made ready for a sixth battle. The war, which in the beginning might have almost passed for a local struggle, had now become thoroughly national. Cnut had now to fight, not against Wessex, but against England, and there is nothing which leads us to think that he now had any English followers under his banners. Eadmund’s new host was gathered from all parts of England, even from districts whose inhabitants were largely of Danish origin. We have no complete list of the shires which sent contingents, but we incidentally find that men came from districts as far apart from each other as Herefordshire, East-Anglia, and Lindesey. The Danes meanwhile sailed along the coast of Essex, and entered the estuary of the Crouch. There they left their ships, while the army went on a plundering expedition into Mercia, which is spoken of as being more fearful than any that had gone before it. After this they returned towards their ships, the latter part of their course leading them along the high ground [Sidenote: _Sixth_ and last battle, at Assandun.] which lies south of the Crouch. Along these heights Eadmund followed them, and at last overtook and engaged them in the sixth and last battle of this wonderful year, the memorable fight of Assandun.[786] At the end of the range, two hills of slight positive height, but which seem lofty in the low lands of the East of England, look down on the swampy plain watered by the tidal river. Between the hills and this lowest ground lies a considerable level at an intermediate height, which seems to have been the actual site of the battle. Of the two hills one still keeps the name of Ashington, an easy corruption of the ancient form, while the other, in its name of Canewdon, perhaps preserves the memory of the Danish conqueror himself. On Assandun then, a site marked by entrenchments which are perhaps witnesses of that day’s fight, perhaps of yet earlier warfare, Eadmund drew up his forces in three ranks, he made the speech usual before

## action, and at first seemed disposed to await the attack of the

enemy.[787] The King took the post which immemorial usage fixed for a royal general, between the two ensigns which were displayed over an English army, the golden Dragon, the national ensign of Wessex, and the Standard, seemingly the personal device of the King.[788] But Cnut had no mind to attack; most likely he wished to avoid a battle altogether, and merely sought to get back to his ships with his plunder. At all events he had no mind to attack the English as long as they were posted on a spot where the ground gave them the advantage. Yet the moment was favourable for battle; the Raven fluttered her wings, and Thurkill, overjoyed at the happy omen, called for immediate action.[789] But Cnut, young as he was, was wary, and would fight only after his own fashion. He gradually led his troops off the hills into the level ground,[790] that is, the intermediate height between the hills and the swampy plain. The main object of Eadmund was to cut off the Danes from their ships; he had therefore no choice but to leave his strong post and to come down to the lower ground. This movement differed from that of those English troops at Senlac, who, in defiance of Harold’s orders, left the hill to pursue the Normans in their real or pretended flight. At Senlac, in withstanding horsemen, the one thing to be done was to keep the strong post against all assaults; at Assandun, English and Danes, using much the same tactics and the same weapons, could meet on equal terms on the level ground. If Eadmund gave up the advantage of his strong position for defence, he gained the advantage of the charge down hill for his [Sidenote: First attack of the English.] attack. He accordingly began the battle with a furious assault upon the Danes; he even forsook the royal post, and, charging sword in hand in the front rank, he burst like a thunderbolt upon the thickest of the enemy.[791] The Danes held their ground manfully, and the fight was kept up with equal valour, and with frightful slaughter, on both sides. But on the whole the Danes had the worse, and they were beginning to give way, when Eadric again betrayed his lord and King and all the people of English kin.[792] He was in command of the Magesætas or men of Herefordshire and of the forces of some other parts of his [Sidenote: Treacherous flight of Eadric.] old earldom; at the head of these troops, according to a previous agreement with Cnut, the English Ealdorman, the brother-in-law of the King, took to flight. The battle however was kept up till sunset, and even by the light of the moon; but, after the flight of Eadric, the English had to maintain the struggle on very unequal terms. All England fought against Cnut; but Cnut had the victory.[793] [Sidenote: Slaughter of the English nobility.] The slaughter of the English nobility,[794] of the chief leaders and of the King’s own following, was fearful. There died Godwine, Ealdorman of Lindesey, wiping out, it may be, by a valiant death the errors of an earlier stage of his life.[795] There died the hero Ulfcytel, brave and faithful as ever; the first English leader who had checked the career of Swegen, and who now ended his glorious life by dying sword in hand in fight against the son of his old enemy.[796] There died one of the many Ælfrics of our story, redeeming on this hard-fought field the infamy which his more celebrated namesake had brought upon his very name. There died one personally unknown to us, but a scion of a house than which none has been more famous in our history, the East-Anglian Æthelweard, the son of Æthelwine the Friend of God.[797] And, in times like these, not only the temporal chiefs, but Bishops and Abbots also, had not scrupled to take the field against the invader. Wulfsige of Ramsey came with the heir of the great house to which his monastery owed so much. Five and twenty years before he had played the churl towards the host of Brihtnoth on its march to Maldon.[798] Like Godwine of Lindesey, long years of national wretchedness had brought him to a more patriotic frame of mind, and he now, in his old age, came to give to his King and country such help as his years and calling allowed him. Eadnoth of Dorchester,[799] once Provost of Wulfsige’s minster, came, either through love of his old companions or in the train of Godwine and the valiant men of his own diocese. These holy men, we are told, came only to pray and not to fight,[800] and in the case of the aged Wulfsige we may well believe that it was so. But we cannot forget that other English prelates, before and after, did not shrink from wearing weapons and commanding armies. We have seen that, in this age, Archbishop Ælfric not only bequeathed ships to his dioceses, but personally commanded fleets,[801] and it may well be that the arm of Eadnoth, if not that of Wulfsige, was found as strong as those of Ealhstan in an earlier, and of Ealdred in a later, generation.[802] At all events, whether they came to pray or to fight, the prelates met with no more mercy from [Sidenote: Victory of the Danes.] the Danish sword than the lay chieftains. At last, under cover of night, the King and the remnant of his army escaped; Eadmund Ironside, for the first time in this year of battles, was a fugitive. The Danes hardly dared to pursue; but they kept possession of the place of slaughter. They tarried on the field all night; in the morning they buried their own dead; they gathered the spoils of the slain English, and left their bodies to the fowls of the air and to the beasts of the land.[803] They then went to their ships and sailed towards London,[804] most likely meaning to begin the siege a fourth time. When they were gone, some of the scattered English ventured to return and carry off the bodies of the slain leaders. Æthelweard and Wulfsige found an honourable grave in their own church at Ramsey; the body of Eadnoth lay in the rival minster of Ely, the resting-place of Brihtnoth.[805]

