The death of Dunstan was the signal for the breaking down of the
artificial kingdom which he had held together by the mere power of his
solitary organising capacity. Æthelred, the son of Eadgar (who succeeded
after the brief reign of his brother Eadward), lost hopelessly all hold
over the Scandinavian north. At the same time, the wicking incursions,
intermitted for nearly a century, once more recommenced with the same
vigour as of old. Even before Dunstan's death, in 980, the pirates
ravaged Southampton, killing most of the townsfolk; and they also
pillaged Thanet, while another host overran Cheshire. In the succeeding
year, "great harm was done in Devonshire and in Wales;" and a year later
again, London was burnt and Portland ravaged. In 985, Æthelred, the
Unready, as after ages called him, from his lack of rede or counsel,
quarrelled with Ælfric, ealdormen of the Mercians, whom he drove over
sea. The breach between Mercia and Wessex was thus widened, and as the
Danish attacks continued without interruption the redeless king soon
found himself comparatively isolated in his own paternal dominions.
Northumbria, under its earl, Uhtred (one of the house of Bamborough),
and the Five Burgs under their Danish leaders, acted almost
independently of Wessex throughout the whole of Æthelred's reign. In 991
Sigeric, archbishop of Canterbury, advised that the Danes should be
bought off by a payment of ten thousand pounds, an enormous sum; but it
was raised somehow and duly paid. In 992, the command of a naval force,
gathered from the merchant craft of the Thames, was entrusted to Ælfric,
who had been recalled; and the Mercian leader went over on the eve of an
engagement at London to the side of the enemy. Bamborough was stormed
and captured with great booty, and the host sailed up Humber mouth.
There they stood in the midst of the old Danish kingdom, and found the
leading men of Northumbria and Lindsey by no means unfriendly to their
invasion. In fact, the Danish north was now far more ready to welcome
the kindred Scandinavian than the West Saxon stranger. Æthelred's realm
practically shrank at once to the narrow limits of Kent and Wessex.
The Danes, however, were by no means content even with these successes.
Olaf Tryggvesson, king of Norway, and Swegen
Forkbeard,[1] king of
Denmark, fell upon England. The era of mere plundering expeditions and
of scattered colonisation had ceased; the era of political conquest had
now begun. They had determined upon the complete subjugation of all
England. In 994 Olaf and Swegen attacked London with 94 ships, but were
put to flight by a gallant resistance of the townsmen, who did "more
harm and evil than ever they weened that any burghers could do them."
Thence the host sailed away to Essex, Kent, Sussex, and Hampshire,
burning and slaying all along the coast as they went. Æthelred and his
witan bought them off again, with the immense tribute of sixteen
thousand pounds. The host accepted the terms, but settled down for the
winter at Southampton—a sufficient indication of their
intentions—within easy reach of Winchester itself; and there "they fed
from all the West Saxons' land." Æthelred was alarmed, and sent to Olaf,
who consented to meet him at Andover. There the king received him "with
great worship," and gifted him with kinglike gifts, and sent him away
with a promise never again to attack England. Olaf kept his word, and
returned no more. But still Swegen remained, and went on pillaging
Devonshire and Cornwall, wending into Tamar mouth as far as Lidford,
where his men "burnt and slew all that they found." Thence they betook
themselves to the Frome, and so up into Dorset, and again to Wight. In
999, on the eve of doomsday as men then thought, they sailed up Thames
and Medway, and attacked Rochester. The men of Kent stoutly fought them,
but, as usual, without assistance from other shires; and the Danes took
horses, and rode over the land, almost ruining all the West Kentings.
The king and his witan resolved to send against them a land fyrd and a
ship fyrd or raw levy. But the spirit of the West Saxons was broken, and
though the craft were gathered together, yet in the end, as the
Chronicle plaintively puts it, "neither ship fyrd nor land fyrd wrought
anything save toil for the folk, and the emboldening of their foes."
