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HISTORY OF THE NORMAN CONQUEST.

London

HENRY FROWDE

[Logo]

Oxford University Press Warehouse

Amen Corner, E.C.

THE HISTORY
OF THE
NORMAN CONQUEST OF ENGLAND,
ITS CAUSES AND ITS RESULTS.

BY

EDWARD A. FREEMAN, M.A., Hon. D.C.L. & LL.D.

LATE FELLOW OF TRINITY COLLEGE,

Knight Commander of the Greek Order of the Saviour

and of the Servian Order of Tekova,

Corresponding Member of the Imperial Academy of Sciences of Saint Petersburg,

of the Royal Academy of Lincei of Rome,

of the Royal Society of Sciences of Göttingen,

and of the Historical Society of Massachusetts.

VOLUME I.

THE PRELIMINARY HISTORY TO THE ELECTION OF EADWARD THE CONFESSOR.

Αἰνέσωμεν δὴ ἄνδρας ἐνδόξους, καὶ τοὺς πατέρας ἡμῶν τῇ γενέσει.... κυριεύοντες ἐν ταῖς βασιλείαις αὐτῶν.... βουλεύσονται ἐν συνέσει αὐτῶν.... ἡγούμενοι λαοῦ ἐν διαβουλίοις.—Ecclus. c. xliv.

THIRD EDITION, REVISED.

Oxford:

AT THE CLARENDON PRESS.

M.DCCC.LXXVII.

[All rights reserved]

PREFACE TO THE THIRD EDITION.

This third English edition of these two volumes has been again thoroughly revised throughout. I have not however thought it needful to recast or enlarge the earlier chapters, as I still cling to the hopes with regard to my first and fifth volumes which I expressed in the Preface to the fifth volume. But I have added and corrected in detail, wherever I have found any fresh matter or any fresh light on old matters. And I found also, in revising what I wrote twelve years back, that I could improve a good deal in point of mere style. I have often put a good English word where I had at first allowed a stranger to creep in. In the first volume I have seen reason to alter my narrative on one point of some local and personal interest, though not greatly affecting the general history. I have been convinced by the arguments of Mr. James Parker that the murder of Sigeferth and Morkere at Oxford has been confounded with the massacre of Saint Brice, and that some details which belong to the earlier event have been transferred to the later. In the Norman chapter in the second volume, I have once or twice worked in, in the form of new or enlarged local description, the results of later journeys in Normandy and Maine. And I have also made some improvements in the maps.

The author of a work on this scale always does wisely in not reviewing his reviewers, and I shall certainly not spend any great time reviewing mine. I, and doubtless others, have been amused at many pieces of criticism, perhaps not the least at the amazement with which some people have seen Old-English names written in Old-English fashion. As this seems to be commonly looked on as some special device of my own, we thus become aware of the singular fact that there are people who think themselves fit to write about early English history without having looked at Kemble or Lappenberg. But, without strictly reviewing my reviewers, I have had some doubts whether I ought not to examine in detail an article headed “Earl Godwin and Earl Harold,” which appeared in the North British Review for April 1870, and which bears the signature of Mr. C. H. Pearson. In earlier revisions I have made a few references to Mr. Pearson’s views as set forth in his other works, and I believe that there are one or two to this article itself. But in my present revision I thought it was better on the whole not to go into any long controversy—for a long controversy it could hardly fail to be—with regard to my general views either of Godwine or of his son. When I read Mr. Pearson’s arguments, I find that his notions of historical evidence, and his general way of looking at everything, are so different from mine that it is really better to leave the question to the judgement of the few scholars who may think it worth while to make a minute comparison between Mr. Pearson’s statements and my own. I say a minute comparison, because it would not be safe to accept either my views or the statements of the original writers on Mr. Pearson’s showing. I must decline to have my judgement of Godwine measured by the report which Mr. Pearson has thought fit to give of it. I do not know where Mr. Pearson found that “Godwin is the spotless being of Mr. Freeman’s imagination, the saint and hero of an impure and unheroic age.” He certainly did not find that picture any where in the History of the Norman Conquest, least of all where my notions of Godwine are most formally put forth, namely in the seventh chapter, the first in the second volume. I must further protest against Mr. Pearson’s statement that I “believe in” a “settlement of the Witan in 1051” in favour of William. Of this belief no trace will be found in my writings; indeed it is expressly denied at p. 430 of my second volume (p. 421 of the first edition). Nor do I admit that I have “started from the conception that history for eight hundred years has been in a conspiracy against truth.” I simply go back from legend to history, from the slanders of later times to the witness of the men who eight hundred years back wrote real history. Mr. Pearson goes on to say that “my style throughout is that of a pleader who tries to demolish the character of witnesses by detecting them in trivial inconsistencies, and who delights in accumulating the absurd stories of late and obscure chroniclers in order to throw doubts on a general verdict.” I can only infer that Mr. Pearson is not a student of comparative mythology. I can only infer that he does not see the importance of tracing how a story grew, and what shapes it took in different hands, according to times, places, and changes of feeling. When Mr. Pearson utterly misunderstands my plainest words, when I can find no common ground with him from which to examine historical evidence, I must leave it to others to judge between him and me on the general question.

At the same time, in case any one should make it his business to compare Mr. Pearson and me in detail, I must ask him to accept nothing on Mr. Pearson’s showing—as I ask no one to accept anything on my showing—without minutely testing it by the authorities. I think that any one who does so will not fail to see how much of Mr. Pearson’s genealogical argument is upset by his constant confusion between Wulfnoth the son of Godwine and Æthelnoth the thegn of Kent. Even a Domesday copyist, in his wildest departures from the true forms of English names, would not write Alnod and Ulnod indiscriminately. I have gone thoroughly into this matter in Appendix N., vol. iv, where I see that I have referred to an earlier work of Mr. Pearson’s. So again, when Mr. Pearson rakes up the real or supposed evil deeds (among which he seems to reckon the marriages) of several English Bishops of the eleventh century, he makes his list longer by bringing in a tale, true or false, about Walter of Hereford, who was not an Englishman. And I must lastly beg that no one will accept Mr. Pearson’s summary of any part of the Encomium Emmæ, without reading every word of the Encomiast’s text for himself.

As Mr. Pearson is an historical writer of some reputation, I have thought it right not to let his distinctly controversial article pass by altogether unnoticed. I do not know that there is any other writer of position with whom I need to enter into any controversy. If I were to examine any anonymous criticism, it would be an article signed “H. A.” in the North American Review, in which I am blamed for maintaining the innocence of Godwine, though his guilt is asserted in “the Saxon Chronicle.” It would almost seem as if “H. A.” had written this without either looking at the Chronicles themselves or at the examination of their witness in my Appendix. Indeed it would seem that, even in such respectable quarters as the North American Review, the idea still lingers that there is a single book called “The Saxon Chronicle.” I need hardly say that strange havoc would be made of the history, as strange havoc often has been made, by any one who did not stop to compare the wide difference in statement and feeling between Abingdon and Peterborough.

The Index to the whole five volumes, which will include the index to the present edition of these two, is in preparation.

Somerleaze, Wells,

April 14th, 1877.

PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION.

In revising these volumes for the present edition, I have made many improvements for which I feel that I must in some sort throw myself on the indulgence of the buyers and readers of the first edition. The publication of a large work of this kind in distinct volumes is, I believe, on the whole, the most satisfactory way for the reader, as it certainly is for the author. But it has its disadvantages. If no part of a work is printed till the last page of the last volume is written, a final revision may give the earlier parts the advantage of the author’s researches up to the last moment. But if volumes are published separately, the researches which are needful for the composition of the later volumes continually bring to light matter which would have been highly useful during the composition of the earlier volumes. This is especially the case with a subject like mine, where information has to be sought for in so many quarters, and where a great deal of information is drawn from purely incidental notices in quarters where it might hardly have been looked for. Take for instance one of our primary authorities for a great part of my subject, the Norman Survey. None but a professed editor or commentator on Domesday would sit down to read it through, word for word; but, in searching in it for facts bearing on one subject, one is sure to light by the way on facts bearing on half-a-dozen other subjects as well. In these ways I have, in the course of writing the later parts of my work, come across much matter which enables me to correct and improve what I had already written in the earlier parts. All these improvements in detail I have thought it right to make in preparing a second edition. And I have also in many places improved the arrangement of the matter, by throwing some portions of the text and a considerable portion of the notes into the form of Appendices. These portions were chiefly passages which consisted of dissertation rather than narrative, and which therefore seemed better suited to the form of detached essays. This change will, I hope, be found to make the narrative hang better together; but, as the passages removed to the Appendix have shown a tendency to grow on the road, it has somewhat increased the size of the volumes.

I have also done my best to improve the maps. I have added a map of Gaul in the tenth century, which seemed needful for the better understanding of the fourth Chapter. I have also recast the map of Britain in 597, which, as it stood in the first edition, was a failure, owing to the attempt, which can never be thoroughly successful, to represent the state of things at two different periods at once. As it is, it is designed to show, as far as evidence or probable conjecture makes it possible to show, how things stood at the exact time of the mission of Augustine. In this difficult task I have been much helped by Archdeacon Jones, my former colleague in writing the History of Saint David’s, by Mr. J. R. Green, and yet more by Mr. Haddan, whose knowledge of Celtic matters is really amazing. But, after all, there are many points on which it is impossible to get beyond conjecture.

As the changes in the text and notes have disturbed the order of paging, I have added a special Index to this edition of these two volumes. When the whole work is complete, a general Index to the whole five volumes will be given.

It will be at once seen that these improvements are in some sort made at the cost of the purchasers of the first edition, for it is impossible for them to be thrown into the form of a separate supplement for their benefit. I can only ask again for their indulgence towards a course which could not be helped, if the book was to be brought as near perfection as might be.

The revision required by these volumes has unavoidably delayed the composition of the fourth volume; but I am happy to say that it is begun.

Somerleaze, Wells,

November 26th, 1869.

PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION.

The present volume is the first instalment of a work which I have contemplated, and for which I have at various times collected materials, for the last twenty years. I had hoped to complete the work, or so much of it as would come down to the actual accession of William the Conqueror, in time for it to appear during the year 1866, the octocentenary year of the Conquest. I found however that, to make the main subject really intelligible from my point of view, it was necessary to treat the preliminary history at much greater length than I had originally thought of. The present volume therefore is merely introductory to the account of the actual Conquest. The second portion of the narrative, containing the reigns of Eadward, Harold, and William, is already in progress, and will follow with all possible speed.

I think it right to add that this work must not be taken as a sign that I have at all given up the design of going on with my History of Federal Government. Of the second volume of that work a considerable part is already written. One or two circumstances led me to lay it aside for a time, and I do not at all regret that such has been the case. The part on which I was engaged was the history of the German Confederation, and I find that, of what I have written, part has already become antiquated through the events of the past year. When Germany shall have assumed a shape possessing some greater chance of permanence than her present clearly transitional state, I shall be better able to take a general view of German Federal history from the beginning. The peculiarity of the German Confederation is that it is the one recorded Confederation which arose from the separation of the component parts of a Kingdom. There now seems every chance of its changing back again into something more like its original state. The condition of the Hanseatic towns also, another part of my subject, is already greatly modified by the same events. It is even possible that they may not be without effect on the European position of Switzerland. On the whole, I believe that the delay in my work will only lead to its improvement, and that a volume on Swiss Federalism, and on German Federalism generally, will be far more valuable two or three years hence than it would have been if I had been able to complete it in the year before last.

With regard to my present work, my main object is to draw out that view of the Norman Conquest which I believe to be the one true one. That view, I may say, is formed by uniting the views of the two most eminent writers who have dealt with the subject, Augustine Thierry and Sir Francis Palgrave. The name of the last-mentioned illustrious scholar can never be uttered by any student of early English history without a feeling of deep gratitude. But his great and unfinished works set forth only half the truth. His eloquent French rival sets forth the other half. Each of these great writers must stand charged with considerable exaggeration on his own side of the question. Still, in the main, I think we may say that each is right in what he asserts and wrong only in what he leaves out of sight. From one point of view, the Norman Conquest was nearly all that Thierry says that it was; from another point of view, it was hardly more than Sir Francis Palgrave says that it was. Both writers also singularly resemble each other in a certain lack of critical power. Nothing in any period of history, above all, nothing in the period of history with which I am concerned, is more necessary than to distinguish the respective value of different authorities. Now in this respect both Thierry and Sir Francis Palgrave were deficient. Neither, I believe, ever made a statement for which he could not give chapter and verse in some shape or other. But both of them were too apt to catch at any statement which seemed at all to support their several theories, without always stopping to reflect whether such statements came from contemporary chronicles or charters or from careless and ill-informed compilers three or four centuries later.

The prominence which I have given to the preliminary history contained in this volume is due to a deep and growing conviction that the history of the Norman Conquest, and indeed all later English history also, is constantly misunderstood through a fatal habit of beginning the study of English history with the Norman Conquest itself. A confused and unhappy nomenclature hinders many people from realizing that Englishmen before 1066 were the same people as Englishmen after 1066. They thus fail to perceive that the Norman Conquest, instead of wiping out the race, the laws, or the language which existed before it, did but communicate to us a certain foreign infusion in all three branches, which was speedily absorbed and assimilated into the preexisting mass. We cannot understand the Norman Conquest of England without knowing something of the history both of Englishmen and of Normans before they met in arms on the hills of Sussex. As regards the Normans, the conquest of England was but the most brilliant and the most permanent of a series of brilliant conquests, from the occupation of Rouen to the occupation of Naples. As regards England, the Conquest was the grand and final result of causes which had been at work at least ever since the death of Eadgar. The Danish invasions, and the Norman tendencies of Eadward, each, in different ways, both suggested the enterprise of William and made that enterprise easier to be effected. I therefore look on the earlier history of Normandy, and still more on the English history from the accession of Æthelred to the death of Harthacnut, as so closely connected with my subject as to need a treatment in considerable detail. With the reign of Eadward the period of the Conquest itself begins. And I may add that I have done my best to throw some life into a period of our history which is full alike of political instruction and of living personal interest. That period is commonly presented to ordinary readers in the guise either of fantastic legends or else of summaries of the most repulsive dryness. I have striven to show what was the real political state of England in the tenth and eleventh centuries. I have striven also to clothe with flesh and blood the dry bones of men like Brihtnoth and Ulfcytel and Eadmund and our illustrious Danish conqueror himself.

As in my History of Federal Government I ventured to restore the Greek spelling of proper names, so I now follow the example of scholars like Kemble, Lappenberg, and others, in employing the genuine spelling of Old-English names. As they are generally spelled, they are a mere chaos of French and Latin corruptions, following no principle of any kind. Æðelstán becomes “Athelstane,” while Æðelred, exactly the same form, becomes “Ethelred.” I do not however follow Mr. Kemble in retaining the obsolete letter ð. It seems to me as much out of place to write Æðelðryð in the midst of a modern English sentence, as it would be to write Αθênê or Θeopompos. At one time I felt inclined to except those names which are still in familiar use, like Alfred and Edward, on the same principle on which I write Philip and not Philippos. Were the English names, like the Greek, simply cut short at the end, there would be no difficulty in so doing. But it would be unpleasantly inconsistent to write Ælfric and Alfred, Eadwig and Edward. I therefore make a chronological distinction; by the time of our post-Norman Edwards, the a had been dropped in contemporary spelling, and I write accordingly. The names of Normans and other foreigners, William, John, and the like, I give in their modern shape. Nothing could be gained by writing Willelm, Willaume, or Guillaume, all of them mere corruptions just as much as the modern English form. Names of places again I write with their usual modern spelling, because in them we have, what in the names of men we have not, an universally received and, allowing for some misconceptions, fairly consistent system. I except only one or two places, like Brunanburh, Ethandun, Assandun, of which the geographical position is more or less uncertain, and whose fame is wholly confined to the time of which I am writing.

I have given two maps, chiefly founded on those in Spruner’s Hand-Atlas. As in the maps which accompanied my History of Federal Government, any attempts to mark the boundaries of states whose boundaries were always fluctuating must always be more or less conjectural, and my conjectures, or those of Dr. Spruner, may not be the same as the conjectures of all my readers. All such attempts must be taken at what they are worth and no more. For one such conjecture I am specially responsible. In the map of Britain in 597 I have attempted, by means of cross-colouring, to mark the extent of territory north of the Thames and Avon which was West-Saxon in 597, but which I believe to have become Mercian in 628. In so doing I have followed the indications given by Dr. Guest in his papers and local maps; but I believe that mine is the first attempt to show the results of his researches on the general map of Britain. In this map my object was to mark all ascertained places mentioned in the Chronicles, with the addition of a few from Bæda, up to the time of Ecgberht. In the later map of the English Empire my principle was to mark those places which were mentioned in my own history from the time of Ecgberht to the Norman Conquest.

I have now only to return my thanks to those friends who have helped me in my undertaking in various ways, by comments and suggestions, by the loan of books, and in a few cases, though very few, by verifying references to books which I had not at hand. At their head I am proud to place the two men who stand at the head of living students of English history, Dr. Guest and Professor Stubbs. I have also to thank Viscount Strangford for several valuable suggestions as to the early Celtic ethnology of Britain. My thanks are due also for help of different kinds to the Rev. S. W. Wayte, now President of Trinity College, to the Rev. John Earle, late Professor of Anglo-Saxon, to the Rev. J. E. B. Mayor, of St. John’s College, Cambridge, to F. H. Dickinson, Esq., of Trinity College, Cambridge, to the Rev. J. R. Green, of Jesus College, a rising scholar to whom I look for the continuation of my own work, and to W. B. Dawkins, Esq., of Jesus College and of the Geological Survey. Mr. Dawkins I have especially to thank for much help in my investigations of the battle-fields of Maldon and Assandun, and I look to him for more valuable help still when I come to the greater battle which forms the centre of my whole history. And I must add my thanks for the kindness of every sort which I have uniformly received from the Delegates of the University Press, from one especially whose loss all historical students are now lamenting, my late learned and deeply esteemed friend Dr. Shirley.

Somerleaze, Wells,

January 4th, 1867.

CONTENTS.

CHAPTER I.
INTRODUCTION.
A. D. |  | PAGE
| The Norman Conquest important, not as the beginning of English history, but as its chief turning-point | 1
| Necessity of the earlier English history to its right understanding | 2
| Its character as compared with earlier and later conquests | 3
| Nature of the changes effected by it | 4–5
| Divisions of the work | 5–7
CHAPTER II.
FORMATION OF THE KINGDOM OF ENGLAND. 449–975.
§ 1. The Heathen Period of English Conquest. 449–597.
| The languages, races, and local names of Britain essentially the same now as at the time of the Norman Conquest | 8
| The Norman element absorbed in the existing English nation | 9
| The English Conquest; credibility of the narrative | 9
| Question of earlier Teutonic settlements | 10–12
| Analogy of the Danish invasions | 12
| Course of the English Conquest to the end of the sixth century | 13–15
| Difference between the English Conquest and other Teutonic conquests | 15–18
| Extermination of the Celtic inhabitants | 18
| Causes and results of the difference | 19–21
| Britain at the end of the sixth century; occupation of the country by various Low-Dutch tribes | 21–23
| No regular Heptarchy, but seven Kingdoms prominent among others | 23–24
| Growth of Wessex | 24–25
| Peculiar character of Mercia | 26–27
| Supremacy of the Bretwaldas | 28
§ 2. Conversion of the English to Christianity. 597–681.
| Peaceful progress of Christianity in England | 29
| Effects of the conversion; increased intercourse with the Continent | 30–31
| England the first national Church in the West | 31–32
| Cessation of wars of extermination | 33
| Advance of Wessex; Celtic element in the Western shires | 33–35
§ 3. Fluctuations of Dominion between Northumberland, Mercia, and Wessex. 577–823.
617–633 | Rivalry of Mercia and Northumberland; reign of Eadwine | 35–36
627–655 | Reign of Penda of Mercia | 36–37
635–685 | Greatness of Northumberland under Oswald and his successors | 37
716–819 | Renewed greatness of Mercia; reign of Offa | 37–38
| Influence of Charles the Great in English affairs | 38–39
802 | Accession of Ecgberht of Wessex | 39
§ 4. Permanent supremacy of Wessex. 823–924.
802–837 | Gradual submission of the other English Kingdoms to Ecgberht | 40–41
815–837 | His successes over the Welsh; independence of the Northern Celts | 41–42
789–1070 | Danish Invasions | 43
| Three Periods of the Danish Invasions | 43–45
837–901 | Reigns of Æthelwulf and his sons | 45–46
867–877 | Danish Conquest of Northumberland, East-Anglia, and part of Mercia | 46
871–880 | Election of Ælfred; Danish Invasions of Wessex | 46–47
878–890 | Peace of Wedmore and establishment of Guthrum in East-Anglia | 47–48
| Character and extent of the Danish occupation; its effect on local nomenclature | 48
| Character of Ælfred | 49–53
| Consolidation of England promoted by the Danish Wars | 53–55
893–901 | Later wars and death of Ælfred | 55–56
901–925 | Reign of Eadward the Elder; his Kingdom reaches the Humber | 56–58
924 | Commendation of Northumberland, Scotland, and Strathclyde | 58–60
§ 5. Imperial Supremacy of the West-Saxon Kings of the English. 924–975.
925–940 | Reign of Æthelstan; Northumberland first incorporated | 60
937 | Battle of Brunanburh | 61
940–955 | Reigns of Eadmund and Eadred; final incorporation of Northumberland | 62
945 | Grant of Cumberland to Malcolm of Scotland | 63
955 | Reign of Eadwig in Wessex and Eadgar in Mercia | 63
| Character of Dunstan | 63–64
958–975 | Sole reign of Eadgar; his supremacy over all Britain | 64–66
975–1016 | Reigns of Eadward and Æthelred | 66–67
| Recapitulation | 67–68
CHAPTER III.
THE CONSTITUTION OF ENGLAND IN THE TENTH AND ELEVENTH CENTURIES.
| The Old-English Constitution survived the Norman Conquest | 69–71
§ 1. Origin of the Old-English Kingship.
| Summary of the growth of Wessex | 72
| The germs of our institutions to be traced to the earliest times | 72–74
| Analogy with other Teutonic and other Aryan nations | 74
| Origin of Kingship; earlier government by Ealdormen or Heretogan | 74–76
| Difference between Ealdormen and Kings | 76–78
| Title of King | 78
| Kingship national and not territorial | 78–79
| Growth of kingly power through extension of territory | 79–80
§ 2. The Early Teutonic Constitution and its Decay.
| The Teutonic Free Community; analogies elsewhere | 80–81
| Eorls and Ceorls | 82–84
| The Mark; Folkland; the Eðel | 84–85
| Origin and nature of the Comitatus or Thegnhood; Homeric and other analogies | 85–89
| The Thegns supplant the old Eorls | 89
| Effects of the change; Commendation; depression of the Ceorls | 90–91
| Growth of feudal principles | 91–93
| Earlier form of military service | 93–94
| Folkland and Bookland | 94–96
| Comparison between England, Germany, and Switzerland | 96–97
| Changes in the ancient Constitution; their necessity | 97
| Ceorldom sinks into Villainage, but the Villains are gradually emancipated | 97
| Amalgamation of Marks into Shires and of Shires into Kingdoms | 98–100
§ 3. Origin and Powers of the Witenagemót.
| Democratic constitution of the old Assemblies of the Mark and the Shire | 100–102
| The Assembly of the Kingdom inevitably shrinks up into an Assembly of the King’s Thegns | 102–103
| The Witenagemót of Wessex becomes the General Legislature, the Gemóts of other Kingdoms surviving as local bodies | 104
| Powers of the Gemót greater than those of a modern Parliament | 105–106
| Right of deposing the King | 106–107
| Right of electing the King; combination of the hereditary and elective principles | 107–110
| Direct action of the Witan in all matters | 110–112
| Joint action of the King and the Witan | 112–113
| Loss and recovery of Parliamentary freedom after the Conquest | 113–114
| Importance of the personal character of the King | 114–115
| His influence as Executive and as Hlaford of the chief men | 116–117
§ 4. The Imperial Power of the King and his Relation to the Dependent Kingdoms.
954 | England one Kingdom, but much local independence retained | 117
| Statement of the question as to the superiority of the West-Saxon Kings over all Britain | 118
924 | Superiority over Scotland dates from the Commendation to Eadward | 118–119
922 | Final Commendation of the Welsh | 119
| Nature of Commendation; analogous instances | 119–121
924–1291 | Claims of the two Edwards; change of ideas meanwhile | 122
| Threefold relation of the King of Scots to the English Crown | 122–123
| Geography and relations of Scotland, Lothian, and Strathclyde | 123–124
| History of Cumberland | 124–126
| History of Lothian; it becomes the historical Scotland | 126–129
| Analogy between Scotland and Switzerland | 129–130
922–1283 | History of Wales | 130–131
| Position of the dependent Kingdoms | 131–133
| Statement of the case as to the Imperial Titles | 133–134
| The Titles used in the Charters imply an Imperial position | 134–136
| No continuous tradition from the Provincial Emperors | 136–137
286–407 | Real position of the “Tyrants” | 137–139
| No analogy between them and the Bretwaldas | 139–140
| The Imperial style adopted through a feeling that the position of the West-Saxon Kings was analogous to that of the Emperors | 140–143
| Position of Ecgberht, of Æthelstan, of Eadgar | 140–141
| The Imperial titles go out of use after the Norman Conquest | 143–144
| Late instances of their use | 144–145
827–1869 | Growth of the English system of dependencies | 145–146
| The Kingdom of England and Empire of Britain transferred to William | 146–147
CHAPTER IV.
SKETCH OF THE HISTORY OF NORMANDY DURING THE TENTH CENTURY.
| Original kindred of Englishmen, Danes, and Normans | 148–149
| Danes in England become Englishmen, in Gaul, Frenchmen | 149–151
§ 1. General Effects of the Scandinavian Settlements in Gaul.
| Analogy between the settlements of Rolf and Guthrum | 151
| Results of the Norman settlement on general history; character of the Normans | 151–154
| Effects on French history; position of Gaul; struggle between Paris and Laon decided by the Normans | 154–155
| Origin of Modern France | 155–156
888 | Division of the Empire; Eastern and Western Franks | 156
830–888 | Growing importance of Paris; Odo the first Parisian King | 156–159
§ 2. Settlement and Reign of Rolf. 911–927.
| The Danish ravages within the Empire compared with those in England | 159–163
| Various Danish settlements in Gaul; exceptional importance of that at Rouen | 163–164
876–911? | Character of Rolf; his earlier exploits | 164–166
911 | Rolf in possession of Rouen; his defeat at Chartres | 166
912 | Peace of Clair-on-Epte; analogy with that of Wedmore | 166–167
| The Kingdom strengthened by the cession | 167–168
| Rolf’s homage to Charles; extent of his grant | 168–170
| Internal condition of Normandy; probable position of the two races; vestiges of the Danish language | 171–173
| Normandy not an absolute Monarchy | 173–174
922–927 | Rolf supports the Karlings against Robert and Rudolf | 174–176
927? 932? | Abdication and death of Rolf | 176
924 | His acquisition of the Bessin; its importance | 176–179
§ 3. Reign of William Longsword. 927–943.
| Religion of Rolf; birth and education of his son William | 179–181
931 | Breton revolt | 182–183
| Relations between Æthelstan and the Continent; Alan of Britanny takes refuge in England | 183–186
936 | Alan restored; the Côtentin and the Channel Islands become Norman; their subsequent history | 186–189
932 | Danish and Christian parties; revolt and submission of the Danish party | 189–190
| William’s position between the two; Danish education of his son Richard | 190–192
| Part played by William in French history; condition of Gaul | 192–196
926–933 | William’s fidelity to Charles the Simple; he does homage to Rudolf after his death | 196–197
936 | Election of Lewis; influence of Æthelstan | 198–200
| Reign and character of Lewis; true character of the later Karlings | 200–201
939–940 | Affairs of Montreuil and Lotharingia; intervention of Æthelstan and Otto | 201–205
942–943 | Council of Attigny; murder of William Longsword | 205–206
§ 4. Reign of Richard the Fearless. 943–996.
943 | Accession of Richard; his minority and doubtful legitimacy | 206–208
942–973 | Events of the year 943; influence of Germany in French affairs | 208–210
943 | New Danish settlement; apostasy of Richard; the Christians seek French help | 210–211
| Lewis defeats the Danes and recovers Richard | 212
| Norman version | 213–214
944–945 | Lewis in Normandy; his defeat and capture by Harold Blaatand | 214–219
945–946 | Lewis imprisoned by Hugh; intervention of Eadmund and Otto; release of Lewis and renewal of his Kingship | 219–221
| Commendation of Richard to Hugh of Paris | 221–222
| The alliance between Normandy and Paris determines the fall of the Karlings | 223
946 | War of the three Kings against the two Dukes; defeat of Otto before Rouen | 224–226
947–954 | Series of Synods; progress and death of Lewis | 227–230
954–986 | Reign of Lothar; the old generation dies off | 230–231
956–960 | Relations between Hugh Capet and Richard | 232
962 | Theobald of Chartres; his enmity towards Richard | 233–234
| Second intervention of Harold? | 234–235
| Policy of Hugh Capet; general peace between Ducal and Royal France | 236
973–980 | Changed relations between France and Germany on the death of Otto the Great | 236–238
986–991 | Reign of Lewis the Fifth; his death; election of Hugh Capet; permanence of his dynasty; position of Rheims as crowning-place | 239–240
987–991 | Robert associated with his father in the Kingdom; struggle with Charles of Lotharingia | 240–241
| Permanent establishment of the Parisian dynasty; effects of the change | 241–242
| Lotharingia finally becomes German under Carolingian Dukes | 242–243
§ 5. Comparison between France, England, and Normandy.
| Influence of the Normans on the Capetian revolution; their settlement made Gaul French | 243–245
| Relations between Normandy and France fixed by the Capetian Revolution | 245–246
| Contrast between England and France | 247–249
| Position of the later Karlings; power of the Crown not immediately increased by the change of dynasty | 249–251
| Growth of the doctrine of nobility | 252–253
996 | Last days and death of Richard | 254–255
§ 6. Early Years of Richard the Good. 996–997.
| Aristocratic feelings of Richard | 255–256
997 | Revolt of the Peasants; their political organization; the revolt crushed by Rudolf of Ivry | 256–258
CHAPTER V.
THE DANISH CONQUEST OF ENGLAND. 975–1016.
| Character and reign of Æthelred | 260–263
§ 1. Reign of Eadward the Martyr. 975–979.
975 | Death of Eadgar; reaction against the monks | 263–264
| Disputed election to the Crown; election of Eadward; banishment of Oslac of Northumberland | 264–266
§ 2. From the election of Æthelred to the first dispute with Normandy. 979–1000.
979 | Murder of Eadward; election of Æthelred | 266
979–988 | Death of Dunstan; various internal events | 267–268
980–982 | Beginning of Danish inroads; characters of Swegen and Olaf | 268–270
988–993 | Beginning of Danish attempts at settlement | 268
991 | Norwegian invasion; battle of Maldon and death of Brihtnoth | 270–276
| The Danes first bought off; Ealdorman Ælfric | 277–279
992 | Naval victory of the English; treason of Ælfric | 279–280
| Greatness of London | 280–283
993 | Ravages in the North; treason of Godwine and others | 283–284
988–991 | Affairs of Wales | 284–285
991 | Dispute between Æthelred and Richard appeased by Pope John the Fifteenth; increasing connexion between England and Normandy | 285–287
§ 3. From the first dispute with Normandy to the Massacre of Saint Brice. 991–1002.
994 | Great combined expedition of Olaf and Swegen; attack on London defeated by the citizens; Æthelred buys peace | 287–289
994–1000 | Peace with Olaf; his later days | 289–291
994–1003 | Inaction of Swegen | 291
995 | Meetings of the Witenagemót; Ælfric elected Archbishop; Translation of the Bernician Bishopric to Durham | 291–294
996–998 | Gemóts of Cealcyth, Calne, and London; legislation | 294–295
997–999 | Renewed ravages and inefficient resistance | 295–297
| Causes of inefficient resistance | 297–299
1000 | Character of Æthelred; he ravages Cumberland | 299–301
| Second quarrel with Normandy; alleged English invasion of the Côtentin | 301–303
1002 | Marriage of Æthelred and Emma; its results | 303–307
1000 | Expected end of the world; condition of Europe and Asia | 307–308
1001 | Invasion of Sussex; treason of Pallig; defence of Exeter; Battle of Pinhoe | 308–312
1001–1002 | Meetings of the Witan; fresh payments to the Danes | 312–315
1002 | Massacre of the Danes; its probable extent | 315–316
| Burning of Saint Frithswyth’s church at Oxford; murder of Gunhild | 316
§ 4. From the Massacre of Saint Brice to Swegen’s Conquest of England. 1002–1013.
1003 | Results of the Massacre; invasion by Swegen in person; Exeter betrayed by Hugh the Frenchman | 317–318
| Renewed treason of Ælfric; Swegen sacks Salisbury | 318–321
1004 | Exploits of Ulfcytel of East-Anglia; Swegen burns Norwich and Thetford; his drawn battle with Ulfcytel | 322–325
1005 | Year of respite and famine | 325
1006 | Rise and character of Eadric; murder of Ælfhelm | 326–328
| Malcolm of Scotland besieges Durham; the city delivered by Uhtred | 328–330
1006 | Great devastation of the Danes in Wessex | 330–332
1007 | Witenagemót of Shrewsbury; tribute paid again | 333
1007–1008 | Two years’ respite; Eadric Ealdorman of the Mercians | 333–334
1008–1009 | Legislation; decree for the formation of a fleet | 334–339
| The fleet raised by assessments; origin of ship-money | 339–341
1009 | Alleged Embassy to Normandy; Richard’s treaty with Swegen | 341–343
| The fleet assembled at Sandwich; quarrel of Wulfnoth and Brihtric; dispersion of the fleet | 343–344
1009–1010 | Invasion of Thurkill; vain attack on London; Oxford burned | 344–346
1010 | Last year of resistance; Ulfcytel’s battle at Ringmere; hopeless state of the country | 346–350
1011 | Peace again purchased; Eadric invades Wales | 350–352
| Siege and capture of Canterbury; captivity of Ælfheah | 352–354
1012 | Martyrdom of Ælfheah | 354–355
| Money paid to the Danes; Thurkill joins the English | 355–356
1013 | Swegen’s last invasion; the North submits | 356–358
| He ravages Mercia and is repulsed from London | 358–360
| The West-Saxons submit; Swegen acknowledged King; London submits | 360–361
1013–1014 | Æthelred and his family take refuge in Normandy | 361–362
§ 5. From the Conquest of England by Swegen to the Death of Æthelred. 1013–1016.
| Importance of Swegen’s Conquest as preparatory to William’s | 362–364
1014 | Death of Swegen | 365–366
| Double election to the Crown; the Danes choose Cnut; the English Witan vote the restoration of Æthelred | 367–368
| Return and legislation of Æthelred | 368–370
| Æthelred drives out Cnut; position of Thurkill | 370–371
1015 | Witenagemót of Oxford; murder of Sigeferth and Morkere | 371–374
| The Ætheling Eadmund marries Ealdgyth and establishes himself in the Five Boroughs | 374
| Cnut returns; he ravages Wessex and is joined by Eadric; Wessex submits to Cnut | 375–377
1016 | Cnut and Eadric invade Mercia; Eadmund and Uhtred in the North; submission and murder of Uhtred | 377–379
| Cnut sails towards London | 380
| Death of Æthelred | 380
§ 6. The War of Cnut and Eadmund. 1016.
| Double election of Cnut and Eadmund; short and glorious reign of Eadmund | 380–383
| Eadmund acknowledged in Wessex; Cnut’s fresh siege of London | 383–384
| Battle of Pen Selwood; victory of Eadmund | 384–385
| Battle of Sherstone; victory doubtful | 385–387
| Cnut renews the siege of London; Eadric joins Eadmund | 387
| Battles of London and Brentford; third siege of London | 387–388
| Cnut ravages Mercia; battle of Otford | 388–389
| Battle of Assandun; treason of Eadric; final victory of Cnut | 389–394
| Conference of Olney and division of the Kingdom | 395–398
| Death and burial of Eadmund | 398–400
CHAPTER VI.
THE DANISH KINGS IN ENGLAND. 1017–1042.
| Character of the Reigns of Cnut and his Sons | 401–404
§ 1. The Reign of Cnut in England. 1017–1035.
1016–1017 | Witenagemót of London; Cnut chosen King | 405
| Outlawry of the two Eadwigs; fate of the Ætheling | 406
| Fourfold division of England; Cnut’s preference for Wessex | 406–407
| First appearance of Earl Godwine; his first Earldom | 408–410
1017 | Cnut marries Ælfgifu-Emma; his relations with Ælfgifu of Northampton and her sons | 410–412
| Banishments and executions | 412–415
| Execution and character of Eadric | 415–418
| Leofwine succeeds Eadric in Mercia | 418
1018 | Danegeld paid; Cnut sends home most of his ships | 418–419
| Witenagemót of Oxford; renewal of Eadgar’s Law | 419–422
1019 | Cnut visits Denmark | 422
| Exploits of Godwine; his marriage with Gytha | 422–424
1020 | Cnut returns to England; Witenagemót at Cirencester; banishment of Æthelweard | 424–425
| Godwine Earl of the West-Saxons | 425–426
| Consecration of the church on Assandun; import of the ceremony | 426–428
| Later policy of Cnut; Danes make way for Englishmen | 428
1021 | Banishment of Thurkill | 428–429
1023 | Thurkill viceroy of Denmark | 429
1023–1030 | Banishment of Eric; banishment and death of Hakon | 429–430
1025 | Ulf put to death | 431
| Character and position of Cnut | 432–434
1027 | His letter from Rome | 434
1028–1035 | His Laws | 434–436
| Personal traditions of Cnut; his ecclesiastical foundations | 437–443
§ 2. The Foreign Relations of Cnut. 1018–1035.
| Unparalleled peace of Cnut’s reign | 443–444
| The Housecarls; Cnut’s military legislation | 444–446
| Cnut’s foreign policy; affairs of Wales | 446–447
| Affairs of Northumberland and Scotland; succession of the Northumbrian Earls | 448
1018 | Malcolm defeats Eadwulf at Carham | 448–449
1028? | Affairs of Cumberland; submission of Duncan | 449–450
1031 | Submission of Scotland; homage of three Kings | 450–451
1015 | Cnut’s northern wars; loss of Norway | 452–453
1015–1028 | Reign of Saint Olaf in Norway | 453–454
1025 | Cnut’s defeat at the Helga | 454
1028 | Cnut chosen King of all Norway | 454
| Cnut’s friendly relations with the Empire; he recovers the frontier of the Eider | 455–456
996–1031 | Affairs of Normandy; friendly relations between Normandy and France | 456–458
| Affairs of Britanny and Chartres | 458–460
1013? | Story of Olaf and Lacman | 460–463
| Foreign expeditions and conquests of the Normans | 463–464
1024 | Burgundian War | 464
1018 | Norman exploits in Spain | 464–465
1016–1090 | Conquest of Apulia and Sicily; its bearing on that of England | 465–467
1026 | Unbroken peace between Richard and Cnut; death of Richard | 467
1026–1028 | Reign of Richard the Third | 468
1028–1031 | Accession of Robert; he restores various expelled princes | 468–470
1026 | Relations between Cnut and Robert; marriage of Robert and Estrith | 471–473
1028–1035 | Robert’s intervention on behalf of the Æthelings; his attempted invasion of England | 473–477
1035 | Pilgrimage of Robert; death of Robert and Cnut | 477–479
§ 3. The Reign of Harold the son of Cnut. 1035–1040.
| Extent and partition of Cnut’s Empire | 479–481
1036 | Swegen expelled from Norway | 481
1035–1036 | Candidature of Harold and Harthacnut; Witenagemót at Oxford; division of the Kingdom | 481–488
1035–1037 | Emma and Godwine Regents for Harthacnut in Wessex | 488–489
1036 | Attempt of the Ætheling Ælfred; conflicting versions of the story | 489–493
| Estimate of the evidence; real position of Ælfred; real question as to the conduct of Godwine | 493–497
| Inconsistency of the ordinary story | 497–498
| Evidence and suspicion against Godwine; his probable innocence | 498–501
| Dissatisfaction in Wessex at the absence of Harthacnut | 501–502
1037 | Harthacnut deposed and Harold chosen King over all England | 503
| He banishes Emma | 503
| His reign and character | 504–506
1039 | Welsh inroad and death of Eadwine | 506
1040 | Duncan besieges Durham and is defeated by the citizens | 507–508
1039 | Preparations of Harthacnut | 508
1040 | Death of Harold | 509
§ 4. The Reign of Harthacnut. 1040–1042.
1040 | Election of Harthacnut; his landing and coronation | 509–511
| His character; he lays on a Danegeld and digs up Harold’s body | 511–513
1040–1041 | His second Danegeld | 513
| Accusation, trial, and acquittal of Godwine | 514–517
1041 | The Danegeld levied by the Housecarls; tumult at Worcester | 517–520
| Worcester burned and the shire ravaged | 521–522
| Harthacnut recalls Eadward | 522–524
| Succession of the Northumbrian Earls; Ealdred, Eadwulf, Siward; Siward murders Eadwulf by the connivance of Harthacnut and obtains the whole Earldom | 524–527
| Harthacnut sells the See of Durham to Eadred | 527
1042 | War with Magnus; defeat of Swegen Estrithson | 528
| Death of Harthacnut; marriage of Tofig and Gytha; first foundation of Waltham | 528–530
| Election of Eadward | 530
| Summary | 530–532
APPENDIX.
Note A. | The use of the word “English” | 533
B. | The Bretwaldadom and the Imperial Titles | 548
C. | The Early Relations between England and the Continent | 565
D. | The Relations of Charles the Great with Mercia and Northumberland | 569
E. | The Changes in Nomenclature produced by the Danish Settlement | 570
F. | Æthelred and Æthelflæd of Mercia | 573
G. | The Commendation of 924 | 575
H. | The Grant of Cumberland | 580
I. | The Cession of Lothian | 582
K. | Ealdormen and Kings | 589
L. | Origin of the word King | 593
M. | King of England or King of the English? | 594
N. | Commendation | 597
O. | Growth of the Thegnhood | 599
P. | Grants of Folkland | 600
Q. | The Constitution of the Witenagemót | 601
R. | The Right of the Witan to depose the King | 604
S. | The Election of Kings | 608
T. | Names of Kingdoms and Nations | 609
V. | Notices of Language in the Tenth Century | 617
W. | The Vassalage of Normandy | 620
X. | Danish Marriages | 624
Y. | The Election of Lewis | 626
Z. | The Death of William Longsword | 628
AA. | Leading Men in England at the Death of Eadgar | 633
BB. | The Election of Eadward the Martyr | 638
CC. | The two Ælfrics | 639
DD. | The Treaty with Olaf and Justin | 641
EE. | The Relations of Æthelred with Normandy | 642
FF. | Æthelred’s Invasion of Cumberland | 646
GG. | The Massacre of Saint Brice | 648
HH. | Ulfcytel of East-Anglia | 653
II. | The Rise of Eadric | 654
KK. | The Succession of the Northumbrian Earls | 659
LL. | The Assessment of 1008 | 661
MM. | Wulfnoth of Sussex | 663
NN. | Thurkill the Dane | 666
OO. | Wulfric Spot | 671
PP. | The Taking of Canterbury and the Martyrdom of Ælfheah | 673
QQ. | The Kingship and Death of Swegen | 678
RR. | The Sermon of Wulfstan or Lupus | 683
SS. | The Children of Æthelred | 685
TT. | The Elections of Cnut and Eadmund | 689
VV. | The War of Cnut and Eadmund | 694
WW. | The Conference of Cnut and Eadmund | 705
XX. | The Death of Eadmund | 711
YY. | The two Eadwigs | 717
ZZ. | The Origin of Earl Godwine | 719
AAA. | The West-Saxon Earldom | 731
BBB. | The Marriage of Cnut and Emma | 733
CCC. | The Family of Leofwine of Mercia | 737
DDD. | The Death of Eadric | 740
EEE. | The Exploits and Marriage of Godwine | 743
FFF. | Wyrtgeorn King of the Wends | 747
GGG. | The Death of Ulf | 749
HHH. | The Pilgrimage of Cnut | 751
III. | The Laws of Cnut | 753
KKK. | The Housecarls | 755
LLL. | Cnut’s Relations with Scotland | 759
MMM. | The Battle at the Helga | 765
NNN. | Cnut’s Relations with the Empire | 766
OOO. | Ælfred the Giant | 770
PPP. | Cnut’s Relations with Normandy | 771
QQQ. | The Division of Cnut’s Dominions | 774
RRR. | The Candidature of Harold and Harthacnut | 775
SSS. | The Death of the Ætheling Ælfred | 779
TTT. | The Burial of Harold the First | 787
VVV. | The Trial and Acquittal of Godwine | 789
WWW. | The Origin of Earl Siward | 791
XXX. | Tofig the Proud | 792
YYY. | Events after the Death of Harthacnut | 794

CHAPTER I.
INTRODUCTION.