[Sidenote: Results of the battle.]

The real blow to England in this battle was the loss of so many of the chief men whom it was hard to replace. This remarkable slaughter of the nobility is emphatically pointed out in all our narratives,[806] and it is not unlikely that it had a real political effect, like the cutting off of the mediæval baronage in the Wars of the Roses. But as a mere military success, Cnut’s victory at Assandun does not seem to have been very decisive. At any rate, instead of being followed up by any vigorous blow, it led only to a conference and a compromise between [Sidenote: Eadmund prepares for a seventh battle.] the contending Kings. Neither the spirit nor the resources of Eadmund were worn out. Indeed he seems to have been readier than his rival to try his fate once more in a seventh battle. As undaunted as ever, he made his way into Gloucestershire, and there began gathering recruits for a new campaign.[807] He seems to have been actually ready with a fresh army, when Cnut, with his victorious host, came after him. But no battle took place. Eadric—still, strange to say, in the King’s confidence—and the other Witan who were with him, the relics of Assandun, persuaded Eadmund, much against his will,[808] to consent to a conference and a division of the kingdom. The two Kings drew near to the Severn from opposite sides, Eadmund from the west, Cnut from [Sidenote: Conference of Olney.] the east. They met in an island of the river, called Olney,[809] to which the Kings were, seemingly together with chosen witnesses,[810] rowed over from their several banks of the river. The meeting was a friendly one; we can well believe that two such valiant captains as Cnut and Eadmund might, in the course of their warfare, conceive a real respect for each other. But, among the many great qualities which Cnut, in after times, gradually developed out of his original barbarism, this particular virtue of generosity towards personal rivals is one of which we see few signs. Without imputing to Cnut any actual treachery, we may feel sure that in this, as in most other acts of his life, he was guided by policy rather than by sentiment. Still, from whatever motives, the two Kings treated one another with the utmost courtesy. [Sidenote: Division of the kingdom between Eadmund and Cnut.] A division of the kingdom was the essential principle of the treaty; the two Kings now agreed on details. They settled the extent of their respective dominions, and also the amount of money which, as a necessary consequence of any treaty with Danes, was to be paid to the Danish fleet. They moreover swore oaths of friendship and brotherhood, and, like the heroes of Homer,[811] they exchanged arms in token of mutual good will.[812] The terms of the treaty, indeed the fact of Cnut’s consenting to any treaty at all, show how formidable the power of Eadmund must still have seemed. The Imperial dignity remained to the English King, who, unlike his rival, was already a King in the fullest sense of the word, a King crowned and anointed. With this over-lordship of the whole realm, Eadmund kept the immediate dominion of all England south of the Thames, together with East-Anglia, Essex, and London. Cnut took the remainder, the larger portion of the kingdom. As compared with the division between Ælfred and Guthrum, the dominions of Eadmund were larger on one side and smaller on another. Eadmund gained Essex and East-Anglia, which, in the earlier division, fell to the lot of the Danes, while he lost the part of Mercia which was kept—or, more strictly, won back—by Ælfred. It would seem that each prince was to succeed to the dominions of the other, at all events if he died childless. The brothers of the two Kings seem to have been formally shut out. The sons of Eadmund were left in the usual position of minors. No immediate provision or stipulation was made for them; but their position as Æthelings, entitled to a preference on any future vacancy, seems to have been distinctly acknowledged. It is hardly possible that a lasting separation of the two parts of the kingdom was seriously meant. Such a division could not have lasted longer than the joint lives of the two reconciled competitors, and it would probably have been annulled at no distant time by the first quarrel between them.[813]

