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Early Britain - Anglo-Saxon Britain
The Recovery Of The North
by Allen, Grant (B.A.)
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The history of the tenth century and the first half of the eleventh
consists entirely of the continued contest between the West Saxons and
the Scandinavians. It falls naturally into three periods. The first is
that of the English reaction, when the West Saxon kings, Eadward and
Æthelstan, gradually reconquered the Danish North by inches at a time.
The second is that of the Augustan age, when Dunstan and Eadgar held
together the whole of Britain for a while in the hands of a single West
Saxon over-lord. The third is that of the decadence, when, under
Æthelred, the ill-welded empire fell asunder, and the Danish kings,
Cnut, Harold, and Harthacnut, ruled over all England, including even the
unconquered Wessex of Ælfred himself.
At Ælfred's death, his dominions comprised the larger Wessex, from Kent
to the Cornish border at Exeter, together with the portion of Mercia
south-west of Watling Street. The former kingdom passed into the hands
of his son Eadward; the latter was still held by the ealdorman Æthelred,
who had married Ælfred's daughter Æthelflæd. The departure of the Danish
host, led by Hæsten, left the English time to breathe and to recruit
their strength. Henceforth, for nearly a century, the direct wicking
incursions cease, and the war is confined to a long struggle with the
Northmen already settled in England. Four years later, the east Anglian
Danes broke the peace and harried Mercia and Wessex; but Eadward overran
their lands in return, and the Kentish men, in a separate battle,
attacked and slew Eric their king with several of his earls. In 912,
Æthelred the Mercian died, and Eadward at once incorporated London and
Oxford with his own dominions, leaving his sister Æthelflæd only the
northern half of her husband's principality. Thenceforth Æthelflæd, "the
Lady of the Mercians," turned deliberately to the conquest of the North.
She adopted a fresh kind of tactics, which mark again a new departure in
the English policy. Instead of keeping to the old plan of alternate
harryings on either side, and precarious tenure of lands from time to
time, Æthelflæd began building regular fortresses or burhs all along
her north-eastern frontiers, using these afterwards as bases for fresh
operations against the enemy. The spade went hand in hand with the
sword: the English were becoming engineers as well as fighters. In the
year of her husband's death, the Lady built burhs at Sarrat and
Bridgnorth. The next year "she went with all the Mercians to Tamworth,
and built the burh there in early summer; and ere Lammas, that at
Stafford." In the two succeeding years she set up other strongholds at
Eddesbury, Warwick, Cherbury, Wardbury, and Runcorn. By 917, she found
herself strong enough to attack Derby, one of the chief cities in the
Danish confederacy of the Five Burgs, which she captured after a hard
siege. Thence she turned on Leicester, which capitulated on her
approach, the Danish host going over quietly to her side. She was in
communication with the Danes of York for the surrender of that city,
too, when she died suddenly in her royal town of Tamworth, in the year
918.
Meanwhile Eadward had been pushing forward his own boundary in the east,
building burhs at Hertford and Witham, and endeavouring to subjugate
the Danish league in Bedford, Huntingdon, and Northampton. In 915,
Thurketel, the jarl of Bedford, "sought him for lord," and Eadward
afterwards built a burh there also. On his sister's death, he annexed
all her territories, and then, in a fierce and long doubtful struggle,
reconquered not only Huntingdon and Northampton but East Anglia as well.
The Christian English hailed him as a deliverer. Next, he turned on
Stamford, the Danish capital of the Fens, and on Nottingham, the
stronghold of the Southumbrian host. In both towns he erected burhs.