So, year after year, the endless invasion dragged on its course, and
everywhere each shire of Wessex fought for itself against such enemies
as happened to attack it. At last, in the year 1002, Æthelred once more
bought off the fleet, this time with 24,000 pounds; and some of the
Danes obtained leave to settle down in Wessex. But on St. Brice's day,
the king treacherously gave orders that all Danes in the immediate
English territory should be massacred. The West Saxons rose on the
appointed night, and slew every one of them, including Gunhild, the
sister of King Swegen, and a Christian convert. It was a foolhardy
attempt. Swegen fell at once upon Wessex, and marched up and down the
whole country, for two years. He burnt Wilton and Sarum, and then sailed
round to Norwich, where Ulfkytel, of East Anglia, gave him "the hardest
hand-play" that he had ever known in England. A year of famine
intervened; but in 1006 Swegen returned again, harrying and burning
Sandwich. All autumn the West Saxon fyrd waited for the enemy, but in
the end "it came to naught more than it had oft erst done." The host
took up quarters in Wight, marched across Hants and Berks to Reading,
and burned Wallingford. Thence they returned with their booty to the
fleet, by the very walls of the royal city. "There might the Winchester
folk behold an insolent host and fearless wend past their gate to sea."
The king himself had fled into Shropshire. The tone of utter despair
with which the Chronicle narrates all these events is the best measure
of the national degradation. "There was so muckle awe of the host," says
the annalist, "that no man could think how man could drive them from
this earth or hold this earth against them; for that they had cruelly
marked each shire of Wessex with burning and with harrying." The English
had sunk into hopeless misery, and were only waiting for a strong rule
to rescue them from their misery.
The strong rule came at last. Thorkell, a Danish jarl, marched all
through Wessex, and for three years more his host pillaged everywhere in
the South. In 1011, they killed Ælfheah, the archbishop of Canterbury,
at Greenwich. When the country was wholly weakened, Swegen turned
southward once more, this time with all Northumbria and Mercia at his
back. In 1013 he sailed round to Humber mouth, and thence up the Trent,
to Gainsborough. "Then Earl Uhtred and all Northumbrians soon bowed to
him, and all the folk in Lindsey; and sithence the folk of the Five
Burgs, and shortly after, all the host by north of Watling-street; and
men gave him hostages of each shire." Swegen at once led the united army
into England, leaving his son Cnut in Denalagu with the ships and
hostages. He marched to Oxford, which received him; then to the royal
city of Winchester, which made no resistance. At London Æthelred was
waiting; and for a time the town held out. So Swegen marched westward,
and took Bath. There, the thegns of the Welsh-kin counties—Somerset,
Dorset, Devon, and Cornwall—bowed to him and gave him hostages. "When
he had thus fared, he went north to his ships, and all the folk held him
then as full king." London itself gave way. Æthelred fled to Wight, and
thence to Normandy. He had married Ymma, the daughter of Richard the
Fearless; and he now took refuge with her brother, Richard the Good.
Next year Swegen died, and the West Saxon witan sent back for Æthelred.
No lord was dearer to them, they said, than their lord by kin. But the
host had already chosen Cnut; and the host had a stronger claim than the
witan. For two years Æthelred carried on a desultory war with the
intruders, and then died, leaving it undecided. His son Eadmund,
nicknamed Ironside, continued the contest for a few months; but in the
autumn of 1016 he died—poisoned, the English said, by Cnut—and Cnut
succeeded to undisputed sway. He at once assumed Wessex as his own
peculiar dominion, and the political history of the English ends for two
centuries. Their social life went on, of course, as ever; but it was the
life of a people in strict subjection to foreign rulers—Danish, Norman,
or Angevin. The story of the next twenty-five years at least belongs to
the chronicles of Scandinavian Britain.
At the end of that time, however, there was a slight reaction. Cnut and
his sons had bound the kingdom roughly into one; and the death of
Harthacnut left an opportunity for the return of a descendant of Ælfred.
But the English choice fell upon one who was practically a foreigner.
Eadward, son of Æthelred by Ymma of Normandy, had lived in his mother's
country during the greater part of his life. Recalled by Earl Godwine
and the witan, he came back to England a Norman, rather than an
Englishman. The administration remained really in the hands of Godwine
himself, and of the Danish or Danicised aristocracy. But Mercia and
Northumbria still stood apart from Wessex, and once procured the exile
of Godwine himself. The great earl returned, however, and at his death
passed on his power to his son Harold, a Danicised Englishman of great
rough ability, such as suited the hard times on which he was cast.