Importance of the Norman Conquest, not as the beginning of English history, but as its chief turning-point.

The Norman Conquest is the great turning-point in the history of the English nation. Since the first settlement of the English in Britain, the introduction of Christianity is the only event which can compare with it in importance. And there is this wide difference between the two. The introduction of Christianity was an event which could hardly fail to happen sooner or later; in accepting the Gospel, the English only followed the same law which, sooner or later, affected all the Teutonic nations. But the Norman Conquest is something which stands without a parallel in any other Teutonic land. If that Conquest be only looked on in its true light, it is impossible to exaggerate its importance. And yet there is no event whose true nature has been more commonly and more utterly mistaken. No event is less fitted to be taken, as it so often has been taken, for the beginning of our national history. For its whole importance is not the importance which belongs to a beginning, but the importance which belongs to a turning-point. The Norman Conquest brought with it a most extensive foreign infusion, an infusion which affected our blood, our language, our laws, our arts; still it was only an infusion; the older and stronger elements still survived, and in the long run they again made good their supremacy. So far from being the beginning of our national history, the Norman Conquest was the temporary overthrow of our national being. But it was only a temporary overthrow. To a superficial observer the English people might seem for a while to be wiped out of the roll-call of the nations, or to exist only as the bondmen of foreign rulers in their own land. But in a few generations we led captive our conquerors; England was England once again, and the descendants of the Norman invaders were found to be among the truest of Englishmen. England may be as justly proud of rearing such step-children as Simon of Montfort and Edward the First as of being the natural mother of Ælfred and of Harold. In no part of history |Importance of the earlier English history to the right understanding of the Conquest.| can any event be truly understood without reference to the events which went before it and which prepared the way for it. But in no case is such reference more needful than in dealing with an event like that with which we are now concerned. The whole importance of the Norman Conquest consists in the effect which it had on an existing nation, humbled indeed, but neither wiped out nor utterly enslaved, in the changes which it wrought in an existing constitution, which was by degrees greatly modified, but which was never either wholly abolished or wholly trampled under foot. William, King of the English, claimed to reign as the lawful successor of the Kings of the English who reigned before him. He claimed to inherit their rights, and he professed to govern according to their laws. His position therefore, and the whole nature of the great revolution which he wrought, are utterly unintelligible without a full understanding of the state of things which he found existing. Even when one nation actually displaces another, some knowledge of the condition of the displaced nation is necessary to understand the position of the displacing nation. The English Conquest of Britain cannot be thoroughly understood without some knowledge of the earlier history of the Celt and the Roman. But when there is no displacement of a nation, when there is not even the utter overthrow of a constitution, when there are only changes, however many and important, wrought in an existing system, a knowledge of the earlier state of things is an absolutely essential part of any knowledge of the later. The Norman Conquest of England is simply an insoluble puzzle without a clear notion of the condition of England and the English people at the time when the Conqueror and his followers first set foot upon our shores.

Character of the Norman Conquest as compared with earlier and later conquests.

The Norman Conquest again is an event which stands by itself in the history of Europe. It took place at a transitional period in the world’s developement. Those elements, Roman and Teutonic, Imperial and ecclesiastical, which stood, as it were, side by side in the system of the early middle age, were then being fused together into the later system of feudal, papal, crusading Europe. The Conquest itself was one of the most important steps in the change. A kingdom which had hitherto been purely Teutonic was brought within the sphere of the laws, the manners, the speech, of the Romance nations. At the very moment when Pope and Cæsar held each other in the death-grasp, a Church which had hitherto maintained a kind of insular and barbaric independence was brought into a far more intimate connexion with the Roman See. And as a conquest, compared with earlier and with later conquests, the Norman Conquest of England holds a middle position between the two classes, and shares somewhat of the nature of both. It was something less than such conquests as form the main subject of history during the great Wandering of the Nations. It was something more than those political conquests which fill up too large a space in the history of modern times. It was much less than a |The immediate change effected by the Norman Conquest less than the change effected by the Barbarian conquests.| national migration; it was much more than a mere change of frontier or of dynasty. It was not such a change as when the first English conquerors slew, expelled, or enslaved the whole nation of the vanquished Britons. It was not even such a change as when Goths or Burgundians sat down as a ruling people, keeping their own language and their own law, and leaving the language and law of Rome to the vanquished Romans. But it was a far greater change than commonly follows on the transfer of a province from one sovereign to another, or even on the forcible acquisition of a crown by an alien dynasty. The conquest of England by William wrought less immediate change than the conquest of Africa by Genseric; it wrought a greater immediate change than the conquest of Sicily by Charles of Anjou. |In what the change really consisted.| It brought with it not only a new dynasty, but a new nobility; it did not expel or transplant the English nation or any part of it; but it gradually deprived the leading men and families of England of their lands and offices, and thrust them down into a secondary position under alien intruders. It did not at once sweep away the old laws and liberties of the land; but it at once changed the manner and spirit of their administration, and it opened the way for endless later changes in the laws themselves. It did not abolish the English language; but it brought in a new language by its side, a language which for a while supplanted it as the language of polite intercourse, and which did not yield to the reviving elder speech till it had affected it by the largest infusion that the vocabulary of one |Formal legislative changes for the most part of a later date.| European tongue ever received from another. The most important of the formal changes in legislation, in language, in the system of government and in the tenure of land, were no immediate consequences of the Conquest, no direct innovations of the reign of William. They were the gradual developements of later times, of times when the Norman as well as the Englishman found himself under the yoke of a foreign master. But the reign of William paved the way for all the later changes that were to come, and the immediate changes which |Immediate results of the Conquest mainly practical.| he himself wrought were, after all, great and weighty. They were in truth none the less great and weighty because they affected the practical condition of the people far more than they affected its written laws and institutions. When a nation is driven to receive a foreigner as its King, when that foreign King divides the highest offices and the greatest estates of the land among his foreign followers, though such a change must be carefully distinguished from changes in the written law, still the change is, for the time, practically the greatest which a nation and its leaders can undergo.

Plan and extent of the present History.

I propose then, as a necessary introduction to my narrative of the actual Conquest, to sketch the condition of England and of Normandy at the time when the two nations came into contact with each other. This process will involve a summary of the earlier history of both |Narrative of the actual Conquest and its immediate causes. 1042–1087.| countries. From the beginning of the eleventh century the history of England and of Normandy becomes more and more intermixed, and it will be necessary to tell the story more and more in detail. The period of the actual Conquest and its immediate causes, the reigns of Eadward, of Harold, and of William, will form the centre of the work. The reigns of William’s sons will show the character of the Norman government in England, and the amount of immediate change which it really |Accession of the Angevin dynasty. 1154.| brought with it. With the accession of the Angevin dynasty the purely Norman period comes to an end. A King succeeds who is in one sense both Norman and English, in another sense neither Norman nor English. Presently Norman and Englishman alike have to struggle for their own against the perpetual intrusion of fresh shoals of foreigners seeking their fortunes at the expense of both. The natural effect of this struggle was that Norman and Englishman forgot their differences, and |Reign of Henry the Second. 1154–1189.| united in resistance to the common enemy. Under Henry the Second the struggle is for a while delayed, or veils itself under an ecclesiastical form. A prelate of English birth but of the purest Norman descent, wins the love of the English people in a struggle in which nothing but an unerring instinct could have shown them that their interest was in any way involved. |Degradation of England under Richard the First. 1189–1199.| Under Richard, the most thoroughly foreign of all our Kings, the evil reaches its height, and England might pass for a dependency of the Count of Poitiers. As is usual in cases of national discontent, it is not till the worst day is passed that the counter-revolution openly |National struggle against foreigners. 1214–1272.| begins. Under John and his son Henry, the history of England becomes mainly the history of a struggle between the natives of the land, of whatever race, and the foreign favourites of the court. Norman and Englishman are |1265.| now reconciled; and by their joint work the Old-English liberties are won back in another form, and the modern |End of the work under Edward the First. 1272–1307.| constitution of England begins. At last England, having already won over her baronage, at last wins over her King. The work of reconciliation is completed under the best and greatest of our later Kings, the first who, since the Norman entered our land, either bore a purely English name or followed a purely English policy. Under the great Edward England finally assumed those constitutional forms which, with mere changes of detail, she has preserved uninterrupted ever since. The work of the Conquest is now over; the two races are united under a legislation whose outward form and language was in a great measure French, but whose real life was drawn from the truest English sources. Here then our narrative, even as the merest sketch, comes to its natural close. But for a long time before this point, a mere sketch, pointing out the working of earlier events in their results, will be all that will be needed. The kernel of my narrative will consist of the history of the five and forty years from the election of Eadward to the death of William. The history of these years will fill my three central volumes, containing the history of the actual Conquest and its immediate causes. This central portion will be introduced, as is essential to its understanding, by a sketch of the events which led to it, gradually developing in minuteness from the beginning of the English Conquest to the extinction of the Danish dynasty in England. And it will be wound up with what is no less essential, with a sketch of the history gradually lessening in minuteness down to the reign of Edward the First, and discussing the permanent results of the Conquest on the laws, the language, the arts, and the social condition of England.

CHAPTER II.
THE FORMATION OF THE KINGDOM OF ENGLAND.
449–975.

§ 1. The Heathen period of English Conquest. 449–597.

The races and languages of Britain essentially the same at the time of the Norman Conquest as they are now.

The Norman invaders in the eleventh century found in the Isle of Britain, as any modern invader would find now, three nations, speaking three languages; and they found then, as would be found now, one of the three holding a distinct superiority over the whole land. Then as now, English, Welsh, and Gaelic were the three distinct tongues of the three races of the island; then as now, the dominant Teuton knew himself by no name but that of Englishman, and was known to his Celtic neighbour by no name but that of Saxon. The boundaries of the two races and of their languages were already fixed, nearly as they remain at present. The English tongue has made some advances since the eleventh century; but they are small compared with the advances which it had made between |Preservation of local names and divisions in England.| the fifth century and the eleventh. The main divisions of the country, the local names of the vast mass of its towns and villages, were fixed when the Norman came, and they have survived, with but little change, to our own day. While a map of France or Germany in the eleventh century is useless for modern purposes, and looks like the picture of another region, a map of England proper in the reign of Victoria hardly differs at all from a map of England proper in the reign of William. The Norman found in the land substantially the same English nation which still exists, occupying substantially the same territory which it occupies at present. He found it already exhibiting, in its laws, its language, its national character, the most essential |The Norman element absorbed in the English nation then and now existing.| of the features which it still retains. Into the English nation which he thus found already formed his own dynasty and his own followers were gradually absorbed. The conquered did not become Normans; but the conquerors did become Englishmen. It was by a very different process that the English themselves had made good their footing in the land in which the Norman found them, and to which they had long before given their name.

The English Conquest of Britain. A.D. 449–924.

The details of the English Conquest of Britain, and the exact amount of historical truth to be found in them, are questions which hardly concern us here. It will be enough to point out the essential difference between the traditional narrative of the English Conquest, as contained in the English Chronicles,[1] and the romantic narrative of which Geoffrey of Monmouth is the chief |General credibility of the traditional narrative.| spokesman. The narrative in the Chronicles is perfectly credible in itself, and perfectly consistent with all the undoubted phænomena of later history. It is also perfectly consistent with the record of all those living witnesses whose testimony may be mistaken, but which themselves cannot lie. Such are the evidence of language and local nomenclature, the evidence of the surviving antiquities, the camps, the dykes, the barrows, which chronicle this warfare as well as the warfare of earlier and of later times. The only question is whether an accurate narrative of details can have been handed on from the date assigned to Hengest to the ascertained date of Bæda, whether by oral tradition, by runes, or by written documents which are lost to us. And this really amounts to little more than a question whether, in the earliest part of the narrative, the exact names and the exact dates can always be trusted. Some of the earlier names may be mythical;[2] some of the dates may have been reached by ingenious calculation rather than by genuine tradition. But granting all this, the main substance of the narrative remains essentially where it was.

Much learning and ingenuity has been spent, and, I venture to think, in many cases wasted, in attempts to show the untrustworthiness of the traditional account, by |Questions of earlier Teutonic invasions and settlements in Britain.| bringing forward proofs of Teutonic invasions, and even of Teutonic settlements, of an earlier date than that assigned by the Chronicles to the beginning of the English Conquest.[3] The facts which are brought forward are in most cases probable and in some cases certain, but I cannot look on them as having that bearing on later history which they have sometimes been supposed to have. It is possible that, among the tribes which Cæsar found in Britain, some, especially in the eastern districts of the island, may have been of Teutonic origin, or in some degree mingled with Teutonic elements. It is certain that in Britain, as everywhere else, Teutonic soldiers largely served in the Roman armies, and that settlements of such soldiers sometimes grew into permanent colonies.[4] It is certain that, long before the days of Cerdic or Hengest, Theodosius and Stilicho repelled Teutonic invasions; and it is probable that, by repelling such invasions, they hindered the formation of Teutonic settlements in Britain at that earlier |The course of the English Conquest not affected by them.| time.[5] But these facts or probabilities do not affect the credibility of the recorded course of the English Conquest, or of the tradition which fixes its real beginning in the middle of the fifth century. Teutonic settlements before the Roman invasion, or under the Roman domination, would be something quite different from the Teutonic invasions recorded from the fifth century onwards. Teutonic tribes subdued by the Roman arms, Teutonic soldiers planted as colonists by the Roman government, would sink into the general mass of Roman subjects; they would retain no strong national feeling; they would most likely not even retain their national language. The only way in which they could possibly influence the later history would be by making the establishment of the later Teutonic settlers a less difficult matter in those parts of the country which they occupied than in those where the population was purely Celtic or Roman.[6] We may admit the fact that the Teutonic, and even the distinctively Saxon, invasions began, not in the fifth century, but in |Light thrown on these events by the analogy of the Danish invasions.| the fourth. But the true bearing of this fact will be best understood by comparing the successive Saxon invasions with the later and better known invasions of the Danes both in England and in Gaul. In the Danish invasions I shall presently endeavour to establish three periods, one of mere plunder, one of settlement, one of political conquest. For the last of these three there was no opportunity under the circumstances of the earlier Teutonic invaders, but for the first two stages we may fairly look in the history of the English, as well as in that of the Danish, Conquest. The Saxon pirates against whom the Roman government found it needful to establish so elaborate a system of defence, find their parallels in those Danish plundering expeditions which ravaged various parts of England in the latter half of the eighth century and the former half of the ninth, and in the ravages inflicted on Gaul by chieftains earlier than Hasting. The Anglian, Saxon, and Jutish settlements of the fifth and sixth centuries answer to the |878.| settlements of Guthrum in East-Anglia in the ninth |912.| century and of Rolf in Neustria in the tenth. Even if it be held that the Saxons who were driven back by Theodosius and Stilicho designed settlement and not merely plunder, still, as they did not actually settle, the case remains much the same. The Teutons were baffled in their attempts at settlement in the fourth century; they succeeded in their attempts at settlement in the fifth. The general history of the Conquest, as handed down to us in the Chronicles, is therefore in no way affected by the certain fact of earlier incursions, by the possible fact of much earlier settlements. The really lasting effect of the Saxon invasions of the fourth century seems to have been this; the Saxon name became familiar to the Celtic inhabitants of Britain earlier than the Anglian name; consequently Saxon, and not Angle or English, has been the name by which the Teutonic immigrants in Britain have been known to their Celtic neighbours from that day to this.[7]

Course of the English Conquest.

What then the English Chronicles profess to record is, not these early and transient incursions which led to no permanent result, but that series of constant, systematic, successful attempts at settlement on the part of various Teutonic tribes which constituted the English Conquest of |418.| Britain. Early in the fifth century the Roman legions were withdrawn from the island, and the former provincials were left to defend their new and precarious independence |No improbability in the story of Vortigern’s invitation, but the tale not essential.| how they might. The Southern Britons were now exposed to the attacks of the Picts and Scots who had never submitted to the Roman yoke, and there is no absurdity in the familiar story that a British prince took Teutonic mercenaries into his pay, and that these dangerous allies took advantage of the weakness of their hosts to establish themselves as permanent possessors of part of the island. But if this account be rejected, the general narrative of the Conquest is in no way affected; and, if it be accepted, we may be sure that Vortigern’s imitation of many Roman precedents did but hasten the progress of events. The attempts which had been checked while the Roman power was flourishing were sure to be renewed when the check was withdrawn, and if a Welsh King did invite a Jutish chieftain to defend him, that invitation was only the occasion, and not the cause, of the Conquest which now |449–597.| began. We cannot seriously doubt that, in the course of the fifth and sixth centuries, a succession of tribes of kindred origin, all of them of the same Low-Dutch[8] stock, and speaking essentially the same Low-Dutch language, landed at various points of the British coast, that they gradually forced their way inland, and founded permanent |Extent of the English dominion and of the independent British states at the end of the sixth century.| Teutonic kingdoms. Before the end of the sixth century the Teutonic dominion stretched from the German Ocean to the Severn, and from the English Channel to the Firth of Forth. The northern part of the island was still held by Picts and Scots, Celtic tribes whose exact ethnical relation to each other hardly concerns us.[9] And the whole west side of the island, including not only modern Wales, but the great kingdom of Strathclyde, stretching from Dumbarton to Chester, and the great peninsula containing Cornwall, Devon, and part of Somerset, was still in the hands of independent Britons. The struggle had been long and hard, and the natives often kept their hold of a defensible district long after the surrounding country had been occupied by the invaders. It is therefore probable that, at the end of the sixth century and even later, there may have been within the English frontier inaccessible points where detached bodies of Welshmen still retained a precarious independence. It is probable also that, within the same frontier, there still were Roman towns, tributary to the conquerors rather than occupied by them.[10] But by the end of the sixth century even these exceptions must |The English Conquest, as a whole, accomplished by 597.| have been few. The work of the Conquest, as a whole, was accomplished. The Teutonic settlers had occupied by far the greater part of the territory which they ever were, in the strictest sense, to occupy. The complete supremacy of the island was yet to be won; but that was to be won, when it was won, by quite another process.

Points of difference between the English Conquest and other Teutonic conquests.

The English Conquest of Britain differed in several important respects from every other settlement of a Teutonic people within the limits of the Roman Empire. Everywhere else the invaders gradually adopted the language and the religion of the conquered. If the conquerors were heathens at the time of their settlement, they gradually adopted Christianity. If they had already adopted Christianity in its Arian form, they gradually exchanged their heretical creed for that of the Catholic |Gradual Romanization of the conquerors elsewhere in religion, language, &c.| Church. Everywhere but in Britain the invaders gradually learned to speak some form, however corrupt, of the language of Rome. The Teutonic conquerors of Italy, Spain, and Gaul have indeed infused into the Romance languages of these countries a large proportion of words of Teutonic origin. Still the language of all those countries remains essentially Latin; the Teutonic element in them is a mere infusion. Everywhere but in Britain the invaders respected the laws and the arts of Rome. The Roman Law was preserved, side by side with the Barbarian codes, as the rightful heritage of the conquered people; and, in the process of ages, the Roman Law gradually recovered its position as the dominant code of a large portion of continental Europe. Everywhere but in Britain the local divisions and local nomenclature survived the Conquest. Nearly every Gaulish tribe recorded by Cæsar has left its name still to be traced on the modern map.[11] In Britain everything is different. |Retention by the English of their Teutonic language and heathen worship.| The conquering English entered Britain as heathens, and, after their settlement in Britain, they still retained the heathen worship of their fathers. They were after a while converted to Christianity, but they were not converted by the Christians whom they found in the island, but by a special mission from the common ecclesiastical centre. Our bishoprics and ecclesiastical divisions are not, as they are in Gaul, an heritage of Roman times, representing Roman political divisions. Our oldest episcopal sees are foundations of later date than the English Conquest, and the limits of their dioceses answer, not to anything Welsh or Roman, but to the boundaries of ancient English |History of the English language—| principalities. And, as the English in Britain retained their religion, so they also retained their language, and they retained it far more permanently. A few Celtic, and a still fewer Latin,[12] words found their way into English from the first days of the Conquest, and a somewhat larger stock of Latin ecclesiastical terms[13] was |a Low-Dutch tongue with a Romance infusion.| naturally brought in by the Christian missionaries. But, with these two very small classes of exceptions, the English language retained its purely Low-Dutch character down to that great infusion of Romance words into our vocabulary which was a result, though not an immediate result, of the Norman Conquest. And to this day, though the Romance infusion divides the vocabulary of our dictionaries with our natural Teutonic speech, it still remains only an infusion, an infusion greater in degree, but essentially the same in kind, as the Teutonic infusion into the Romance languages.[14] As we cannot put together the shortest French sentence without the use of Romance words, so we cannot put together the shortest English sentence without the use of Teutonic words. But we can put together sentence after sentence of French without a single Teutonic word, and we can equally put together sentence after sentence of English without a single Romance word. In Britain too the arts of Rome perished as utterly as the language and the religion of Rome; arts, language, and religion were all brought back again at a later time and in a corrupted form. |Slight and late influence of the Roman Law in England.| The laws of Rome perished utterly; they exercised no influence upon our insular jurisprudence, until, in times after the Norman Conquest, the Civil Law was introduced as something utterly exotic. And even then our insular jurisprudence proved too strong for it; the Imperial legislation never gained in England the same supremacy which it gained in most parts of the Continent, and even in the Scottish portion of our island. The municipal institutions of the Roman towns in Britain utterly perished; no dream of ingenious men is more groundless than that which seeks to trace the franchises of English |Local nomenclature of England essentially Teutonic.| cities to a Roman source. In England again the local nomenclature is everywhere essentially Teutonic. A few great cities and a few great natural objects, London on the Thames and Gloucester on the Severn, still retain names older than the English Conquest; but the great mass of the towns and villages of England bear names which were given them either by the Angles and Saxons of the fifth and sixth centuries or by the Danes of the |Probable extirpation of the Celtic inhabitants.| ninth and tenth. In short, though the literal extirpation of a nation is an impossibility,[15] there is every reason to believe that the Celtic inhabitants of those parts of Britain which had become English at the end of the sixth century had been as nearly extirpated as a nation can be. The women would doubtless be often spared;[16] but as far as the male sex is concerned, we may feel sure that death, emigration, or personal slavery were the only alternatives which the vanquished found at the hands of our fathers. The nature of the small Celtic element |Nature of the Celtic element in English confirms this view.| in our language would of itself prove the fact. Nearly every Welsh word which has found its way into English expresses some small household matter, such as women and slaves would be concerned with; nearly all the words belonging to the nobler callings, all the terms of government and war, and nearly all the terms of agriculture, are thoroughly Teutonic. In short, everywhere but in Britain an intruding nation sat down by the side of an elder nation, and gradually lost itself in its mass. In Britain, so far as such a process is possible, the intruding nation altogether supplanted the elder |Difference in the actual process of the Conquest in Britain and elsewhere.| nation. The process of the Conquest again, its gradual character, the way in which the land was won, bit by bit, by hard fighting, was of itself widely different from the Gothic settlements in Italy or Spain. This peculiar character of the English Conquest would of itself favour the complete displacement of the former inhabitants, by giving the remnant of the vanquished in any district the means of escape to those districts which were yet unconquered.

Causes of the difference.

This remarkable contrast between the English Conquest of Britain and the other Teutonic settlements within the Empire seems to be due to two main causes. The position of Britain differed from that of Italy or Gaul or Spain, and the position of the Angles and Saxons differed from that of Goths, Burgundians, or even Franks. |Britain less thoroughly Romanized than Gaul and Spain.| The event alone might seem to show that the Roman occupation of Britain had not brought about so complete a Romanization of the country as had taken place in Gaul and Spain. The evidence of language looks the same way. In Spain and in Gaul the ante-Roman languages survive only in a few out of the way corners; the speech of the land is Roman. But in no part of Britain has any Roman language been spoken for ages; the speech of the land, wherever it is not English, is not Roman but Celtic. The surviving Britons kept, and still keep, their own native language and not the language of their Roman conquerors. It would therefore seem that the Roman occupation of Britain was, after all, very superficial, and that, when the legions were withdrawn, the natives largely fell back into their ancient barbarism. The English therefore found in Britain a more stubborn, because a more truly national, resistance than any that their Teutonic kinsmen found elsewhere. But on the other hand, they did not find that perfect and striking fabric of Roman laws, manners, and arts which elsewhere impressed the minds of the conquerors, |Familiarity of the other Teutons with Roman civilization.| and changed them from destroyers into disciples. Again, the Goths above all, and the Franks in some degree, had long been familiar with Rome in peace and in war. They had resisted Roman attempts at conquest and they had repaid them in kind. They had served in the Roman armies, and had received lands and honours and offices as the reward of their services. They were, in short, neither wholly ignorant of Roman civilization nor |The English utterly ignorant of it.| utterly hostile to it. But our forefathers came from lands where the Roman eagle had never been seen, or had been seen only during the momentary incursions of Drusus and Germanicus. They had never felt the charm which led Gothic kings to glory in the title of Roman generals, and which led them to respect and preserve the forms of Roman civilization and the monuments of Roman art. Our forefathers appeared in the Isle of Britain purely as destroyers; nowhere else in Western Europe were the existing men and the existing institutions so utterly swept away. The English wiped out everything Celtic and everything Roman as thoroughly as everything Roman was wiped out of Africa by the Saracen conquerors of Carthage. A more fearful blow never fell on any nation than the landing of the Angles |Results of the peculiar character of the English Conquest.| and Saxons was to the Celt of Britain. But we may now be thankful for the barbarism and ferocity of our forefathers. Had we stayed in our earlier land, we should have remained undistinguished from the mass of our Low-Dutch kinsfolk. Had we conquered and settled only as Goths and Burgundians conquered and settled, we should be simply one more member of the great family of the Romance nations. Had we been a colony sent forth after the mother country had attained to any degree of civilization, we might have been lost like the Normans in Sicily or the Franks in Palestine. As it was, we were a colony sent forth while our race was still in a state of healthy barbarism. We won a country for ourselves, and we grew up, a new people in a new land, bringing with us ideas and principles common to us with the rest of our race, but not bringing with us any of the theories and prejudices which have been the bane of later colonization. Severed from the old stock, and kept aloof from intermixture with any other, we ceased to be Germans and we did not become Britons or Romans. In our new country we developed a new system for ourselves, partly by purely native growth, partly by independent intercourse with the common centre of civilization. The Goth is merged in the Romance population of Italy, Spain, and Aquitaine; the Old-Saxon has lost his national being through the subtler proselytism of the High-German; but the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes, transplanted to the shores of Britain, have won for themselves a new name and a new national being, and have handed on to us the distinct and glorious inheritance of Englishmen.

Condition of Britain at the end of the sixth century.

Thus, before the end of the sixth century, by far the greater and more fertile portion of Britain had become heathen and Teutonic. The land had been occupied by various tribes; and most probably, as always happens in such migrations, few bodies of settlers had been perfectly homogeneous. A certain following of allies or subjects of other races is almost sure to come in under the shadow of the main body. But it is clear that that main body was everywhere so distinctly and predominantly of Low-Dutch blood and speech as to swallow up any foreign elements which may have accompanied it during its migration, as well as any that it may have incorporated during the |The country occupied by various kindred tribes, Angles, Saxons, Jutes, and Frisians.| process of the Conquest or after its completion. Three kindred tribes, Angles, Saxons, and Jutes, are, in the common national tradition, said to have divided the land among them in very unequal proportions. For Saxons a contemporary foreign notice substitutes Frisians.[17] But Angles, Saxons, Frisians, were all tribes of one common stock; all spoke mere dialectic varieties of one common tongue. From the very beginning of the Conquest, all the Teutonic settlers, without distinction, are spoken of as belonging to “the English kin.”[18] To trace out, by the evidence of local nomenclature or otherwise, the exact extent of the settlements of these various kindred tribes is highly interesting and important as a matter of antiquarian and philological research. But the results of such inquiries are of little moment for the purpose of such a sketch as the present. |The various Teutonic tribes in Britain fused into one nation before the Norman Conquest.| Long before the Norman Conquest the various Low-Dutch tribes in Britain had been fused into one English nation. The distinction between Angle and Saxon had become a merely provincial distinction, and the jealousies which undoubtedly survived between them had become merely provincial jealousies. To the united nation the Angle had given his name, the Saxon had given his royal dynasty; the Jute, the least considerable in the extent of his territorial possessions, had been, according to all tradition, the first to lead the way to a permanent settlement, and he had undoubtedly been honoured by supplying the ecclesiastical centre from which Christianity was spread over the land. If Wessex boasted of the royal capital of Winchester, Kent boasted no less proudly of the spiritual metropolis of Canterbury.

The old notion of a regular Heptarchy inaccurate,

The old notion of an Heptarchy, of a regular system of seven kingdoms, united under the regular supremacy of a single over-lord, is a dream which has passed away before the light of historic criticism. The English kingdoms in Britain were ever fluctuating, alike in their number and in their relations to one another. The number of perfectly independent states was sometimes greater and sometimes less than the mystical seven; and, till the beginning of the ninth century, the whole nation did not admit the regular |yet seven kingdoms more conspicuous than others.| supremacy of any fixed and permanent over-lord. Yet it is no less certain that, among the mass of smaller and more obscure principalities, seven kingdoms do stand out in a marked way, seven kingdoms of which it is possible to put together something like a continuous history, seven kingdoms which alone supplied candidates for the dominion of the whole island. First comes the earliest permanent |Kent. 449–825.| Teutonic settlement in Britain, the Jutish kingdom of Kent. The direct descendants of Hengest reigned over a land, which, as the corner of Britain nearest to the continent, has ever been the first to receive every foreign immigration, but which, notwithstanding, prides itself to this day on its specially Teutonic character and on the retention of various old Teutonic usages which have vanished elsewhere. Besides Kent, the Jutes formed no other strictly independent state. Their only other settlement |[The Jutes of Wight. 530–686.]| was a small principality, including the Isle of Wight and part of Hampshire, whose history is closely connected with that of the great Saxon kingdom in its immediate |The three Saxon kingdoms.| neighbourhood, in which it was at last merged. The remainder of the English territory south of the Thames, together with some districts to the north of that river, formed the three kingdoms of the Saxons, the East, the South, and the West, whose names speak for themselves. Among these Sussex and Essex fill only a secondary part in |Sussex. 477–825.| our history. The greatness of Sussex did not last beyond the days of its founder Ælle, the first Bretwalda. Whatever |Essex. 526–825.| importance Essex, or its offshoot Middlesex, could claim as containing the great city of London was of no long duration. We soon find London fluctuating between the condition of an independent commonwealth and that of a dependency of the Mercian Kings. Very different was |Wessex. 519–869.| the destiny of the third Saxon kingdom. Wessex has grown into England, England into Great Britain, Great Britain into the United Kingdom, the United Kingdom into the British Empire. Every prince who has ruled England before and since the eleventh century[19] has had the blood of Cerdic the West-Saxon in his veins. At the |577–584.| close of the sixth century Wessex had risen to high importance among the English kingdoms, though the days of its permanent supremacy were still far distant. Step by step, from a small settlement on the Hampshire coast, the West-Saxons had won their way, fighting battle after battle against the Welsh, and, after nearly every battle, extending their borders by a new acquisition of territory. At the time of which I speak they held the modern shires of Hampshire, Berks, Wilts, Dorset, part of Somerset, with a considerable dominion north of the Thames and Avon, including the shires of Buckingham, Oxford, Gloucester, and Worcester, and an undefined territory stretching northwards along the valley of the Severn.[20] But this northern dominion was not lasting; the Thames and the Avon became the permanent boundaries of Wessex to the north, and the later extension of the West-Saxon dominion was wholly westward. At this time the Somerset Axe, and the forests on the borders of Somerset and Wiltshire, separated the kingdom from the independent |The three Anglian kingdoms.| Britons to the West. North of the Thames lay the three great kingdoms of the Angles. One of these, probably the most purely Teutonic realm in Britain,[21] occupied the great peninsula, or rather island,[22] between the fens and |East-Anglia. 571–870.| the German Ocean, which received from them the name of East-Anglia. Far to the north, from the Humber to the |Northumberland. 547–876.| Forth, lay the great realm of the Northumbrians, sometimes united under a single prince, sometimes divided by the Tyne or the Tees into the two kingdoms of Bernicia and Deira. Both these kingdoms have a large sea-board, but they are not, like Wessex, distinctly attributed to a personal founder from beyond sea. The first recorded King of the Northumbrians is Ida, who began to reign in 547;[23] the first recorded King of the East-Angles is Offa, who began to reign in 571.[24] These dates give the beginnings of the kingdoms, but they do not give the beginnings of the English settlements in those countries. What Ida and Offa did was apparently to unite districts ruled by several independent, or at most confederated, Ealdormen into a |Mercia. 584?–877.| single kingdom. Meanwhile, in the middle of Britain, a power equal to any of the others was growing up, in which the same process is still more plainly to be discerned. The kingdom of the Mercians, the march or border land against the Welsh, appears at the end of the sixth century as a powerful state, but it has no distinctly recorded |Peculiar character of Mercia, as an union of small states of different origins.| founder, no distinctly recorded date of origin.[25] It seems to have grown up through the joining together of a great number of small principalities, probably of much more varied origin than the different portions of the other kingdoms. The prevailing blood was Anglian; but it is certain that the Mercian kingdom was considerably enlarged by conquest at the expense of the Saxon race. The West-Saxon conquests north of the Thames and Avon were gradually cut off from the West-Saxon body, and were constrained, along with all the other states of Mid-England, to admit the Mercian supremacy. Mercia, throughout its history, appears far more divided than any other part of England, the result, no doubt, of its peculiar |Minor principalities in the other kingdoms.| origin. But it must not be supposed that the other kingdoms formed compact or centralized monarchies. Wessex was an union of several kindred principalities, each having its own Ealdorman or Under-king, though all were united under one supreme chief. At one time five West-Saxon Kings appear in a single battle.[26] So in Kent there were Kings of East and West Kent, a fact which has left its memory in our ecclesiastical arrangements to the present day. No other English shire contains two bishoprics; the two sees of Canterbury and Rochester still bear witness to the former existence of two distinct kingdoms within the present shire. So, in East-Anglia, the two divisions of the race, the North and the South Folk, have left their almost unaltered names to two modern counties. But in these cases the principalities seem to have been formed by separate, though kindred, detachments of colonists, each of them ruled by a prince of the one royal house. In Wessex each successive conquest from the Welsh seems to have formed a new principality; but the national unity of the West-Saxon people was never lost, and it does not appear that any but princes of the line of Cerdic ever ruled within their borders. But in Mercia a crowd of wholly independent principalities seem to have been gradually united under one common rule—a type of the fate which the whole island was destined to undergo, though not at the hands of Mercia.

Such were the territorial divisions of Teutonic Britain at the end of the sixth century. Among a crowd of lesser states seven principal Kingdoms stand out conspicuously. And I do not hesitate to add that it was by no means unusual for the sovereign of one or other of these states |The supremacy of the Bretwaldas.| to win, whether by arms or by persuasion, a certain dominion over the rest, a dominion which presented the aspect of an acknowledged, though probably not a very well defined, supremacy. The famous title of Bretwalda[27] appears to have been borne by the princes in whom such a supremacy was successively vested. Eight kings, of five different kingdoms, including all the seven except Essex and Mercia, are said to have possessed this supremacy over the rest of their fellows. The list, it should be remarked, does not form a continuous series, and it ends, after a considerable gap, with the prince who established in one kingdom a lasting supremacy over all the rest. The earlier names probably represent earlier attempts at establishing a supremacy of the same kind, a supremacy which was more or less fully acknowledged at the time, but which the princes who held it failed to hand on to their successors. The early Bretwaldas and their dominion present us with the first foreshadowings of that union of the whole English race which was at last carried out by the West-Saxon Kings of the ninth and tenth centuries.

§ 2. Conversion of the English to Christianity. 597–681.

The last years of the sixth century were marked by a change hardly less important than the first settlement of the Teutonic tribes in Britain. The Christian faith, which the English had hitherto despised or passed by unheeded as the creed of the conquered Welsh, was now set before them by a special mission from the city which still commanded the reverence of all Western Europe. Kent, under its King Æthelberht, who then held the rank of Bretwalda, became the first Christian |597.| kingdom, and Canterbury became the first Christian city, the spiritual metropolis of the English nation. To the vanquished Welsh the conquering Saxons and Angles |Controversies between the Roman and Scottish parties.| had never listened; but no sooner had the Roman missionaries begun their work than another Christian element was brought in from the North, at the hands of the already converted Picts and Scots. Sectarian differences divided the two parties, and led to controversies which threatened to tear the infant Church in pieces. Christian Kings and kingdoms apostatized; heathen Kings overthrew the champions of the new faith |Christianity makes its way in England without violence.| in battle; but, amidst all these fluctuations, Christianity gradually but steadily made its way. And in no part of the world did Christianity make its way in a more honourable manner. We nowhere read of any of those persecutions, those conversions at the point of the sword, which disgraced the proselytizing zeal of the Frankish and Scandinavian apostles of the faith. Of the first Christian prince in England, it is distinctly told us that, while still a heathen, he hindered none of his subjects from embracing Christianity, and that, after he was himself converted, he constrained none to forsake their ancient faith.[28] In less than a century all the English kingdoms had fully accepted Christianity, and they had distinctly preferred its Roman to its Scottish form. |Conversion of Sussex, the last heathen part of Britain. 681| Before the end of the seventh century, the spiritual conquest of Britain was completed by the entrance of the South-Saxons into the fold of Christ; and, in the course of the eighth century, the insular Teutons showed themselves the most zealous of missionaries for the |English missionaries on the Continent.| conversion of those of their continental brethren who still remained in heathen darkness. Bishoprics were gradually founded, the limits of each diocese commonly answering to those of a kingdom or principality. The |597.| supremacy of Kent at the beginning of the conversion, |627.| the supremacy of Northumberland at the stage when Christianity was first preached to the northern English, is still shown to this day in the metropolitan position of Canterbury, the city of the Bretwalda Æthelberht, and of York, the city of the Bretwalda Eadwine. The land was speedily covered with churches and monasteries, the distinction between regulars and seculars being, during the missionary period, not very accurately drawn. Our forefathers soon acquired a fair share of the learning of the age, and the first two centuries after the conversion form a brilliant period in our ecclesiastical history, one which seems the more brilliant from the contrast with the time of renewed heathenism and darkness, which, in a large portion of Britain, was to follow it.