These successes once more placed the West Saxon king in the foremost
position amongst the many rulers of Britain. The smaller principalities,
unable to hold their own against the Scandinavians, began spontaneously
to rally round Eadward as their leader and suzerain. In the same year
with the conquest of Stamford, "the kings of the North Welsh, Howel, and
Cledauc, and Jeothwel, and all the North Welsh kin, sought him for
lord." In 923, Eadward pushed further northward, and sent a Mercian host
to conquer "Manchester in Northumbria," and fortify and man it. A line
of twenty fortresses now girdled the English frontier, from Colchester,
through Bedford and Nottingham, to Manchester and Chester. Next year,
Eadward himself, now immediate king of all England south of Humber,
attacked the last remaining Danish kingdom, Northumbria, throwing a
bridge across the Trent at Nottingham, and marching against Bakewell in
Peakland, where again he built a burh. The new tactics were too fine
for the rough and ready Danish leaders. Before Eadward reached York, the
entire North submitted without a blow. "The king of Scots, and all the
Scottish kin, and Ragnald [Danish king of York], and the sons of Eadulf
[English kings of Bamborough], and all who dwell in Northumbria, as well
English as Danes and Northmen and others, and also the king of the
Strathclyde Welsh and all the Strathclyde Welsh, sought him for father
and for lord." This was in 924. Next year, Eadward "rex invictus" died,
over-lord of all Britain from sea to sea, while the whole country south
of the Humber, save only Wales and Cornwall, was now practically united
into a single kingdom of England.
But the seeming submission of the North was fallacious. The Danes had
reintroduced into Britain a fresh mass of incoherent barbarism, which
could not thus readily coalesce. The Scandinavian leaven in the
population had put back the shadow on the dial of England some three
centuries. Æthelstan, Eadward's son, found himself obliged to give his
sister in marriage to Sihtric or Sigtrig, Danish king of the Yorkshire
Northumbrians, which probably marks a recognition of his vassal's
equality. Soon after, however, Sihtric died, and Æthelstan made himself
first king of all England by adding Northumbria to his own immediate
dominions. Then "he bowed to himself all the kings who were in this
island; first, Howel, king of the West Welsh; and Constantine, king of
Scots; and Owen, king of Gwent [South Wales]; and Ealdred, son of
Ealdulf of Bamborough; and with pledge and with oaths sware they peace,
and forsook every kind of heathendom." In the West, he drove the Welsh
from Exeter, which they had till then occupied in common with the
English, and fixed their boundary at the Tamar. But once more the
pretended vassals rebelled. Constantine, king of Scots, threw off his
allegiance, and Æthelstan thereupon "went into Scotland, both with a
land host and a ship host, and harried a mickle deal of it." In 937, the
feudatories made a final and united effort to throw off the West Saxon
yoke. The Scots, the Strathclyde Welsh, the people of Wales and
Cornwall, the lords of Bamborough, and the Danes throughout the North
and East, all rose together in a great league against their over-lord.
Anlaf, king of the Dublin Danes, came over from Ireland to aid them,
with a large body of wickings. The confederates met the West Saxon
fyrd or levy at an unknown spot named Brunanburh, where Æthelstan
overthrew them in a crushing defeat, which forms the subject of a fine
war-song, inserted in full in the English
Chronicle.[1] Three
years
later Æthelstan died, as his father had died before him, undisputed
over-lord of all Britain, and immediate king of the whole Teutonic
portion.
Yet once more the feeble unity of the country broke hopelessly asunder.
Eadmund, who succeeded his brother, found the Danes of the North and the
Midlands again insubordinate. The year after his accession "the
Northumbrians belied their oath, and chose Anlaf of Ireland for king."
The Five Burgs went too, and the old boundary of Watling Street was once
more made the frontier of the Danish possessions. In 944, however,
Eadmund subdued all Northumbria, and expelled its Danish kings. His
recovery of the Five Burgs, and the joy of the Christian English
inhabitants, are vividly set forth in a fragmentary ballad embedded in
the Chronicle. The next year he harried Strathclyde or Cumberland, the
Welsh kingdom between Clyde and Morecambe, and handed it over to
Malcolm, king of Scots, as a pledge of his fidelity. At Eadmund's death
in 946—when he was stabbed in his royal hall by an outlaw—his kingdom
fell to his brother Eadred. Two years later Northumbria again revolted,
and chose Eric for its king. Eadred harried and burnt the province,
which he then handed over to an earl of his own creation, one of the
Bamborough family. The king himself died in 955, and was succeeded by
his nephew Eadwig. But Northumbria and Mercia revolted once more, and
chose Eadwig's brother, Eadgar, instead of their own Danish princes.
Eadwig died in 958, and Eadgar then became king of all three provinces;
thus finally uniting the whole of Teutonic England into one kingdom.
