CHAPTER XIV

THE SETTLEMENTS OF THE SEA-ROVERS

It is in the reign of King Egbert that we begin to hear of the Danes coming as sea-rovers and raiding the coasts on both sides of the English Channel. They came, they harried and stole, and went away again.

[Sidenote: Alfred the Great]

That was bad. But it began to be worse when they did not go away again, when they came in such numbers that they could actually dare to establish themselves for the winter up some river. They had then come to stay. Within thirty years after the death of Egbert they became so strong that they took the towns of York and Nottingham. The English kingdom was again, at this time, disunited. This was partly owing to the custom--which proved fatal to the union, of the continental empire also--for a king, at his death, to divide up his kingdom, by will, and give portions to two or more of his sons. But in a fortunate hour for England, Alfred, who won the name of "the Great," came to the throne of Wessex in 871.

He fought the Danes on land, uniting the people of Kent and Essex with his own Wessex men. He fought them with varying success, on the whole getting the better of them. He also (and you might make a note of this as the beginning of Britain's naval power) defeated some of their ships with his own fleet.

Whereupon came many more Danes with many more ships; and English and Danes had to meet in many a battle and skirmish until a decisive victory at {119} length enabled Alfred to come to a settlement with them. Even so, the settlement was far from establishing him as sovereign over all England. An arrangement was made by which the Danes were to occupy, undisturbed, the eastern side, and were to leave the English in peaceable possession of the west. We have spoken before of that old Roman road called Watling Street, which ran from London to Chester: you may take that line as about the boundary line between the two peoples who now held England.

Alfred, besides this peaceful settlement with the Danes, owes his claim to the title of "great" to the wisdom with which he settled the affairs of his own kingdom and for the favour that he showed to literature and culture of all kinds. He was a Christian, and had insisted, when he made his treaty with the Danes, that they should profess themselves Christians and be baptised. He did all that he could to help in educating his people. He himself made translations into the Anglo-Saxon of books written in Latin giving the description and history of parts of Germany from which some of the Gothic tribes had come. He also caused books on religion to be translated, so that the people who were educated sufficiently to be able to read their own language might study them, and while he rebuilt monasteries and other buildings belonging to the Church, which had been ruined in the perpetual wars, he expected the priests and the Churchmen (the clerics, or clerks) to undertake the education of the people.

Probably Alfred was far too wise to suppose that peace would be kept for long between his Anglo-Saxons on the west of the Watling Street and the Danes on the east. The Danes were of a race akin to the Anglo-Saxons and to the Franks--they were German or Gothic. The Romans and Anglo-Saxons themselves had both come into Britain as quite a different race {120} from the inhabitants whom they conquered; but the Danes were of nearly the same stock as those whom they found, and harassed, in England. Both were of that race called Nordic, of which it was characteristic for the men to be tall and large, with fair hair and blue eyes. We have seen how the English were gradually losing their freedom under their earls or thanes. The Danes came in with their freedom little if any less than it ever had been. They were hardy and independent; and even to this day we find these qualities to be characteristic of the dwellers in those lands east of the Watling Street in which most of the Danes settled. The southern and western men are of a tamer character.

[Illustration: A VIKING SHIP.]

It would take far too long to tell how the Danes broke the peace arranged by Alfred, and all about the continual fighting, with the many changes of fortune which came to pass between them and the English all through the tenth century. Towards the end of that century we find the English kings bribing the commanders of combined fleets of Danes and of allied Northmen, from Norway, to retire and leave the English coasts. Of course that only meant that these pirates came again the next year, so that it became necessary to levy a special tax, which was called the Danegeld, to buy them off.

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An English king, Ethelred, in the hope, as we are told, of making the Northmen his friends instead of his persecutors and pirates, married the daughter of the Duke of Normandy. This Normandy is the Normandy that you will see on the maps of to-day and lies just across the English Channel. The Duke and his Normans (or Northmen) were of the same kin as the ravagers of the English coast. Therefore Ethelred seemed to be likely to gain peace for his kingdom when he married a daughter of this race. What did happen is that about sixty years later (he was married to the Duke's daughter in 1002) another Duke of Normandy, William, established himself as King of England. It is with this marriage of Ethelred's that the influence of Normandy in England begins. The Normans did not come upon England all of a sudden in 1066, the year of their conquest. There had been some preparation leading to it.