Effects of the conversion of the English. Their former isolated position.

The conversion of the English to Christianity at once altered their whole position in the world. Hitherto our history had been almost wholly insular; our heathen forefathers had had but little to do, either in war or in peace, with any nations beyond their own four seas. We hear little of any connexion being kept up between the Angles and Saxons who were settled in Britain, and their kinsfolk |Instances of connexion with the Franks in Gaul.| who abode in their older land.[29] The little intercourse that we read of with the mainland seems to be wholly with the Franks who now bore rule on the opposite coast of Gaul. Englishmen seem once, in the sixth century, to have found their way to the Imperial court, but it was in company with the ambassadors of a Frankish prince, who at least tried to represent himself as the over-lord of Britain.[30] One instance of connexion between Britain and Gaul may have had some indirect effect in promoting the work of conversion. English Kings then, and long after, commonly intermarried with English women, the daughters either of other English princes or of their own nobles. But the Bretwalda Æthelberht, before the landing of Augustine, was already married to a Frankish princess, who retained her Christian religion in his heathen court. Such a fact is chiefly remarkable for its strangeness; yet it points to a considerable amount of intercourse between Kent and the Franks of Paris at this particular moment. Still, up to the end of the sixth century, Britain, as a whole, was cut off from the rest of the world. It was a heathen and barbarous island, where the Christian faith was professed only by an obscure remnant, which, in some remote corners beyond the reach of the invaders, still retained a form of Christianity which, after all, was not the orthodoxy of the Old or of the New Rome. It was the conversion of our forefathers which brought England for the first time, not only within the pale of the Christian Church, but within the pale of the general political society of Europe. But our insular position, combined with the events of our earlier history, was not without its effect on the peculiar character of |England the first strictly national Church in the West.| Christianity as established in England. England was the first great territorial[31] conquest of the spiritual power, beyond the limits of the Roman Empire, beyond the influence of Greek and Roman civilization. Italy, Spain, Gaul, Africa, the Greek East and the remoter Churches of doubtful loyalty and orthodoxy, were all either actually under the sway of Cæsar, or retained distinct traces of the recent times when they had been so. When Æthelberht received baptism, the political sway of Rome still reached from the Ocean to the Euphrates, and the language of Rome was the one civilized speech from the Ocean to the Hadriatic. Strictly national Churches existed only in those lands of the further East, where the religious and the political loyalty of Syrians and Egyptians was already equally doubtful, and which were destined to fall away at the first touch of the victorious Saracen. In England, |Error of not employing the English language in public worship.| alone in the West, a purely national Church arose. One great error indeed was committed; the vernacular tongue did not become the language of public worship. The mistake was natural. It had occurred to no man to translate the Latin services, drawn up at a time when Latin was the universal language of the West, into those provincial dialects, the parents of the future Romance tongues, which were already growing up in Gaul and Spain. We should as soon think now of translating the Prayer-Book into the dialects of Somerset or Yorkshire. Led thus to look on Latin as the one tongue of worship, as well as of literature and government, Augustine and his successors failed to see that Teutonic England stood in a wholly different position from Romanized Gaul and Spain. They failed to see that the same reasons which required that men should pray in Latin at Rome required that they should pray in English at Canterbury. The error was pardonable, but in its effects it was great. Still, though England had not vernacular services, she soon began to form a vernacular literature, sacred and profane, poetical and historical, to which no other nation of the West can supply a parallel. The English Church, reverencing Rome, but not slavishly bowing down to her, grew up with a distinctly national character, and gradually infused its influence into all the feelings and habits of the English people. By the end of the seventh century, the independent, insular, Teutonic Church had become one of the brightest lights of the Christian firmament.

In short, the introduction of Christianity completely changed the position of the English nation both within its own island and towards the rest of the world. From this time the amount of intercourse with other nations steadily increased, and the change of religion had also a most |Practical effect of Christianity.| important effect within the island itself. The morality of the Gospel had a direct influence upon the politics of the age. The evangelical precepts of peace and love did not put an end to war, they did not put an end to aggressive conquest, but they distinctly humanized the way in which |The wars with the Welsh no longer wars of extermination.| war was carried on. From this time forth the never-ending wars with the Welsh cease to be wars of extermination. The heathen English had been satisfied with nothing short of the destruction or expulsion of their enemies; the Christian English thought it enough to |Advance of Wessex.| reduce them to political subjection. This is clearly marked in the advance of Wessex towards the West. Twenty |Conquests of Ceawlin. 577–584.| years before the coming of Augustine, Ceawlin, the West-Saxon Bretwalda, had won the great battle of Deorham; he had taken the cities of Bath, Gloucester, and Cirencester; he had then carried his arms northward, and in his northern march he had destroyed the Roman city of Uriconium. These northern conquests, as we have seen,[32] were in a certain sense temporary; the districts overrun by Ceawlin beyond the Avon, like the other West-Saxon possessions north of the Thames, ceased for ever to be Welsh, but they did not become for ever West-Saxon. But the land between the Avon and the Axe, the northern part of modern Somerset, became an abiding part of the West-Saxon realm. This was the last heathen conquest, the last exterminating conquest, waged by the West-Saxons against the Britons. During a space of three hundred years, the process of West-Saxon conquest |Further advances of the West-Saxons. 652–926.| still went on; step by step the English frontier advanced from the Axe to the Parret, from the Parret to the Tamar; Taunton at one stage, Exeter at another, were border fortresses against the Welsh enemy; step by step the old Cornish kingdom shrank up before the conquerors; till at last no portion of land south of the Bristol Channel was subject to a British sovereign. This was conquest; it was, no doubt, fearful and desolating conquest; but it was no longer conquest which offered only the dreadful alternatives of death, banishment, or personal slavery. The Christian Welsh could now sit down as subjects of the |In these later wars the Welsh are allowed to become West-Saxon subjects.| Christian Saxon. The Welshman was acknowledged as a man and a citizen; he was put under the protection of the law; he could hold landed property; his blood had its price, and his oath had its ascertained value.[33] The value set on his life and on his oath shows that he was not yet looked on as the equal of the conquering race; but the Welshman within the West-Saxon border was no longer a wild beast, an enemy, or a slave, but a fellow-Christian living under the King’s peace. There can be no doubt that the great peninsula stretching from the Axe to the Land’s End was, and still is, largely inhabited by men who are only naturalized Englishmen, descendants of the old Welsh inhabitants, who gradually lost their distinctive language and were merged in the general mass of their |Celtic element still remaining in the western shires of Wessex.| conquerors. In fact, the extinction of the Cornish language in modern Cornwall within comparatively recent times was only the last stage of a process which began with the conquests of Cenwealh in the seventh century. The Celtic element can be traced from the Axe, the last heathen frontier, to the extremity of Cornwall, of course increasing in amount as we reach the lands which were more recently conquered and therefore less perfectly Teutonized. Devonshire is less Celtic than Cornwall, and Somerset is less Celtic than Devonshire, but not one of those three shires can be called a pure Teutonic land like Kent or Norfolk. The same rule would doubtless apply to those less accurately recorded conquests by which the Mercian Kings extended their dominion from the Severn to the modern boundaries of Wales. We have now everywhere passed the age of extermination, and have entered on the age marked by the comparatively harmless process of political conquest.

BRITAIN IN 597.

FOR THE DELEGATES OF THE CLARENDON PRESS.

§ 3. Fluctuations of dominion between Northumberland, Mercia, and Wessex. 577–823.

History of the seventh and eighth centuries; position of the smaller kingdoms; of Wessex.

During the seventh and eighth centuries there were many fluctuations in the relative position of the English kingdoms. Not only Essex, but Sussex and East-Anglia, each of which had given the nation a single Bretwalda, sink into insignificance, and even Kent falls into quite a secondary position. Wessex stood higher; but its Kings, occupied with extending their western frontier, made as yet no attempt to win the supremacy of the whole island, and they often had no small difficulty in maintaining their own independence against Northumbrians |Rivalry of Mercia and Northumberland.| and Mercians. The rivalries of these last two powers fill for a long while the most important place in our history. |Greatness of Northumberland at the| At the end of the sixth century and the beginning of the seventh, Northumberland was at the height of its power. Its King Æthelfrith stands forth in the pages of Bæda[34] as |beginning of the period.| the mightiest of conquerors against the Welsh, and as checking an invasion of Picts and Scots at the great battle |603.| of Dægsanstan. It must always be borne in mind that, at this time and long after, Lothian was politically as well as ethnologically English, and that Picts and Scots—whatever was the amount of distinction between them—are to |Dominion of Eadwine. 617–633.| be looked for only north of the Forth. Eadwine, the first Christian King of Northumberland, and who ranks as the fifth Bretwalda, has left his name to the frontier fortress of Eadwinesburh or Edinburgh. Eadwine was a true Bretwalda in every sense of the word, holding a supremacy alike over Teutons and Britons.[35] Five Kings of the |626.| West-Saxons fell in battle against him;[36] but at last |633.| he died at Heathfield in battle against Penda, the |Reign of Penda of Mercia. 627–655.| heathen King of the Mercians. Along with Penda appeared a strange ally, Cadwalla, the Christian King of the Strathclyde Welsh, the last of his race who could boast of having carried on aggressive war, as distinguished from mere plundering inroads, within the territory of any, |641.| English people. Not long afterwards, Oswald, the restorer of the Northumbrian kingdom and the sixth Bretwalda, fell in another battle against the heathen Mercian. The arms of Penda were no less successful against the West-Saxons. |628.| Even before the overthrow of Eadwine, he had most likely annexed to Mercia part of the West-Saxon |644.| lands north of the Thames and Avon;[37] and sixteen years later, Cenwealh, who afterwards appears as an extender of the West-Saxon frontier at the expense of the Welsh, was for a while driven from his kingdom by the same terrible enemy. Penda, in short, came nearer to achieving the |Extent of his dominion.| union of the whole English nation under one sceptre than any prince before the West-Saxon Ecgberht. Everything looked as if the lasting dominion of Britain were destined for Mercia, and even as if the faith of Christ were about to be plucked up out of the land before it had well taken root. But it was impossible that England should now fall back under the rule of a mere heathen conqueror. The dominion of Penda appears in our history as a mere passing tyranny, and, though he must have possessed more real power than any English prince had ever done before him, his name finds no place on the list of Bretwaldas. |Death of Penda. 655.| At last the seventh prince who bore that title, Oswiu of Northumberland, checked him in his last invasion, and slew him in the battle of Wingfield, a name which, obscure as it now sounds, marks an important turning-point in the history of our island. The strife between the creeds of Christ and of Woden was there finally decided; the Mercians embraced the religion of their neighbours, and Northumberland again became the leading power of |Greatness of Northumberland under Oswald, Oswiu, and Ecgfrith. 635–685.| Britain. Under her two Bretwaldas, Oswald and Oswiu, the English dominion was, seemingly for the first time, extended beyond the Forth, and Picts and Scots, as well as English and Britons, admitted the supremacy of the Northumbrian King.[38] But the greatness of Northumberland lasted no longer than the reigns of Oswiu and his son |685.| Ecgfrith. Ecgfrith was slain in battle against the Picts; the northern dominion of Northumberland died with him, and the kingdom itself, which had been for a while the most flourishing and advancing state in Britain, was gradually weakened by internal divisions. It sank into utter insignificance, and stood ready, as we shall soon see, |Greatness of Mercia. 716–819.| for the irruption of a new race of conquerors. After the decline of Northumberland, the Christian Mercians are again seen on the road to that supremacy which had once been so nearly grasped by their heathen forefathers. The |655–656.| fall of Penda carried with it a momentary subjugation of Mercia to Northumberland, but the land almost immediately recovered its independence, and in the next century Mercia again advanced from independence to dominion. |Æthelbald, 716–757. Offa, 757–795. Cenwulf, 796–819.| Under three bold and enterprising Kings, Æthelbald, Offa, and Cenwulf, the armies of Mercia went forth conquering and to conquer, and the periods of momentary confusion which divided these three vigorous reigns seem to have been no serious hindrance to the general advance of the kingdom. Wessex was still engaged in its long struggle with the Welsh, and was in no position to aspire to the dominion of Britain. It was quite as much as the West-Saxon Kings could do to push their conquests against the Welsh on the one hand and to maintain their independence against Mercia on the other. Wessex was more than once invaded by the Mercians; at one time it became actually |752.| tributary; till Cuthred, in the middle of the eighth century, finally secured its independence in the fight of Burford. In the latter half of that century, Offa raised the Mercian kingdom to a greater degree of real power than it had ever held, even during the momentary dominion of Penda. He conquered from the Welsh the lands between the Severn and the Wye, a lasting and useful acquisition for the English nation, which he is said to have secured by the great dyke which still bears his name. On the other side of Britain, all the smaller states, East-Anglia, Essex, Kent, and Sussex, were brought more or less completely under his power. Victorious over all enemies within his own island, Offa, as the mightiest potentate of the West, corresponded on equal terms with the Great Charles, the mightiest potentate of the East.[39] |Influence of Charles the Great| Occasional misunderstandings between the two princes seem not to have seriously interrupted their friendship. It |in English affairs. 808.| is possible that the Kentish Kings applied for help against Offa to the mighty Frank; it is more certain that, after Offa’s death, Charles, now Emperor, procured the restoration of the banished Northumbrian King Eardwulf, and there seems reason to believe that both the Northumbrian and his Scottish neighbours acknowledged themselves the vassals of the new Augustus.[40]

After the death of Offa the greatness of Mercia continued for a while undiminished under the reign of his son Cenwulf. But meanwhile the seeds of a mighty revolution |Accession of Ecgberht of Wessex. 802.| were sowing. A prince, taught in the school of adversity, who had learned the arts of war and statecraft at the feet of the hero of the age, was, in the eighth year after Offa’s death, raised to the throne of the West-Saxons.[41] He was destined to win a dominion for which that narrow and local description seemed all too mean. Once, but seemingly once only, in the hour of victory, did the eighth Bretwalda, the founder of the abiding supremacy of Wessex, venture to exchange his ancestral title of King of the West-Saxons for the prouder style of King of the English.[42]

§ 4. Permanent Supremacy of Wessex. 823–924.

Analogy between Charles and Ecgberht.

Ecgberht was chosen King of the West-Saxons two years after Charles the Great was chosen Emperor. And we can hardly doubt that the example of his illustrious friend and host was ever present before his eyes. He could not indeed aspire, like Charles, to the diadem of the Cæsars, but he could aspire to an analogous rank in an island which men sometimes counted for another world. He could win for his own kingdom a lasting superiority over all its neighbours, and so pave the way for the day when all England and all Britain |Permanent supremacy of Wessex now established.| should acknowledge only a single King. The eighth Bretwalda not only established a power over the whole land such as had been held by no other prince before him, but he did what no other Bretwalda had ever done, he handed on his external dominion as a lasting possession to his successors in his own kingdom. From this time forward, Wessex remained the undisputed head of the English nation. The power of the West-Saxon Kings might be assaulted, and at last overthrown, by foreign invaders, but it was never again disputed by rival |Ecgberht the founder of the kingdom of England.| potentates of English blood. In short, as Charles founded the Kingdom of Germany, Ecgberht at least laid the foundations of the Kingdom of England. In his reign |Gradual submission of the other states. 802–837.| of thirty-six years he reduced all the English kingdoms to a greater or less degree of subjection. The smaller states seem to have willingly submitted to him as a deliverer from the power of Mercia. East-Anglia became |Kent, &c. 823. [See Chron. in anno.]| a dependent ally; Kent and the smaller Saxon kingdoms were more closely incorporated with the ruling state. While in East-Anglia Kings of the old line continued to reign as vassals of the West-Saxon over-lord, Kent, Essex, and Sussex were united into a still more dependent realm, which was usually granted out as an apanage to some prince of the West-Saxon royal house.[43] Northumberland, torn by civil dissensions, was in no position to withstand the power which was growing up in the |Submission of Northumberland. 829.| south of Britain. At the approach of a West-Saxon army the Northumbrians seem to have submitted without resistance; keeping, like East-Anglia, their own line of |Final struggle with Mercia. 802–829.| vassal Kings. But Mercia was won only after a long struggle. Ecgberht had inherited war with Mercia as an inheritance from his predecessors. The first year of his reign, before he had himself come back to assume the crown to which he had been chosen, was marked by a successful resistance to a Mercian inroad.[44] And even |825.| many years after, one of the greatest victories of his reign, the fight of Ellandun, was a victory over Mercian invaders within the West-Saxon realm. That victory deprived Mercia of all her external dominion; it was immediately after it that Ecgberht annexed the smaller |Submission of Mercia. 829.| kingdoms which had become Mercian dependencies. Four years later, Mercia herself had to submit to the conqueror; |830–874.| she kept her Kings for nearly another half century, but they now received their crown at the hands of the West-Saxon over-lord. It is immediately after recording this greatest of Ecgberht’s triumphs that the Chronicles give him in a marked way the title of Bretwalda.

It was immediately after the submission of Mercia that Ecgberht received the far more easily won submission of Northumberland, which completed his work of welding all the Teutonic kingdoms of Britain into one whole. |Successes of Ecgberht over the Welsh. 815–837.| But, while thus occupied, he had also to carry on the usual warfare with his Celtic neighbours. The power of the Cornish Britons was now utterly broken. The long struggle which had gone on ever since the days of Cerdic was now over; the English frontier seems to have been extended to the Tamar,[45] and the English |825.| supremacy was certainly extended to the Land’s End. The Welsh however within the conquered territory still |835.| kept their distinct being, and they sometimes, with the aid of foreign invaders, strove to cast off the yoke. Against the North-Welsh,[46] that is the inhabitants of Wales proper, Ecgberht was equally successful. As Lord of Mercia he inherited from the Mercian Kings a warfare against them as constant as that which he had inherited from his own ancestors against the Welsh of Cornwall. As soon therefore as he had established his supremacy |828.| over Mercia, he went on to require and to receive the submission of the Celtic neighbours of his new dominion. |North and West Welsh vassals of Wessex.| From this time forth all the Celtic inhabitants of Britain south of the Dee were vassals of the West-Saxon King. But his power never reached to the Picts, the Scots, or |Independence of Picts, Scots, and Strathclyde Welsh.| the Strathclyde Welsh. In fact, the northern Celts, except so far as they came in for their share of the Danish invasions, enjoyed about this time a century of unusual independence. The power of Northumberland had long been unequal to maintaining its old supremacy over its Celtic neighbours, and the new over-lord of Northumberland seems not to have attempted to enforce it. Ecgberht therefore, even at the height of his power, was not Lord of the whole isle of Britain. To win that title was the work of the West-Saxon conquerors of the next century.

But just as the West-Saxon monarchy was reaching this pitch of greatness, it was threatened by an enemy |Invasions of the Danes. 789–1070.| far more formidable than any that could be found within the four seas of Britain. We have now reached the time of the Danish invasions. The Northern part of Europe, peopled by a race closely akin to the Low-Dutch and speaking another dialect of the common Teutonic speech, now began to send forth swarms of pirates over all the seas of Europe, who from pirates often grew into conquerors. They were still heathens, and their incursions, both in Britain and on the Continent, must have been |787. [Chron. in anno.]| a scourge almost as frightful as the settlement of the English had been to the original Britons. The Scandinavian incursions began before the accession of Ecgberht, and even his power did not keep them wholly in check. It must however have had some considerable effect, as it is only quite towards the end of his reign that we hear of them again. In his last years their incursions |833.| became frequent and formidable, and in one battle the Bretwalda himself was defeated by them. But he afterwards gained, over the united forces of the Danes and |836.| the revolted Welsh, the battle of Hengestesdun in Cornwall, which may rank with Ellandun as the second great victory of his reign. Soon after this success, which barely checked the Danish invasions, but which completed |837.| the submission of the West Welsh, King Ecgberht died, like his model Charles, with, his own power undiminished, but perhaps foreseeing what was to come when his sceptre should pass into weaker hands.

Three Periods of the Danish invasions.

The Danish invasions of England, as I have already said,[47] fall naturally into three periods, each of which finds its parallel in the course of the English Conquest of Britain. As the Saxons and Angles plundered and desolated long before they actually settled, so now their |First Period, of simple plunder. 789–855.| Northern kinsmen followed the same course. We first find a period in which the object of the invaders seems to be simple plunder. They land, they harry the country, they fight, if need be, to secure their booty, but whether defeated or victorious, they equally return to their ships, and sail away with what they have gathered. This period includes the time from the first recorded invasion |Second Period, of settlement. 855–897.| till the latter half of the ninth century. Next comes a time in which the object of the Danes is clearly no longer mere plunder, but settlement. They now, just as the English had done before them, come in much stronger bodies, and instead of sailing away every winter with their plunder, they make lasting settlements in a large part of the country. This took place in the second half of the ninth century. During the greater part of the tenth century we read of few or no fresh invasions from Scandinavia; the energies of the Northern tribes were just now mainly devoted to those successive settlements in Gaul which formed the Duchy of Normandy. |Struggle of the West-Saxon Kings with the Danes settled in Britain. 902–954.| But the West-Saxon Lords of Britain were engaged for more than fifty years in a constant struggle to subdue and keep in obedience the Danes who had already settled in the island. And the Danes in Britain were often helped by the Scandinavian settlers who had occupied the eastern coast of Ireland and the islands to the west and north of Scotland. A short interval of peace, the glorious reign of Eadgar, now follows; |Third Period of Danish invasion. Period of political conquest. 980–1016.| towards the end of the tenth century the plundering invasions of the Danes begin again; but they soon assume altogether a new character. The North of Europe, hitherto divided among a crowd of petty princes, had now, like England, like the Empire, settled down into a more regular order of things. Three great kingdoms, Sweden, Norway, and Denmark, had arisen. With Sweden we had nothing directly to do; the conquests of that power were made to the East. With Norway also England proper had comparatively little to do, though the Northmen who ravaged and settled in Scotland and Ireland seem to have come mainly from that part of Scandinavia. But the history of England for a long term of years is one record of constant struggles with the power of Denmark. This forms the third period. We have passed the time of mere plunder; we have passed the time of mere local settlement. We have now reached the time of political conquest, the |994–1013.| time analogous to the conquests of the West-Saxon Kings from Cenwealh to Eadred. We now see a King of all Denmark bent on achieving the conquest of all England. We at last see the foreign invader succeeding |1013–1016.| in his attempt, and reigning as King of the English, with the formal, though no doubt the constrained, assent of the English nation. Of these three periods, the third, as furnishing some of the immediate causes of the Norman Conquest, I must deal with in greater detail at a later stage of this history. The two earlier periods, those of mere plunder and of mere settlement, come within the bounds of the present preliminary sketch.

The reigns of the son and the grandsons of Ecgberht were almost wholly taken up by the struggle with the |Reign of Æthelwulf and his sons. 837–901.| Northmen. In the reign of Æthelwulf the son of Ecgberht it is recorded that the heathen men wintered for the first time in the Isle of Sheppey. This marks |855.| the transition from the first to the second period of their invasions. Hitherto they had plundered and had gone away with their plunder; to spend the winter on English soil was the first step towards a lasting |866.| settlement. It was not however till about eleven years from this time that the settlement actually began. Meanwhile the sceptre of the West-Saxons passed from one hand to another. It is remarkable that no English king of this or of the following century seems to have reached old age. After Æthelwulf, whose age is uncertain, only one or two of his descendants for several generations reached the age of fifty, and the greater part of them were cut off while they were quite young. Four sons of Æthelwulf reigned in succession, and the |858–871.| reigns of the first three among them make up together |Reign of Æthelred. 866–871.| only thirteen years. In the reign of the third of these princes, Æthelred the First, the second period of the invasions fairly begins. Five years were spent by the Northmen in ravaging and conquering the tributary |Conquest of Northumberland. 867–869.| kingdoms. Northumberland, still disputed between rival kings, fell an easy prey; one or two puppet princes did not scruple to receive a tributary crown at the hands |Invasion of Mercia. 868.| of the heathen invaders.[48] They next entered Mercia, they seized Nottingham, and the West-Saxon King, hastening to the relief of his vassals, was unable to |Conquest of East-Anglia. 866–870.| dislodge them from that stronghold. East-Anglia was completely conquered, and its King Eadmund died a |First invasion of Wessex. 871.| martyr. At last the full storm of invasion burst upon Wessex itself. King Æthelred, the first of a long line of West-Saxon hero kings, supported by his greater brother Ælfred, met the invaders in battle after battle |Reign of Ælfred. 871–901.| with varied success. He died, and Ælfred succeeded, in the thick of the struggle. In this year, the last of Æthelred and the first of Ælfred, nine pitched battles, besides smaller engagements, were fought with the heathens on West-Saxon ground. At last peace was |872.| made; the Danes withdrew to London, within the Mercian frontier; Wessex was for a moment delivered, but the supremacy won by Ecgberht was lost. For a few years Wessex was subjected to nothing more than temporary incursions, but Deira or Southern Northumberland, and north-eastern Mercia were systematically |876–877.| occupied by the Danes, and the land was divided among them. In Bernicia or Northern Northumberland English princes still reigned under Danish supremacy. The last native King of the Mercians,[49] Burhred, the brother-in-law |874.| of Ælfred, had already been deposed by the Danes, |Second invasion of Wessex. 878.| and had gone to Rome, where he ended his days. At last the Danes, now settled in a large part of the island, made a second attempt to add Wessex itself to their possessions. For a moment the land seemed conquered; Ælfred himself lay hid in the marshes of Somerset; men might well deem that the Empire of Ecgberht, and the kingdom of Cerdic itself, had vanished for ever. But the strong heart of the most renowned of Englishmen, the saint, the scholar, the hero, and the lawgiver, carried his people safely through this most |Peace of Wedmore and evacuation of Wessex. 878–880.| terrible of dangers. Within a few months the Dragon of Wessex was again victorious; the Northmen were driven to conclude a peace which Englishmen, fifty years sooner, would have deemed the lowest depth of degradation, but which now might fairly be looked upon as honourable and even as triumphant. By the terms of the Peace of Wedmore the Northmen were to leave Wessex and the part of Mercia south-west of Watling-Street;[50] they, or at least their chiefs, were to submit to baptism, and they were to receive the whole land beyond Watling-Street as vassals of the West-Saxon |Reign of Guthrum-Æthelstan in East-Anglia. 880–890.| King. Guthrum, the Danish King, was accordingly baptized by the name of Æthelstan; he took possession of his new dominions, and observed the peace with decent fidelity down to his death.

Character and extent of the Danish occupation.

A large part of England thus received a colony of Danish inhabitants. They gave their name to their conquest, and England is now divided into Wessex, Mercia, and Denalagu, the region where the Danish law was in force. This Danish occupation was a real settlement of a new people in the land. There is no reason to think that any extirpation or expulsion of the native inhabitants took place, such as that which accompanied the English Conquest. But the displacement of landowners and the general break-up of society must have been far greater than anything that was afterwards |Evidence of local nomenclature.| brought about by the Normans. How extensive the Danish occupation was is best seen in the local nomenclature and local divisions.[51] The West-Saxon shires keep to this day the names and the boundaries of the principalities founded by the first successors of Cerdic. |Contrast between the West-Saxon and Mercian shires.| In some of them there is no one dominant town in a shire; several shires contain a town bearing a cognate name, but the shire is seldom called directly and solely after a town. In short, the local divisions of Wessex were not made but grew. Mercia, on the other hand, has every appearance of having been artificially mapped out. The shires, with at most two exceptions, are called after towns, and in most cases the shire groups itself round its capital, as round an acknowledged and convenient centre. The names of the old principalities vanish, and their boundaries are often disregarded. One principality is divided among several shires, and another shire is made up of several ancient principalities. We can hardly doubt that the old divisions were wiped out in the Danish invasions, and that the country was divided again by the English Kings after the reconquest.

Names of places in Northumberland and Mercia retaining the names of Danish lords.

Again, the names of the towns and villages throughout a large part of the ceded territory show the systematic way in which the land was divided among the Danish leaders. Through a large region, stretching from Warwickshire to Cumberland, but most conspicuously in Yorkshire, Lincolnshire, and Leicestershire, the Danish termination by marks the settlements of the invaders, and, in a vast number of cases, the name of the manor still retains the name of the Danish lord to whom it was assigned in the occupation of the ninth century. In two cases at least the Danes gave new names to considerable towns. Streoneshalh and Northweorthig received the |Whitby and Derby.| new names of Whitby and Derby (Deoraby). This last town is one of considerable importance in the history of the Danish settlement. It was, together with Lincoln, |The Five Boroughs.| Leicester, Nottingham, and Stamford, a member of a confederation of Danish towns, which, under the name of the Five Boroughs, often plays a part in the events of the tenth and eleventh centuries.

Character of Ælfred.

Ælfred, the unwilling author of these great changes, is the most perfect character in history. He is a singular instance of a prince who has become a hero of romance, who, as a hero of romance, has had countless imaginary exploits and imaginary institutions attributed to him, but to whose character romance has done no more than justice, and who appears in exactly the same light in history and |Singular union of virtues in him.| in fable. No other man on record has ever so thoroughly united all the virtues both of the ruler and of the private man. In no other man on record were so many virtues disfigured by so little alloy.[52] A saint without superstition, a scholar without ostentation, a warrior all whose wars were fought in the defence of his country, a conqueror whose laurels were never stained by cruelty,[53] a prince never cast down by adversity, never lifted up to insolence in the hour of triumph—there is no other name in history |Comparison with Saint Lewis;| to compare with his. Saint Lewis comes nearest to him in the union of a more than monastic piety with the highest civil, military, and domestic virtues. Ælfred and Lewis alike stand forth in honourable contrast to the abject superstition of some other royal saints, who were so selfishly engaged in the care of their own souls that they refused either to raise up heirs to their throne or to strike a blow on behalf of their people. But even in Saint Lewis we see a disposition to forsake an immediate sphere of duty for the sake of distant and unprofitable, however pious and glorious, undertakings. The true duties of a King of the French clearly lay in France and not in Egypt or at Tunis. No such charge lies at the door of the great King of the West-Saxons. With an inquiring spirit which took in the whole world, for purposes alike of scientific inquiry and of Christian benevolence, Ælfred never forgot that his first duty was to his own people. He forestalled our own age in exploring the Northern Ocean, and in sending alms to the distant Churches of India; but he neither forsook his crown, like some of his predecessors, nor neglected its |with Washington;| duties, like some of his successors. The virtue of Ælfred, like the virtue of Washington, consisted in no marvellous displays of superhuman genius, but in the simple, straightforward, discharge of the duty of the moment. But Washington, soldier, statesman, and patriot like Ælfred, has no claim to Ælfred’s character of scholar and master |with William the Silent;| of scholars. William the Silent, like Ælfred the deliverer of his people, had no call to be also their literary teacher; and in his career, glorious as it is, there is an element of intrigue which is quite unlike the noble simplicity of both Ælfred and Washington. The same union of zeal for religion and learning with the highest gifts of the warrior and the statesman is found on a wider field of |with Charles the Great;| action, in Charles the Great. But even Charles cannot aspire to the pure glory of Ælfred. Amidst all the splendours of conquest and legislation, we cannot be blind to an alloy of personal ambition and personal vice, to occasional unjust aggressions and occasional acts of cruelty. |with Edward the First.| Among our own later princes, the great Edward alone can bear for a moment the comparison with his glorious ancestor. And, when tried by such a standard, even the great Edward fails. Even in him we do not see the same wonderful union of gifts and virtues which so seldom meet together; we cannot acquit Edward of occasional acts of violence, of occasional recklessness as to means; we cannot attribute to him the pure, simple, almost childlike disinterestedness which marks the character of Ælfred. The times indeed were different; Edward had to tread the path of righteousness and honour in a time of far more tangled policy, and amidst temptations, not harder indeed, but far |Ælfred’s position as a legislator;| more subtle. The legislative merits of Edward are greater than those of Ælfred; but this is a difference in the times rather than in the men. The popular error which makes Ælfred the personal author of all our institutions hardly needs a fresh confutation. Popular legends attribute to him the invention of Trial by Jury and of countless other portions of our law, the germs of which may be discerned ages before the time of Ælfred, while their existing shapes cannot be discerned till ages after him. Ælfred, like so many of our early kings, collected and codified the laws of his predecessors; but we have his own personal witness[54] that he purposely abstained from any large amount of strictly new legislation. The legislation of Edward, on the other hand, in its boldness and originality, forms the most |as scholar.| marked of all epochs in the history of our law. It is perhaps, after all, in his literary aspect that the distinctive beauty of Ælfred’s character shines forth most clearly. The mere patronage of learning was common to him with many princes of his age. Both Charles the Great and several of his successors had set brilliant examples in this way. What distinguished Ælfred was his own personal appearance as an author. Now, as a rule, literary kings have not been a class deserving of much honour. They have commonly stepped out of their natural sphere only to display the least honourable characteristics of another calling. But it was not so with the Emperor Marcus; it was not so with our Ælfred. In Ælfred there is no sign of literary pedantry, ostentation, or jealousy; nothing is done for his own glory; he writes, just as he fights and legislates, with a single eye to the good of his people. He shows no signs of original genius; he is simply an editor and translator, working honestly for the improvement of the subjects whom he loved. This is really a purer fame, and one more in harmony with the other features of Ælfred’s character, than the highest achievements of the poet, the historian, or the philosopher. I repeat then that Ælfred |Happiness of Ælfred in his successors.| is the most perfect character in history. And he was specially happy in handing on a large share of his genius and his virtue to those who came after him. The West-Saxon kings, for nearly a century, form one of the most brilliant royal lines on record. From Æthelred the Saint to Eadgar the Peaceful, the short and wretched reign of Eadwig is the only interruption to one continued display of valour under the guidance of wisdom. The greatness of the dynasty, obscured under the second Æthelred, flashes forth for a moment in the short and glorious career of the second Eadmund. It then becomes more permanently eclipsed under the rule of Dane, Norman, and Angevin, till it shines forth once more in the first of the new race whom we can claim as English at heart, till, if not Ælfred himself, at least his unconquered son, seems to rise again to life in one who at once bore his name and followed in his steps.

The Danish settlement tends to the consolidation of England under the West-Saxon Kings.

There can be little doubt that the Danish settlement in England, which seemed at first to be the utter destruction of the West-Saxon monarchy, tended in the end to the consolidation of England and of all Britain under the West-Saxon kings. Looking at Ælfred as Bretwalda, a title which had passed away, or as King of the English, a title which he hardly ventured to assume, his loss was beyond expression. But, as local King of the West-Saxons, he undoubtedly gained. The Danes were nominally his vassals;[55] but their vassalage was so purely nominal that we may look on Ælfred as having lost all authority over East-Anglia, Northumberland, and the larger half of |Closer union between Mercia and Wessex.| Mercia. But the remainder of Mercia was more closely united to Wessex than it had been since the seventh century. The new frontier gave to Ælfred nearly the whole of the old extent of Wessex beyond the Thames and Avon, while it added a large region in the centre of England which had never been West-Saxon before.[56] Still this great acquisition was not absolutely incorporated with the West-Saxon kingdom. The over-lord no longer entrusted the dependency to a vassal King, but English |Before 886.| Mercia still had an Ealdorman of her own, a man of princely descent within the land over which he ruled. But Æthelred, the new ruler of south-western Mercia, was the son-in-law of the West-Saxon King and ruled by his |Recovery of London. 886.| father-in-law’s appointment.[57] And along with the recovered portion of Mercia, Ælfred also regained London, a city which we shall henceforth ever find to be one of the firmest strongholds of English freedom and one of the truest bulwarks of the realm.

Consolidation of Wessex.

We may therefore look on the immediate West-Saxon territory as actually increased by the Danish invasion. The recovered part of Mercia was reduced to the form of a province; we hear no more of even dependent Kings in Kent and Sussex, but at most of Ealdormen of the King’s appointment. All England south-west of Watling-Street was fast growing into a compact and homogeneous kingdom. |Progress of the West-Saxon power aided by the Danish| And the very fact of the foreign occupation of the rest of England paved the way for its easier incorporation with the one kingdom which remained independent. The wars of Wessex with the Danes of Mercia and Northumberland were wars of quite another character from the |settlements.| old border strife between the English inhabitants of the several kingdoms. They were in the strictest sense national wars, wars of religion and patriotism. The West-Saxon Kings were, in the eyes of all Englishmen in whatever part of the island, the champions of the national independence and the national faith. Their conquests brought with them deliverance from the Danish yoke, and we therefore find them everywhere welcomed as deliverers by the subject English population. One or two attempts at a division of the kingdom[58] show that the old local feelings had not fully died out; but their ill success shows no less clearly that such divisions no longer rested on any strong national basis. The successors of Ælfred were gradually enabled to win back the supremacy established by Ecgberht, and to enlarge it into an actual sovereignty over all England and an acknowledged supremacy over all Britain. The kingdom so formed was at last overcome by a Danish conqueror; but it was overcome by a very different process from the settlement of this or that wandering pirate. It was the transfer of the crown of a consolidated English kingdom to the head of the King of a now no less consolidated kingdom of Denmark.

880–893.

The reign of Ælfred contains two intervals of nearly |897–901.| perfect peace. After the great deliverance of Wessex |Later Danish Wars of Ælfred. 893–897.| there was no very serious warfare with the Danes till quite towards the end of Ælfred’s life. Then came five years of a struggle almost as fearful as that of the early days of his reign. But in the end Ælfred and England were again victorious. During the years of peace Ælfred had seen the need of forming a naval force to meet the wikings on their own element. It is wonderful how wholly the old sea-faring spirit of the Angles and Saxons |Ælfred the founder of the English navy.| seems to have died out before his time. But both Ælfred and his successors diligently fostered the naval power of England, alike for war, for commerce, and for discovery. In short, Ælfred laid the foundations of that naval greatness which is the special pride of Englishmen. His fleet seems to have preserved Wessex itself from anything more than a few landings for plunder. But for three years, Danish invaders, helped by the Danes settled in the country, marched to and fro through all Britain |Death of Ælfred. 901.| north of the Thames. But at last Ælfred succeeded in reducing them at least within the terms of the Peace of Wedmore, and he again enjoyed a few years of quiet before his death.

Reign of Eadward the Elder 901–925.