Harold employed the lifetime of Eadward, who was childless, in preparing
for his own succession. The king died in 1066, and Harold was quietly
chosen at once by the witan. He was the last Englishman who ever sat
upon the throne of England.
The remaining story belongs chiefly to the annals of Norman Britain.
Harold was assailed at once from either side. On the north, his brother
Tostig, whom he had expelled from Northumbria, led against him his
namesake, Harold Hardrada, king of Norway. On the south, William of
Normandy, Eadward's cousin, claimed the right to present himself to the
English electors. Eadward's death, in fact, had broken up the temporary
status, and left England once more a prey to barbaric Scandinavians from
Denmark, or civilised Scandinavians from Normandy. The English
themselves had no organisation which could withstand either, and no
national unity to promote such organisation in future. Harold of Norway
came first, landing in the old Danish stronghold of Northumbria; and the
English Harold hurried northward to meet him, with his little body of
house-carls, aided by a large fyrd which he had hastily collected to use
against William. At Stamford-bridge he overthrew the invaders with great
slaughter, Harold Hardrada and Tostig being amongst the slain.
Meanwhile, William had crossed to Pevensey, and was ravaging the coast.
Harold hurried southward, and met him at Senlac, near Hastings. After a
hard day's fight, the Normans were successful, and Harold fell. But even
yet the English could not agree among themselves. In this crisis of the
national fate, the local jealousies burnt up as fiercely as ever. While
William was marching upon London, the witan were quarrelling and
intriguing in the city over the succession. "Archbishop Ealdred and the
townsmen of London would have Eadgar Child,"—a grandson of Eadmund
Ironside—"for king, as was his right by kin." But Eadwine and Morkere,
the representatives of the great Mercian family of Leofric, had hopes
that they might turn William's invasion to their own good, and secure
their independence in the north by allowing Wessex to fall unassisted
into his hands. After much shuffling, Eadgar was at last chosen for
king. "But as it ever should have been the forwarder, so was it ever,
from day to day, slower and worse." No resistance was organised. In the
midst of all this turmoil, the Peterborough Chronicler is engaged in
narrating the petty affairs of his own abbey, and the question which
arose through the application made to Eadgar for his consent to the
appointment of an abbot. In such a spirit did the English meet an
invasion from the stoutest and best organised soldiery in Europe.
William marched on without let or hindrance, and on his way, the
Lady—the Confessor's widow—surrendered the royal city of Winchester
into his hands. The duke reached the Thames, burnt Southwark, and then
made a détour to cross the river at Wallingford, whence he proceeded
into Hertfordshire, thus cutting off Eadwine and Morkere in London from
their earldoms. The Mercian and Northumbrian leaders being determined to
hold their own at all hazards, retreated northward; and the English
resistance crumbled into pieces. Eadgar, the rival king, with Ealdred,
the archbishop, and all the chief men of London, came out to meet
William, and "bowed to him for need." The Chronicler can only say that
it was very foolish they had not done so before. A people so helpless,
so utterly anarchic, so incapable of united action, deserved to undergo
a severe training from the hard taskmasters of Romance civilisation. The
nation remained, but it remained as a conquered race, to be drilled in
the stern school of the conquerors. For awhile, it is true, William
governed England like an English king; but the constant rebellion and
faithlessness of his new subjects drove him soon to severer measures;
and the great insurrection of 1068, with its results, put the whole
country at his feet in a very different sense from the battle of Senlac.
For a hundred and fifty years, the English people remained a mere race
of chapmen and serfs; and the English language died down meanwhile into
a servile dialect. When the native stock emerges again into the full
light of history, by the absorption of the Norman conquerors in the
reign of John, it reappears with all the super-added culture and
organisation of the Romance nationalities. The Conquest was an
inevitable step in the work of severing England from the barbarous
North, and binding it once more in bonds of union with the civilised
South. It was the necessary undoing of the Danish conquest; more still,
it was an inevitable step in the process whereby England itself was to
begin its unified existence by the final breaking down of the barriers
which divided Wessex from Mercia, and Mercia from Northumbria.