England had thus once more for a moment, as in the days of Eadwig and Eadgar, two Kings. But her two Kings were this time not hostile kinsmen, but reconciled enemies. After the conference at Olney, the newly made brothers parted. Cnut’s army returned to their ships, which had doubtless stayed in the Thames near London. The citizens beneath whose walls the power of Cnut and his father had been so often shattered, now made peace [Sidenote: The Danes winter in London.] with the Danish host. As usual, money was paid to them, and they were allowed to winter as friends within the unconquered city.

[Sidenote: Death of Eadmund Ironside. November 30, 1016.]

But meanwhile a sudden event set aside all the late engagements and made Cnut master of the whole realm. On Saint Andrew’s day King Eadmund Ironside died in London. The manner of his death is uncertain.[814] Perhaps the overwhelming toil of the last seven months may have worn out the strength even of one whose vigorous frame had won him his distinctive surname. The personal exertions of Eadmund must in truth have been greater than those of any other man in the two armies. Besides actual marching and fighting, there was the going to and fro after each battle to gather fresh troops. This labour must have pressed more severely on Eadmund than on any one else, far more severely than on Cnut, who had his army always ready at hand. It is therefore quite possible in itself that the death of Eadmund was natural, and such a belief is in no way [Sidenote: Suspicions against Eadric;] contradicted by our best authorities. But, according to a report which obtained a wide belief, he died by the hand, or at least by the practice, of Eadric. The traitor, or some kindred wretch in his employ, slew the King and brother whom he had so often betrayed, and that by a specially base and treacherous form of assassination. [Sidenote: against Cnut.] That Cnut himself had a hand in the deed is an obvious surmise, and one which his conduct immediately afterwards certainly does not belie. But no English authority hints at any such suspicion; the only writers who attribute the murder to Cnut, or who even imply that he was ever accused of the crime, are to be found among the Danish King’s own countrymen. But whether the death of Eadmund was natural or violent, whether Cnut was or was not the instigator of the murder, if murder there was, he at least reaped all the advantage of the opportune end of his former rival and now sworn brother. The unbroken succession of the West-Saxon Kings, of the English Emperors of Britain, had now come to an end. The remains of the last, and one of the noblest, of that great line were carried to the common sanctuary of Briton and Englishman, and the body of Eadmund Ironside was laid by that of his grandfather [Sidenote: Eadmund’s tomb at Glastonbury.] Eadgar in the great minster of Glastonbury.[815] In later times, through all the rebuildings of that wonderful pile, the memory of the hero of Sherstone and Assandun still lived. Till men arose in whose eyes art, history, and religion were alike worthless, he held a worthy place among a galaxy of royal tombs which Winchester or Westminster could hardly surpass.[816] Behind the high altar, in his own chapel as a canonized saint, rested the body of Eadgar the Peaceful. Before the altar lay the supposed remains of the legendary Arthur and his yet more legendary Queen. North and south slept two champions of England, alike in name and in glory. On the north side lay Eadmund the Magnificent, one of the brother heroes of Brunanburh, the conqueror of Scot and Cumbrian and Northman, the deliverer of English cities from the heathen yoke. To the south lay his namesake and descendant, as glorious in defeat as in victory, the more than equal rival of the mighty Cnut, the man who raised England from the lowest depth of degradation, the guardian whose heart and arm never failed her, even if his ear lent too easy credence to the counsels of the traitor.[817]

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