Ælfred’s successor, Eadward the Elder, completed the work which Ecgberht had begun, by first extending the supremacy of Wessex over the whole island of Britain. |Reigns of his sons. 925–955.| Under his sons, Æthelstan, Eadmund, and Eadred, that supremacy was maintained and consolidated at the point |Reign of Eadgar. 958–975.| of the sword. His grandson, Eadgar the Peaceful, enjoyed the fruit of their labours, and further strengthened their work by a reign of strong and orderly government, by holding himself in constant readiness for war during a time, for those days, of most unusual peace. Thus, from |800–975.| Ecgberht to Eadgar, it took a hundred and seventy years to build up the Kingdom of England, a kingdom which, as coming events showed, could still be conquered, but which could no longer be permanently divided. The twenty-five years of Eadward are the turning-point; what he won his successors had only to keep. It is only |Importance of the reign of Eadward.| the unequalled glory of his father which has doomed this prince, one of the greatest rulers that England ever beheld, to a smaller degree of popular fame than he deserves. His whole reign bears out the panegyric passed on him by an ancient writer,[59] that he was fully his father’s equal as a warrior and ruler, and was inferior to him in nothing except those literary labours which were so peculiarly Ælfred’s own. The work of Eadward was twofold; he enlarged the borders of his immediate kingdom, and he brought the whole island under vassalage. His wars, and those of his three successors, were, it should be remembered, waged mainly against the Danes settled in Britain. These settlers were sometimes helped by their brethren from Denmark, and more commonly by the Danes and Northmen settled in Ireland; but, on the whole, foreign invasions do not form an important feature in the |Alliance of Æthelwald with the Danes. 901–905.| events of this half century. The war began when the Northumbrian Danes took the part of a defeated candidate for the West-Saxon crown,[60] who did not scruple to accept their alliance, and to lead them to plunder and attempted conquest against his own countrymen. But Eadward, when thus put on the defensive, did something more than merely defend the kingdom which he had received |Recovery of Mercia, &c. by Eadward and Æthelflæd. 905–922.| from his father. With the help of his sister Æthelflæd, the famous Lady of the Mercians, the widow of their Ealdorman Æthelred, he recovered from the Danish yoke the whole of Mercia, East-Anglia, and Essex, and the brother and sister secured their conquests by building |Annexation of Mercia. 922.| fortresses in all directions. By the English population of all these districts Eadward was welcomed as a deliverer, and he found no difficulty in annexing the liberated lands to his own kingdom. After the death of Æthelflæd, who was her brother’s close ally rather than his subject, the separate being of Mercia came to an end. The whole Mercian land on both sides of the Watling-Street was |Eadward’s kingdom extended to the Humber.| incorporated by Eadward with his own kingdom. He thus became, what no West-Saxon King had been before him, immediate sovereign of all England south of the Humber. Having thus extended his immediate dominion beyond all precedent, he was able to extend his more general supremacy equally beyond anything possessed by |All the Princes of Britain submit to him. 922–924.| his predecessors. The princes of Wales, Northumberland, Strathclyde, and Scotland, all submitted to him by a voluntary act; “they chose him to father and to lord.”[61] The Welsh and Northumbrian princes only renewed a homage which they had already paid both to Ecgberht and to Ælfred; but the relation with Strathclyde and Scotland was new. No warfare with either country is spoken of; the act of submission seems to have been made by the free consent of the rulers and people of the two |Probable causes of their voluntary submission.| Northern kingdoms. The motive to such an act is doubtless to be found in a dread of Eadward’s power, combined with a sense of the necessity of his position as the general champion of Britain against the Danes. Scotland and Strathclyde had suffered as much from Scandinavian invasions as England had. To choose the West-Saxon King as their over-lord might involve some national humiliation, but it was better to receive the champion of Christendom as an over-lord than to be exposed without defence to the |Novelty and greatness of his position.| incursions of the heathen. Eadward thus obtained a far greater extent of dominion than had been held by Ecgberht himself. Ecgberht’s immediate kingdom stopped at the Thames, and his over-lordship reached only to the Forth. Eadward’s immediate kingdom reached to the Humber, and his over-lordship extended over the whole island. The submission of Scotland and Strathclyde to Eadward is the most distinctive feature in Eadward’s reign. It was something which surpassed the greatest exploits of his predecessors. The Scots had recognized a precarious supremacy in the old Northumbrian Kings. They had recognized a supremacy yet more precarious still in the great Frankish Emperor. But their submission to Wessex was wholly new; the days had long passed when they had bowed to an over-lord at York, and they had never before bowed to an over-lord at |Vassalage of Scotland. 924–1328.| Winchester. This commendation of Scotland to the West-Saxon King is an event so important for the history of the next four hundred years, and it is an event which is often so completely misunderstood, that I must reserve some consideration of its exact bearing for my next Chapter. It is enough to say here that, from this time to the fourteenth century, the vassalage of Scotland was an essential part of the public law of the isle of Britain. No doubt many attempts were made to cast off the dependent relation which had been voluntarily incurred; but when a King of the English had once been chosen “to father and to lord,” his successors never willingly gave up the position which had thus been bestowed upon them. Whenever the King of the English is strong enough, he always appears as the acknowledged |973.| superior of the King of Scots. Kenneth acts the part of a faithful vassal to Eadgar. Eadward the Confessor, like his nobler namesakes before and after, acts as superior |1054.| lord and, as such, transfers the tributary crown from an |1072.| usurper to the lawful heir. When the Norman William had subdued England, he claimed and received the homage of Scotland as one of the undoubted rights of the crown |Homage paid for Scotland proper.| which he had won. And nothing is clearer than that this homage was paid, not only for Cumberland or Lothian, but for the true kingdom of the Celtic Picts and Scots. In the days of Eadward and Æthelstan, Lothian was still English or Danish, an integral part of the kingdom of Northumberland, and the submission of Strathclyde was the separate act of another independent prince. The facts are undoubted; they are plain matters of history, which ought never to be looked at through the medium of provincial prejudice. The vassalage of Scotland to England is as certain as the earlier vassalage of Mercia to Wessex; but, for the last hundred and sixty years, one fact has been of as little practical importance as the other.

§ 5. The Imperial Sovereignty of the West-Saxon Kings of the English. 924–975.

Eadward the Elder then was the first prince who could really claim to be King of the English and Lord of the |Reign of Æthelstan. 925–940.| Isle of Britain. His son Æthelstan added the finishing stroke to the work of his father, by first making Northumberland |926.| an integral portion of the realm. He thus became immediate King of all the Teutonic races in Britain, and superior Lord of all the Celtic principalities. |Renewal of homage by the vassal Kings. 926.| In his second year, all the vassal princes, Welsh and Scottish, and the English prince of Northumberland beyond the Tyne,[62] renewed their homage. It is expressly mentioned that they renounced all idolatry; many of the Danes no doubt still clave to their ancient worship. But Æthelstan had to fight to retain the empire which his father had won. Neither Danes, Welsh, nor Scots were very faithful vassals; but the power of the King of the |933.| English was too much for them all. Scotland was ravaged by land and sea; Wales was constrained not only to homage but to tribute. At last the rebellious Danes and their kinsmen from Ireland who came to their help, together with Constantine of Scotland and Owen of Strathclyde, who did not scruple to league themselves with the |Battle of Brunanburh. 937.| heathen barbarians, were all overthrown by Æthelstan and his brother Eadmund in the glorious fight of Brunanburh. That fight, looked on at the time as the hardest victory that Angles and Saxons had ever won, still lives in the earliest and noblest of those national lays with which the Chronicles, especially at this period,[63] relieve the direct |Foreign connexions of Æthelstan.| course of their prose narrative. The reign of this great prince is also remarkable for the brilliant position which England now held with regard to foreign countries. Contrary to the usual custom of English Kings, Æthelstan, himself childless, systematically formed family connexions with the chief powers of Europe. His numerous sisters |[Marriage 929. Otto King, 936. Emperor, 962.]| were married to a crowd of princes, ranging in dignity from Sihtric, the momentary King of the Northumbrians, to Otto, who placed his English wife on the throne of the East-Franks and who lived to be the restorer of the Roman Empire. With some degree of exaggeration of the real facts, the court of “glorious Æthelstan” is painted to us as the common refuge of oppressed princes and as the school where the scions of royalty learned the lessons which befitted kings and warriors. But putting aside glories which are at least partly fabulous, it is certain that the reign of Æthelstan was a time of vigorous government and successful warfare at home, and that in his days England had an unusual amount of connexion with foreign countries, and enjoyed an unusual amount of consideration among them.[64] The reigns of his two |Reigns of Eadmund and Eadred. 940–955.| younger brothers, Eadmund the Magnificent and Eadred the Excellent,[65] form a continuation of the same tale. The Northumbrian Danes were constantly revolting, constantly setting up kings of their own, and they were as constantly brought back to submission by the superior power of the |Final submission of Northumberland. 954.| Emperor[66] of Britain. At last, under Eadred, the rebellious land was finally subdued, the last phantom of Northumbrian royalty vanished, and the whole land beyond the Humber was for the future ruled by Earls of the King’s appointment. Another success, hardly less valuable, |Final recovery of the Five Boroughs. 941.| was the final recovery of the Five Boroughs by Eadmund; a poetical entry in the Chronicles vividly paints the delight of their English inhabitants at their |Period of friendly relations with Scotland. 937–1000.| deliverance from the yoke of their heathen masters.[67] The relations of Scotland to the Imperial power seem, after the great defeat of Brunanburh, to have remained friendly for many years. Several Scottish Kings in succession had the wisdom to avoid following the suicidal policy of Constantine. Indeed the Scottish King Malcolm received a considerable extension of territory at the hands of Eadmund. The Kingdom of Strathclyde was conquered and abolished, and part of it, under the name of Cumberland, |Grant of Cumberland to Malcolm. 945.| was granted by Eadmund to Malcolm, on the usual tenure of faithful service in war.[68] This principality remained for a long time the apanage of the heirs-apparent of the Scottish crown, much as Kent had been to Wessex in the |946.| days of Ecgberht and Æthelwulf. That the Scots renewed their oaths on the accession of Eadred is no proof of hostile feelings on either side; it was merely an usual and necessary precaution at the beginning of a new reign, doubly necessary when Northumberland was in rebellion. The work begun by Ecgberht was now finally accomplished. The King of the West-Saxons had grown step by step into the acknowledged King of the English and Emperor of the Isle of Albion. A time now came when it seemed for a moment that that work was about to be undone, and that the blow was struck in the very hearth and home of the English Empire. For a moment Wessex and Mercia were again divided. The events of the next reign are recorded with a singular amount of contradiction,[69] and the voice to which we should have listened with undoubting |Succession of Eadwig in Wessex and Eadgar in Mercia. 955.| confidence is all but silent.[70] But as far as can be made out, the two young sons of Eadmund succeeded their uncle Eadred, the elder, Eadwig, reigning in Wessex as superior lord, while the younger, Eadgar, reigned as Under-king north of the Thames. From the stirring tale of an Empire saved, consolidated, and defended by the unwearied efforts of six wise and valiant monarchs, we turn to find ourselves involved in the thick of an ecclesiastical controversy. |Dunstan. 925–988.| Dunstan, a name known to too many readers only as the subject of one of the silliest of monastic legends, stands forth as the leading man in Church and State. As the minister of Eadred and of Eadgar, as the Jehoiada or |Character of his policy.| Seneca who watched over the still harmless childhood of the second Æthelred, Dunstan is entitled to lasting and honourable renown. The ecclesiastical changes which are commonly connected with his name, but which perhaps rather belong to contemporary prelates like Oda of Canterbury and Æthelwald of Winchester, are of a more doubtful character. To bring back the monks to the observance of their rule, to raise the character of the secular clergy, often no doubt ignorant and worthless enough, were thoroughly praiseworthy undertakings. But the complete prohibition of clerical marriage, the substitution of regulars for seculars in many of the cathedral and other chief churches of England, were certainly the works of a zeal which had far outrun discretion. And these measures had also the effect of dividing the nation into two parties, and of producing an amount of mutual hostility which might well have led to even greater evils than it did lead to. The whole of the short reign of Eadwig is shrouded in mystery; but it is clear that he was the enemy of Dunstan, perhaps to some extent the enemy of the monks generally, and it is certain that he was the vigorous opponent of the policy which strove everywhere to substitute monks for secular |956.| canons. The banishment of Dunstan, combined with an uncanonical marriage, seems to have roused popular feeling against a prince on whose real merits we are hardly in a |Eadgar chosen King of the Mercians. 957.| position to pronounce a judgement. The Mercians chose their Under-king Eadgar King in his own right, and in his separate dominions Dunstan was recalled and his policy vigorously carried out. The death of Eadwig soon followed, |Eadgar succeeds to the whole kingdom. 958–975.| and the Kingdom of England and the Empire of all Britain were again united under the sceptre of Eadgar the Peaceful. His reign of seventeen years is a period of almost unbroken peace; we hear, almost unavoidably, of wars with the Welsh, of moment enough to be recorded by Welsh chroniclers, but which the English writers pass by.[71] Of Danish invasions we hear nothing for certain; but Westmoreland, a part of the Cumbrian fief of the Scottish |966.| King, was once ravaged, seemingly by Eadgar’s orders,[72] |958| and we hear also more distinctly of a portion of Eadgar’s own kingdom, the Isle of Thanet, being treated in the like way at his bidding. These last facts point to some local |His peaceful and vigorous government.| revolts or disturbances.[73] With these exceptions, weapons of war seem to have hung useless throughout the English dominions for a time which, short as it seems to us, was in those days a wonderfully long interval of repose. But if Eadgar’s sword hung useless, it at least did not rust. Eadgar, like Ælfred, knew how to guard his Empire, and a fleet which yearly sailed round the whole island, and which often carried the King in person, was a sufficient |His effective supremacy over all Britain.| safeguard of Britain against foreign foes. And no West-Saxon Basileus ever made his supremacy so fully felt by all the races of the island as the one West-Saxon Basileus who never drew his sword against a Scottish or Northumbrian enemy. After a single inroad early in his reign,[74] Kenneth of Scotland remained on good terms with his over-lord, and, according to some statements, Eadgar even increased his dominions by a most important grant of territory.[75] To the Danes of Northumberland he was anxious to show that he had no mind to deal with them as with a conquered people, and that he remembered their services in helping to raise him to the crown.[76] In his legislation he takes care to assert their perfect equality with the English and their right to be governed only by laws of their own choosing.[77] He delighted in pomp and splendour, and there seems no reason to doubt the historic truth of the tale of that famous pageant in which |973.| the Emperor of Britain was rowed on the Dee by eight vassal kings.[78] But if the tale were only a symbolical expression, it would still be a most true and speaking symbol of the days of the greatest glory and prosperity of |He encourages intercourse with foreign countries.| the West-Saxon Empire. Under Eadgar too England held a high place in the estimation of foreign lands, and intercourse with them, commercial and otherwise, was carefully promoted by his enlightened policy.[79] In ecclesiastical matters the party of the regulars was steadily favoured. This fact may perhaps have won for Eadgar more than his due share of praise at the hands of monastic writers. But exaggeration itself cannot obscure the real glory of such a reign as his.[80]

Reign of Eadward the Martyr. 975–979.

But with Eadgar the glory of England sank. The reign of his elder son Eadward was short and troubled, and the young prince himself died by violence, most probably through the intrigues of an ambitious step-mother. |Reign of Æthelred the Unready. 979–1016.| He was succeeded by his brother Æthelred, a child, and one who would have been happy if he had always remained a child. In his time the Danish invasions began again, in a new form and with a more terrible effect than ever. In his time too begins that direct and intimate connexion between English and Norman history which shows that we are now approaching the days of the Norman Conquest, and that we have reached the first links in the chain of its direct causes. The reign of Æthelred will therefore claim a somewhat fuller treatment than that of a preliminary sketch.

Recapitulation.

We have thus traced out the steps by which the West-Saxon Kings, from Ecgberht onwards, founded that Kingdom of England which one conquest was to hand over to the King of the Danes and another conquest to the Duke of the Normans, but which was never again to be permanently divided, and which each conquest only served to unite more firmly. We have seen also how, along with the consolidation of their Teutonic kingdom, the same West-Saxon princes obtained a more extended and more precarious Empire over their Celtic neighbours. The later fate of the various Celtic portions of Britain has been widely different. In Cumberland no sign is left, and in Cornwall not many, that the dominion of the English King was once that of an external over-lord and not that |Union of Wales; [1293. 1536. 1830.]| of an immediate sovereign. On Wales the English dominion was pressed closer and closer, till all political and civil distinctions between Wales and England were wiped out, though the ancient language, and with it a distinct |of Scotland; [1328. 1707.]| and strong provincial feeling, still remains. Scotland, after various fluctuations, at last won complete independence of the English over-lord, and was finally united with England on equal terms as an independent kingdom. |Man still distinct.| Strange to say, the little realm of Man is the only part of the Empire of Eadgar which is not now thoroughly fused into the general mass of the United Kingdom.[81] But different as has been the later fate of the various portions of the dominions of Eadgar, his Teutonic Kingdom and his Celtic Empire both passed nearly untouched into the hands of the Norman Conqueror. In another preliminary Chapter I shall attempt a general picture of the condition and constitution of the Kingdom and Empire which were thus transferred. I shall then give some account of the history of Normandy up to the point which I have now reached in the history of England. I shall then be ready to go on with the more detailed history of the Norman Conquest itself and of the causes which immediately led to it, beginning with the reign of Æthelred the Second.

CHAPTER III.
THE CONSTITUTION OF ENGLAND IN THE TENTH AND ELEVENTH CENTURIES.[82]

I have no intention whatever of entering, in the present Chapter, into any examination of the minute details of our early English legal antiquities, still less into the controversies to which many points relating to them have given rise. I wish merely to give such a sketch of the political condition of England, at the time when England and Normandy began to influence each other’s affairs, as may make the narrative of their mutual intercourse intelligible. |The Old-English constitution survived the Norman Conquest.| What the constitution was under Eadgar, that it remained under William. This assertion must be taken with all the practical drawbacks which are involved in the forcible transfer of the crown to a foreign dynasty, and in the division of the greater part of the lands of the kingdom among the followers of the foreign King. But the constitution remained the same; the laws, with a few changes in detail, remained the same; the language of public documents remained the same. The powers which were vested in King William and his Witan remained constitutionally the same as those which had been vested in King Eadgar and his Witan a hundred years before. |The changes immediately following on the Conquest practical, not formal.| The change in the social condition of the country, the change in the spirit of the national and local administration, the change in the relation of the kingdom to foreign lands, were changes as great as words can express. The practical effect of these changes was a vast increase of the royal power, and the introduction of wholly new relations between the King and every class of his subjects. But formal constitutional change there was none. I cannot too often repeat, for the saying is the very summing up of the whole history, that the Norman Conquest was not the wiping out of the constitution, the laws, the language, the national life of Englishmen. The changes which distinguish the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries from the |Various causes of the ultimate results of the Conquest.| tenth and eleventh are not owing to any one cause. Many of them are merely the natural results of altered circumstances. Many of them are the work of lawgivers legislating for a new state of things, and, in not a few cases, confirming or restoring ancient English institutions under foreign names. Many of them are due to the ingenuity of lawyers whose minds were full of theories of law wholly alien to the principles of ancient English jurisprudence. All these changes were in some sort the final results of the Conquest. Some of them were actually caused by the Conquest; others were hastened by it. But of very few |Change in the monarchy from the old Teutonic to the later mediæval type.| indeed was it the direct and immediate cause. The English kingship gradually changed from a kingship of the old Teutonic type into a kingship of the later mediæval type. The change began before the Norman Conquest; it was hastened by the Norman Conquest; but it was not completed till long after the Norman Conquest. Such a change was not, and could not be, the work of one man or of one generation. But English kingship, like the other main features of the English polity, may be said to have fully put on its later form when the absent Edward was proclaimed in the place of his father, when the King was for the first time held to reign before he had received the rite which clothed him with the kingly office.

§ 1. Origin of the Old-English Kingship.

Question proposed, Origin and nature of the ancient English Kingship.

What then was the nature, and what was the origin, of that kingship, which the election—the constrained and unwilling election, but still the election—of the Witan of all England did, on Midwinter-day, eight hundred years back,[83] entrust to William, Duke of the Normans—from that day forward William, King of the English? That election transferred to him the same internal power over his own kingdom, the same external power over the dependent kingdoms, which had been held by Eadgar and Æthelred, and which an earlier forced election of a foreign conqueror had transferred to the hands of Cnut the Dane. |Summary of the growth of Wessex.| We have already traced the course of the events by which those powers, internal and external, grew up. Two Saxon chiefs, Ealdormen or Heretogan, formed a settlement on the |495.| south coast of Britain. After some years of successful |519.| warfare, they assumed the kingly title over their own tribe.[84] One of their successors incorporated some of the |823–828.| other Teutonic kingdoms with his own realm, and obtained an external supremacy over all the other Teutons in the island and over a portion of the Celts. A series of his |878–954.| successors, after long struggles, incorporated all the Teutonic states into one kingdom, and obtained an external Empire over all the Celtic states. The Ealdorman of the Gewissas thus gradually grew into the King of the West-Saxons, the King of the Saxons,[85] the King of the English, the Emperor of all Britain. The external aspect of this process, the dates of its several stages, I have already marked. I must now dwell a little longer on the real origin and nature of the various powers implied in those different descriptions of the ruler. Each stage marks an advance in the extent of territorial dominion; each stage marks also an advance in the amount of political authority enjoyed by the sovereign.

Modern political controversies alien to the question.

In following up these researches into our earliest political antiquities it is absolutely necessary to cast away all thoughts of modern political controversies. Time was when the whole fabric of our liberties was held to depend on the exact nature of the entry made by William the Bastard. Time was when supporters and opponents of parliamentary reform thought to strengthen their several positions by opposite theories as to the constitution of the Witenagemót. To this day a popular orator will sometimes think that he adds point to a declamation by bringing in Saxon Ælfred as the author of Trial by Jury, perhaps of every other privilege which other lands are held either not to possess or to have borrowed from ourselves. Every notion of this kind must be wholly cast away, if we would fairly and impartially learn what the institutions of our Teutonic forefathers really were. The lover of freedom certainly need not shrink from the inquiry. |The present shape of our political institutions not to be looked for in early times,| He will not indeed find that the finished systems of the nineteenth or of the seventeenth century were brought over ready made in the keels of Hengest and Horsa. He will not even find that they appeared in their perfect form in the Imperial Witenagemót of Eadgar the Peaceful. He will not find the legislative authority vested in a representative assembly to which every shire and borough sends the men of its choice. He will not find a King the freedom of whose will is at once hampered and protected by the tutelage of ministers responsible to that representative assembly. He will not find tribunals in which issues of law are determined by Judges independent alike of King and people, while issues of fact are determined by the people themselves in the form of jurors taken at haphazard from among them. Not one of these things will he find in the finished shape in which he is familiar |but the germs of later institutions may be traced from the beginning.| with them. But he will find the first principles from which all of them were derived; he will find the germs out of which all of them were developed. He will not find the relations of King, Lords, and Commons accurately balanced in the first Teutonic settlement on the shores of Kent. But he will find the rudiments of all three in days which were ancient in the days of Hengest. Let him go as far back as history or tradition throws any light on the institutions of our race, and he will find the germs alike of the monarchic, the aristocratic, and the democratic |Necessity of comparison with other Teutonic nations.| branches of our constitution. When positive evidence within our own land fails us, we must go for illustration and explanation, not to the facts, the theories, the controversies, of modern politics, but to the kindred institutions of the kindred nations of the mainland. Our Parliament is the true and lawful representative, by true and lawful succession, of the ancient Meeting of the Wise; but, if we would search out the origin and constitution of that Meeting of the Wise, we must go, not to the parliamentary traditions of the last six hundred years, but to the Marzfeld of the Frankish Kings, to the Landesgemeinden of Schwyz and Uri, to those yet earlier assemblies which still rise before us in full life in the pages of the first inquirer into the habits and institutions of our |Records of Teutonic Law from Tacitus onwards.| race. From the Germania of Tacitus onwards, through the Barbaric Codes, through the Capitularies of the Frankish Kings and Emperors, through the records of our own insular legislation from the Dooms of Æthelberht to the so-called Laws of Henry the First, we have a series of witnesses, showing what were the general principles of Teutonic law, and what were the particular forms which it took in particular times and places. In truth we may go beyond the records of our own immediate race. The early history of the Teuton is constantly illustrated by |Analogies with the Homeric Achaians.| the early history of his Aryan kinsmen, and the living picture of the old Achaians of Homer brings vividly before us many an institution of our own forefathers and many an incident of their early history.

Origin of Teutonic kingship.

The sketch which has been given in the last Chapter has shown that the Imperial lordship of all Britain, as held by Æthelstan and his successors, and even the supremacy of Wessex over the other English kingdoms, as established by Ecgberht, were institutions of comparatively late growth. But it must not be thought that even the full-grown local kingship, such as we find it held by Æthelberht in Kent and by Eadwine in Northumberland, was a thing which had been from the beginning. In the days of Tacitus some of the Teutonic tribes had kings and |Kingship not universal; government by Ealdormen or Heretogan.| others had not; in the time of Cæsar it would seem that kingship was the exception and not the rule.[86] The chieftains of the first settlers in our own island bore no higher title than Ealdorman or Heretoga. These two names express two different sides of the same office. The same man is Ealdorman as a civil ruler and Heretoga as a military chieftain. The former name survives in our |Force and history of the names.| language, but with sadly diminished dignity; the title which once expressed a rank which, among worldly dignities, was inferior to kingship alone, has taken refuge with a class of municipal magistrates, reaching downwards to the pettiest boroughs. The other name, always much more rarely in use, has dropped altogether out of our tongue, while, among the continental Teutons, the cognate word Herzog expresses a dignity the distinction between which and modern kingship must be drawn by the courtier and not by the politician. The name of Ealdorman is one of a large class; among a primitive people age implies command and command implies age; hence, in a somewhat later stage of language, the elders are simply the rulers, and the eldest are the highest in rank, without any thought of the number of years which they may really have lived. |Import of the change from Ealdormen to Kings.| It is not perfectly clear in what the authority or dignity of the King exceeded that of the Ealdorman, but it is clear that the title of King did carry with it an advance in both respects. Even the smallest kingdom was probably formed by the union of the districts of several Ealdormen. It is probable too that the King was distinguished by some religious sanction of heathen times, analogous to the ecclesiastical consecration which in later times the Church bestowed on kings, but not on princes of lower rank. It is certain that kingship required descent from the Gods; it may be that no such divine origin was |Instances in Britain and elsewhere.| needed by the mere Ealdorman. At all events, we find the change from Ealdorman to Kings taking place in more than one kingdom of Teutonic Britain, as well as among many of the kindred tribes on the mainland. We have already seen that the kingdoms of Northumberland and East-Anglia were formed by the union of several smaller |The West-Saxon Ealdormen become Kings. 495–519.| states whose rulers did not assume the royal title.[87] In Wessex the account is still more remarkable. Cerdic and Cynric entered the land with the title of Ealdorman; they did not assume kingship till after the arrival of fresh reinforcements, and till a decisive victory over the Welsh had strengthened their position in the country. During the whole period commonly called that of the Heptarchy the whole land was full of petty princes, some of whom undoubtedly bore the title of King, though others may have |Alleged return of Wessex to ealdormanship. 673–685.| reigned simply as Ealdormen. According to one account, the West-Saxons, as late as the seventh century, were for ten years without any common sovereign, while the Ealdormen or Under-kings reigned independently. This falling back on an older system has its parallels; there is one noted case in Lombard history; but it would be specially remarkable in a kingdom which had, from the beginning, greater |Distinction between King and Ealdorman from Ecgberht onwards.| unity than most of its fellows. But at least from the time of Ecgberht onwards there is a marked distinction between the King and the Ealdorman. The King is a sovereign, the Ealdorman is only a magistrate. The King may be hampered in the exercise of his power by the rights of his people or by the joint action of the great men of his realm; he may be chosen by his Witan and he may be liable to be deposed by them; still he is a sovereign, inasmuch as he does not rule by delegation from any personal superior. |Distinction between the Ealdorman and the dependent King.| He may even be, by original grant or more probably by commendation, dependent on some more powerful King; but even such dependence does not degrade him from his sovereign rank. His relation to his over-lord binds him to certain external services, but in his internal government he remains perfectly independent, with his power limited only by the laws of his own realm. But the Ealdorman has become distinctly a subject. He may hold the fullest royal power within his own district; he may be the descendant of former Ealdormen and even of former Kings; he may have a reasonable hope that he may hand on his dignity to his own children; still he is not a sovereign, but a subject. The King is supreme; the Ealdorman is simply sent by him. He is a Viceroy appointed by the King and his Witan; he is liable to be removed by them, and he is responsible to them for the exercise of his |Position of Ealdorman Æthelred in Mercia. 880–912.| authority. When the kingdom of Mercia was broken up, Ælfred entrusted the government of the part which fell to his share to his son-in-law Æthelred as Ealdorman. Æthelred was a man of royal descent; he exercised full royal power in Mercia; but he exercised it simply as a Governor General or Lord Lieutenant, the representative of a sovereign whose higher authority he carefully acknowledges |Case of Northumberland. 954.| in his charters.[88] So, when Northumberland was finally incorporated with England under Eadred, kingship was abolished, and the government was entrusted to a magistrate with the title of Ealdorman or its Danish |Contrary process in the Empire.| equivalent Earl.[89] By the exactly contrary process, Princes of the Empire, Dukes—that is, Ealdormen or Heretogan—and not only Dukes, but Counts, Margraves, Landgraves, all of them originally mere magistrates under the Emperor-King, have gradually grown into sovereign princes, and have at last, in several cases, ventured to assume the kingly title.[90]

Title of King (Cyning); its origin.

The mere title of King seems to be comparatively recent among the Teutonic nations. It is not found in the earliest Teutonic prose writing, the Gothic Gospels; but in our own language it seems to be as old as the English settlements in Britain. Most of the questions which have arisen as to the etymology of the word only show how modern a thing scientific etymology is.[91] Cyning, by contraction King, comes from the same root as the word cyn or kin. And the connexion is not without an important meaning. The King is the representative of the race, |The Teutonic kingship national, not territorial.| the embodiment of its national being. A King, in the old Teutonic sense, is not the King of a country, but the King of a nation. Such titles as King of England or King of France are comparatively modern, and the idea which they express is equally so.[92] The Teutonic King is not the lord of the soil, but the leader of the people. The idea of the King of a country would have been hardly intelligible to our forefathers. Every King is King of a people. He is King of Goths, Franks, Saxons, wherever Goths, Franks, Saxons, may happen to settle. The Goths and their Kings moved from the Danube to the Tiber, and from the Tiber to the Tagus; but Alaric and Athaulf were equally Kings of the Goths, in whatever quarter of the world the Goths might be. So in our own island, the King is King of the West-Saxons, Mercians, or Northumbrians. |No names for the English kingdoms as distinguished from the people.| In truth the countries themselves, as distinguished from their inhabitants, can hardly be said to have any names. We talk for convenience’ sake of Wessex, Mercia, and so forth; but the correct description is the Kingdom of the West-Saxons, the Kingdom of the Mercians. |The King is King of the English (not of England), but Emperor of Britain.| So, when the West-Saxon King had swallowed up all his brethren, he became, not King of England, but King of the English. It is only in their Imperial character, in their character, not as chiefs of a nation, but as lords over all the dwellers within the isle of Britain, that our Kings ever assume the territorial description. Indeed |Name of England hardly known.| England itself has hardly yet found a geographical name. Englaland is a late form, scarcely found before the Danish Conquest. The common name for the land is the name of the people, Angel-cyn.[93]

Growth of the kingly power by mere extension of territory.

The King’s power and dignity gradually grew. They grew by the mere extension of his dominions. The larger a prince’s territory becomes, the greater is the distance at which he finds himself from the mass of his subjects. He becomes more and more clothed with a sort of mysterious dignity; he comes to be more and more looked upon as something different from ordinary men, even from ordinary civil magistrates and military leaders. The prince of a small territory is known to all his people; he is, according to the character of his government, their personal friend or their personal enemy; if worthy himself and the descendant of worthy ancestors, he may command a strong feeling of clannish loyalty, but he cannot hedge himself in with the fence of any special divinity. A King who reigns over all Wessex is, in the nature of things, more of a King[94] than one who reigns only over Wight, and a King who reigns over all England is more of a King than one who reigns only over Wessex. Through this cause only, every fresh addition of territory added fresh power and dignity to the Kings of the House of Cerdic in their progress from the ealdormanship of a corner of Hampshire to the Imperial crown of the Isle of Britain. But this cause was by no means the only one. The growth of the royal power was greatly helped by another cause, fully to understand which we must go back to the very earliest accounts which we have of the political |Two elements in Teutonic political life, the free Community and the Comitatus.| institutions of the Teutonic race. From the very beginning of our history two opposing elements may be seen, one of which in the end gained the complete mastery over the other. The one is the original self-governing Teutonic community; the other is the King or other lord with his personal following.[95]

§ 2. The Early Teutonic Constitution and its Decay.

The Teutonic Free Community; its monarchic, aristocratic, and democratic elements.

I said above that, in the very earliest glimpses of Teutonic political life, we find the monarchic, the aristocratic, and the democratic elements already clearly marked. There are leaders, with or without the royal title; there are men of noble birth, whose noble birth, in whatever the original nobility may have consisted, entitles them to pre-eminence in every way; but beyond these there is a free and armed people, in whom the ultimate sovereignty resides. Small matters are decided by the chiefs alone, great matters are submitted by the chiefs to the assembled nation.[96] Such a system is far more than Teutonic; it |Analogy of the Homeric Achaians,| is a common Aryan possession; it is the constitution of the Homeric Achaians on earth and of the Homeric Gods on Olympos. Zeus or Agamemnôn is King; he has his inner Council of great Gods or of great leaders; he has his general Assembly of all the divine race or of all the |and the historical Macedonians.| warriors who fought before Ilios.[97] The constitution of legendary Hellas remained the constitution of historical Macedonia; the assembly of the Macedonian nation—in war-time of the Macedonian army—remained, even under Philip and Alexander, the constitutional authority to decide on questions of succession to the throne and the tribunal in which was vested the power of adjudging a |The system a natural one in a small state.| Macedonian to death.[98] In short, the division of powers between the supreme leader, the Council, and the general Assembly, is the form into which the government of a small state or independent tribe almost necessarily throws itself. The hereditary prince and the aristocratic council may be exchanged for an elective chief magistrate and an elective council; but the division of powers remains the same, and in either case the ultimate sovereignty remains in the general Assembly, in the Agorê, the Ekklêsia, the Comitia, the Marzfeld, the Landesgemeinde. Of the nature and functions of such an assembly I shall have presently to speak, when I trace out the origin and nature of the Old-English Witenagemót. My present point is the distinction |Distinction of Eorl and Ceorl.| of orders in the state. Tacitus sets before us a marked distinction between the noble and the common freeman, that is, in Old-English phrase, between the Eorl and the Ceorl. The modern English forms of these words have altogether lost their ancient meaning. The word Earl, after several fluctuations, has settled down as the title of one rank in the peerage; the word Churl has come to be a word of moral reprobation, irrespective of the rank of the person who is guilty of the offence. But in the earlier meaning of the words, Eorl and Ceorl—words whose happy jingle causes them to be constantly opposed to each other—form an exhaustive division of the free members of the state. The distinction in modern language is most nearly expressed by the words Gentle and Simple. The ceorl is the simple freeman, the mere unit in the army or in the assembly, whom no distinction of birth or office marks out from his fellows. It must not be forgotten that, among the ancient English, as among all other Teutonic nations, the system of slavery was in full force. The ceorl therefore, like the ancient Greek citizen, though he might be looked down upon by an aristocratic class, was actually a privileged person as compared with a large number of human beings in his own city or district.[99] The origin of the distinction it is in vain to search after; the difference of the eorl and the ceorl is a primary fact from which we start; it is as old as the earliest notices of Teutonic institutions, and the only attempt at its explanation is to be found in an ingenious mythical story in a Northern saga.[100] Nor is it very easy to see in what the privileges of the eorl consisted, or how far they were secured by definite laws. |Analogy of the democratic Cantons of Switzerland.| Perhaps we may gain some light by looking at those communities which have preserved the old Teutonic system of government with the least alteration, the democratic |Traditional predominance of certain families.| Cantons of Switzerland.[101] There, amid the purest democracy in the world, where every adult freeman has a direct and equal vote in the Assembly, we still find that certain families, enjoying no legal privileges above their fellows, were long held in a kind of hereditary reverence, and that members of those families were preferred above all others to the highest offices in the state. Such were the houses of Reding in Schwyz, of Tschudi in Glarus, of the Barons of Attinghausen in Uri. The office of Landammann, the chief magistracy of the commonwealth, conferred by the yearly vote of the Landesgemeinde, commonly fell to the lot of members of these great houses; the same man was constantly re-elected year after year, and, when he died, |Comparison of old county families among ourselves.| his son was often elected in his place. Or without going so far from home, we may see what is essentially the same thing in the position of old county families, holding no legal advantages above their fellows, but which still enjoy an hereditary respect and preference at their hands. The eorl and the ceorl in fact answer pretty nearly to the esquire and the yeoman;[102] the modern artificial peerage is something quite different, and we shall presently perhaps see its beginnings.

The territory or Mark of the Community.

The primitive Teutonic community is thus set before us as one consisting of eorls and ceorls, headed by a King, Ealdorman, or other leader, temporary or permanent, elective or hereditary. Such a community occupies its own territory, its Mark,[103] which territory consists of land of two kinds. There is the common land, either applied to the general use of the community or else held by individuals on such terms as the community, in its character of landowner, may think good to allow. There are also the particular possessions of individuals, portions assigned to them by common consent, which are the absolute property of their owners, held of no superior, but simply subject to such burthens as the community, in its political character, may think good to impose on its members. All this again is in no way distinctively Teutonic; it is the story of the ancient commonwealths of Greece and Italy over again. |Folkland or Ager Publicus.| The folkland[104] of England and the ager publicus of Rome are the same thing. The English and the Latin names translate one another; they both describe the land which still belongs to the community as a body, and of which individuals cannot be more than the occupiers.[105] The whole history of the Roman Agrarian Laws, so long misunderstood, turns simply on the regulation of this common land of the state. In the time of Cæsar it would seem that the whole territory of a Teutonic community was folkland; individuals could obtain no right in it beyond that of a yearly tenancy.[106] But the custom of allotting portions of the common stock in absolute property gradually advanced. A conquest like that of Britain would be highly favourable to the growth of the practice. When a band of Teutonic warriors took possession of a district and slew or dispossessed its former inhabitants, we cannot doubt that, besides |Allodial property, eðel or odal.| the stock reserved as common property, each man who had borne his share in the labours and dangers of the conquest would claim his reward in the absolute ownership of some portion of the conquered territory. The eorls, who would doubtless act as the leaders of the expedition, may well have received a larger allotment; but we may be sure that no freeman bearing arms went altogether without some share of the spoil. Such an allotment in absolute property, held of no superior, subject to nothing but the laws of the state, is called in different Teutonic dialects eðel, odal, or alod. It is an estate, great or small, which the owner does not hold either of the King or of any other lord, but in regard to which he knows no superior but God and the law.

These communities of freemen, among whom some had a pre-eminence in rank, and doubtless in wealth, but among |The primitive democracy gives way to the institution of| whom every freeman was a member of the state, form one of the elements of Teutonic life as we see it in its very earliest pictures. But those same pictures set no less strongly before us another element, which grew up alongside of the primitive democracy, and which was destined in the long run to supplant it more or less completely in nearly every Teutonic country. The ancient Teutonic community can now be seen in its purity only in a few of the smallest Swiss Cantons, and in several even of these[107] the ancient freedom had to be reconquered and was not uninterruptedly retained. Everywhere else it is as much as we can do to trace out some faint footsteps of the ancient system, such as we see in common lands, in some forms of communal institutions, in petty and half obsolete local |the Comitatus, the personal following of the Chiefs.| tribunals. The thing itself has given way to the other institution described by Tacitus, the Comitatus, the personal following of the chiefs. Every Teutonic King or other leader was surrounded by a band of chosen warriors, personally attached to him of their own free choice.[108] The chief and his followers were bound together by the strongest ties of mutual trust, and a lack of faithfulness on either side was reckoned among the most shameful of crimes. The followers served their chief in peace and in war; they fought for him to the death, and rescued or avenged his |Nature of the relation.| life with their own. In return, they shared whatever gifts or honours the chief could distribute among them; and in our tongue at least it was his character of dispenser of |The Hlaford and his Gesiðas.| gifts which gave the chief his official title. He was the Hlaford, the Loaf-giver,[109] a name which, through a series of softenings and contractions, and with an utter forgetfulness of its primitive meaning, has settled down into the modern form of Lord. His followers were originally his Gesiðas or Companions, a word which Ælfred uses to express the Latin Comes, but which must have dropped out of use |Origin of Þegnas (Thanes).| very early, as it is not found in the Chronicles. The Gesið or Companion became the Þegn (Thegn, Thane) or Servant, a change of name which might seem to imply a lowering of the nature of the relation, and which perhaps in a manner did so.[110] As Kings grew in power and dominion, it was not unnatural that a certain element of servility should find its way into the relation of the Comitatus, of which there is no trace in the primitive shape of that institution. The service of the King or other great lord conferred dignity even on the freeman. This is a notion altogether foreign to the ideas of republican Greece and Rome; but here again the primitive Teuton is but the |Homeric analogies.| reproduction of the primitive Achaian. The Homeric Kings have their comitatus, their Gesiðas or ἑταῖροι, their Þegnas or θεράποντες, free, noble, the cherished companions of their lords, but who do for those lords, without any loss of their own dignity, services which in later Greece none but slaves would have rendered. Eteôneus, Automedôn,[111] Mêrionês, the divine Patroklos himself, all appear in this relation; all are connected by this voluntary personal tie to a chieftain of higher rank. They are the very counterparts of Lilla, the faithful Thegn of Eadwine,[112] and of those true companions who fought to the death for |Contrast with the republican Greeks and Romans.| Cynewulf and Cyneheard.[113] The republican Greek knew no lord but the law.[114] He was a member of a civil community, and as a good citizen he obeyed the magistrates whom the choice of the community clothed with a limited and temporary power. But personal dependence on another human being seemed to him the distinguishing mark of the slave as opposed to the citizen. The republican Roman shared the same feeling; the early Cæsars were served by slaves or freedmen;[115] it was only as the Empire gradually grew into an avowed monarchy, and gradually assumed somewhat of the pomp of eastern kingship, that service about the person of the Emperor began to be looked upon as honourable in a man of free Roman birth. In the Teuton, as in the Homeric Achaian, the feeling of the civil community, though far from unknown, was less strong, and the tie of personal dependence was not felt to imply degradation. Indeed the Teuton carried the principle of personal service far further than the Roman ever did. It was held that purely menial services, when rendered to persons of higher rank, in no way degraded the ordinary freeman. It was even held that men of any rank short of the highest were actually honoured by rendering such services to those who were one degree higher than themselves. None of the old Cæsars ever held such lordly state |Developement of the principle in the later Empire and in modern Kingdoms.| as those among their successors who, while keeping hardly a trace of real Imperial power, still saw Kings and sovereign Dukes doing services about their person and household which, in the days of Augustus, would have been deemed a degradation to the meanest Roman citizen. So, among ourselves, offices about the person and household of the lord became high and honourable. The King’s dish-thegn, his bower-thegn, his horse-thegn or staller, all became great dignitaries of the kingdom, high in rank and influence,[116] as some of them, among all the changes in our institutions, still remain. There thus arose a new kind of nobility, nobility by service, the nobility which gradually attached |The Thegns supplant the old Eorls.| to the Thegns or Servants of Kings and Ealdormen; and this nobility gradually supplanted the elder nobility of immemorial descent.[117] Men pressed into the service of powerful leaders, till such service became the necessary badge of anything like distinguished rank. The Thegn, whose name might sound at first hearing like the exact opposite of the ancient Eorl, gradually took his place. The word Thegn became equivalent to noble or gentle. The King’s Thegns formed the highest class of gentry; the Thegns of Ealdormen and Bishops formed a lower class. Again to use a modern parallel, the ancient Eorl answers to the gentleman of ancient family, looked at simply as the descendant of certain forefathers and the owner of certain property; the Thegn answers to the gentleman, whether with or without such ancestry, looked at as holding, by royal commission, his place in the local magistracy and the local military force.