[Sidenote: Massacre of the Danes]

Unfortunately for Ethelred's hope of peace, he formed, or was led to agree to, a design of exterminating the Danes in England by a wholesale massacre. It was a design in which the English were the more ready to take a hand because of their hatred of the Danish troops which several of the kings had been keeping in their pay. These mercenaries were very insolent and high-handed in their dealings with the civil inhabitants, and on the signal given the inhabitants readily rose against them.

Thus a general massacre took place; but then followed that which, with a people of the fierce and resolute character of the Danes and Northmen, was sure to follow. A great force came over the sea, and, though twice bought off by payment of the Danegeld, they came again in 1013, and yet again, and finally, two years later, under Canute they came to stay. Canute, victorious, was first acknowledged king of the old Danish possessions in the {122} east of England and a few weeks later of the entire country.

Within a year he too married that sister of the Duke of Normandy who had been married to Ethelred and was now a widow. And so, once more, the Norman influence came in.

Canute, who reigned close on twenty years, was followed by two kings of Danish race whose reigns only covered seven years together, and then followed the last of our Saxon kings, the first Edward. He was Saxon on the father's side; for his father was that Ethelred who married the Duke of Normandy's sister. On the mother's side, therefore, he was Norman.

The right of this Edward, called the Confessor, to the kingdom was not undisputed, but he had the support of a certain Earl Godwine, who, with his sons, had become so great a power that he claimed, and was able to maintain, lordship over half the realm of England. This great earl consolidated his power by marrying his daughter to King Edward, and one of the sons of Earl Godwine was that Harold who became king after Edward, and who was defeated and killed by William the Conqueror at the Battle of Hastings.

It is my wish, in telling this story, to trouble you with as few names as possible, in order to avoid confusion, but I want you to bear these names in mind and to be clear as to how the people were related lo each other, because it is this relationship that explains how it was that William the Conqueror came to lay claim to the throne of England. He did not merely come as a conqueror to take, by force, what was not his. He came to enforce what was, or what he claimed to be, his right.

Harold, then, succeeded Edward, on Edward's death, as king. But before his death Edward had tried to arrange for a successor. We have to remember {123} that the principle that the eldest son of the king should follow his father on the throne was not established in those days. But Edward had no son. He had a great-nephew, who was no more than a child. And he seems to have had no wish that the kingdom should go back to the Danes, although he had married a sister of Harold, the Dane. So he approached William, Duke of Normandy, with a proposal to appoint him as successor.

So the story is told; but its truth is not clearly proved. It has also been said that he sent Harold himself as his ambassador in this delicate matter, to the Norman court. That does not sound probable. What does appear to be established is that Harold, by some means or other--possibly by having to run his ship on the coast of Normandy in a storm--came into William's power, and that, while so held, waiting till a ransom should be paid for him and he should be released, William made him take a very solemn oath that on Edward's death he would do his best to support William's claim to the throne of England.

That being done, Edward dies, and Harold, far from keeping that most solemn oath, claims the kingdom of England for himself, and actually accedes to the throne, apparently without any serious opposition from the people.

[Sidenote: William the Conqueror]

But then comes William of Normandy, mightily indignant, with his fleet. He lands at Hastings, encounters Harold and his forces, defeats them heavily, Harold is killed in the battle, and William becomes King of England. He is accepted with a readiness, and with a slight opposition after the first battle, which we may suppose to be due to two causes, one, that our country had been so long vexed by fighting that it was weary and was willing to receive any peace at any price, and, two, that the Norman influence had spread through the country far and wide {124} before the actual coming of the conqueror, so that the means for establishing his conquest were already prepared.

[Illustration: NORMAN GATEWAY, COLLEGE GREEN, BRISTOL.]

[Sidenote: The Northmen in France]

But it is very likely that this coming of the Northmen, the Normans, out of France will have caused you to ask a question or two in your minds. You may be wondering how it should be that Normans, Northmen, {125} should be coming to England from Normandy, that is to say from the south. You may be wondering how it is that there are Northmen established there, as Dukes, that is as great rulers. When last we considered the Continent of Europe this Normandy was part of the great Empire of Charlemagne. In order to see how the Northmen came to be there we may go back to the Empire of Charlemagne in the ninth century. We have seen how that Empire was brought about and compacted. It is now a most important thing for the understanding of the great story that we should see how quickly that splendid Empire fell to pieces after Charlemagne's death. The understanding of that will make quite clear how the Normans were able to settle themselves as independent rulers of the part of France which is still, after them, called Normandy.

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