Eadgar's reign forms the climax of the West Saxon power. It was, in
fact, the only period when England can be said to have enjoyed any
national unity under the Anglo-Saxon dynasties. The strong hand of a
priest gave peace for some years to the ill-organised mass. Dunstan was
probably the first Englishman who seriously deserves the name of
statesman. He was born in the half-Celtic region of Somerset, beside the
great abbey of Glastonbury, which held the bones of Arthur, and a good
deal of the imaginative Celtic temper ran probably with the blood in
his
veins.[2] But
he was above all the representative of the Roman
civilisation in the barbarised, half-Danish England of the tenth
century. He was a musician, a painter, a reader, and a scholar, in a
world of fierce warriors and ignorant nobles. Eadmund made him abbot of
Glastonbury. Eadgar appointed him first bishop of London, and then, on
Eadwig's death, Archbishop of Canterbury. It was Dunstan who really
ruled England throughout the remainder of his life. Essentially an
organiser and administrator, he was able to weld the unwieldy empire
into a rough unity, which lasted as long as its author lived, and no
longer. He appeased the discontent of Northumbria and the Five Burgs by
permitting them a certain amount of local independence, with the
enjoyment of their own laws and their own lawmen. He kept a fleet of
boats cruising in the Irish Sea to check the Danish hosts at Dublin and
Waterford. He put forward a code, known as the laws of Eadgar, for the
better government of Wessex and the South. He made the over-lordship of
the West Saxons over their British vassals more real than it had ever
been before; and a tale, preserved by Florence, tells us that eight
tributary kings rowed Eadgar in his royal barge on the Dee, in token of
their complete subjection. Internally, Dunstan revived the declining
spirit of monasticism, which had died down during the long struggle with
the Danes, and attempted to reintroduce some tinge of southern
civilisation into the barbarised and half-paganised country in which he
lived. Wherever it was possible, he "drove out the priests, and set
monks," and he endeavoured to make the monasteries, which had
degenerated during the long war into mere landowning communities, regain
once more their old position as centres of culture and learning. During
his own time his efforts were successful, and even after his death the
movement which he had begun continued in this direction to make itself
felt, though in a feebler and less intelligent form.
One act of Dunstan's policy, however, had far-reaching results, of a
kind which he himself could never have anticipated. He handed over all
Northumbria beyond the Tweed—the region now known as the Lothians—as a
fief to Kenneth, king of Scots. This accession of territory wholly
changed the character of the Scottish kingdom, and largely promoted the
Teutonisation of the Celtic North. The Scottish princes now took up
their residence in the English town of Edinburgh, and learned to speak
the English language as their mother-tongue. Already Eadmund had made
over Strathclyde or Cumberland to Malcolm; and thus the dominions of the
Scottish kings extended over the whole of the country now known as
Scotland, save only the Scandinavian jarldoms of Caithness, Sutherland,
and the Isles. Strathclyde rapidly adopted the tongue of its masters,
and grew as English in language (though not in blood) as the Lothians
themselves. Fife, in turn, was quickly Anglicised, as was also the whole
region south of the Highland line. Thus a new and powerful kingdom arose
in the North; and at the same time the cession of an English district to
the Scottish kings had the curious result of thoroughly Anglicising two
large and important Celtic regions, which had hitherto resisted every
effort of the Northumbrian or West Saxon over-lords. There is no reason
to believe, however, that this introduction of the English tongue and
English manners was connected with any considerable immigration of
Teutonic settlers into the Anglicised tracts. The population of
Ayrshire, of Fife, of Perthshire, and of Aberdeen, still shows every
sign of Celtic descent, alike in physique, in temperament, and in habit
of thought. The change was, in all probability, exactly analogous to
that which we ourselves have seen taking place in Wales, in Ireland, and
in the Celtic north of Scotland at the present day.
[1] See chapter xx.
[2] It
is impossible to avoid noticing the increased
importance of semi-Celtic Britain under Dunstan's
administration. He was himself at first an abbot of the old
West Welsh monastery of Glastonbury: he promoted West
countrymen to the principal posts in the kingdom: and he had
Eadgar hallowed king at the ancient West Welsh royal city of
Bath, married to a Devonshire lady, and buried at
Glastonbury. Indeed, that monastery was under Dunstan what
Westminster was under the later kings. Florence uses the
strange expression that Eadgar was chosen "by the
Anglo-Britons:" and the meeting with the Welsh and Scotch
princes in the semi-Welsh town of Chester conveys a like
implication.
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