The Comitatus—the Thegnhood, as we may call it—thus |Effects of the growth of the Thegnhood.| grew and developed, and became the central institution of the state. With every advance of the kingly power—and every accession of territory, every free or constrained union of one district with another, implied an advance of the kingly power—the dignity of the King’s Thegns rose along with the dignity of their Hlaford. In one way |Favourable to individual Ceorls, but depressing to the class.| the change was a liberalizing one. The Ceorl could not become an Eorl, simply because a man cannot change his forefathers; but several ways were open to him of becoming a Thegn.[118] And now Thegn’s rank had become practically equivalent to Eorl’s rank. But though individual Ceorls might thus rise, there can be no doubt that the growth of the Thegnhood was on the whole depressing to the Ceorls, the simple freemen, as a class. The idea of the simple landman—I must borrow a word from our continental brethren, as the word citizen brings in quite other ideas—the undistinguished, but still free and, in a sense, equal member of a free community, gradually died out. The institution of the Comitatus, which in its origin was essentially voluntary, was pressed, as it were, upon all men, till at last it became a principle that no man should be without his lord. The freeman might choose his lord; he might determine to whom, in technical phrase, he should commend[119] |Commendation.| himself; but a lord he must have, a lord to act at once as |Every man must have a Lord.| his protector and as his surety, at once to watch over him and to give a guaranty for his good behaviour. The lordless man became a kind of outlaw, while in the older state of things the whole community would be lordless, except those who might of their own free will have entered |Depression of the Ceorls towards the period of the Conquest.| the Comitatus of some chief.[120] And there is little doubt that the condition of the Ceorls had greatly changed for the worse in the later times as we approach the Norman Conquest. Some classes among them seem to have been fast approaching to the condition of villainage or even to that of serfdom. This change is not peculiar to England; but it is the peculiar glory of England that the bondage of the mass of its people began later, and that it certainly ended sooner, than in any other western country where such bondage existed. The peasantry of Germany gradually sank into a lower state of serfdom than ours, and they remained in it much longer. The free peasantry of Russia did not sink into serfdom till villainage was nearly forgotten in England, but their deliverance from the yoke has been reserved for our own times.

Elements of Feudalism in England, but no Feudal System.

This sketch of the growth of the Thegnhood and its effects at once suggests the question, Did the Feudal System exist in England before the Norman Conquest? One might perhaps be allowed to answer this question by another, Did the Feudal System ever exist anywhere? In England, before the Norman Conquest, the Feudal System most certainly did not exist. There was no systematic feudalism, but the elements of feudalism were there. |Two elements of Feudalism;| Feudalism consists of two main elements; the feudal relation implies the union of two other relations. There is |the relation of the Comitatus and the holding of land by military service.| the personal relation of lord and vassal, lord and man,[121] bound together by mutual will and mutual fidelity, the one owing service, the other owing protection; there is in short the old Teutonic relation of the Comitatus, the relation of the Hlaford and his Thegn. But alongside of this, the feudal relation commonly implies the holding of land by military service. To grant land on such a tenure is in truth one form, one among several, of that bounty of the lord to his followers to which his very title of Hlaford is |Military tenures suggested by the relation of the Comitatus,| owing. The lord makes his follower a grant of land as the reward of past services, and he makes the continuation of those services the condition of his follower’s keeping the land so granted. But there can be no doubt that the tendency to this particular form of bounty was greatly strengthened by the example of the Roman practice of |and also by the Roman tenures on the frontier.| granting out frontier lands to be held by military service.[122] The holders of such lands held them of the Roman Republic, and to the Roman Republic their service was due. They stood in no personal relation to the Emperor; they were not his men, his vassals, his Gesiðas, his Thegns; their service was due to him only so far as he was the head and |The two elements united produce Feudalism.| representative of the commonwealth. But the union in the same person of the Teutonic tie of the Comitatus and the Roman tie of land held by military service would produce a relation coming very near to the strictly feudal relation. The Roman custom would easily suggest to the Teutonic conquerors the practice of rewarding their followers with grants of lands—in short with benefices or fiefs—as the most convenient and honourable form which the bounty of the lord could take. In Britain indeed, |Growth of Feudalism slower in England than on the Continent.| where Roman institutions were so utterly swept away, this influence would hardly exist; at any rate it would be far weaker than it was on the continent. Hence we find feudalism growing up far more slowly in England than in Gaul or even in Germany; in our old constitution we find the elements of feudalism; but they were not as yet worked into a systematic shape; they had not as yet become the materials of an elaborate jurisprudence. Homage was there; for the relation of every man to his lord was a relation of homage. Heriots too and other incidents of a feudal character already existed. But these feudal elements had not yet been wrought together into any harmonious feudal system. The Comitatus, the germ of feudalism, had thriven and developed and was now dominant; but the old Teutonic constitution had not been |Feudal elements strengthened by the Norman Conquest.| utterly wiped out. The Norman Conquest no doubt strongly tended to promote the further developement of the feudal element; but, as in every other case, it only opened and prepared the way for further changes.

Earlier form of military service; the Trinoda Necessitas.

The military service due from land held by a feudal tenure is strictly due to the lord as the lord. That lord may be the King; but if so, the service is still in strictness owing to him, not as head of the state, but as lord of the fief. But there is another obligation to military service which is older than this. All land in England was, by the earliest Common Law, subject to three burthens, to contributions to the three works most necessary for the defence of the country. These were the famous Trinoda Necessitas, the obligation to service in the field (fyrd) and to a share in the repairs of fortresses and of bridges.[123] But these are duties owed by the citizen to the commonwealth, or by the subject to the sovereign, not duties owed by a personal vassal to a personal lord. Land, in an age when there was little property except in land, is simply taken as the measure of the contribution due from each man to the common defence. From these burthens, as a rule, no land could be free; even church lands were regularly subject to them, though in some cases their owners contrived to obtain exemptions.[124] These ancient obligations pressed alike on the ancient allodial possession and on the land held by any more modern tenure. They were not feudal services, but a tax paid to the state. They were in fact the price paid to the commonwealth for the protection which it gave; or rather they were the share which each member of the commonwealth was bound to take in the protection of himself and his neighbours.

Folkland and Bookland.

I have already mentioned the folkland, the common land of the community or of the nation, out of which the ancient allodial possessions were carved. This process of turning public property into private went on largely in later times. The alienation was now commonly made by a document in writing, under the signatures of the King and his Witan; land so granted was therefore said to be booked to the grantee, and was known as bookland. Portions of the folkland were thus cut off from the public ownership, and were booked to private individuals or corporations. The greater number of the existing ancient charters consists of grants of this kind. |Conversion of Folkland into Bookland in favour of the Church and of the King’s Thegns.| A vast number are of course in favour of the Church, but those which are made to the King’s faithful Thegns are hardly less common. In either case portions of the folkland are alienated, booked, to private use with the consent of the Witan. The booking might of course be made on any terms; any sort of tenure might be created; but the great object of the grantee was to get the land on the same terms as an ancient eðel, subject only to the three burthens, which not even the most favoured Thegn, hardly the most favoured churchman, could hope to escape.[125]

Conversion of Folkland into Bookland required the assent of the Witan.

The folkland, the common property of the state, was of course at the disposal of the state, and of the state only. It was granted by the King, but only by the consent and authority of his Witan. That is to say, in modern language, the change of folkland into bookland required an Act of Parliament, but acts to that effect were passed constantly and without difficulty. The folkland belonged to the nation and not to the King. The King was only its chief administrator, enjoying its use, so far as he enjoyed it, only as the head and representative of the nation. |The King’s private estate.| But the King, like any other man, had his private estate. Like any other man, he might have his ancient allodial property, or he might, like any other man, have land booked to him, land which followed the ordinary course of legal succession or testamentary disposal.[126] It was indeed needful that the King should have such private possessions; for, in our ancient elective monarchy, the reigning King had no certainty that the crown, and the possessions attached to the crown, would ever pass to |Folkland passes into Terra Regis,| his descendants. But after the Norman Conquest, as the royal power increased, and as the modern notion of hereditary right was gradually developed, these two kinds of possession got confounded. On the one hand, the nation was forgotten or merged in the person of its chief; the folkland was held to be the King’s land, Terra Regis; the King was led to look on the possessions of the nation as his own, and to grant them away at his own pleasure without the consent of Parliament. On the other hand, lawyers brought in the strange doctrine that the King could hold no private property, but that, on his accession to the crown, his private estate was merged in what was now held to be the royal domain. By one of those curious cycles which so often come round in human affairs, both these wrongs have been redressed, one formally, the other practically. Our modern Kings have recovered the ancient right, common to them with other men, of inheriting, purchasing, and bequeathing |and becomes Folkland again.| private estates. On the other hand, now that the royal domain is given up to the nation to be controlled by Parliament, it is practically brought back to its ancient condition of folkland. That is to say, after so many centuries of usurpation, the land of which the Kings had defrauded the nation has come back to its lawful owners.[127]

The old Teutonic constitution gradually dies out everywhere but in Switzerland.

By these various means the old system of free Teutonic communities gradually died out in England, as it died out in all parts of the continent save one. It lingered in Friesland till the fifteenth century;[128] in the primitive Switzerland it lingers still. Everywhere else it has utterly |It yields in England to a real national monarchy, in Germany to the dominion of petty princes.| vanished, or has left only such faint traces as it has left among ourselves. But England did not suffer from the change as Germany did. Our free marks and shires gradually gave way, but they gave way before the developement of a real national life, before the establishment of a really national sovereignty. But in Germany local freedom was rooted out, not in favour either of the nation or of its sovereign, but for the advantage of that crowd of princes, great and small, which were for ages the curse of the land. The free communities of Germany vanished; but the German nation gained nothing, the German King gained nothing; the liberties and rights alike of the King, of the nation, and of the local communities, were confiscated to the profit of a brood of petty despots. The constitution which Tacitus saw and wondered at, the constitution for which Arminius fought and conquered, the constitution whose working may still be seen year by year in the free air of Uri and Appenzell, gave way in the great Teutonic realm to the dominion of princes who represented nothing but themselves, who embodied no national or provincial being, who were the mere creation of modern dynastic and diplomatic arrangements,—arrangements which did their best to wipe out every historic name and every national memory, and to assign to each of their princely creatures an arbitrary extent of dominion traced out at haphazard upon the map.[129] Such was the fate of the Teutonic mainland; such was not the fate of the Teutonic island. The uprooting of the old free communities, the growth of the power of the King and of his Thegns, no doubt tended in England, as elsewhere, to the degradation, at least for a while, of the lowest class of |Ceorldom sinks into Villainage, but the Villains are gradually emancipated.| freemen. The ceorl was fast sinking into the villain. Still, even in the worst times, enough of the old spirit remained in our laws to give the villain those means of obtaining enfranchisement which gradually did enfranchise the whole class, without the institution of villainage ever being formally done away with. And the uprooting of the old |Change of the old constitution necessary.| communities was needful, if England was ever to become a great and united nation. We must remember that the kingdom, like all our ancient divisions, from the shire, perhaps from the hundred, upwards, was formed by the aggregation of smaller divisions.[130] The unit is the mark, roughly represented by the modern parish or manor. The shire must not be looked on as a division of the kingdom,[131] nor the hundred or the mark as a division of the shire. |Shires formed out of Marks, and Kingdoms out of Shires.| The hundred is in truth formed by an aggregation of marks, the shire by an aggregation of hundreds, the kingdom by an aggregation of shires. The aggregation of marks into shires is indeed mainly to be inferred from local nomenclature and from the analogy of other Teutonic countries; but the aggregation of shires into kingdoms is |The Mark-system probably less perfect in England than elsewhere.| matter of recorded history. It is even possible that the circumstances of the English Conquest of Britain may have hindered the mark from ever possessing the same amount of independence in England which it possessed in the older Teutonic lands. When every English settlement had to defend itself, and if possible to extend itself, in the teeth of a hostile Welsh population, the different settlements must have kept up a very close union; there must have been from the beginning, if not centralization, yet at any rate something like federation. The first followers of Cerdic no doubt settled themselves in marks, forming self-governing communities; but all must have held themselves ready to march at Cerdic’s bidding, whenever it was needful to repel an inroad of the Welsh, whenever things promised well for a fresh inroad upon them. Still such communities, the mark and the shire, however dependent externally on some central authority, were doubtless internally self-governed from the beginning. We have already seen[132] how shires, ruled each one by its own Ealdorman, came together into kingdoms under a single |Formation of the greater Kingdoms.| King. We have seen also that the nature of the process differed in different parts of the country, that in Mercia, for instance, wholly independent states were thus brought into union, while in Wessex, though there were many Ealdormen and even many Kings, there was still a certain unity from the first. There was always a head King of the West-Saxons, and all the Under-kings were most likely Æthelings of the blood of Cerdic. Gradually the connexion became closer, the process no doubt being quicker in Wessex than in Mercia or Northumberland. The head King became the only King, the only independent executive; and the assembly of his Witan became the only independent legislature. In place of Kings, independent or dependent, the shires received Ealdormen, named by the King and his Witan, and liable to be removed by |Process of amalgamation; royal officers in the Shires.| them. The folkland of the shire became the folkland of the whole kingdom. A crowd of royal officers[133] of various ranks, whose main duty was to look after the royal interests, were scattered over all parts of the country. The Ealdorman still remained, the shadow of ancient kingship, and so far the representative of local independence. But beside him arose a new officer, the Scírgerefa, Shirereeve, or Sheriff, the immediate officer of the King, the agent of the central authority, the representative of the dependence of each local division on the common King and Assembly of the nation. Once the shires were the units, out of the union of which the kingdom was formed; now the kingdom forms a new whole, of which the shires have sunk to be mere administrative divisions. In Mercia we have seen[134] that, after the Danish conquest, the country was artificially mapped out again into fresh shires, which must have been felt to be still more completely mere administrative divisions than those West-Saxon shires which had once been separate principalities.

§ 3. Origin and Powers of the Witenagemót.

By these means those great kingdoms were formed which produced Bretwaldas and which strove for the supremacy of Britain. Each stage of union increased the kingly power; each stage lessened the independence of local communities and lessened the importance of their |Democratic constitution of the old Assemblies.| individual members. The democratic character of the old Teutonic system contained the seeds of its own destruction, whenever it should be applied to districts of any great extent. We may be sure that every Teutonic freeman had |The Assembly of the Mark,| a voice in the assembly—the Gemót, the Gemeinde, the Ekklêsia—of his own mark. In fact he in some sort keeps it still, as holding his place in the parish vestry. He had a voice; it might be too much to say that he had a vote; for in an early state of things formal divisions are not likely to be often taken; the temper of the assembly is found out by easier means. But the man who clashed his arms to express approval, or who joined in the unmistakeable sound which expressed dissent,[135] practically gave as efficient a vote as if he had solemnly walked out into a lobby. The Homeric Agorê is the type of every such assembly, and the likeness of the Homeric Agorê may |of the Shire.| be seen in an English county-meeting to this day.[136] The voice which the simple freeman, the ceorl, had in the assembly of his mark, he would not lose in the assembly of his shire, the Scirgemót. The county court is to this |The right becomes less valuable with each extension of area.| day an assembly of all the freeholders of the shire.[137] But the right of attending the assembly of the shire would become really less valuable than the right of attending the assembly of the mark. The larger the assembly, the more distant the place of meeting, the more difficult, and therefore the more rare, does the attendance of individual members become, and the smaller is the importance of each individual member when he gets there. We cannot doubt that the assemblies of the mark, of the shire, and of the kingdom all went on side by side: but at each stage of union the competence of the inferior assembly |Every freeman had a theoretical right to attend the National Assembly.| would be narrowed. We cannot doubt that every freeman kept in theory the right of appearing in the assembly of the kingdom, no less than in the assemblies of the mark and of the shire. Expressions are found which are quite enough to show that the mass of the people were theoretically looked on as present in the national assembly and as consenting to its decrees.[138] But such a right of |The right goes practically out of use.| attendance necessarily became a mere name. The mass of the people could not attend; they would not care to attend, they would find themselves of no account if they did attend. They would therefore, without any formal abrogation of their right, gradually cease from attending. The idea of representation had not yet arisen; those who did not appear in person had no means of appearing by deputy; of election or delegation there is not the slightest trace, though it might often happen that those who stayed away might feel that their rich or official neighbour who went would attend to their wishes and would fairly act in their interests. By this process an originally democratic assembly, without any formal exclusion of any class of its members, gradually shrank up into an aristocratic assembly. I trust that I have shown in another work[139] how, under closely analogous circumstances, the Federal Assembly of Achaia, legally open to every Achaian citizen, was commonly attended only by those who were both rich and zealous, and how it often happened that the members of the inner body, the Senate, themselves alone formed the |The Assembly practically an Assembly of the King’s Thegns.| assembly. In the same way, an assembly of all the freemen of Wessex, when those freemen could not attend personally and when they had no means of attending by representatives, gradually changed into an assembly attended by few or none but the King’s Thegns. The great officers of Church and State, Ealdormen, Bishops, Abbots, would attend; the ordinary Thegns would attend more laxly, but still in considerable numbers; the King would preside; a few leading men would discuss; the general mass of the Thegns, whether they formally voted or not, would make their approval or disapproval practically felt; |Vestiges of the old popular rights.| no doubt the form still remained of at least announcing the resolutions taken to any of the ordinary freemen whom curiosity had drawn to the spot; most likely the form still remained of demanding their ceremonial assent, though without any fear that the habitual “Yea, yea,” would ever be exchanged for “Nay, nay.”[140] It is thus that, in the absence of representation, a democratic franchise, as applied to a large country, gradually becomes unreal or delusive. |Primary Assemblies suited only to small commonwealths.| A primary assembly, an Ekklêsia, a Landesgemeinde, is an excellent institution in a commonwealth so small as to allow of its being really worked with effect. But in any large community it either becomes a tumultuous mob, like the later Roman Comitia or the Florentine Parliament, or else it gradually shrinks up into an aristocratic body, as the old Teutonic assemblies did both in England and on the continent. When the great statesmen of the thirteenth century, Earl Simon and King Edward, fully established the principle of representation, they did but |The Ancient right restored in another shape in the thirteenth century.| bring back the old state of things in another shape. The ordinary freeman had gradually lost his right of personal attendance in the national assembly; it was inexpedient and impossible to restore that right to him in its original shape; he may be looked on as having in the thirteenth century legally surrendered it, and as having received in its stead the far more practical right of attending by his representatives.

Thus was formed that famous assembly of our forefathers, called by various names, the Mycel Gemót or Great Meeting, the Witenagemót[141] or Meeting of the Wise, sometimes the Mycel Getheaht or Great Thought.[142] |The Witenagemót.| But the common title of those who compose it is simply the Witan, the Sapientes or Wise Men. In every English kingdom we find the royal power narrowly limited by the necessity under which the King lay of acting in all matters of importance by the consent and authority of his Witan, in other words, of his Parliament. |The Gemót of Wessex becomes the general Legislature, those, of the other kingdoms surviving as local bodies.| As the other kingdoms merged in Wessex, the Witan of the other kingdoms became entitled to seats in the Gemót of Wessex, now become the common Gemót of the Empire. But just as in the case of the assemblies of the mark and the shire, so the Gemóts of the other Kingdoms seem to have gone on as local bodies, dealing with local affairs, and perhaps giving a formal assent to the resolutions of the central body.[143] |Lack of information as to the constitution of the Assembly.| As to the constitution of these great councils in any English kingdom our information is of the vaguest kind. The members are always spoken of in the loosest way. We find the Witan constantly assembling, constantly passing laws, but we find no law prescribing or defining the constitution of the assembly itself. We find no trace of representation or election; we find no trace of any property qualification;[144] we find no trace of nomination by the crown, except in so far as all the great officers of the court and the kingdom were constantly present. On the other hand we have seen that all the leading men, Ealdormen, Bishops, Abbots, and a considerable body of other Thegns, did attend; we have seen that the people as a body had in some way a share in the legislative acts of their chiefs, that those acts were in some sort the acts of the people themselves, to which they had themselves assented, and were not merely the edicts of superiors which they had to obey. There is no doubt that, on some particular occasions, some classes at least of the people did actually take a part in the proceedings of the national council; thus the citizens of London are more than once recorded to have taken a share in the election of Kings.[145] No theory that I know of will explain all these phænomena except that which I have just tried to draw out. This is, that every freeman had an abstract right to be present, but that any actual share in the proceedings of the assembly had, gradually and imperceptibly, come to be confined to the leading men, to the King’s Thegns, strengthened, under peculiarly favourable circumstances, by the presence of exceptional classes of freemen, like the London citizens.[146] It is therefore utterly vain for any political party to try to press the supposed constitution of our ancient national councils into the service |The Witenagemót proves nothing in modern political controversies.| of modern political warfare. The Meeting of the Wise has not a word to utter for or against any possible Reform Bill. In one sense it was more democratic than anything that the most advanced Liberal would dare to dream of; in another sense it was more oligarchic than anything that the most unbending Conservative would dare to defend. Yet it may in practice have fairly represented the wishes of the nation; and if so, no people ever enjoyed more complete political freedom, than the English did in these early times. |Extent of the powers of the Assembly; greater than those of a modern Parliament.| For the powers of the ancient Witenagemót[147] surpassed beyond all measure the powers which our written law vests in a modern Parliament. In some respects they surpassed the powers which our conventional constitution vests in a modern House of Commons. The King could do absolutely nothing without the consent of his Wise Men. First of all, it was from them that he derived his political being, and it was on them that he depended for its continuance. The Witan chose the King and the |Power of deposing the King.| Witan could depose him. The power of deposition is a power which, from its very nature, can be exercised but rarely; we therefore do not find many Kings deposed by Act of Parliament either before or since the Norman Conquest. But we do find instances, both before and since the Norman Conquest, which show that, by the ancient constitution of England, the Witan of the land did possess the right of deposing the sovereign, and that on great and emergent occasions they did not shrink from exercising that right. I will not attempt to grapple with the confused history of Northumberland, where at one time Kings were set up |Instances in Northumberland;| and put down almost daily. Such revolutions were doubtless as much the result of force as of any legal process; still we can hardly doubt that the legal forms were commonly observed, and sometimes we find it distinctly recorded that they were. Let us keep ourselves to the more certain history of the line of Cerdic. Five times—we |in Wessex.| might more truly say six times—thrice before and twice since the Norman Conquest, has the King of the West-Saxons or of the English been deprived of his |Sigeberht. 755.| kingly office by the voice of his Parliament.[148] Sigeberht of Wessex, in the eighth century, was deposed by the vote of the general assembly of his kingdom, and another King |Æthelred deposed, 1013; restored, 1014.| was elected in his stead. Æthelred the Second was deposed by one act of the Legislature and restored by another. Harthacnut, in the like sort, was deposed, while still uncrowned, from his West-Saxon kingdom, though he |Harthacnut deposed, 1037; re-elected, 1040.| was afterwards re-elected to the whole kingdom of England. |Edward the Second deposed, 1327; Richard the Second, 1377.| Edward the Second was deposed by Parliament; so was Richard the Second. At a later time the Parliament |Case of James the Second.| of England shrank from the formal deposition of James the Second, and took refuge in a theory of abdication which, though logically absurd, practically did all that was wanted. But the Parliament of Scotland had no such scruples, and that body, in full conformity with ancient examples, declared the crown of Scotland to be forfeited. In a land where everything goes by precedent, a right resting on a tradition like this, though its actual exercise may have taken place only five or six times in nine hundred years, is surely as well established as any other. Under our modern constitution the right is likely to remain dormant. The objects which in past times required the deposition of the King, if not from his office, at least from his authority, can now be gained by a parliamentary censure of the Prime Minister, or in the extremest case by bringing an impeachment against him.

The King elected by the Witan.

If the Witan could depose the King, still more undoubtedly did the Witan elect the King.[149] It is strange how people’s eyes are blinded on this subject. It is not uncommon to hear people talk about the times before and shortly after the Norman Conquest as if the Act for the Settlement of the Royal Succession had already been in force in those days. It is strange to hear a number of princes, both before and since the Conquest, popularly spoken of as “usurpers,” merely because they came to the crown in a different way from that which modern law and |Popular misconceptions on this subject.| custom prescribe. It is strange that people who talk in this way commonly forget that their own principle, so far as it proves anything, proves a great deal more than they intend. If Harold, Stephen, John, were usurpers, Ælfred and Eadward the Confessor were usurpers just as much. Ælfred and Eadward, no less than John, succeeded by election, to the exclusion of nephews whom the modern law of England would look upon as the undoubted heirs of the crown. It is stranger still to hear others talk as if hereditary succession, according to some particular theory of it, was a divine and eternal law which could not be departed from without sin. Those who talk in this way should at least tell us what the divine and unchangeable law of succession is; for in a purely historical view of things, nearly every kingdom seems to have a law of succession of its own. Our forefathers at any rate knew nothing of any such superstitions. The ancient English kingship was elective. It was elective in the same sense in which all the old Teutonic kingdoms were elective. Among a people in whose eyes birth was highly valued, it was deemed fitting that the King should be the descendant of illustrious and royal forefathers. In the days of heathendom it was held that the King should come of the supposed |Kings commonly chosen out of a particular family.| stock of the Gods. Thus in every kingdom there was a kingly house, out of which alone, under all ordinary circumstances, Kings were chosen; but within that kingly house the Witan of the land had a free choice. The |The eldest son of the last King has a preference, but no more.| eldest son of the last King would doubtless always have a preference; if he was himself at all worthy of the place, if his father’s memory was at all cherished, he would commonly be preferred without hesitation, probably chosen without the appearance of any other candidate. But a preference was all to which he was entitled, and he seems not to have been entitled even to a preference unless he |Minors constantly passed by.| was actually the son of a crowned King.[150] If he were too young, or otherwise disqualified, the electors passed him by and chose some worthier member of the royal family. Ælfred and Eadred were chosen in preference to the minor sons of elder brothers. Eadward the Confessor was chosen in preference to the absent son of an elder brother. At the death of Eadgar, when the royal family contained only minors to choose from, the electors were divided between the elder and the younger brother. Minors who had been once passed by might or might not be elected at a later vacancy. Æthelwold, the son of Æthelred the First, who had been passed by in favour of his uncle Ælfred, was again passed by on Ælfred’s death, because no claim could compare with that of Eadward, the worthy son of the most glorious of fathers. The children of Eadmund were passed by in favour of their uncle Eadred, but on Eadred’s death the |A certain preference acquired by the recommendation of the last King.| choice fell on the formerly excluded Eadwig. And as a certain preference was acquired by birth, a certain preference was acquired by the recommendation of the late King. So Eadgar recommended his elder son Eadward to the electors; so Eadward the Confessor recommended Harold. Æthelwulf had long before attempted, by the help of a will confirmed by the Witan, to establish a peculiar law of succession, which soon broke down.[151] But it is clear that a certain importance was attached to the wishes of a deceased and respected King, as conveying a distinct preference. But it conveyed nothing more than a preference; the person who enjoyed such preference, whether by birth or by nomination, could still be passed by without breach of constitutional right. From these principles it follows that, as any disqualified person in the kingly house might be passed by, so, if the whole house were disqualified, the whole house might be passed by. |Harold the son of Godwine lawfully chosen.| That is to say, the election of Harold the son of Godwine, the central point of this history, was perfectly good in every point of view. The earlier election of Cnut was |Cnut’s election good in form, but made under duresse.| equally good in point of form; only it was an election under duresse—duresse a little, but not much, stronger than that under which an English Chapter elects its Bishop.

An ancient English King then was, not the father of his people, but their child, their creation. And the assembly which had elected him, and which could depose him, claimed to direct him by its advice and authority |Direct share of the Witan in every branch of government.| in almost every exercise of the kingly power. Every act of government of any importance was done, not by the King alone, but by the King and his Witan. The Great Council of the nation took an active share even in those branches of government which modern constitutional theories mark out as the special domain of the Executive. That laws were ordained, and taxes imposed,[152] by the authority of the Witan, that they sat as the highest court for the trial of exalted and dangerous offenders, is only what we should look for from the analogy of modern times. It is more important to find that the King and his Witan, and not the King alone, concluded treaties, made grants of folkland, ordained the assemblage of fleets and armies, appointed and deposed the great officers of Church and State. Of the exercise of all these powers by the assembled Witan we shall find abundant examples in the course of this history. Now these are the very powers which a modern House of Commons shrinks from |Difference between the direct and indirect action of Parliament.| directly exercising. These are the powers which, under our present system, Parliament prefers to entrust to ministers in whom it has confidence, ministers whom it virtually appoints, and whom it can virtually dismiss without any formal ceremony of deposition. And, in our present state of things, little or no harm, and some direct good, comes from Parliament preferring an indirect course of action |Direct action necessary in early times.| on these subjects. But in an earlier state of things, a more direct agency of the Parliament or other national assembly is absolutely necessary. The assembly has to deal, not with a ministry whom it can create and destroy without any formal action, but with a personal King, whom it has indeed elected and whom it can depose, but whose election and deposition are solemn national acts, his deposition indeed being the rarest and most extreme of all national acts. In such a state of things the power of the King may be strictly limited by law; but, within the limits which the law prescribes to him, he acts according to his own will and pleasure, or according to the advice of counsellors who are purely of his own choosing. In such a state of things the King and the nation are brought face to face, and it is needful that the national assembly should have a much more direct control over affairs than is at all needful when the ingenious device of a responsible ministry is interposed between King and Parliament. Long after the days of our ancient Witenagemóts, in the days of Edward the Third for instance, Parliament was consulted about wars and negotiations in a much more direct way than it is now. The control of Parliament over the Executive is certainly not less effective now than it was then; but the nature of our present system makes it desirable that the control of Parliament should be exercised in a less direct way than it was then. Our present system avoids, above all things, all possibility of direct personal collision between Parliament and the sovereign. But such direct personal collisions form the staple of English history from the thirteenth century onwards. In earlier times we seldom come across any record of the debates of our national councils, though we often know their determinations. How far such collisions commonly took place in early times[153] we have but small means of knowing. They were perhaps less to be looked for in the tenth or eleventh century than in the thirteenth or fourteenth. In the later times the King had to deal with his Parliament as with something external to himself, something which laid petitions before him which he could accept or reject at pleasure. A struggle in those days was a struggle between the King and an united Parliament. Nowadays, as we all know, the struggle takes place within the walls of Parliament itself. But we can well believe that, in this respect as in so many others, the earliest times were really more like our own |Joint action of the King and the Witan.| than the intermediate centuries were. An ancient Witenagemót did not petition; it decreed; it confirmed the acts of the King which, without the assent of the Witan, had no validity; it was not a body external to the King, but a body of which the King was the head in a much more direct sense than he could be said to be the head of a later mediæval Parliament. The King and his Witan acted together; the King could do nothing without the Witan, and the Witan could do nothing without the King; they were no external, half-hostile, body; they were his own council, surrounding and advising him. Direct collisions between the King on the one hand and an united Gemót on the other were not likely to be common. And as to the great powers of the Witenagemót, as to its direct participation in all important acts of government, there can be no doubt. They are legibly |Diminution of parliamentary action after the Conquest.| written in every page of our early history. The vast increase of the power of the crown after the Norman Conquest, the gradual growth of a systematic feudal jurisprudence, did much to lessen the authority and dignity of the national councils. The idea of a nation and its chief, of a King and his counsellors, almost died away; the King became half despot, half mere feudal lord. England was never without national assemblies of some kind or other; but from the Conquest in the eleventh century till the second birth of freedom in the thirteenth, our national assemblies do not stand out in the same distinct and living shape in which they stand out both in earlier |The old freedom won back in the thirteenth century.| and in later times. Here again we owe our thanks to those illustrious worthies, from the authors of the Great Charter onwards, who, in so many ways, won back for us our ancient constitution in another shape. I have said that no political party can draw any support for its own peculiar theories from that obscurest of subjects, the constitution of the Witenagemót. But no lover of our old historic freedom can see without delight how venerable a thing that freedom is, how vast and how ancient are the rights and powers of an English Parliament. Our ancient Gemóts enjoyed every power of a modern Parliament, together with some powers which modern Parliaments shrink from claiming. Even such a matter of detail as the special security granted to the persons of members of the two Houses has been traced, and not without a show of probability, to an enactment which stands at the very front of English secular jurisprudence, the second among the laws ordained by our first Christian King and the Witan of his kingdom of Kent.[154]

The King not a puppet in the hands of the Witan.

As the powers of the Witan were thus extensive, as the King could do no important act of government without their consent, some may hastily leap to the conclusion that an ancient English King was a mere puppet in the hands of the national council. No inference could be more mistaken. Nothing is clearer in our early history than the personal agency of the King in everything that is done, and the unspeakable difference between a good and |Vast importance of the personal character of the King.| a bad King. The truth is that in an early state of society almost everything depends on the personal character of the King. An able King is practically absolute; under a weak King the government falls into utter anarchy. Change the scene, as we shall presently do in our narrative, from the days of Eadgar to those of Æthelred—change it again from the long, dreary, hopeless, reign of Æthelred to the few months of ceaseless energy which form the reign of the hero Eadmund—compare the nine months of Harold with the two months which followed his fall—and we shall see how the whole fate of the nation turned upon the personal character of its sovereign. With such witnesses before us, we can the better understand how our forefathers would have scouted the thought—if the thought had ever occurred to them—of risking the destiny of the nation on the accidents of strict hereditary succession, and how wisely they determined that the King must be, if not the worthiest of the nation, at any rate the worthiest of the kingly house. The unhappy reign of Æthelred showed the bad side of even that limited application of the hereditary principle which was all that they admitted. Under her great Kings England had risen from her momentary overthrow to an Imperial dominion. At home she had a strong and united government, and her position in the face of other nations was one which made her alliance to be courted by the foremost princes of Europe. The accession of the minor son of Eadgar, a child who, except in his crimes and vices, never got beyond childhood, dragged down the glorious fabric into the dust. So greatly did national welfare and national misfortune depend on the personal character of the King. The King, it is true, could do nothing without his Witan; but as his Witan could do nothing without him, he was not a shadow or a puppet, but a most important personal agent. He was no more a puppet than the Leader of the House of Commons is a puppet. We may be sure that the King and his immediate advisers always had a practical initiative, and that the body of the Witan did little but accept |Overwhelming personal influence of an able King.| or reject their proposals. We may be sure that a King fit for his place, an Ælfred or an Æthelstan, met with nothing that could be called opposition, but wielded the assembly at his will. Princes clothed with far smaller constitutional powers than those of an ancient English King have become the ruling spirits of commonwealths which denied them any kind of independent action. Agêsilaos guided the policy of Sparta, and Francesco Foscari guided the policy of Venice,[155] with a personal influence almost as commanding as that which Periklês exercised in the pure democracy of Athens or Aratos in the mixed constitution of the Achaian League. So when a great King sat on the West-Saxon throne, we may be sure that, while every constitutional form was strictly observed,[156] the votes of the Witan were guided in everything by the will of the King. But when the King had no will, or a will which the Witan could not consent to, then the machine gave way, and nothing was to be seen |Importance of the King as the Executive.| but confusion and every evil work.[157] Again, the King was not only the first mover, he was also the main doer of everything. The Witan decreed, but it was the King who carried out their decrees. Weighty as was the influence of his personal character on the nature of the resolutions to be passed, its influence was weightier still on the way in which those resolutions were to be carried out. Under a good King counsel and execution went hand in hand; under a weak or wicked King there was no place found for either. Sometimes disgraceful resolutions were passed; sometimes wise and good resolutions were never carried into effect. The Witan under Æthelred sometimes voted money to buy off the Danes, sometimes they voted armies to fight against them; but, with Æthelred to carry out their votes, it mattered little what their |Influence of the King as Hlaford of all the chief men.| votes were. Add to all this the boundless influence which attached to the King from his having all the chief men of the land bound to him by the personal tie of thegnship. He was the Cyne-hlaford, at once the King of the nation and the personal lord of each individual. Though his grants of folkland and his nominations to the highest offices needed the assent of the Witan, yet in these matters above all his initiative would be undoubted; the Witan had only to confirm, and they would seldom be tempted to reject, the proposals which the King laid before them. He was not less the fountain of honour and the fountain of wealth, because in the disposal of both he had certain decent ceremonies to go through. |General importance and influence of the King.| Add to all this that in unsettled times there is a special chance, both of acts of actual oppression which the law is not strong enough to redress, and of acts of energy beyond the law which the nation easily forgives in the case of a victorious and beloved prince. Altogether, narrowly limited as were the legal powers of an ancient English King, his will, or lack of will, had the main influence on the destinies of the nation, and his personal character was of as much moment to the welfare of the state as the personal character of an absolute ruler.

§ 4. The Imperial power of the King and his relation to the Dependent Kingdoms.

The King and his Witan then, in their joint action, formed the supreme legislature and the supreme tribunal |England strictly one kingdom, but much local independence retained by the incorporated kingdoms.| of the English kingdom. That kingdom, from the days of Æthelstan onwards, took in the whole Teutonic portion of Britain, together with those Celtic lands to the south-west which had been incorporated and to a great extent Teutonized. This whole region, at least from the overthrow of the last Northumbrian King under Eadred, formed in the strictest sense one kingdom; the revolt of the Mercians against Eadwig was only a momentary interruption of its unity. The ancient divisions were indeed by no means forgotten; above all, the great Danish land beyond the Humber still retained a lively memory of its former independence. Both Northumberland and the other incorporated kingdoms kept much of the form of distinct states; each state had its local Witenagemót, presided over by its local Ealdorman or Earl, who exercised, by commission from the King and his Witan, full royal authority within his own province. But I have already explained that, vast as were the powers of an ancient Ealdorman, he was still only a great magistrate, not a prince, even a dependent prince. The whole land formed one kingdom under one King, and the King and his Witan held direct authority in every corner of it. But this kingdom of the English was not the only title and dignity to which the house of |Superiority or Empire of the West-Saxon Kings over all Britain.| Cerdic had attained. The King of the English was also Emperor of the whole isle of Britain. I must now explain somewhat more at length the nature of this British Empire, as distinguished from the English kingdom which was |Statement of the question. First, the fact of the superiority. Secondly, the force of the assumption of strictly Imperial titles.| only part of it. In this inquiry two special points call for notice. There is, first, the fact that the English Kings did exercise a superiority of some kind over the whole of Britain, a fact which has sometimes been called in question by local prejudice. There is, secondly, the question as to the exact nature of that superiority, and as to the motives which led the Kings of the tenth and eleventh centuries to assume distinctively Imperial titles. It must not be forgotten that in those days such titles were not assumed at random; the idea of the Roman Empire was still thoroughly understood, and indeed the Roman Empire itself, both in the East and in the West, was in one of its most flourishing periods.

