Chapter V (2)

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.]