The fact that the West-Saxon or English Kings, from Eadward the Elder onwards, did exercise an external supremacy over the Celtic princes of the island is a fact too clear to be misunderstood by any one who looks the evidence on |Superiority over Scotland dates from Eadward the Elder. 924.| the matter fairly in the face. I date their supremacy over Scotland from the reign of Eadward the Elder, because there is no certain earlier instance of submission on the part of the Scots to any West-Saxon King. I pass by the |No earlier supremacy in Wessex.| instances of Scottish submission to the earlier Northumbrian Kings, as well as the seeming submission of both Scots and Northumbrians to the Roman Empire itself in the person of Charles the Great.[158] These instances do not prove the existence of any permanent superiority; they are rather analogous to the temporary and fluctuating superiority of this or that Bretwalda over the other English kingdoms. But from the time of Eadward the Elder onwards the case is |Submission of Wales to Ecgberht, 830; to Eadward, 922.| perfectly clear. The submission of Wales dates from the time of Ecgberht; but it evidently received a more distinct and formal acknowledgement in the reign of Eadward. Two years after followed the Commendation of Scotland and |The Welsh and Scottish people concur with their princes in the Commendation.| Strathclyde.[159] Now it seems to be implied in the case of Wales, and it is still more plainly stated in the case of Scotland and Strathclyde, that the people of both those countries had a share in those acts of their princes by which Eadward was chosen to Father and to Lord. I conceive this to mean that the Scottish and Welsh princes acted in this matter by the consent and authority of whatever body in their own states answered to the Witan in England. In both cases the commendation was a |Nature of Commendation;| solemn national act. I use the feudal word commendation, because that word seems to me better than any other to express the real state of the case. The transaction between Eadward and the Celtic princes was simply an application, on an international scale, of the general principle of the |the relation unaffected by greatness or smallness of scale.| Comitatus. That relation, like all the feudal relations which it helped to form, may be entered into either on the greatest or on the smallest scale. The land which is originally granted out on a feudal tenure, or which its allodial owner finds it expedient to convert into a fief held on feudal tenure, may be a kingdom or it may be a rood of land maintaining its man. So the lord whom a man chooses, and the man who chooses the lord, may be of any possible rank, from the Emperor and the Pope with their vassal Kings down to the smallest Thegn and his neighbouring ceorl. It would even seem that the ceorl himself might be the lord of a poorer ceorl.[160] The relation is exactly the same, whatever may be the rank and power of the parties between whom it is contracted. In every case alike, great or small, faithful service is owing on the one side and faithful protection on the other. In every case alike, great or small, the relation may imply a strictly feudal tenure of land or it may not. Now the Chroniclers, in recording these cases of Welsh and Scottish submission, make use, as if of set purpose, of the familiar legal phrases which express the relation of commendation on the smaller |Process of Commendation on a small scale.| scale. A man “chose his lord;” he sought some one more powerful than himself, with whom he entered into the relation of Comitatus; as feudal ideas strengthened, he commonly surrendered his allodial land to the lord so chosen, and received it back again from him on a feudal tenure. This was the process of commendation, a process of every day occurrence in the case of private men choosing their lords, whether those lords were simple gentlemen or |Instances of Commendation among sovereign princes.| Kings. And the process was equally familiar among sovereign princes themselves.[161] Almost all the northern and eastern vassals of the Western Empire, some of them of kingly rank,[162] became vassals by commendation. The commendation was doubtless in many cases far from voluntary, but the legal form was always the same. The lands of these princes were not original grants from the Emperors; but their holders found it expedient to come to terms with their Imperial neighbour, and to place themselves and their lands in the same position as if their lands had really been Imperial grants. We might go on to say that the |Commendation of the Normans to Leo the Ninth. 1053.| Norman conquerors of southern Italy commended themselves to the Pope whom they took prisoner, and that the Sicilian kingdoms, on the strength of that commendation, remained for seven hundred years in the position of fiefs |Commendation of England to the Pope by John [1213]; to the Emperor by Richard. 1193.| of the Holy See. The kingdom of England itself was twice commended to a foreign potentate. John, as all the world knows, commended his kingdom to the Pope; and his brother Richard had before that commended it to the Emperor. There was nothing unusual or degrading in the relation; if Scotland, Wales, Strathclyde, commended themselves to the West-Saxon King, they only put themselves in the same relation to their powerful neighbour in which every continental prince stood in theory, and most of them in actual fact, to the Emperor, Lord of the World. |Homage of Odo the West-Frank to Arnulf. 888.| Not to speak of a crowd of smaller instances, Odo, King of the West-Franks, commended himself to Arnulf of Germany, just as Howel and Constantine commended themselves to Eadward of Wessex. And this commendation was made before Arnulf became Emperor and Lord of the World, while he was still the simple King of the Eastern Franks.[163] The commendation of Scotland and Strathclyde was, in form at least, a perfectly voluntary act, done with the full consent of the nations interested. The kingdom of Strathclyde soon came to an end, and with the Welsh of Wales proper no lasting relations of any kind |Relations between England and Scotland as friendly as was usual in such cases.| could be kept up. But between the English over-lord and his Scottish vassal the mutual compact was not worse kept than it commonly was in such cases. It was often broken and often renewed; but this was no more than happened always and everywhere in those turbulent times. The relations between the English Basileus and the King of Scots were at least as friendly as the relations which existed in the tenth century between the King of the West-Franks |The claims of Edward the First in 1291 rest on the Commendation to Eadward the Elder in 924.| and his dangerous vassals at Paris and Rouen. The original commendation to the Eadward of the tenth century, confirmed by a series of acts of submission spread over the whole of the intermediate time, is the true justification for the acts of his glorious namesake in the thirteenth century.[164] The only difference was that, during that time, feudal notions had greatly developed on both sides; the original commendation of the Scottish King and people to a lord, had changed, in the ideas of both sides, into a |Change of ideas in the meanwhile.| feudal tenure of the land of the Scottish kingdom. But this change was simply the universal change which had come over all such relations everywhere. That this point, the only point which could with any justice have been brought forward against Edward on the Scottish side, never was brought forward shows how completely the ancient notion of commendation had gone out of mind.[165] But the principal point at issue, the right of the over-lord to decide between two claimants of the vassal kingdom, rested on excellent precedents in the reigns of Eadward the Confessor and of William Rufus. Altogether the vassalage—to use the most convenient word—of Scotland from the |924–1328.| commendation to Eadward to the treaty of Northampton |Threefold relation of the King of Scots to the English Crown.| is one of the best authenticated facts in history. But it is here needful to point out two other distinct events which have often been confounded with the commendation of Scotland, a confusion through which the real state of the case has often been misunderstood. In the eleventh century at least, if not in the tenth, the King of Scots stood to his English over-lord in a threefold relation, grounded on three distinct acts which are popularly confounded. In this matter, as in so many others, prevalent ignorance is strengthened by inattention to historical geography. As it is hard to make people understand that there has not always been a kingdom of France including Marseilles and Strassburg, perhaps even including Nizza and Chambery, so it is hard to make people understand that there were not always kingdoms of England and Scotland, with the Tweed and the Cheviot Hills as the boundaries between them. It must be borne in mind that in the tenth century no such boundaries were known, and that the very names of England and Scotland were only just beginning to be |Geography of Scotland, Strathclyde, and Lothian in the tenth century.| heard. At the time of the commendation the country which is now called Scotland was divided among three quite distinct sovereignties. North of the Forth and Clyde reigned the King of Scots, an independent Celtic prince reigning over a Celtic people, the Picts and Scots, the exact relation between which two tribes is a matter of perfect indifference to my present purpose. South of the two great firths the Scottish name and the Scottish dominion were unknown. The south-western part of modern Scotland formed part of the kingdom of the Strathclyde Welsh, which up to 924 was, like the kingdom of the |Relations of the three to one another and to the English Crown.| Scots, an independent Celtic principality. The south-eastern part of modern Scotland, Lothian in the wide sense of the word, was purely English, as in language it remains to this day. It was part of the kingdom of Northumberland, and it had its share in all the revolutions of that kingdom. In the year 924 Lothian, like the rest of Northumberland, was subject only to that precarious superiority on the part of Wessex which had been handed on from Ecgberht and Ælfred, In the year 924, when the three kingdoms, Scotland, Strathclyde, and Northumberland, all commended themselves to Eadward, the relation was something new on the part of Scotland and Strathclyde; but on the part of Lothian, as an integral part of Northumberland, it was only a renewal of the relation which had been formerly entered into with Ecgberht and Ælfred. It is not uncommon to hear the vassalage of Scotland proper, that is, the land north of the Forth and Clyde, mixed up with questions about Cumberland and Lothian. But, at the time of the Commendation of 924, Lothian stood in no relation at all towards Scotland, except that of simple, most likely not very friendly, neighbourhood. Strathclyde |Since 908.| was already ruled by princes of the Scottish royal house,[166] but it was still a kingdom quite independent of Scotland. The transactions which brought Scotland, Strathclyde, and Lothian into their relations to one another and to the English crown were quite distinct from each other. They were as follows:—

First, The Commendation of the King and people of the Scots to Eadward in 924.

Secondly, The Grant of Cumberland by Eadmund to Malcolm in 945.

Thirdly, The grant of Lothian to the Scottish Kings, either under Eadgar or under Cnut.

Popular confusions; true nature of the grant of Cumberland.

These three events are perfectly distinct, and the relations created by them are perfectly distinct; but, as always happens when several relations and tenures co-exist, the three gradually got confounded together, both in idea and in fact. Both in popular conception and in the hands of partizan Scottish writers, the second of these three events is made to obscure the other two. The grant by an English King to a Scottish King of a country described as Cumberland is something too clear to be denied; that the Scottish princes held their Cumbrian dominions as a fief of the English crown, that they did homage for them to the English King, no Scottish writer has ever ventured to call in doubt.[167] In truth there seems never to have been any wish to call this fact in doubt, because the Cumbrian homage, put forth sometimes even in an exaggerated shape, has formed a convenient means of escape from the fact of the homage for Scotland proper and from the fact of the purely English character of Lothian. And the confusion of geographical terms comes conveniently in. In modern language Cumberland means a single shire which for ages has been undoubtedly English. In modern language Lothian means three shires which for ages have been undoubtedly Scottish. People are thus led to believe that Lothian was from all time an integral part of Scotland, and also that the homage done by the Scottish to the English King was done only for the county of Cumberland as an integral part of England. But in the language of the year 945 Lothian was still an integral portion of England; Cumberland meant a country, part of which is now English and part Scottish, but which up to that time was neither English nor Scottish, but the seat of a distinct Welsh principality. By Cumberland in short is meant, not merely the modern English county so called, but all northern Strathclyde; that is, modern Cumberland together |Circumstances of the grant of Cumberland or Strathclyde.| with a considerable portion of modern Scotland. In 945 the reigning King Donald revolted against his over-lord Eadmund; he was overthrown and his kingdom ravaged;[168] it was then granted on tenure of military service to Donald’s kinsman Malcolm King of Scots. Malcolm could hardly have earned this favour except by sharing in the war against Donald, which indeed his actual relation to the English crown bound him to do. For a long time the fief then granted was granted out again by the Scottish Kings as an apanage for their own heirs-apparent. The southern part of this territory was afterwards, as we shall see at a later stage of our history, |The part kept by Scotland becomes merged in the Scottish kingdom.| annexed to England; the northern part was kept by the Scottish Kings, and was gradually, though very gradually, incorporated with their own kingdom. The distinction between the two states seems to have been quite forgotten in the thirteenth century; neither side in the controversies of that time drew any distinction between the tenure of Fife and the tenure of Galloway; the claims of the English crown were asserted, admitted, or denied, |Original distinction between the position of Strathclyde or Cumberland, and the position of Scotland proper.| equally with regard to both. Yet the relations between England and Scotland proper and the relations between England and Strathclyde or Cumberland, though much the same in their nature, were wholly different in their origin. The relation in which Scotland stood to England was one of commendation; the relation in which Cumberland stood to England was one of original grant. This last fact marks a distinct advance in feudal ideas. Cumberland was from the beginning a real territorial fief. Eadward did not grant Scotland to Constantine, because Scotland had never been his; but Constantine and his people, by their own act, put themselves in the same position as if it had been so granted. But Eadmund really did grant Cumberland to Malcolm; he granted him a territory which he had himself conquered, and which he might have kept in his own hands. Cumberland in short—including, as must not be forgotten, the south-western shires of modern Scotland—was held by the Scottish King or his son as a feudal benefice in the strictest sense.

Grant of Lothian.

Cumberland then was truly a fief of the crown of England, but it was not a fief held within the kingdom of England. This last position, popularly thought to be the position of Cumberland, was really the position of Lothian. The date of the grant of Lothian is not perfectly clear.[169] But whatever was the date of the grant, there can |Lothian an integral part of England.| be no doubt at all as to its nature. Lothian, an integral part of England, could be granted only as any other part of England could be granted, namely to be held as part of England, its ruler being in the position of an English Earl. If the grant was really made by Eadgar, this is still more likely to be the case, on account of the unusual friendliness of the relations between Eadgar and Kenneth. Eadgar might well grant, and Kenneth might well accept, a purely English government, held by a tenure which would bind him still more closely to his English over-lord than either his commendatory relation for Scotland |Lothian gradually separated from England and merged in Scotland.| or his feudal relation for Strathclyde. But in such a grant the seeds of separation were sown. A part of the kingdom which was governed by a foreign sovereign, on whatever terms of dependence, could not long remain in the position of a province governed by an ordinary Earl. The King of Scots, though holding all his dominions by various kinds of dependent tenure, could not be dealt with in any portion of them like a simple Earl of the Northumbrians. That the possession of Lothian would under all ordinary circumstances remain hereditary, must have been looked for from the beginning. This alone would distinguish Lothian from all other earldoms. Though it was very common to appoint the son of a deceased Ealdorman to his father’s dignity, still he had not so much as a preferential claim; the office was held altogether at the pleasure of the King and his Witan. But when a province was once granted to a foreign prince, even though that prince remained a feudatory of the English crown, this kind of control was parted with for ever, or could be won back only at the cost of war. |Distinction between Scotland, Strathclyde, and Lothian gradually forgotten.| Lothian could not fail to become an hereditary dominion of the Scottish Kings; it could not fail gradually to lose its distinct character and the remembrance of its distinct tenure, and to be gradually merged in the mass of the other dominions of its rulers. By the time of the great controversy of the thirteenth century the distinction seems to have been forgotten on both sides, exactly as it was in the case of Strathclyde. The claims of the English King were the same over the whole country, over Scotland, Strathclyde, and Lothian; they were put forward as a whole, and they were accepted or rejected as a whole. Yet, when we weigh the claims of Edward the First by the letter of the compacts of the tenth century, if we pronounce them to go a little beyond the mark in the case of Scotland proper, we must equally pronounce them to fall a little under the mark in the case of Lothian. The fact is that the progress of feudal ideas had wiped out the distinction, and had brought all tenures to the same level. The alternative by that time had come to be whether Scotland, as a whole, that is, Scotland proper, Scottish Strathclyde, and Lothian, should be a fief of England or an independent kingdom. That Scotland, Strathclyde, and Lothian were originally all dependencies of England, but held in three different degrees of dependence, had passed out of mind on both sides.

Later history of Lothian.

It was then to be expected that Lothian, when once granted to the King of Scots, should gradually be merged in the kingdom of Scotland. But the peculiar and singular destiny of this country could hardly have been looked for. |Lothian becomes the historical Scotland.| Neither Eadgar nor Kenneth could dream that this purely English province would become the historical Scotland. The different tenures of Scotland and Lothian got confounded; the Kings of Scots, from the end of the eleventh century, became English in manners and language; they were not without some claims to the crown of England, and not without some hopes of winning it. They thus learned to attach more and more value to the English part of their dominions, and they laboured to spread its language and manners over their original Celtic territory. They kept their ancient title of Kings of Scots, but they became in truth Kings of English Lothian and of Anglicized Fife. A state was thus formed, politically distinct from England and which political circumstances gradually made bitterly hostile to England—a state which indeed kept on a dark and mysterious Celtic background, but which, as it appears in history, is English in laws, language, and manners, more truly English indeed, in many respects, than England itself remained after the Norman Conquest. As in so many other cases, the people took the name of their sovereign; the English subjects of the King of Scots learned to call themselves Scots and their country Scotland. Meanwhile the true Scots to the north of them, the original subjects of the Scottish dynasty, forsaken as it were by their natural princes, became the standing difficulty of their government. The true Scots are known in history only as a mass of turbulent tribes, alien in customs, language, and feeling from those who had taken their name—tribes which the Kings of Dunfermline and Edinburgh had much ado to keep in even nominal subjection—tribes which, by a strange turning about of relations, were ready to fight for their English over-lord against the Kings of Dunfermline and Edinburgh. |Analogy between the history of Scotland and of Switzerland.| The history of Scotland is in many respects strikingly analogous to the history of Switzerland. I pass by the singular likeness in the national character of the two peoples, a likeness to be traced alike in the virtues and in the defects of each. I speak only of the outward facts of their history. In the case of Switzerland, parts of the German, Burgundian, and Italian nations were, through a variety of political causes, detached from the main body of their respective countrymen, and became united by a close political tie to one another. They thus formed an artificial nation,[170] a political and historical |Their position as artificial nations.| nation, but not a nation of common blood and speech. In the case of Scotland, portions of the English, Welsh, and Irish[171] nations were in like manner detached from the main body of their own people; they became in like manner politically connected with one another, and grew in like manner into an artificial nation. In both cases it is often amusing to hear men claim as their forefathers those who were the bitterest enemies of their real forefathers. But in both cases it is more important to mark, what the history both of Switzerland and of Scotland abundantly proves, that an artificial nation of this kind is capable of as true and honourable national feeling as any nation of the most unmixed blood and language. The history both of Switzerland and of Scotland presents so many materials for honest pride that it is a pity that exaggerations and perversions of history should have ever been allowed to step in in either case. And, to cite one point more of likeness, each people has drawn its national name from a very small portion of its territory and population. Switzerland, German, Burgundian, and Italian, has taken its common name from the single small canton of Schwyz. Scotland, English, Welsh, and Gaelic, has taken its common name from the original small colony of Irish Scots who settled on the coast of Argyllshire.

Case of Wales analogous to that of Scotland.

I have dwelt on the Scottish question at length, both because of its intrinsic importance, and because the relations between the crowns of England and Scotland will call for constant notice in the course of our history. The case with regard to Wales is the case of Scotland over again. The homage of the Welsh Kings was always due, and was constantly exacted, from the days of Ecgberht and Eadward onwards. The only difference was in the |1283.| final result. Wales was incorporated with the English |1328.| kingdom at the close of the thirteenth century; Scotland obtained perfect independence in the fourteenth. The life of one man made all the difference. The great Edward lived thoroughly to secure his Welsh conquest; before he had thoroughly secured his Scottish conquest, his mission had passed to a son who could not keep his crown on his head at home.

Before we leave this subject, it may be well to remember what the relations between a dependent kingdom and its superior lord really were. The King of the English did not, by virtue of the commendation, claim any jurisdiction within the dominions of his vassals. The individual inhabitant of Scotland stood in no relation to |The relation between Scotland and England international only.| the English King.[172] The relation was a purely international one. The King and people of the Scots chose the King of the English as their Father and Lord; it became his duty to protect them against their enemies, and it became their duty to serve him against his enemies. But with the internal management of the Scottish kingdom he had no concern, nor did this or that individual |The relation often broken on both sides.| Scot become his man or his subject. Such was the The relation often broken on both sides. relation; as we go on, we shall see its engagements broken on both sides. We shall find the Scottish vassal more than once breaking through his duty of fidelity, and |1000.| we shall once at least find the English over-lord of Strathclyde breaking through his duty of protection, setting up an unjust claim to a tribute which was not imposed by the original grant, and cruelly harrying the land in revenge for a perfectly justifiable refusal of his demands.[173] But such breaches of duty on both sides are in no way peculiar to England and Scotland; they form a very large portion of the history of any two |Delicate nature of the relation.| countries between which such relations existed. The truth is that the feudal or commendatory relation is a very delicate relation, one which offers constant temptations to a breach of its duties on both sides, temptations which, |Analogy with colonial relations.| in a rude age, must often have been irresistible. The relation is not identical with the modern relation between the mother country and its colonies and dependencies, but there are many points of analogy between the two. And we all know well how very delicate the relation always is between the metropolis and its colony. But the point to be borne in mind is that the English over-lord of Scotland, Strathclyde, and Wales claimed no sovereignty within those countries, but only a superiority over them. He claimed such a superiority as the King of the French exercised, or claimed to exercise, over the Duke of the Normans. The relation was less close than the relation between the Emperor and the German princes, as no common Diet looked after the common interests of |Attendance of the Welsh and Scottish princes in the Witenagemót.| all. That the Scottish and Welsh princes had the right, which they most likely deemed a burthen, of attending the meetings of the English Witan is certain; it is equally certain that the attendance of the Scottish and Cumbrian princes was exceedingly rare.[174] And at any rate they must have come only in their personal capacity, to transact any business which they might have with their over-lord and his counsellors. We cannot suppose that the English Gemót was ever attended by any Scottish or Welsh Witan beyond the immediate suite of the Scottish and Welsh Kings. The Kings came, because they were the men of the English over-lord; but the private Scot or Briton was not the man of the English over-lord, and had no need to attend the assembly which he summoned. As little can we deem that the English Gemót took on itself to make laws for Wales or Scotland. Neither can we deem that the Welsh and Scottish princes, though they sign the acts of the Gemóts at which they were present, took any active share or interest in purely English affairs.

The King of the English was thus over-lord or external superior of all the princes of the isle of Britain. |Statement of the case as to the Imperial titles.| In that character, our Kings, from the days of Æthelstan onwards, bore titles beyond those of ordinary royalty, titles which in strictness belonged only to the successors of Charles and of Constantine. They appear in their public acts as Basileus, Cæsar, Imperator, Imperator Augustus.[175] |1st. Are they to be taken as seriously implying Imperial claims?| Several questions at once arise. Are these titles mere outpourings of vanity, mere pieces of inflated rhetoric, mere specimens of the turgid style of the tenth century? Or do they imply a serious claim on the part of the English Kings to be looked on as something more than mere Kings, to be deemed the peers of the lords of Imperial |2nd. If so, are they to be traced uninterruptedly to the old provincial Emperors?| Rome, Old and New? And if they do imply such a claim, from what was that claim understood to be derived? Did the Emperors of Britain in the tenth century inherit, or claim to inherit, their Imperial rank from the provincial Emperors who reigned in Britain in the third, fourth, and fifth centuries? Are we to trace an uninterrupted succession of Imperial sovereignty from Carausius onwards, through Maximus, Constantine,[176] Aurelius Ambrosius, and the eight Bretwaldas, down to the Imperatores and Basileis of the days succeeding the commendations of Scotland, Wales, and Strathclyde? Or are we to see in these titles |3rd. Or are they borrowed from the style of the contemporary Emperors, through a feeling that the position of the English King was an Imperial one?| merely an imitation of the style of the contemporary Roman Emperors, Eastern and Western—an imitation not grounded solely on a love of sounding titles, but on a feeling that the English sovereignty was in some sort greater than that of ordinary Kings, that it had something in common with that of the Emperors, that in truth the King of the English held in his own island a position answering to that which the Emperor of the Romans held in the rest of the world? These questions have given rise |The third alternative the true one.| to a large amount of controversy. My own belief, briefly to sum it up, is that vanity and the love of sounding titles may well have had some secondary share in the matter, but yet that these titles were seriously meant as a distinct assertion of the Imperial position of the English crown. But I do not believe that there was the least thought of any succession from the ancient provincial Emperors, or from any phantom of Imperial sovereignty which may have lingered on among the Welsh at the time of the English Conquest or afterwards. I believe that these titles were taken in order to claim for the English crown an absolute independence of the Roman Empire, and at the same time to assert its right to a superiority over all the princes of Britain of the same kind as that which the Emperor exercised, or claimed to exercise, over all the princes of the mainland. I believe in short that, as the Metropolitan of England was sometimes spoken of as Pope of another world,[177] so the King of the English claimed to be Emperor of the same island world, a world over which the Lord of the greater world at Rome or at Constantinople had no authority. I will now go on to give the reasons for the conclusions to which I have come.

Turgid style of the Latin

It is undoubtedly true that the Latin charters of our Kings during the latter half of the tenth century are |Charters of the tenth century.| the most turgid and absurd of all human compositions. Nothing is said straightforwardly; no idea is expressed by the word which would most naturally occur to express it. The Latin language is ransacked for strange and out of the way terms; and when Latin fails, the writers draw on whatever store of Greek they enjoyed. They turn the whole into a piebald or mongrel language, something like the jargon of English lawyers in the seventeenth century.[178] When such a taste prevailed, it was no wonder that the names of King, Ealdorman, and Bishop were thought not |Prevalent use of Greek and other strange titles.| grand enough, and that the dignitaries of Church and State were described by strange, foreign, and often quite unintelligible titles, Roman, Greek, Persian, anything that came uppermost. Again, it is no less true that |This affectation hardly known in the English Charters.| this sort of affectation is almost wholly confined to the Latin charters. Those which are drawn up in English are for the most part simple and business-like, and in them the use of Imperial titles is much rarer.[179] Still I |The Imperial titles then conveyed a distinct meaning, and were not likely to be taken up at random.| cannot look on such titles as Basileus, Imperator, Imperator Augustus, as mere outbursts of swelling rhetoric. We must remember that they were all formal titles, titles to which a very distinct meaning was attached, titles which expressed a special position and which carried with them a special reverence, titles which were not then, as they are now, taken up at random by every upstart who, half in shame, half in self-conceit, shrinks from calling himself by the straightforward title of King. Any one who knows what the mediæval theory of the Empire was will understand that for a man to call himself Imperator Augustus was in those days no light matter. It was a thing which the vainest potentate would hardly do without some kind of reason for it. For an ordinary King to call himself Emperor was very nearly as strong a measure as it would have been for an ordinary Archbishop |Force of the word Basileus.| to call himself Pope. Basileus again, the favourite title of all, was one specially Imperial; by a caprice of language it had become the Greek equivalent of Imperator; it was the special title of the Eastern Emperors, the assumption of which by any other prince was held by them to be an infringement of their sole claim to represent the old Roman sovereignty. It is hard to believe that our Kings would have assumed a title surrounded by such associations, one which had been made the subject of many disputes, merely to make a sentence in a charter sound more swelling. It is hard to believe that they would have assumed it without a direct intention to claim thereby a distinctly Imperial sovereignty. Still, considering the fondness for Greek titles and Greek words of all kinds which the charters so constantly display, if the title of Basileus stood alone, it might not be safe to lay |Still more distinct import of the other titles.| too much stress upon it. But when we also meet with Cæsar, Imperator, and Augustus, it is impossible to believe that any title of the class was assumed without a meaning. Whatever we say of the Greek title of Basileus, these Latin titles at least were not vague descriptions borrowed from a strange and half unintelligible language. They were titles in familiar use, titles which every one understood, titles which the diplomacy of the age studiously applied to one potentate and to one potentate only. They were titles whose force and use must have been perfectly well known to every man who understood the Latin language. It is utterly inconceivable that such titles should have been |The titles meant to assert an Imperial position.| taken up at random. They could have had no object but to claim for the prince who assumed them a sovereignty of the same kind as that which belonged to the prince for whom they were commonly reserved.

Granting then that the assumption of the Imperial titles had a meaning, and that it was not a mere piece of rhetorical vanity, the second question follows;—Was there any real continuous Imperial tradition handed on from the days of the provincial Emperors, or were the Imperial titles simply assumed in imitation or rivalry or whatever it is to be called, of the contemporary German, Italian, and Byzantine Emperors? My own conviction is |No continuous tradition from the provincial Emperors.| very decidedly on the latter side.[180] I do not see how any continuous Imperial tradition could have been handed on from a Roman ruler in Britain to a West-Saxon King. Every circumstance of the English Conquest shuts out such a belief. It is likely enough that in Wales and Cornwall memories might still linger on from the days when Cæsars and Augusti reigned in Britain. It is likely enough that Aurelius or Arthur or any other Welsh leader may have put forward some kind of Imperial pretensions. But that these princes should have handed on such rights or claims to their English conquerors and destroyers seems to me utterly inconceivable. We have seen in the last Chapter how completely the English Conquest of Britain differed from all other Teutonic conquests. Elsewhere the conquerors became more or less Romanized; they rejoiced to receive from the reigning Emperor the investiture of some Roman dignity, some empty title of Consul or Patrician. From the assumption of the Imperial dignity itself our whole race shrank with a kind of superstitious awe till the spell was broken by the coronation of the great Charles. This last motive indeed was one which could have no effect upon the mind of Ælle or Ceawlin; but its place would be fully supplied by utter ignorance, carelessness, and contempt for the titles and institutions of the vanquished. Consul, Patrician, Augustus, all would be |Real position of the “Tyrants” or provincial Emperors.| alike unintelligible and despicable in their eyes. And, before we rule that an English Bretwalda or an Emperor of Britain was in any sense a successor of the so-called Tyrants[181] or provincial Emperors, let us remember what the position of these Tyrants or Emperors really was. Carausius, Maximus, Constantine, and the rest, never called themselves Emperors of Britain. According to the strict Imperial theory, an Emperor of Britain is an absurd impossibility; the titles assumed by Eadgar are in themselves as ridiculous as the titles assumed by those who in later times have called themselves “Emperor of Austria,” “Emperor of Hayti,” “Emperor of Mexico,” “Emperor of the French.” The Emperor is essentially Lord of Rome and of the World; and it was only by setting itself up as being in some sort another world that Britain could lay any claim to either a Pope or an Emperor of its own. |Not Emperors of Britain, but pretenders to the whole Roman Empire while possessing only a part.| But the very last thought of the old Tyrants or provincial Emperors would have been to claim any independent existence for Britain, Gaul, or any other part of the Empire of which they might have gained possession. Nothing could be further from their wishes than to set up anything like a separate national kingdom. They were pretenders to the whole Empire, if they could get it, and they not uncommonly did get it in the end. A man who began as tyrant often became a lawful Emperor, either by deposing the reigning Emperor or by |Carausius. 286–294.| being accepted by him as his colleague. Carausius, the first British Emperor according to this theory, held not only Britain but part of Gaul. It must not be thought that part of Gaul had been annexed to the dominions of a national sovereign of Britain, as Calais was by Edward the Third and Boulogne by Henry the Eighth. Britain and part of Gaul were simply those parts of the Roman Empire of which Carausius, a candidate for the whole Empire, had been able actually to possess himself. At last Carausius was accepted as a colleague by Diocletian and Maximian, and so became a lawful Cæsar and Augustus. |Allectus. 294–297.| Allectus was less fortunate; he never got beyond Britain, and instead of being acknowledged as a colleague, he was defeated and slain by Constantius. Constantius himself reigned in Britain; but no one would call Constantius a British Emperor, and Carausius was a British Emperor |Magnentius. 350.| just as little. Magnentius, Maximus, Constantine, were simply Emperors whose career began in Britain and not in |Maximus. 383–388.| Syria or Africa; they were not content to reign as British |Constantine. 407.| Emperors or Emperors of Britain; they speedily asserted their claim to as large a share of the Roman world as they had strength to win and to keep. Now it is perfectly possible, especially if any of the Welsh princes were descendants of Maximus, that a remembrance of these Emperors may have survived in Britain, and it is not unlikely that the conquest of Gaul by an Emperor who set forth from Britain may be the kernel of truth round which much of the mythical history of Arthur has |No analogy between these Emperors and the English Bretwaldas.| gathered. But it is certainly hard to understand the analogy between a Roman general, trying to obtain the whole Roman Empire, but who is unable to obtain more than Britain or Britain and Gaul, and a Teutonic chief, winning by his own sword some sort of superiority over the other princes, Celtic and Teutonic, within the isle of Britain. The essence of the position of Carausius and his successors is that they aspired to an universal dominion, and with such dominion any independent or national existence on the part of Britain would have been utterly inconsistent. The essence of the position of an English Bretwalda or Basileus is that he is the very embodiment of an independent national existence, that he aspires to a dominion purely insular, that he claims supremacy over everything within the island, but aspires to no conquests beyond it. He is a “Wielder of Britain,” Emperor so far as he is independent of either continental Empire, Emperor so far as he exercises Imperial power over vassal princes within his own island. I can see no likeness between him and a Roman general, who aspires to reign on the seven hills, but who is unluckily shut up against his will within the four seas of Britain.[182]

I infer then that the Imperial style which was affected by our Kings from Æthelstan onwards was not derived by any continuous tradition from any earlier British or Roman |Explanation to be found in the circumstances of the time.| Empire. It is in the circumstances of their own kingdom, and in the general circumstances of Europe during the ninth and tenth centuries, that we must look for the causes which led them to challenge Imperial rank. Ecgberht, |Charles and Ecgberht.| it should not be forgotten, was the friend, the guest, and no doubt the pupil, of Charles the Great.[183] Ecgberht |802.| was chosen to the West-Saxon throne two years after the Old Rome re-asserted, in the person of Charles, her right to choose her own Emperor. We cannot doubt that, through his whole career, he had Charles before him as his model, and that his object was to win for himself the same kind of dominion in his own island which Charles had won on the continent. But Ecgberht never assumed any higher style than that of King of the English, and even that, as far as we know, but once only.[184] In his days the unity of the Western Empire still remained unbroken under his benefactor and his benefactor’s son. It was enough for the West-Saxon King to feel himself well nigh the only independent prince in Western Christendom, |The plans of Ecgberht, checked yet in the end helped by the Danish invasions, were fully carried out by Eadward and Æthelstan.| without setting himself up as a rival Emperor. The schemes of Ecgberht, checked under his immediate successors by the Danish invasions, were in the end really promoted by those invasions, through the weakening and destruction of the other English kingdoms. At last his whole plan was carried out in the latest days of Eadward, and it was established in a more thoroughly organized form by Æthelstan. The whole isle of Britain was now, in different degrees of subjection and dependency, under the supreme dominion of the West-Saxon Kings. Now, and not before, begins the use of the Imperial titles. |Greatness of the position of Æthelstan.| Æthelstan, in whose reign the connexion between England and the continent was unusually busy, Æthelstan, Lord of all Britain, connected by marriage and friendship with all the greatest princes of Europe, could hardly fail to take in the greatness of his own position. He might well feel |His assumption of the Imperial style.| himself to be the peer of Emperors. He was the one prince whose dominions had never, since his own nation entered them, acknowledged any superiority in the lord of either Rome. Of our island at least might be said, whether in honour or in reproach,

“De tributo Cæsaris nemo cogitabat;

Omnes erant Cæsares; nemo censum dabat.”[185]

|Points of analogy between his position and that of the Emperors.| Whatever vague and transitory homage Cæsar may have received from Scots or Northumbrians, it is certain that no King of the West-Saxons ever knew a superior beyond the limits of his own island. But, from the days of Ecgberht onwards, every King of the West-Saxons had claimed or aspired to a superiority of his own through the whole extent of his own island; and now Æthelstan had converted those lofty dreams into a living reality. Gaul, Spain, Italy, Denmark, the Slavonic and other less known lands beyond the Elbe, all had bowed to the dominion of the first Teutonic Cæsar. To England alone he had been a model and a counsellor, but not a master. As the one perfectly independent prince in Western Christendom, Æthelstan was the equal of Emperors, and within his own island he held the same position which the Emperors held in the rest of the world. Like an Emperor, he not only had his own kingdom, governed under him by his own Dukes or Ealdormen, but his kingdom was surrounded by a circle of vassal princes who paid to him the homage which he himself paid to no superior upon earth. As no other prince in Western Christendom could claim for his own kingdom the same perfect independence of all Imperial superiority, so no other prince in Western Christendom could show, in a crowd of dependent princes, so perfect a reproduction of the Imperial majesty. And |No universally acknowledged Emperor at this time.| it must not be forgotten that during the first half of the tenth century there was not, as there was before and after, any one Emperor universally acknowledged by all the Christian states of the West. The days of the Carolingian Cæsars were past; the days of the Saxon Cæsars were not yet come. Guy, Lambert, Berengar, |888–896.| were Augusti not less fleeting, and far more feeble, than any of the tyrants of whom Britain had once been so fertile. The King of the English and Lord of all Britain might well feel himself to be a truer representative of Imperial greatness than Emperors whose rule was at most confined to a corner of Italy. He was, beyond all doubt, the second among Western Kings. The Kings of the Eastern Franks, not yet Emperors in formal rank, but marked out in the eyes of all men as the predestined heirs of Charles, were the only rulers who could be held to surpass him in power and glory. Without waiting for any formal coronation, the soldiers of Henry and Otto had saluted their victorious Kings as Imperatores and Patres Patriæ, and, with the same feeling, Æthelstan assumed, or received from his counsellors, the titles which placed |Revival of the Empire under Otto [962], not likely to make the English Kings withdraw their Imperial claims.| him on a level with them. The new birth of the Empire during the reign of Eadgar, the coronation of Otto the Great, which at once restored to the Imperial crown no small share of its ancient power and dignity, would by no means tend to make our princes lay aside any Imperial claims which they had already asserted. Eadgar was on the best terms with his Imperial uncle; still it might be thought needful to assert that England owed him no kind of homage, and that the other princes of Britain owed homage to Eadgar and not to Otto.

Here then, as it seems to me, and not in any traditions of Ambrosius or Carausius, is to be found the true explanation of the otherwise startling title of Emperor of |Full import of the Imperial titles.| Britain. That title was meant at once to assert the independence of the English crown upon any foreign superior, and to assert the dependence of all the other powers of Britain upon the English crown. It was meant to assert that the King of the English was, not the homager but the peer, alike of the Imperator of the West and of the Basileus of the East, and it was meant to assert that Scots, Welsh, and Cumbrians owed no duty to Rome or to Byzantium, but only to their Father and Lord at |They go out of use after the Norman Conquest, because insular dominion is no longer the chief object.| Winchester. The Imperial titles last in common use down to the Norman Conquest; after that their employment is rare, and they gradually die out altogether. And why? Because the Norman and Angevin Kings, though they were by no means disposed willingly to abate a tittle of the rights of their predecessors within the four seas of Britain, were far from looking on insular dominion as the main object of their policy. They were Kings of England, and they knew the strength and value of England; some of them had wisdom enough to value England for her own sake; still in the eyes of all of them, one main value of England was to serve as a nursery of men and a storehouse of money to serve their plans of continental ambition. They were Kings of England, but they were also Counts of Anjou, Dukes of Normandy and Aquitaine, striving after an equality with their liege lord at Paris, sometimes perhaps after a superiority over him. The British Empire in which Æthelstan gloried, and in which Cnut in the midst of his Northern triumphs gloried no less, was assuredly not despised by the wisdom of Henry of Anjou. But if it was one object of his policy, it was not the only one. In the eyes of the Poitevin knight-errant who came after him, it seemed hardly worth keeping; and it was something which could not be kept in the grasp of John and Henry the |The old claims take a more strictly feudal shape under Edward the First.| Third. At last in the great Edward there again arose a true Bretwalda, one who saw that the dominion of Æthelstan and Eadgar was a worthier prize than shadowy dreams of aggrandizement beyond the sea. But by this time the notion of a British Empire had given way to more purely feudal ideas, and his claims to supremacy took their shape |Later traces of the ideas.| accordingly. But traces of the old ideas still lingered on. Through the fourteenth, the fifteenth, the sixteenth centuries, a chain of instances may be put together which show that the idea of an Empire of Britain was not wholly forgotten.[186] Even when no Imperial claims were put forward on behalf of England, it was thought needful carefully to shut out all claims on the part of any other power to Imperial supremacy over England. And in the sixteenth century, along with the revived study of our early history, the Imperial titles themselves revive in a more definite form. The Imperial character of the English sovereignty was strongly asserted both by Henry the Eighth and by Elizabeth. In the days of Charles the Fifth a denial of all dependence on the Roman Cæsar may have been no less needful than a denial of all dependence on the Roman Pontiff. Henry may well have deemed it prudent to take the same precautions against his Imperial nephew which Eadgar had taken against his Imperial uncle. Protests of the like sort were again made in the reign of Elizabeth. We find her more than once formally described as Empress, an Empress whose Empire reached from “the Orcade isles to the mountains Pyrenee.” In this last description we find the key to the style. An Empire implied subordinate kingdoms. Elizabeth claimed to be Empress as being independent of the continental Emperor; she also claimed to be Empress as having a royal vassal within her own island. The same phrases which assert the independence of England upon the Austrian Emperor also assert the dependence of Scotland upon the English Empress.[187]

This then I believe to be the true account of the Imperial titles and Imperial pretensions of the English Kings in the tenth and eleventh centuries. Our Kings meant to assert at once their own perfect independence and the dependence of the other princes of Britain upon them. |Growth of the English system of dependencies. 827–1869.| It is perhaps worth notice that in all this we may see the beginnings of a system which has gone on to our own day. From the days of Ecgberht onwards the House of Cerdic has never been without its dependencies. Their sphere has gradually been enlarged; as nearer dependencies have been incorporated with the central state, another more distant circle of dependencies has arisen beyond them. Wessex held the supremacy over England; England held it over Great Britain; Great Britain held it over Ireland and a crowd of smaller islands and colonies; the United Kingdom holds it over colonies and dependencies of every kind, from Man to New Zealand. Since the days of the Roman Commonwealth, no other land has had so large an experience of the relations between a central power and half-incorporated states of various kinds. |Imperial character still retained by England.| In this sense, England is now a more truly Imperial power than any other in the world. Putting aside the local associations of Rome and Constantinople, no modern state comes so near to the notion of an Empire as understood either by Æthelstan or by Otto. There is therefore an historical meaning in the familiar phrases of “the British Empire” and “the Imperial Parliament,” whether any remembrance of ancient Bretwaldas and Basileis was or was not present to the minds of those who devised them.

Summary.

I thus bring to an end my survey of the political condition of England and its dependent states in the tenth and eleventh centuries. The dominion won by Eadward and Æthelstan was handed over unimpaired to William the Bastard. We have seen what that dominion was. There was a home monarchy in which the power of the King was strictly limited by law, but in which his personal influence was almost unbounded. There was also an external lordship over a body of vassal princes who had the right and the duty, though perhaps but seldom the will, to appear in the Great Council of their Over-lord along with the Bishops and Ealdormen of his own realm. |The old Kingdom and Empire transferred to William.| This dominion was, by the forced election of the English Witan, transferred to the hands of the Norman Conqueror. Under his successors the character of the monarchy |Gradual changes| gradually altered, but it altered far more through a change in the spirit of the administration than through actual |after the Conquest.| changes in the laws. The power of the crown was vastly increased in the hands of William and his sons, and in other respects the kingdom gradually changed from the old Teutonic to the later mediæval form. But it was always the constitutional doctrine that William, a legal claimant of the crown, received the crown as it had been held by his predecessors. It follows that a thorough knowledge of the position of those predecessors, of the nature of their authority and of the limits on their power, is absolutely necessary, if only to understand the position of the Norman Kings, what changes they made and what changes they did not make. What was the real nature and amount of those changes, political and social, will be shown in my last volume. And, along with them, I shall deal more specially with some points, like language and art, the earlier forms of which are most fittingly treated of by way of comparison with their later forms. For the present we turn for a while from the history and state of England as they stood under Ælfred and his immediate successors, to trace out the early history of the land which became closely connected with England in the course of the tenth century, and which sent forth the conquerors of England in the eleventh.

CHAPTER IV.
SKETCH OF THE HISTORY OF NORMANDY DURING THE TENTH CENTURY.[188]

The two foreign conquests of England which form the main subject of English history during the eleventh century were the work of nations which came originally of the same stock. First came the Danes themselves; |Normans and English originally kinsmen.| then came the Normans, the descendants of Danish or other Scandinavian settlers in Gaul. In mere blood therefore the Normans were allied in different degrees to all the Teutonic inhabitants of Britain, and they were very closely allied to the descendants of the Danish settlers in the North and East of England. And there can be little doubt that this original community of blood really had an important practical effect, and that the speedy fusion of Normans and English was greatly promoted by the fact that conquerors and conquered were in truth kinsmen. |Practical, but unrecognized, effects of this kindred.| But this influence was a purely silent one, and it was in no way acknowledged by those on whom it acted. Neither side thought at all of any kindred as existing between them. And to all appearance, no two nations of Western Europe could have been found which, in speech, feelings, |The Danes in England become Englishmen.| and manners, differed more widely from one another. The Danes who settled in England had been easily turned into Englishmen. Though the likeness of speech and institutions between the two nations has often been exaggerated, it was something not only real but palpable. It needed no historical research to find it out; it was something which men of both nations could feel for themselves. Among the earlier Teutonic settlers in Britain, we can well believe that there were some whose original kindred with the Teutons of Scandinavia was quite as close as their original kindred with some of their fellow Teutons in Britain. Anyhow, the languages of the two nations were closely allied; their institutions were very similar, those of England being doubtless the more advanced and regularly organized of the two. Religion formed the main difference between them; but the Danes in England soon adopted the Christian faith, and they were followed, after no very great interval, by their brethren in Denmark. Thus the Danish settler in England, when once baptized, readily became an Englishman, differing from the Angle or the Saxon only as the Angle and the Saxon differed from one another. This absorption into a kindred nation is less remarkable than the fact that the same people in another land adopted, with not much greater difficulty, a language and culture which was wholly alien to them. |The Danes in Gaul become Frenchmen.| For, as the Danes who settled in England became Englishmen, so the Danes who settled in Gaul equally became Frenchmen. The Normans of the eleventh century were men of Scandinavian descent who had cast away every outward trace of the language, manners, and feelings which made them kindred to Englishmen, and had adopted instead the language, manners, and feelings of Latin France. Before they landed in England, they had become Frenchmen; though still proud of the Norman name, they were content, as speakers of the French tongue, to call themselves Frenchmen in distinction from the Teutonic English.[189] No doubt the old Scandinavian element was still at work within them; it made them Frenchmen on a far nobler and grander scale than other Frenchmen, and it enabled them, when they had once settled in England, unconsciously but surely to become Englishmen. Still, when they followed their Duke to the conquest of England, they were in every outward respect no longer Scandinavians but Frenchmen. In a word, they were no longer Northmen but Normans; the change in the form of the name aptly sets forth the change in those who bore it.[190]

§ 1. General Effects of the Scandinavian Settlements in Gaul.

Importance of the Norman settlement in Gaul.

The settlement of the Northmen in Gaul, and their consequent change into Normans, is the great continental event of the first half of the tenth century; it challenges a place alongside of the restoration of the Empire by Otto |Comparison of the settlements of Rolf and Guthrum.| in the second half. Its beginnings indeed might seem small. A band of Scandinavian pirates settled in Northern Gaul, exactly as another band of Scandinavian pirates had, thirty years before, settled in Eastern Britain. In both cases the sovereign of the invaded land found it expedient to secure the safety of the rest of his dominions, by surrendering a portion of them to the invader and by requiring baptism and nominal homage as guaranties for peace and good neighbourhood. The settlement of Rolf in Neustria exactly answers to the settlement of Guthrum in East-Anglia. Charles the Simple and his counsellors may well have justified their act by quoting the example of Ælfred himself. But the results of the two events were widely different. The East-Anglian and Northumbrian Danes were fused into the general mass of Englishmen, and they were soon distinguished from other Englishmen by |Results of the Norman settlement on general history.| nothing more than mere provincial differences. But the settlement of Rolf in Neustria had far wider results. It affected the later history of all Europe. The Scandinavians in Gaul embraced the creed, the language, and the manners of their French neighbours, without losing a whit of their old Scandinavian vigour and love of adventure. The people thus formed became the foremost apostles alike of French chivalry and of Latin Christianity. They were the Saracens of Christendom, spreading themselves over every corner of the world and appearing in almost every |Their prominence in devotion,| character. They were the foremost in devotion, the most fervent votaries of their adopted creed, the most lavish in gifts to holy places at home, the most unwearied in pilgrimages to holy places abroad. And yet none knew better how to hold their own against Pope and prelate; the special children of the Church were as little disposed to unconditional obedience as the most stiffnecked |and in war.| of Ghibelines. And they were no less the foremost in war; they were mercenaries, crusaders, plunderers, conquerors; |Change of their tactics.| but they had changed their element and they had changed their mode of warfare. No Norman fleets now went forth on the errand of the old wikings; the mounted knight and the unerring bowman had taken the place of the elder tactics which made the fortress of shields invincible. North, south, east, the Norman lances were lifted; and they were lifted in the most opposite of causes. |Their exploits in the Eastern Empire,| Norman warriors pressed into the remotest East to guard Eastern Christendom against the first Turkish invader;[191] other Norman warriors were soon found to be the most dangerous enemies of Eastern Christendom in its own |1071.| home. If the Norman fought by the side of Rômanos at |1081.| Manzikert, he threatened the Empire of Alexios with overthrow at Dyrrhachion. His conquests brought with |in England,| them the most opposite results in different lands. To free |in Sicily.| England he gave a line of oppressors; to enslaved Sicily he gave a line of beneficent rulers. But to England he gave also a conquering nobility, which in a few generations became as truly English in England as it had become French in Normandy. If he overthrew our Harolds and our Waltheofs, he gave us a Fitzwalter and a Bigod to win back the rights for which Harold and Waltheof had fallen. In the arts of peace, like his Mahometan prototypes, he invented nothing; but he learned, adapted, improved, |Influence of the Normans on art; their welcome of foreigners.| and disseminated everything. He ransacked Europe for scholars, poets, theologians, and artists. At Rouen, at Palermo, and at Winchester, he welcomed merit in men of every race and every language. He guided Lanfranc and Anselm from Lombardy to Bec and from Bec to Canterbury. Art, under his auspices, produced alike the stern grandeur of Caen and Ely and the brilliant gorgeousness of Palermo and Monreale. In a word, the indomitable vigour of the Scandinavian, joined to the buoyant vivacity of the Gaul, produced the conquering |Disappearance of the Norman race,| and ruling race of Europe. And yet that race, as a race, has vanished. It has everywhere been absorbed by the |in Sicily,| races which it has conquered. From both Sicilies the Norman has vanished as though he had never been. And there too have vanished along with him the races which he used as his instruments, and which he alone taught to work in harmony. Greek, Saracen, and Norman have alike disappeared from the realm of good King William. |in Britain.| In our own land the fate of the Norman has been different. He abides in his lineage and in his works, but he is Norman no longer. He has settled in every corner of the British islands; into every corner of those islands he has carried with him the inborn qualities of his own race, but in every corner of those islands he has assumed the outward characteristics of the races among which he settled. The Scottish Bruce or the Irish Geraldine passed from Scandinavia to Gaul, from Gaul to England, from England to his own portion of our islands; but at each migration he ceased to be Scandinavian, French, or English; his patriotism was in each case transferred to his new country, and his historic being belongs wholly to the home which he had last won. In England itself the Norman has vanished from sight no less than from Apulia and insular Sicily. He has sunk beneath the silent and passive influence of a race less brilliant but more enduring than his own. The Norman has vanished from the world, but he has indeed left a name |Famous men of Norman descent.| behind him. Of him came Richard the Fearless and William the Bastard; of him came that Robert whose foot was first placed upon the ransomed battlements of the |1099.| Holy City, and that mightier Robert who in one year |1086.| beheld the Cæsars of East and West flee before him.[192] |Frederick the Second.| And of his stock, far more truly than of the stock of Imperial Swabia, came the Wonder of his own and of all succeeding ages,[193]—poet, scholar, warrior, legislator—the terror and the marvel of Christendom and of Islam—the foe alike of Roman Pontiffs and of Moslem Sultans—who won alike the golden crown of Rome and the thorny crown of Salem—dreaded in one world as the foremost champion of Christ, cursed in another as the apostate votary of Mahomet—the gay, the brave, the wise, the relentless, and the godless Frederick.

Effects of the Norman settlement on French history.

But on no country was the effect of the Scandinavian settlement in Gaul so deep as it was on Gaul itself. It may sound like a strange paradox, but there can be little doubt that it was the settlement of the Northern pirates which finally made Gaul French in the modern sense. Their settlement was made during the transitional period of West-Frankish history. The modern French nation and language were just beginning to appear. Paris, not yet the capital, had been found to be the most important military post in the kingdom, and the lords of Paris had shown themselves to be its most vigorous defenders. |Period of struggle in West-France. 887–987.| The tenth century was a period of struggle between the Teutonic and the Romance tongues, between Laon and Paris, between the descendants of Charles the Great and the descendants of Robert the Strong.[194] The Norman stepped into the scene of confusion, and he finally decided the quarrel in favour of the French dynasty of |Origin of modern France.| Paris against the Frankish dynasty of Laon. Modern France, we must ever remember, has no part or lot in either of the two dynasties whose associations she so persistently usurps, the Karlings and their predecessors the Merwings. Till the ninth century there was no geographical division which at all answered to modern France.[195] Charles the Great more than once contemplated a division of his Empire; but not one of his proposed divisions coincided even in the roughest way with the limits of the |First glimpse of modern France.| kingdom of the Valois and the Bourbons. Modern France makes its first indistinct appearance in the division which was made on the death of Lewis the Pious. Then, for the |839.| first time, Northern and Southern Gaul, Neustria and Aquitaine, were united to make the kingdom of Charles the Bald. The kingdom thus formed was the first germ of modern France. It roughly answers to its geographical extent, and, what is still more to the purpose, we see that a new nation, with a new language, was springing up |843.| within it. The final settlement of Verdun confirmed the existence of the new kingdom. The Empire was then divided into three kingdoms, the Western, the Eastern, and the narrow debateable ground between them, known as Lotharingia. This last kingdom fell to pieces, while the kingdoms on each side of it grew, flourished, and contended for its fragments. These are the two kingdoms of the East and the West-Franks, which we are already sorely tempted to call by the familiar names of Germany and France.

GAUL IN THE TENTH CENTURY.

FOR THE DELEGATES OF THE CLARENDON PRESS.

Neustria and Aquitaine were never again formally separated |1360.| till the Peace of Bretigny in the fourteenth century.[196] |Union under Charles the Third. 885–887.| Neustria and Austrasia, the kingdoms of the Western and the Eastern Franks, were never again united except during the ephemeral reign of Charles the Third or the Fat. That Emperor, the last who reigned over both the Eastern and the Western Franks,[197] was deposed by common consent |Division of the Empire. 888.| of his various Kingdoms. Four kingdoms now appeared, answering to those of Germany, Italy, France, and Burgundy. And now a more important step still was taken |Kingdoms of East and West-Franks.| in the direction of modern France. The Western Franks took to themselves a new dynasty and a new capital. Since the death of the great Charles, the city on the |Growing importance of Paris.| Seine, the old home of Julian, had been gradually rising in consequence. It plays an important part during the reign of his son Lewis the Pious. Characteristically |830.| enough, Paris first appears in Carolingian history as the scene of a conspiracy against her Teutonic master. There it was that the rebels assembled who seized and imprisoned, |Paris the chief bulwark against the Northmen.| and at last deposed, the pious Emperor.[198] Later in the ninth century Paris won for herself a more honourable renown; she became the bulwark of Gaul against the inroads of the Northmen. The pirates soon found out the importance of the position of the city in any attack or defence of Gaul on her northern side. The Seine, and Paris upon the Seine, now became the great objects of Scandinavian attack. Thrice in the reign of Charles the Bald did the |Formation of the March of Paris. 861.| invaders enter the city. At last a new power was formed, chiefly with the object of defending Gaul from their attack. A large district was granted in fief by Charles the Bald to Robert the Strong, as a march or border territory, to be defended against the invading Northman and the rebellious Breton. And of this march, under Robert’s son Odo, Paris became the head. The power thus formed was destined to a career which seems not unusual for such frontier districts. Rome herself, then still the home of Empire, had begun her own career as a march of the Latin against the Etruscan. So, in later times, the Mark of Brandenburg, the outlying defence of Germany against the Slave, and the Eastern Mark, her outlying defence against the Magyar, have, under the names of Prussia and Austria, eclipsed the older names of Saxony, Swabia, Bavaria, and Eastern Francia. So it was with this outlying march granted to Count Robert by Charles the Bald. Paris now became a centre, a capital; if not a royal, at least a ducal, city. The fief of Robert grew into the duchy of France, and the duchy of France grew into the kingdom. Robert himself became the forefather of the first Capets, of the Valois, and of the Bourbons. |Paris defended by Odo. 885–886.| The great siege of Paris by the Northmen, and its gallant defence by Count Odo, or Eudes, the son of Robert, greatly raised the position alike of the city and of its lord. On the deposition of Charles the Third ineffectual attempts were indeed made on behalf of other candidates, but, in the |Odo elected King. 888.| end, Count Odo was elected and consecrated to what now begins to be called the Kingdom of France, a kingdom over |1848.| which his descendants were still reigning thirty years ago.[199]

Odo of Paris then became “Rex Francorum,” in a sense which, as applied to his family, we cannot better represent than by the title of “King of the French.” His own family was of German descent;[200] but, throughout the following century, his dynasty represents, perhaps quite unconsciously, the growing French nationality, just as the dynasty of Laon represents the decaying Teutonic element. The Dukes and Kings of Paris spoke French long before the end of the tenth century, while the Karlings of Laon still spoke their ancestral Frankish.[201] The hundred years’ struggle between the Carolingian house at Laon and the Capetian[202] house at Paris now begins. This period falls naturally into two stages. In the first stage, the lords of Paris directly disputed the crown with the heirs of Charles; in the second, they preferred the position of kingmakers to that of Kings. Odo was elected as the hero of the siege of Paris, the true champion of Gaul and of |Charles the Simple and Robert.| Christendom. But he soon found a rival in Charles the Simple, whose only claim was the doubtful belief that the blood of his great namesake flowed in his veins. It was in the course of his troubled reign that the Scandinavian invaders made that settlement in Gaul which grew into the Norman duchy. It was at his hands that the first Norman Duke received the investiture of his dominions. But the settlement was made at the immediate cost, not of the Carolingian King at Laon, but of the Capetian Duke at Paris. It was from France, in the strictest sense, that Normandy was cut off. The lord of Rouen now stepped in as a kind of umpire between the two rival powers, and throughout the whole struggle of the century no question was of greater importance than whether the power of Normandy should be arrayed on the side of Paris or on the side of Laon. We have now to record the history of the Norman settlement itself, and the history of the Normans in Gaul during the period of struggle, and to show how important an element they were in determining the controversy in favour of the competitor most foreign to their own ancient blood and speech.

§ 2. Settlement and Reign of Rolf. 911–927.

Comparison of the Danish ravages in England and within the Empire.

The history of the ravages of the Northmen within the Empire, and of their final settlement in Northern Gaul, reads like the tale of their ravages and settlements in our own island told again. Their incursions into the two countries were often closely connected. The same armies and the same leaders are often heard of in Britain and in Gaul, and each country drew a certain advantage from the sufferings of the other. Each often enjoyed a season of comparative rest while the other was undergoing some unusually fearful devastation. The two stories are nearly the same, except that the Gaulish part of the tale especially reads, so to speak, like one long reign of Æthelred from the very beginning. There is nothing at all answering to our long succession of great and victorious Kings from Ælfred onwards. That such was the case was not wholly the fault of the princes who reigned in any part of the Empire. The power of the great Charles had kept the heathen in awe, but it is not granted to every man to |The progress of the Danes favoured by the divisions in the Empire,| be a Charles or even an Æthelstan. When the great Emperor was gone, when the terror of his name was forgotten, ceaseless internal divisions made his Empire an easy prey. Those divisions were themselves inevitable, but they brought with them their inevitable consequences; the land lay open, almost defenceless, before the enemy. Indeed the divisions were actually more fatal because they |and by the partial unity which it retained.| were not complete; the very amount of unity which the Empire still kept proved a further source of weakness. The Empire did not at once split up into national kingdoms, divided by ascertained boundaries, each of them actuated by a national feeling and capable of national resistance to an invader. The state of things was not unlike the elder state of things in the days of the tyrants or provincial Emperors. In those days each ambitious general gave himself out as Cæsar and Augustus; he aspired to the whole Empire, and he held such portions of it as he could win and keep. So now every King was a King of the Franks, ready to hold so much of the common Frankish realm as he could win and keep. Between potentates of this kind there could hardly be either the same formal alliances, or the same sort of international good understanding, which may exist between really distinct nations, each of which is assured of its own position. None of the rival Kings could feel sure that any other King would help him against the common enemy. None of them could feel sure that some other King might not seize the opportunity of a Danish inroad to deprive him of his kingdom, or even that he might not league himself with the heathen invaders against him. It followed therefore that the invaders never encountered the whole strength of the Empire, that they seldom encountered the whole strength even of any one of its component kingdoms. The Carolingian princes, as far as mere vigour and ability goes, have been grossly and unfairly depreciated.[203] The truth is that most of them were men of by no means contemptible natural gifts, but that they were, partly by their own fault, partly by force of circumstances, placed in a position in which they could not use their real vigour and ability to any good purpose. Thus the whole second half of the ninth century is taken up with almost uninterrupted incursions of the Scandinavian pirates on the whole coast of both the Eastern |Position of Germany,| and the Western kingdoms. Germany indeed, owing to the inland position of the greater part of her territory, remained comparatively unscathed. She suffered far more from the Magyars than she suffered from the Northmen. Still the whole Saxon and Frisian coast was as cruelly ravaged as any other part of Europe, and the great rivers afforded the heathens the means of making their way far |Gaul,| into the interior of the country. The Western Kingdom, with its far greater extent of sea-board, suffered far more |and Italy.| severely than the Eastern. Even the Mediterranean coasts of Burgundy and Italy were not wholly spared,[204] though in those seas the Northman was less to be dreaded than the Saracen. In all these countries we find the same kind of devastations which we find in England. In the course of the history, we come across many noble examples of |Instances of resistance to the invaders.| local resistance to the invaders, and several examples of considerable victories gained over them. But we nowhere find any such steady check put to their progress as marks the first half of the tenth century in England. That is to say, no Carolingian prince had the means, even if he had the ability, to carry out the vigorous policy of Eadward the Elder. Yet it would be unjust to withhold their due share of honour from several kings and princes who at |Victory of Arnulf, 891;| least did what they could. The Emperor Arnulf in the |of Lewis, 881.| East,[205] the young King Lewis in the West,[206] gained glorious and, for the moment, important victories over the invaders, and the triumph of Lewis is commemorated in one of the earliest surviving efforts of High-German poetry.[207] The great siege of Paris and its defence by Odo have already been spoken of as among the determining causes which led in the end to the change of dynasty. But such victories were, after all, mere momentary checks; they delivered one part of the country at the expense of another, and the evil went on till it was gradually cured by various indirect |The ravages cease as the Northmen settle and become French.| means. As in England, the Northmen gradually changed from mere plunderers into conquerors and settlers. Instead of ravaging the whole country, they occupied portions of it. Thus they gradually changed, not only into members of the general commonwealth of Christendom but into Frenchmen, distinguished from other Frenchmen only by the large share of their inborn Scandinavian vigour which |No attempt at political conquest, as in England.| they still kept. As the North became more settled and Christianized, as it began to form a political system of its own, the mere piratical incursions gradually ceased, but the attempt at a complete conquest of the whole country, which was successfully tried in England, was never attempted in Gaul. No King of all Denmark or of all Norway ever tried to displace a King of the West-Franks and to reign in his stead over his kingdom. The insular position of Britain, the original kindred between Danes and Englishmen, the actual occupation of so large a portion of the country by earlier Danish settlers, all helped to make such a design possible in England, while even the powers of Swegen or Cnut could hardly have succeeded in carrying out such a scheme in Gaul.

Scattered settlements of the Northmen in Gaul.

The Northmen settled largely in Gaul, but they nowhere occupied any such large unbroken sweep of territory as that which became the Denalagu in England. No such large extent of coast lay so invitingly open to them, and it does not appear that there was any one Danish invasion of Gaul on so great a scale as the great Danish invasion of England under Ingwar and Hubba. The Danish settlements in Gaul were therefore scattered, while in England they were continuous. The Danes in England therefore, though they gradually became Englishmen, still kept on a distinct local existence and local feelings, and they continued to form a distinct and important element in the country. But the Danish settlers in Gaul, holding a district here and a district there, sank much more completely into the general mass of the inhabitants. Some of these settlements were a good way inland, like Hasting’s settlement at Chartres.[208] Ragnald too occupied, at least for a while, the country at the mouth of the Loire.[209] But these settlements led to no permanent results. One alone among the Scandinavian settlements in Gaul was destined to play a real part in history. This was the settlement of Rolf or Rollo at Rouen.

The Rouen settlement; its exceptional importance.

This settlement, the kernel of the great Norman Duchy, had, I need hardly say, results of its own and an importance of its own which distinguish it from every other Danish colony in Gaul. But it is well to bear in mind that it was only one colony among several, and that, when the grant was made, it was probably not expected to be more lasting or more important than the others. But, while the others soon lost any distinctive character, the Rouen settlement lasted; it grew, it became a power in Europe, and in Gaul it became even a determining power. It is perhaps the unexpected developement of the Rouen settlement, together with the peculiar turn which Norman policy soon took, which accounts for the bitterness of hatred with which the Northmen of Rouen are spoken of by the French writers down to at least the end of the tenth century. By that time they had long been Christian in faith and French in speech, and yet the most truly French writer of the age can never bring himself to speak of them by any other name than that of the Pirates.[210] To this feeling we see nothing at all analogous in English history. We see traces of strong local diversities, sometimes rising into local jealousies, between the Danes in England and their Anglian and Saxon neighbours; but there is nothing to compare with the full bitterness of hatred which breathes alike in the hostile rhetoric of Richer and in the ominous silence of the discreet Flodoard.

Rolf or Rollo the founder of the settlement.

The lasting character of his work at once proves that the founder of the Rouen colony was a great man; but he is a great man who must be content to be judged in the main by the results of his actions. The authentic history of Rolf, Rollo, or Rou,[211] may be summed up in a very short space. We have no really contemporary narrative of his actions, unless a few meagre and uncertain entries in some of the Frankish annals may be thought to deserve that name. I cannot look on the narrative of our one Norman writer, put together, from tradition and under courtly influence, a hundred years after the settlement, as at all entitled to implicit belief. Even less faith is due to Northern Sagas put together at a still later time. The French authors again are themselves not contemporary,[212] and their notices are exceedingly brief. I therefore do not feel myself at all called upon to narrate in detail the exploits which are attributed to Rolf in the time before his final settlement. He is described as having been |Earlier exploits of Rolf. 876–911?| engaged in the calling of a wiking both in Gaul and in Britain for nearly forty years before his final occupation of Rouen,[213] and he is said to have entered into friendly relations with a King Æthelstan in England. This Æthelstan has been confounded, in the teeth of all chronology, with our great Æthelstan, but it is clear that the person intended is Guthrum-Æthelstan of East-Anglia.[214] In all this there is nothing improbable, but we can hardly look upon it as certain. And the exploits attributed to Rolf are spread over so many years,[215] that we cannot help suspecting that the deeds of other chieftains have been attributed to him, perhaps that two leaders of the same name have been confounded. Among countless expeditions in Gaul, Britain, and Germany, we find Rolf charged with an earlier visit to Rouen,[216] with a share in the great siege of Paris,[217] and with an occupation or destruction of Bayeux.[218] But it is not till we have got some way into the reign of Charles the Simple, not till we have gone through several years of the tenth century, that Rolf begins clearly to stand out as a personal historic |Rolf in possession of Rouen. 911.| reality. He now appears in possession of Rouen, or of whatever remains of that city had outlived his former harryings. From that starting-point he attacked Chartres. |Defeat of Rolf at Chartres. 911.| Beneath the walls of that city he underwent a defeat at the hands of the Dukes Rudolf of Burgundy and Robert of Paris, which was attributed to the wonder-working powers of the great local relic, the under-garment of the Virgin.[219] But this victory, like most victories over the Northmen, had no lasting effect. Rolf was not dislodged from Rouen, nor was his career of havoc and conquest at all seriously checked. But, just as in the case of Guthrum in England, his evident disposition to settle in the country suggested an attempt to change him from a wasting enemy into a |Peace of Clair-on-Epte. 912.| peaceable neighbour. The Peace of Clair-on-Epte was the fellow of the Peace of Wedmore, and King Charles and Duke Robert of Paris most likely had the Peace of Wedmore before their eyes. |Comparison with the Peace of Wedmore.| A definite district was granted to Rolf, for which he became the King’s vassal; he was admitted to baptism, and received the King’s natural daughter in marriage. And, just as in the English case, the territory granted was not part of the King’s immediate dominions. No part of Wessex was granted to Guthrum; he was merely confirmed in the possession of the lands which he had already conquered at the expense of the |Advantage of the cession to the Crown.| other English kingdoms. Ælfred, as I have already shown,[220] though he lost as an over-lord, gained as an immediate sovereign by the closer incorporation of a large part of Mercia with his own kingdom. Charles also gained by the settlement of Rolf, though certainly not in the same direct way. His immediate territories were not increased, but they were at least not diminished; the grant to Rolf was made at the cost, not of the Frankish |The cession made at the expense of the Duchy of Paris.| King at Laon but of the French Duke at Paris. The district ceded to Rolf was part of the great Neustrian march or duchy which had been granted to Odo of Paris, and which was now held by his brother Duke Robert. Rouen was thus, from the very beginning, something taken away from Paris, and which cut off Paris from the sea. Still the Parisian duchy was not so utterly broken up as the kingdoms of Northumberland, East-Anglia, and Mercia had been; the King had therefore no opportunity of annexing any part of the dominions of Robert, as Ælfred had of annexing a large part of the dominions of Burhred. Still Charles was strengthened indirectly. Duke Robert had to yield to manifest destiny. He had lost Rouen, and his only way to keep Paris was to enter into friendly relations with the new lord of Rouen. |Prominent agency of Duke Robert.| Robert was therefore the chief mover in the whole business; he was Rolf’s godfather at his baptism and gave him his own Christian name. The Duke thus made the most of his loss; but to the King the transaction was a distinct gain. He got two vassals instead of one, two vassals whose relations to one another were likely to be dangerous, and between whom it might often be easy to play off one against the other. Events soon proved that the King had gained a far more faithful vassal in the new proselyte to Christianity and French culture than he already possessed in the turbulent and dangerous lord of Paris. At a later time we shall find the relations between Laon, Rouen, and Paris altogether changed; but for a while the Northmen of the Seine were the firmest support |The Normans the chief support of Charles the Simple.| of the Carolingian throne. During all the later warfare of the reign of Charles the Simple, Rolf clave steadily to the cause of the lord whose man he had become. The Duke of Rouen had no object in opposing the King of Laon, while, by supporting him, he might easily gain an increase of territory at the expense of his nearer neighbours.

Tale of Rolf’s homage to Charles.

The legendary details of Rolf’s homage to Charles are familiar to every one. It is a well-known tale how Rolf was called on to kiss the feet of his benefactor, how he refused with an oath, how he bade one of his followers to perform the degrading ceremony in his stead, how the rude Northman did indeed kiss the King’s foot, but only by lifting it to his own mouth to the imminent danger of the monarch’s seat on his throne.[221] The tale may rest on a true tradition, or it may be a mere invention of Norman vanity; in either case alike it sets forth the original spirit of the men who were to become the noblest representatives of the system within whose pale they were now entering. |Rolf the vassal of Charles.| But whatever was the exact form of the homage, there can be no reasonable doubt that Rolf became, in the full |Exaggerated claims of independence made| sense of the word, the vassal of King Charles.[222] The interested and extravagant Norman writers constantly assert an entire independence on the part of the colonists |by the Norman writers.| and their chief. The land was granted, but it was granted as a pure allodial possession; the Duke of the Normans, though he did not bear the kingly title, nevertheless held, as a King, the monarchy of the Norman land.[223] If anything, it was King Charles who swore fealty to Rolf rather than Rolf who swore fealty to King Charles. All this we may safely put aside, partly as the deliberate creation of Norman vanity, partly as the inflated rhetoric of an author who was writing as the mere laureate of the Norman court. The historian’s own tale of the homage, with its real or mythical incidents, is of itself enough to upset his constitutional theories. That Rolf did homage is plain enough, and, on Rolf’s death, his successor in the duchy |Little practical submission implied in the homage.| renewed the homage. But I must again repeat the caution how little of real subjection is implied in such vassalage at any time, and how purely nominal it became whenever the lord was weak and the vassal strong. Rolf became King Charles’s man and King Charles became Rolf’s lord; but the obligation, after all, amounted to little more than an obligation of mutual defence; all internal sovereignty over the ceded land passed to Rolf without reserve. In the hands of Charles the Great or of Æthelstan such an over-lordship as this was a reality; in the hands of Æthelred or of Charles the Simple it was a mere name. Yet Rolf undoubtedly proved a really faithful vassal to King Charles. No doubt his interest happily coincided with his duty. Still we can well believe that in a new Christian and a new vassal, and a man evidently disposed honestly to do his duty in his new state of life, the sense of right and wrong, in this as in other respects, may well have been far stronger than it was in Dukes of Paris or Burgundy who had long been used to form and to break such engagements with equal ease.

It must not be thought that the district now granted to |Extent of the territory granted to Rolf.| Rolf took in the whole of the later duchy of Normandy. Rouen was the heart of the new state, which took in lands on both sides of the Seine. From the Epte to the sea was its undoubted extent from the south-east to the north. But the western frontier is much less clearly defined. On the one hand, the Normans always claimed a certain not very well defined superiority over Britanny as part of the original grant. On the other hand, it is quite certain that Rolf did not obtain immediate possession of what was afterwards the noblest portion of the heritage of his |The Bessin and the Côtentin later acquisitions.| descendants. The Bessin, the district of Bayeux, was not won till several years later, and the Côtentin, the peninsula of Coutances, was not won till after the death of Rolf. The district granted to Rolf was doubtless, as in the case of Guthrum, mainly determined by the extent of his actual possessions. If, as is most likely, the Dive was the western boundary, the ceded territory answered to nothing in earlier geography, civil or ecclesiastical. It was larger than the diocese of Rouen; it was very much smaller |No geographical name for the “Terra Northmannorum.”| than the province. As a new division, it had—sharing therein the fate of Germany and France—no recognized geographical name. Its inhabitants were the Northmen, the Northmen of the Seine, the Northmen of Rouen. The land itself was, till near the end of the century, simply the Land of the Northmen,[224] a land capable of indefinite extension. So in Britain the vague description of the Denalagu supplanted the ancient names and boundaries of more than one Old-English kingdom. The title of the chief was as little fixed as the name of his dominions; he is Prince, Duke, Count, Marquess, Patrician,[225] according to the taste of each writer. In the mouths of vigorous and plain-spoken enemies his people are only the Pirates, and himself the leader of the Pirates, down to the end of the century.[226]

Internal government of Rolf known only from its results.

Of Rolf’s internal government, of the laws and institutions of the new state, of the details of the settlement of the country, we know absolutely nothing. Norman tradition sets Rolf before us as the mirror of princes, as the type of that class of ruler which that age most valued, the stern, speedy, impartial, minister of justice.[227] But we may judge of the reign of Rolf from its results. What Normandy became shows plainly enough that its first prince must have been a worthy forerunner of our own Cnut. Once settled in the land, he seems to have become as eager for its welfare as he had before been for its devastation. He must have promoted the general adoption, not only of the religion, but of the speech and manners of his neighbours. Otherwise Normandy could never have played the part which it did play even in the next reign, nor could his capital have become so thoroughly French as it was within a short time after his |No records of early Norman history.| death. But of the early institutions and early internal history of Normandy all records have perished, or, more probably, no records ever existed. We have no chronicles, no charters, nothing whatever to guide us but the results. |The settlement probably analogous to the Danish settlement in England.| From such indications as we have we may perhaps infer that the settlement was, on the whole, of much the same kind as the Danish settlement in England.[228] We cannot conceive any systematic extirpation or expulsion of the older inhabitants, such as accompanied the English Conquest of Britain. At the same time we can well believe that, after so many years of systematic havoc at the hands of the wikings, large districts may have stood almost as empty and untilled as if such systematic |Evidence from the peasant revolt. 997.| extirpation or expulsion had taken place. But it is certain that, a hundred years after the conquest, there was a peasantry at once oppressed enough and powerful enough to rise in a well-organized revolt.[229] Though in Normandy, as in England, the condition of the private settlers is likely to have gradually sunk, still we cannot believe that any descendants of the original conquerors could, in so short a time, have been brought down to such utter bondage. These peasants must have been mainly the descendants of the original Gauls, with whatever intermixture of Roman and Teutonic elements the successive conquests of the country had brought with them. |Probable position of the races in the country.| Probably the landowners, great and small, were almost universally of Scandinavian descent, while the remnant of the original population had been brought down to a state of serfdom. It is certain that there is nothing in English history at all answering to this insurrection till we come to the great revolt of the villains of the fourteenth century. This difference seems to point to a wholly different condition of the lower orders in the two countries. |Vestiges of the Danish language.| As regards the language of Normandy, the Danish tongue has utterly vanished out of the land; it had vanished out of the greater part of the land even before we reach any contemporary records; still considerable vestiges, strangely disguised as they are, may to this day be made out in the local nomenclature. In Northern Gaul, just as in Eastern England, many a place lost its name, and took a new name from its new Scandinavian lord. Here and there also we find descriptive names, meaningless in French, but which are, with a slight effort, intelligible in English.[230] These may, according to their geographical position, be either remnants of the Danish speech of Rolf and his followers or remnants of the speech of an earlier Teutonic settlement in part of the country of which I shall presently have to speak. Of the early political condition of the duchy we have absolutely no |Normandy not an absolute monarchy.| account. On the absence of such information one illustrious inquirer[231] has grounded a theory that Normandy had no assembly, no Parliament, no Estates of any kind, but that the Duke, Marquess, Patrician, or whatever he is to be called, ruled without any restraint on his personal will. I confess that I find it impossible to accept a theory so utterly repugnant to the analogy of every other Teutonic people. If there be any truth in Norman tradition, the followers of Rolf, as long as they stayed on ship-board, acknowledged no lord, and professed principles of the most extreme democratic equality.[232] However this may be, it is not likely that, as soon as they were settled on land, they should at once cast away those free institutions which were common to them with all the |Instances of the action of the States.| other branches of the common stock. And there is evidence enough to show that an assembly of some kind was often consulted from the very beginnings of the Norman state, and especially that the transfer of the ducal crown from one prince to another was effected with much the same forms as the same change would have called for in England.[233] At the same time I fully admit that to fix the exact constitution of the Norman assembly at this early time would be still harder than to fix the exact constitution of an English Witenagemót. The little light which we have may perhaps enable us to infer that it put on an aristocratic character almost from the beginning. It has also been supposed that, unlike perhaps every other assembly of the kind, it contained no ecclesiastical members;[234] but if this was the case in the earlier days of the duchy, the rule had clearly been relaxed before the reign of the great William.

Rolf’s attachment to the Carolingian party.

We must remember that we are now in the very thick of the struggle between the two dynasties of Laon and Paris. The Norman stepped in as if sent to be the fated arbiter between the two. When Rolf made his settlement, Charles the Simple was the acknowledged King of the West-Franks; from him he received his grant; with him he entered into the mutual engagements of lord and vassal. With him and his dynasty Rolf sided, and he probably saved the Carolingian crown from utter overthrow, just as a change of policy in his successors finally decided the |End of the Karlings in Germany. 912.| same controversy the other way. It must be remembered that, in the year of Rolf’s settlement, the Carolingian line came to an end in the Eastern Kingdom. The East-Frankish Duke Conrad was now raised to the Teutonic throne, and was presently followed by Henry of Saxony. But Lotharingia refused to acknowledge either of the Kings so chosen. The border land appears throughout our history as ever fluctuating between the Eastern and Western kingdoms. But Lotharingian policy was dictated by one intelligible rule, that of unswerving loyalty to the Carolingian house, wherever its representative might be |Lotharingia attaches itself to Charles the Simple.| found. So now Lotharingia transferred its allegiance to the single Karling who still kept the royal title, and acknowledged the King of Laon as its lord. The power of Charles was thus directly strengthened to the East, while it was indirectly strengthened by the grant to the Northmen in the West. This increase of power on the part of Charles probably led to the conspiracy which soon broke out against |Robert of Paris chosen King. 922.| him, and which issued in the election of Robert of Paris as an opposition King. In the wars which followed, Charles |Rolf sides with Charles.| rested to a great extent on the arms of the Northmen, both Rolf’s settled Northmen of the Seine and the Northmen of the Loire, the followers of Ragnald, who had not |Robert killed at Soissons. 923.| yet won so distinct a local habitation.[235] When Robert was killed at Soissons, his son Hugh the Great refused the crown for himself. He was known as Duke of the French, |Rudolf of Burgundy chosen.| and, satisfied with that title, he bestowed the kingly name on his brother-in-law Rudolf, Duke of French Burgundy.[236] |Imprisonment of Charles at Peronne. 923.| Charles was afterwards treacherously seized and imprisoned by Rudolf’s fellow-conspirator Herbert Count of Vermandois, in the same fortress in which in after days a King |1468.| of France was imprisoned by a Duke of Burgundy.[237] Rolf’s combined policy and loyalty led him to refuse all allegiance |War between Normandy and France. 923–927.| to the usurpers. A war of several years followed between him and the French of Paris under Duke Hugh. The horrors of warfare were not felt on one side only. The Norman land was twice invaded, and Rolf’s fortress of Eu, its chief defence on its north-eastern border, was taken by storm.[238] But these incursions were more than repaid in kind; a large Danegeld was more than once paid to Rolf, and was levied throughout France and Burgundy,[239] and the |Acquisition of Maine and Bayeux. 924.| general results of the war left Rolf in possession of a most important increase of territory. He obtained the district of Bayeux; he obtained also a more fully recognized superiority over Britanny, and it is also distinctly asserted that |Abdication [927?] and death [932?] of Rolf.| he obtained a grant of the land of Maine.[240] Rolf did not long survive these successes; the year of his death is uncertain; but it seems most likely that, by the consent—perhaps at the demand—of the estates of his principality, he resigned |William Longsword succeeds, and does homage to Charles. 927.| the government in favour of his son William, surnamed Longsword.[241] A change in the policy of Herbert of Vermandois had restored Charles to freedom and to some nominal measure of authority. The new prince of the Northmen therefore paid to the true Carolingian King the homage which his father had paid before him, but which he had steadily refused to the Parisian and Burgundian pretenders.

Value of Rolf’s last acquisition.

The acquisition of the territory which this last war added to the dominions of Rolf was inferior in importance only to the original acquisition of Rouen. And it is only on the ground of its being the original acquisition, the beginning and starting-point of the whole settlement, that the possession of Rouen itself can be looked on as more important than the possession of the noble region which |Maine.| was now added to the Land of the Northmen. Maine indeed was the most precarious of all possessions. The struggles for its retention and recovery, the adventures of its gallant Counts and of its no less gallant citizens, form no small part of the later history of the Norman |The Bessin.| duchy. But the acquisition of Bayeux and its territory gave Normandy all that created and preserved the genuine and Norman character; it gave her the cities which are adorned with the noblest works of the days of her independence; it gave her the spot which was to be the earliest home of her mightiest son. Caen, around whose castle and whose abbeys so much of Norman and French history was to centre—Bayeux itself, the see of the mighty Odo, where the tale of the Conquest of England still lives in the pictured history which forms its most authentic record—Cerisy, with its stern and solemn minster, the characteristic work of the Conqueror’s father—Falaise, immortal as the birthplace of the Conqueror himself—all these historic spots lie within the region which the last warfare of the reclaimed wiking had added to the Norman land. |The Saxon colony at Bayeux;| Bayeux itself is a city whose history has an especial claim on the attention of Englishmen. Nowhere, out of the Old-Saxon and Frisian lands, can we find another district of continental Europe which is so truly a brother-land of our own. The district of Bayeux, occupied by a Saxon colony in the latest days of the old Roman Empire,[242] occupied again by a Scandinavian colony as the result of its conquest by Rolf, has retained to this day a character which distinguishes it from every other Romance-speaking |its lasting influence on the district.| portion of the continent. The Saxons of Bayeux kept their name and their distinct being under the Frankish dominion;[243] we can hardly doubt that the Scandinavian settlers found some parts at least of the district still Teutonic, and that nearness of blood and speech exercised over them the same influence which the same causes exercised over the Scandinavian settlers in England. Danes and Saxons were welded together into one Teutonic people, and they kept their Teutonic language and character long after Rouen had become, in speech at least, no less French than Paris. With their old Teutonic speech, the second body of settlers seem to have largely kept their old Teutonic faith. We shall presently find Bayeux the centre of a heathen and Danish party in the duchy, in opposition to Rouen, the centre of the new speech and the new creed. The blood of the inhabitants of the Bessin must be composed of nearly the same elements, mingled in nearly the same proportions, as the blood of the inhabitants of the Danish districts of England.[244] To this day there is no Romance-speaking region of the continent in which an Englishman feels himself so thoroughly at home as in this old Saxon and Danish land. In every part of Normandy, as compared with France or Aquitaine,[245] the Englishman feels himself at home; but in the district of Bayeux he seems hardly to have left his own island. The kindred speech indeed is gone; but everything else remains. The land is decidedly not French; men, beasts, everything, are distinctively of a grander and better type than their fellows in the mere French districts; the general aspect of the land, its fields, its hedges, all have an English look. And no contrast can be greater than that which may be often seen between the tall, vigorous, English-looking, Norman yeoman, out of whose mouth we instinctively feel that the common mother-tongue ought to come, and the French soldier, whose stature, whose colour, whose every feature, proclaims him to be a man of another race, and whose presence proclaims no less unmistakeably that the glory of Normandy has passed away.

§ 3. Reign of William Longsword. 927–943.

Rolf, the converted pirate, died, according to his Norman |Religion of Rolf.| admirers, in the odour of sanctity.[246] According to the wild reports of his enemies, he mingled the two religions, and, while making gifts to the Christian churches, offered Christian captives in sacrifice to his Scandinavian idols. Such a strange confusion is possible at some earlier stage of his career; but we need much better evidence than we have to convince us that he was guilty of any such doings just before his death.[247] But, whatever traces of heathendom may have cloven to Rolf himself, it is certain that his son |Birth and education of William Longsword.| William Longsword, half a Frenchman by birth, was almost wholly a Frenchman in feeling. His mother was French; but he did not spring from the union of the converted Northman with the royal blood of the West-Franks. Gisla bore no children to her already aged husband, and William was the son of a consort who both preceded and followed her in his affections. She was known as Popa, whether that designation was really a baptismal name or, as some hint, a mere name of endearment. She was the daughter of a certain Count Berengar, and was carried off as a captive by Rolf when he took Bayeux in his pirate days.[248] Her brother, Bernard Count of Senlis, plays an important part in the reigns of his nephew and great-nephew. Popa and her son seem to have stood in a doubtful position which they share with more than one |Norman and Frankish laxity as to marriage.| other Norman Duke and his mother. Rolf and Popa were most likely married, as the phrase was, “Danish fashion,”[249] which, in the eyes of the Church, was the same as not being married at all. A woman in such a position might, almost at pleasure, be called either wife or concubine, and might be treated as either the one or the other. Her children might, as happened to be convenient, be either branded as bastards or held entitled to every right of legitimate birth. Rolf put away Popa when he married King Charles’s daughter, and when King Charles’s daughter died, he took Popa back again.[250] So William, Popa’s son, put away Sprota, the mother of his son Richard, when he married Liudgardis of Vermandois.[251] This strange laxity with regard to marriage, though spoken of as something specially Danish, was in truth hardly more Danish than Frankish. The private history of the Frankish Kings, Merwings and Karlings alike, is one long record of the strangest conjugal relations. Ordinary concubinage is not amazing anywhere; what stands out specially conspicuous in the history of these Kings—nowhere more conspicuous than in the history of the great Charles—is the liberty which they assumed of divorcing their Queens at pleasure, and sometimes of having several acknowledged Queens at once. |William Longsword French rather than Danish.| William, born of a doubtful union of this kind, was far more French than Danish in feeling. His tutor was Botho, a Danish companion of Rolf, but one who threw himself thoroughly into the French and Christian interest. Such an education made William familiar with the language and feelings of both classes of his subjects; but his own sympathies lay with the speech, as well as with the creed, of his mother; he was more at home in Romanized Rouen than in Teutonic Bayeux. In the existing state of things, divided as the duchy was between the Danish or heathen and the French or Christian party, the personal sympathies of the prince were of the highest importance, and there can be no doubt that the French feelings and Christian convictions of William had a most decisive effect on the history of the Norman state.[252]

The first great event in the internal history of the duchy |Breton revolt. 931.| during the reign of William is a general revolt of its Breton dependencies. This event was probably not unconnected with the general course of affairs in Gaul. At William’s accession, two Kings, Charles the Simple and Rudolf of Burgundy, disputed the crown of the West-Franks. William, as we have seen, became the vassal of |William’s attachment to the cause of Charles. His peace with Hugh and Herbert. 928.| Charles, and refused all submission to Rudolf. Even in finally making peace with his great French neighbours, Hugh of Paris and Herbert of Vermandois, William made it a condition that Herbert should do homage to Charles as he himself had done. Herbert, it should be remembered, was himself of Carolingian descent, and might have further designs of his own. It was only on these terms that William restored Herbert’s son, who had been given to his father Rolf as a hostage.[253] Charles remained for some while a puppet in the hands of Herbert, brought forth as a sovereign or confined as a prisoner, as suited the ever-shifting |Death of Charles the Simple. 929.| relations of Herbert, Hugh, and Rudolf. At last the unhappy descendant and namesake of the great Emperor died in bonds at Peronne, whether actually murdered by Herbert, or simply worn out by sorrow and captivity, it matters little.[254] Rudolf was now the only acknowledged King, and he soon showed himself to be, in one respect at least, fully worthy of his crown. The independent and unsettled Northmen of the Loire had committed |King Rudolf defeats the Northmen of the Loire at Limoges. 930.| great devastations in Aquitaine. King Rudolf overcame them in a great battle at Limoges, where he utterly broke their power, and procured the acknowledgement of his own supremacy over Aquitaine.[255] It was probably this great defeat of one Norman army by a King to whom no |The Bretons rise.| Norman had hitherto done homage which encouraged the Bretons to make an attempt to throw off the Norman yoke altogether. That yoke was of a twofold kind; there was the more regular and endurable supremacy of the Norman Duke at Rouen, and there was also the constant annoyance of small bands or colonies of independent adventurers within their frontiers or upon their borders. Under their princes, |Massacre of the Normans, Michaelmas 931.| Juhel Berengar and Alan, the Bretons rose; they made a massacre of the Normans in their own country, which may have given a precedent for the later massacre of the Danes in England.[256] The feast of Saint Michael in the one case was what the feast of Saint Brice was in the other. |The Bretons attack Bayeux.| Flushed with success, they entered the Norman duchy, and attacked Rolf’s latest and most precious acquisition, Teutonic Bayeux.[257] Alike under Saxon and under Norman occupation, the Teutonic colony was a thorn in the side of the Celts, which they were always eager to get rid of. |The revolt crushed.| But William completely crushed the revolt, and its only result was to bring all Britanny more completely under Norman control, and to extend the immediate boundaries |Normandy gains the Côtentin peninsula.| of his duchy. The districts of Avranches and Coutances, with the noble peninsula to which the latter city gives its name, were now added to the immediate Norman dominion.[258]

High position of England under Æthelstan.

At this point comes the first of many signs which we shall meet with in the course of our story, all of which show the high position which England held at this time, and the important influence exercised on foreign politics by the renowned prince who now filled the West-Saxon throne. In this, as in every other respect, all depended on the personal character of the King. It was now exactly as it was ages later. England under Æthelstan differed from England under Æthelred, just as England under Elizabeth or Cromwell differed from England under the first or the second pair of Stewarts. Through the whole of this period, the King of the English, the common friend and kinsman of most of the contending princes, appears as a dignified mediator among them. Through the marriages of his sisters, some contracted before, some after his election to the crown, Æthelstan was the brother-in-law of most of the chief princes of Western Europe. |His connexion with most of the Western Princes.| He stood in this relation to King Otto, to King Charles, to King Lewis of Arles, to Duke Hugh of Paris, and to a nameless prince near the Alps.[259] On the imprisonment |Eadgifu and Lewis take refuge in England.| of Charles, his Queen Eadgifu,[260] with her young son Lewis, had taken refuge in England,[261] and the future King of the West-Franks was now learning lessons of war and statesmanship at the hands of his glorious uncle. So |Alan of Britanny does the like.| now, on the extinction of the Breton insurrection, while Berenger submitted to the Normans, Alan took shelter with Æthelstan,[262] as his father before him is said to have taken shelter with Eadward. England might in either case seem a strange place of refuge for a banished Armorican prince and his following. The descendants of those who had originally fled before the English conquerors now sought for safety in the very land from which their forefathers had been driven. And at this particular moment such a refuge might seem stranger than ever. The Breton exiles sought shelter in England at the hands of the very King by whom the last footsteps of Celtic independence in Southern Britain were trampled out. Æthelstan and William of Rouen might well seem to be carrying out |Relations of England with Normandy less friendly than with the other states.| the same work on opposite sides of the sea. But a nearer tie of common hostility might well at that moment unite the Breton and the Englishman. Each was engaged in a struggle with Scandinavian intruders in his own land. Between the Danes in England and the Danes in Normandy communications never wholly ceased, and, long after this time, we shall find the connexion between Denmark and Normandy directly affecting the course of English events. The Normans and their Duke seem always to have been on less intimate terms with England than most of the neighbouring states; William stands almost alone among princes of equal rank in not being honoured with the hand of a sister of glorious Æthelstan. The Norman historian even puts forth a claim on the part of his Duke to a dominion over England,[263] which is among the most ridiculous outpourings of his lying vanity. Still such a boast speaks something as to the feelings which existed between the Danes in Gaul and the great destroyer of the Danish power in Britain. With Æthelstan then, the common champion of Christian and civilized Europe, at the court which was the common shelter of the oppressed, the common school of every princely virtue, did the Breton prince, fleeing from his conqueror, |Restoration of Alan. 936.| seek the safest and the most honourable refuge. At a later date, when the influence of Æthelstan on the affairs of Gaul was specially great, Alan and his companions were allowed to return.[264] He received a large part of Britanny as a vassal of the Norman Duke; he appears to have remained steady in his allegiance, and he is henceforth constantly mentioned among the chief peers of the Norman |His struggles with the Northmen of the Loire.| state.[265] But he could win back the actual possession of his dominions only by hard fighting against the independent Normans of the Loire. These pirates, even after Rudolf’s victory at Limoges, held many points of the country, and they were hardly more inclined to submit to the Norman Duke at Rouen than to the Breton Count at Vannes.[266] Alan restored the ruined city of Nantes, and did much for his recovered dominions in various ways. The relations between Normandy and Britanny were now definitely settled, as far as anything could ever be said to be settled in that age. The boundary between the dominions of the vassal and his lord was fixed by the Norman acquisition |The Côtentin becomes thoroughly Norman.| of the Côtentin and Avranchin. These lands, the last won part of Normandy, form one of the districts which became most thoroughly Norman. They stood open for Norman colonization; and we shall presently see that colonization was allowed, perhaps invited, not only from the settled parts of Normandy, but even directly from the heathen North itself.

Along with the peninsula of Coutances the Norman Dukes obtained a possession which was afterwards to form a bond of connexion of a singular kind between Normandy and England.[267] In comparing the extent of the West-Frankish kingdom at this age with that of modern France in our own day,[268] while mentioning many |Normandy acquires the Channel Islands.| points in which the French frontier has advanced, I had to mention three points where it has fallen back. The extent of the land whose princes acknowledged a nominal superior in the West-Frankish King took in Flanders, Barcelona, and the Channel Islands. Those islands, a natural appendage to the Constantine peninsula, now became Norman. When continental Normandy was lost by John, the insular part of the duchy was still retained, and it has ever since remained a possession of the English crown. As long as the English Kings kept the title either of Duke of Normandy or of King of France, here was a portion of the duchy or of the kingdom whose actual possession might be said to make good their claim to the rest. This insular Normandy remains to this day French in speech, but deeply attached, and with good reason, to the |Peculiar relation of the islands to England.| English connexion. The islands form distinct commonwealths, dependent on the British crown, but not incorporated with the United Kingdom. This condition of a dependency is perhaps that which best suits a community which has a distinct existence of its own, but which could not possibly maintain its independence as a distinct and sovereign state. Keeping their ancient constitutions, and enjoying the protection of the power of England, the Norman islands unite the safety of a great kingdom with the local independence of a small commonwealth. How much they would lose by becoming a French department I need not stop to point out. But they would also lose, not nearly so much, but still not a little, by becoming an English county. The right of sending one or two members to the British Parliament, where, among so many greater interests, their voice could hardly be heard, would be a poor exchange for their present legislative independence. Parliament can indeed, on any emergency which may call for its interference, legislate for the Norman islands. But it must legislate specially for them, after special consideration of the circumstances of the case. The islands cannot find themselves unexpectedly bound by some piece of general legislation, passed without their knowledge and possibly contrary to their interests. Thus the dependent condition of the islands secures a greater consideration of their interests than they could receive if they formed an integral portion of the kingdom. We occasionally hear of internal abuses in the Channel Islands which are held to need the intervention of Parliament, but we never hear of external grievances laid to the charge of Parliament itself. The Norman islands seem to be far |Comparison with Orkney.| more contented as dependencies than those Norwegian islands which, having been formed into a Scottish county, have become an integral part of the United Kingdom. The ancient earldom of Orkney, represented in Parliament by a single member, has its wrongs, or at least its grievances; of the wrongs or grievances of Jersey or Guernsey no one ever heard. And this singular and beneficial relation in which these interesting little communities stand at this day to the English crown is connected by a direct chain of cause and effect with the revolt of the Bretons against Norman supremacy nine hundred and forty years ago.

William, thus become the conqueror of the Bretons, ruled for the present as a French prince. As such, his French speech, French connexions, and French religion, caused him to be hated and dreaded by a large portion of his subjects. A strong Danish and heathen party still survived within the older limits of the duchy, and the newly won lands probably contained some of those independent Danish settlements by which Britanny in general was so |Revolt of the Danish party in Normandy, 932.| infested. Out of these two elements a Danish and heathen revolt was organized. Its leader was Riulf, seemingly an independent Danish chief settled in the Constantine |Legendary details of the revolt and its suppression.| peninsula. The story, as we have it,[269] reads like a romance. The rebels rise in arms; they demand one concession after another; the panic-stricken Duke is ready to yield everything; he even proposes to resign his duchy and to flee to his French uncle at Senlis. But he is recalled to a better mind by his veteran counsellor, the Danish-born Bernard. He then wins an almost miraculous victory over the rebels, and, for the time at least, crushes all signs of revolt. These details cannot be accepted as historical; but one or two points in the story are instructive. The rebels are made to demand the cession of all the country west of the river Risle. The land which would have been left to the Duke after such a cession nearly answers to the original grant to Rolf, excluding the later acquisitions of |Geographical character of the two parties.| Bayeux and Coutances. This demand, like everything else in the history, shows how thoroughly the Norman parties were geographical parties. The Christian and French-speaking Duke might keep Christian and French-speaking Rouen and Evreux; but the heathen and Danish land to the west must be independent of a prince who had cast |Christianity and French manners supported by a party among the native Danes.| away the creed and speech of his forefathers. On the other hand, we see that there were men of Danish birth, old companions of Rolf, men who retained a strong national feeling, who still distinctly threw in their lot with the French party. They wished Normandy to remain an united and independent state; they had not the slightest wish to merge Normandy in France in any political sense; but they wished the Norman duchy to be a member of the general French commonwealth, French in religion, language, and civilization. Such a man was Botho, the old tutor of William and afterwards tutor to William’s son; such were Oslac, bearing a name famous in our own Northumbrian history, and Bernard the Dane, who plays an important part in Norman affairs for many years to |William’s French and Christian government.| come. Through the overthrow of the rebellion this party was now dominant, and William reigned as a Christian prince, as a French prince, aiming at an influence in French affairs proportioned to the extent of his dominion on Gaulish soil. Through his whole life he was subject to strong religious impulses, and, according to a legend which may well contain some groundwork of truth, he was with difficulty hindered from becoming a monk in his own foundation of Jumièges.[270] Yet he was by no means lavish in grants to the Church, and the ecclesiastical foundations, which had suffered so cruelly during the Scandinavian incursions, still remained weak and impoverished, and, in many cases, altogether desolate. His general government is described as just and vigorous, and he seems to have |He does not wholly break with the Danish element.| deservedly won the general love of his subjects. And it is certain that, though he laboured to bring his dominions within the pale of Christian and French civilization, he did not wholly cast away the national speech and national feelings of his fathers. It is not unlikely that his policy towards the Danish element in the duchy varied at different periods of his reign. He may have found that the transformation of a nation must needs be a work of time, that too much haste might hinder the object which he had at heart, that a certain measure of toleration, in language, in manners, and even in religion, might be needful in order to bring about a final change in |Towards the end of his reign he makes further advances to the Danes.| any of those points. In his later days he may even have gone further than this. After all his efforts to identify himself with the French, and to act as a French prince among other French princes, he still found himself scorned and hated, still looked on as Duke only of the Pirates. Under the influence of such feelings, he may to some extent have thrown himself into the hands of the Danish party. According to a story which cannot be received as it stands, but which probably contains some germs of truth, he admitted a fresh Danish colony, direct from Denmark, into the newly-acquired peninsula of Coutances.[271] It is certain that he entrusted his son Richard to the care, not of any French clerk or Bishop, but to his own old |Danish education of his son Richard.| tutor, the Danish-born Botho. The boy was purposely taken to Bayeux, the Teutonic city which Botho himself, in his pirate days, had helped to harry. He was sent thither expressly to become familiar with the ancestral tongue, which was already forgotten at Rouen,[272] but which was still spoken by the mixed Saxon and Danish population of the Bessin. The boy was to be brought up in a Danish city, but by a native Dane who had accepted Christianity and French manners. We may be sure that no religious apostasy was dreamed of; but William now saw that the sovereign of Normandy must be neither pure Dane nor pure Frenchman, but, as far as might be, Dane and Frenchman at once.

Part played by William Longsword in general history.

For the purposes of the present sketch, the internal developement of the Norman duchy, the distinction between its Danish and its French elements, its relations to its Celtic neighbours and vassals, are points of more importance than the part played by its second Duke in the general politics of Gaul. Yet the history of Normandy would be hardly intelligible without some understanding of the general position of the duchy as one of the great |Utter confusion of this period.| fiefs of the West-Frankish crown. The reign of William Longsword forms the most confused part even of the confused Gaulish history of the tenth century. It is a period utterly without principles, almost without definite parties; even the strife between Laon and Paris, between the Karling and the house of Robert, between the Frank and the Frenchman, is in a manner lulled as long as Rudolf of Burgundy fills the Western throne. Every vassal of the Western crown sought little beyond his own gain and aggrandizement, and all of them freely changed sides as often as it suited their interest so to do. And William himself added as much to the confusion as any man, by changing sides perhaps oftener |Comparison between William and the French Princes.| than anybody else. And hardly any practical difference was made by the fact that William seems to have been several degrees less selfish and unprincipled than his neighbours. He was evidently a creature of impulse, and his impulses, if they often led him astray, often led him to righteous and generous actions. Though we cannot set him down, with his panegyrist, as a saint and a martyr, we can at least see in him far nobler qualities than any that can be seen in the contemporary princes of Vermandois, of Flanders, or even of ducal France. Still the practical difference was slight. William was doubtless morally a better man than his neighbours; but politically he was as untrustworthy as the worst of them. His plighted faith went for as little as the plighted faith of a deliberate perjurer. Impulse led him to one course one day, and impulse led him to an opposite course the next day. He probably never was intentionally treacherous, but he did as many of what were in effect treacherous actions as the basest traitor among them all.

Condition of Gaul.

Northern Gaul was at this time divided in very unequal proportions between the King and several vassal princes more powerful than himself. Of Southern Gaul |Practical independence of Aquitaine.| it is hardly needful to speak; of Aquitaine we hear just enough to show that the lands north and south of the Loire were aware of each other’s existence, and that a nominal connexion was held to exist between them. The Aquitanian princes now and then stooped to pay a nominal homage to the King of the West-Franks; otherwise the South moved in a world of its own, a world which was very slightly touched by the revolutions of Laon, Rouen, or Paris. It must always be remembered that the royal city was Laon, a city close upon the Lotharingian frontier, in a district where the Teutonic speech still lingered.[273] |The King’s domain.| The royal domain took in only Laon, Compiègne, and a small territory about those towns. Through the election of Rudolf, ducal Burgundy was brought into a temporary connexion with the crown, but that connexion lasted no longer than the reign of Rudolf himself. To |Lotharingia; explanation of its continual revolutions.| the east and north-east of the royal dominions lay Lotharingia, the border land, ever fluctuating in its allegiance between the Eastern and Western kingdoms. But all its fluctuations follow one unvarying principle, namely that its inhabitants preferred the rule of a Karling to that of any one else, but that, when no Karling was to be had, they preferred the rule of a |Germany.| German to that of a Frenchman. Beyond Lotharingia lay the Eastern Francia, the Teutonic Kingdom, now rapidly rising into greatness under the vigorous Kings |The Saxon Kings.| of the Saxon house. Deeming themselves the true successors of Charles, speaking his tongue and crowned in his royal city, the Saxon Kings already aspired to reunite the scattered fragments of his Empire. Within the Western |Arnulf of Flanders.| Kingdom we find three chief princes, Arnulf of Flanders, Herbert of Vermandois, and Hugh of Paris. The Flanders of those days, it should be remembered, reached far to the south of any border which Flanders has had for some centuries past. Calais, Boulogne, and Arras were all Flemish, and in those days Flemish still meant Low-Dutch. Ponthieu was a frontier district, with a Count of its own, whose homage was disputed between Flanders and Normandy. Of the present sovereign of Flanders it is enough to say that his actions show him to have been |Herbert of Vermandois.| capable of any crime. To the south of Flanders lay Vermandois, governed by the faithless, unprincipled Herbert, himself of Carolingian descent, but the greatest of all sinners against Carolingian royalty; the gaoler, most likely the murderer, of Charles the Simple. His one object was to extend by any means his comparatively narrow territories. More powerful than any other Western prince, far more powerful than his nominal King, was the lord of the Western Francia, the Duke of the French, |The Duchy of France.| Hugh the Great of Paris. His dominions took in the greater part of central Gaul north of the Loire, but, since the establishment of the Norman duchy, they nowhere |Ducal Burgundy.| reached to the sea. Ducal Burgundy need hardly be mentioned; on the death of Rudolf, Duke and King, the duchy was split into several parts, a large share |Archbishopric of Rheims.| falling to the lot of Hugh himself. Along with these temporal principalities we might almost reckon the metropolitan see of Rheims, whose Primate, alone among Western bishops, made some faint approach to the position of the princely prelates of Germany. This great and wealthy church constantly formed an apple of discord among the temporal powers which surrounded it. The rival princes were always striving, sometimes to thrust their nominees into the archbishopric, sometimes to appropriate to themselves the estates of the see. A large share of the history of the times is taken up with disputes about the succession to the archbishopric, which sometimes take the form of ecclesiastical synods, sometimes that of temporal campaigns and sieges. In the end the temporal importance of the see was greatly lessened through the loss of several of its most valuable possessions, |Hugh the Great.| among them the famous lordship of Coucy. Among all these princes Hugh of France stands out the foremost, alike from the extent of his dominions and from the peculiarity of his personal position. The nephew of King Odo, the son of King Robert, the father of King Hugh, the brother-in-law of King Rudolf, King Æthelstan, and King Otto himself, the Duke of the French never would be himself a King. He had no scruple against making |His Policy.| war on the King, none against robbing him of his dominions, none against assuming a complete control over his actions and even keeping him in personal bondage. He had no scruple even against transferring his allegiance from one King to another, against becoming a vassal of the Eastern instead of the Western crown. But if he went thus far, he would go no further; he would always have a King over him, if only to show how much greater he was than any King; but a King he himself never would be. Three times at least he might easily have mounted the throne; but he always declined the glittering bauble that lay within his grasp. In all this there seems something like a guiding principle; and even in other respects, faithless and ambitious as Hugh was, he was distinctly better than some of his fellows. It is some slight comfort to find that a man who was honoured with the hand of a sister of Æthelstan was at least not stained with any such frightful crimes as those which have handed down the names of Arnulf and Herbert to everlasting shame.[274]

William’s relation to the Kingdom, (927); his fidelity to Charles.

When William succeeded his father, Normandy was at war with France; that is, it was at war with Herbert of Vermandois and Hugh of Paris, and with Rudolf of Burgundy, their King of the West-Franks. But Rolf, and after him William, acknowledged no King but the imprisoned Charles. From him Rolf had received his lands; to him Rolf had done homage; to him William repeated that homage on the earliest opportunity, and he never did homage to Rudolf till the death of Charles left the Burgundian Duke without a competitor for the |926–928.| kingly title. Peace was made and peace was again confirmed, without any acknowledgement of the usurper’s claim. It was not till three years later, when Charles |After Charles’s death William does homage to Rudolf. 933.| was dead, and when Rudolf, by his victory at Limoges, had shown himself worthy to reign, that William, seemingly of his own act and deed and without any special circumstances calling for such a course, did homage to Rudolf,[275] and received from him a grant of the maritime Britanny. |Rudolf’s grant of Britanny.| This grant most likely carried with it both a general confirmation of the superiority of Normandy over Britanny and a special confirmation of the transfer of Avranches and Coutances to the immediate dominion of the Norman Duke. Meanwhile Hugh and Herbert were running their usual course; it is hardly the duty of an English, or even of a Norman, historian to reckon up the number of times that they transferred their allegiance from Charles to |Herbert does homage to Henry. 931.| Rudolf and from Rudolf to Charles. It is of more importance to mark that Herbert, at a moment when Rudolf and Hugh were both at war with him, did not scruple to transfer his allegiance to the Eastern King |Rudolf dies. 936.| Henry.[276] At last Rudolf died, and now a most important change took place. It might not be very clear what was the use of a King, if his vassals, several of them more powerful than himself, might rebel against him and make war on him at pleasure. Still, though all the princes were agreed in allowing to the King the smallest possible amount of territory and power, none of the princes was |Diet of election for the new King.| prepared to do without a King altogether. A Diet of election was held, of which some most remarkable details are preserved.[277] The prime mover in the whole matter was Hugh the Great. He might himself have become a candidate; all central and southern Gaul, his own duchy |Central and Southern Gaul favours Hugh; the Eastern part favours Lewis.| and the lands beyond the Loire, sought to confer the crown upon him. But the Eastern part of the kingdom, where there still lingered some traces of Teutonic blood and speech, some feelings of reverence for the blood of the great Emperor, favoured the election of Lewis the son of Charles, who was now living under the protection of his |Hugh declines the crown and procures the election of Lewis.| English uncle. Hugh, according to his invariable policy, declined the crown for himself. He already enjoyed the reality of kingship, and he shrank with a superstitious dread from a title which had brought little gain to his uncle and his brother-in-law and still less to his own father. It was on the motion of the Duke of the French that the assembly agreed to elect Lewis as King of the |Embassy to Æthelstan. 936.| West-Franks, and to send an embassy to Æthelstan to ask for the restoration of his nephew to the throne of his fathers. The embassy passed over into England, and found the King at York.[278] It was the year before Brunanburh, when the presence of Æthelstan was doubtless specially called for in his northern dominions. The ambassadors spoke in the name of Duke Hugh and of all the chief men of the Gauls, and prayed for Lewis to be their |Negotiations between Æthelstan and Hugh.| King. Æthelstan, somewhat doubtful of their good faith,[279] demanded oaths and proposed a further conference. The King of the English hastened to the coast of Kent, and the Duke of the French to the coast of Flanders, not far from Boulogne. Fire signals were exchanged on each side, the materials being found in the wooden houses which lined the shores.[280] Let us hope that, whatever Hugh or Arnulf may have done, Æthelstan at least made good the loss to his subjects. Several English Bishops and Thegns passed over, having at their head Oda, Bishop of the Wilsætas or of Ramsbury, afterwards the famous Primate.[281] Before Æthelstan would trust his nephew across the sea, he demanded satisfactory oaths from the assembled princes; otherwise he would give Lewis one of his own kingdoms, where he might reign safely and prosperously.[282] This was no empty boast; the Emperor of Britain had kingdoms to bestow, lower indeed in rank, but safer and more powerful, than the nominal royalty of Laon. The princes of Gaul swore as they were bidden; but it was agreed that the Duke of the French should be the chief adviser, or rather the protector and guardian, of the new King.[283] Lewis crossed the sea; he landed in the realm which was now his, he sprang on his horse,[284] and rode on amid the cheers of |Lewis crowned King. 936.| his new subjects. He went to his royal city of Laon, where he was consecrated King by Artald Archbishop of Rheims; he then went with his guardian on an expedition into Burgundy, more to his guardian’s profit than to his own.[285] He then visited his powerful vassal at Paris; but in the next year, safe on the rock of Laon, he threw off |He declares his independence of Hugh. 937.| the yoke; he declared his independence of Duke Hugh, and sent for his mother Eadgifu, seemingly to take Hugh’s place as his chief counsellor.[286]

Character of King Lewis; his vigorous and active reign.

The reign of Lewis—Lewis from beyond Sea—is of itself enough to confute the common mistake of believing that the line of Charles the Great ended in a race of imbecile fainéants, like those whom Pippin had set aside.[287] Lewis may be called ambitious, turbulent, and perfidious, but no man was ever less of a fainéant. His life was in truth one of preternatural activity. Early adversity, combined with an education at the hands of glorious Æthelstan, had brought out some very vigorous qualities in his young nephew. If Lewis was ambitious, turbulent, and perfidious, he was but paying off Hugh of Paris and William of Rouen in their own coin. In truth no two positions can well be more unlike one another than the position of |Contrast between the late Karlings and the late Merwings.| the later Karlings and that of the later Merwings. The Duke of the French might now and then put on something of the guise of a Mayor of the Palace, but Pippin and Hugh had very different masters to deal with. The nominal ruler of a vast realm, led about as an occasional pageant and leaving the government of his dominions to an all-powerful minister, is the exact opposite to a King whose domains have shrunk up to the territory of a single city, and who has to spend his life in hard blows to keep that last remnant of his heritage from the ambition of vassals whose territories are far wider than his own. Lewis had to strive in turn against France, Normandy, and Vermandois, and now and then he was able to give each of them nearly as good as they brought. And, small as was the extent of the King’s actual domains, there was still an abiding reverence for the royal name, which breathes in every page of the chroniclers, and which was not without influence even on the minds of the men who fought against him. Still Lewis had constantly to fight for the small remnant of dominion which was left to him. The restless Herbert had to be |938.| driven from a fortress built on the very slope of the King’s |939.| own rock of Laon.[288] The next year we find both William and Hugh in arms against the King in a quarrel arising out of the border disputes of Normandy and Flanders.[289] William was at war with Arnulf, the quarrel between these two great potentates being, if not caused in the first |Affairs of Montreuil. 939.| instance, at any rate aggravated by their differences as to the affairs of a smaller neighbour. This was Herlwin, Count of Montreuil or Ponthieu, whose dominions lay between Normandy and Flanders. Properly he seems to have been a vassal of the Duke of the French,[290] but when his dominions were seized by Arnulf, he got no help from Hugh, while he got very effective help from William. |Montreuil taken by Arnulf and recovered by Herlwin.| By the aid of a Norman force, headed, according to one account, by the Norman Duke himself, Montreuil was recovered, and Herlwin reinstated.[291] But greater powers than any of these were soon to come on the stage. One of them indeed figures in a rather unlooked-for way in the story of Herlwin. When Montreuil was taken by Arnulf, |Herlwin’s wife and children sent to Æthelstan.| the wife and children of the dispossessed Count were sent, of all the people in the world, to King Æthelstan in England. That they should have taken refuge at his court would have been only the natural course of things; but it sounds strange at first that the prisoners should be sent to the King of the English, if not actually as captives in bonds, yet at least as persons over whom some degree of watch was to be kept.[292] The explanation is most likely to be found in the close alliance between Æthelstan and Lewis, possibly also in the kindred between Æthelstan and Arnulf, who was, like Æthelstan, a grandson of Ælfred. Just now Arnulf was the friend, and William |William excommunicated. 939.| the enemy, of Lewis, and William was actually excommunicated by the Bishops in the King’s interest for his harryings of the Flemish territory. That a similar fate fell on Herbert for his aggressions on the lands of the archbishopric of Rheims is less wonderful.[293] Æthelstan soon afterwards again appears as the ally of his nephew, even when ties equally strong might have drawn him towards |Otto the Great, King of the East-Franks. 936.| his nephew’s enemies. King Henry of Germany was now dead, and his son, the great Otto, the brother-in-law of Æthelstan, had succeeded to the throne of the Eastern Franks in the same year in which their common nephew had succeeded to the royalty of the West. After some opposition at the hands of his own brothers, the future restorer of the Empire had received the Frankish diadem in the great Emperor’s minster at Aachen. But the men of border Lotharingia refused to acknowledge another Saxon; there was now again a Karling who was a crowned King; none but that Karling could be their lawful sovereign; the Saxon Duke had been chosen King of Saxony only, because a chief was needed to defend the land against the Slaves, and because the true Carolingian King was at that |The Lotharingians transfer their allegiance from Otto to Lewis. 939.| moment disqualified.[294] The Lotharingians therefore transferred their allegiance from Otto to Lewis. Their first application was rejected; a second, made by the temporal princes of the country—the Bishops clave to Otto—was accepted.[295] A war naturally followed between Lewis and Otto, in which Lotharingia was ravaged by the German King. Lewis was however not without allies. The West-Saxon King stepped in as the champion of his Frankish |The English fleet in the Channel.| nephew against his Old-Saxon brother-in-law; an English fleet appeared in the channel; but in an inland war this naval help could be of little avail, and nothing came of the English intervention beyond the ravage of some parts of the opposite coast.[296] A series of intrigues and backslidings now follow which fairly baffle the chronicler. While Lewis was gaining new subjects to the East, his vassals within his own kingdom almost unanimously forsook |The Western princes do homage to Otto.| him. Not only his old enemies Hugh and Herbert, but the fickle Duke of the Normans, and Arnulf, in whose cause he had himself been so lately warring, all met Otto and transferred their homage from Lewis to him.[297] The motive for this course is not very clear. Otto was indeed a more distant, but he was a far more powerful, over-lord, one far more likely to exercise effective authority over his |Activity of Lewis.| vassals. But the indefatigable Lewis found new friends in Lotharingia; he went into Elsass to a conference with |Lotharingia won and lost.| Hugh of Provence;[298] he drove the partisans of Otto out of Lotharingia, and returned to Laon to chastise a Bishop suspected of treason. These successes were only momentary; Lotharingia was soon recovered by Otto.[299] But the conspiracy of the Western princes against their King was no |William does homage and makes special promises to Lewis. 940.| less transitory. In the year following the general defection William of Normandy changed sides; he met Lewis in the neighbourhood of Amiens; he did homage, and received from the King a fresh grant of his dominions.[300] And he seems to have made something more than the usual promises of allegiance. He is said to have pledged himself either to die in the King’s cause or to restore him to the full exercise of his royal authority.[301] Yet before the year was out William was again in arms, helping Hugh |The princes, William among them, besiege Rheims, and depose Archbishop Artald. 940.| and Herbert in a siege of Rheims.[302] The metropolitan see was disputed between Hugh, a son of Herbert, and Artald, a vigorous champion of the King, who had performed the ceremony of his coronation. Artald was now in possession of the bishopric, and had been endowed by the King with great temporal privileges and with the title of Count.[303] War against the Primate was in every sense war against the King. The city surrendered; Herbert’s Archbishop was admitted; and the conspirators then went a step further in rebellion by besieging the King’s |Hugh and Herbert again do homage to Otto at Attigny. 940.| own city of Laon. Hugh and Herbert presently took a still more daring step by inviting Otto to Attigny, within the acknowledged West-Frankish border, and there renewing their homage to him.[304] With this last transaction William |William renews his homage to Lewis.| had nothing to do; before long we find him again the faithful homager of King Lewis, receiving him with all kingly-state at Rouen, and seemingly bringing with him to their due allegiance, not only his own Breton vassals, but his brother-in-law William of Aquitaine.[305]

We are now drawing near to the end of the troubled career of William Longsword. We here find ourselves involved in such a mass of contradictory statements that I reserve their special examination for another place.[306] |William Longsword murdered by Arnulf. 943.| That William was lured by Arnulf of Flanders to a conference on the island of Picquigny in the Somme, and that he was there murdered by the contrivance of the Flemish prince, there seems no reason to doubt. But as to the motives and circumstances which led to the act, whether Arnulf acted alone or in concert with any of the other Western princes, whether King Otto himself was in any way the unwitting cause of a crime at which his noble heart would have revolted, are questions which I shall |Council of Attigny, held by the two Kings of the Franks as colleagues.| discuss elsewhere. But I cannot, even here, wholly pass by the Council of Attigny, a council at which events took place which one version closely connects with the death of William. Otto was reconciled to Lewis, who had now become his brother-in-law by a marriage with his widowed sister Gerberga, and by Otto’s means the Duke of the French was reconciled to the King. The two Kings then, as colleagues in the administration of one Frankish realm, held a solemn council, at which the great vassals of the Western Kingdom attended. The kings sat side by side; but though the Western King was on his own ground, his Eastern colleague, the truer successor of Charles, the King crowned at Aachen and already no doubt looking to be the Emperor crowned at Rome, took the seat of honour, which, if one tale be true, the Norman alone was found bold enough to challenge for his own immediate lord.

§ 4. Reign of Richard the Fearless. 943–996.

Richard the Fearless succeeds. 943.

William Longsword left one son, Richard, surnamed the Fearless, born of a Breton mother Sprota, who stood, as we have seen, to Duke William in that doubtful position in which she might, in different mouths, be called an honourable matron, a concubine, or a harlot.[307] Her son had been taught both the languages of his country, and he was equally at home in Romance Rouen and in Scandinavian Bayeux.[308] Whether his birth were strictly legitimate or not was a matter of very little moment either in |His doubtful legitimacy little thought of.| Norman or in Frankish eyes. If a man was of princely birth and showed a spirit worthy of his forefathers, few cared to pry over minutely into the legal or canonical condition of his mother. The young Richard had been already, without any difficulty, acknowledged by the Norman and Breton chiefs as his father’s future successor in the duchy,[309] |He is invested with the Duchy by Lewis.| and he now found as little difficulty in obtaining a formal investiture of the fief from his lord King Lewis.[310] In England his minority, for he was only about ten years old, would have been a far greater hindrance to his succession than his doubtful birth. But even in England, within the same century, minors reigned when no better qualified member of the kingly house was forthcoming, and young |Reign of Richard. 943–996.| Richard was the only male descendant of Rolf. The long reign of Richard, reaching over more than fifty years, is one of the most important in the history of Normandy and of France, and it is in his time that we hear of the first direct collision between Normandy and England. And the early part of Richard’s reign is perhaps more crowded with picturesque incidents than any other portion of time |Romantic interest of his early life.| of equal length. The early life of the orphan child, his dangers, his captivity, his escape, his bitter enemies and his faithful friends, the mighty powers which strove for the possession of his person or for influence over his counsels—the tale has all the interest of a complicated romance. Many of the details are doubtless due to the invention of Norman legend-makers; but there is enough in the soberer French and German writers to show that the main outline of the story is trustworthy. But for the purpose of the present sketch, I must set forth the romantic tale of Richard’s childhood only in a greatly abridged shape, and content myself with pointing out those parts of the story which are of political importance.[311]

The year in which William Longsword was murdered was an important year in many ways for the whole of Gaul. It marks in some sort the beginning of a new |Events of the year 943;| epoch. Besides the death of William and the important events which followed upon it, this year was marked by a birth and a death which had no small influence on the |death of Herbert of Vermandois; birth of Hugh Capet.| course of affairs. Herbert of Vermandois, the regicide, the tyrant as he is called, died this year, and died, according to some accounts, in a mysterious and horrible fashion.[312] His dominions were divided among his sons, except some portions which passed into the hands of Hugh of Paris. The royal power thus lost one of its most formidable enemies, while another enemy yet more formidable was still further strengthened. And this year, for the first time, Hugh had a son to be the heir of his greatness. His English wife Eadhild had died childless; but her successor, Hugh’s third wife, Hadwisa, daughter of King Henry and sister of King Otto and Queen Gerberga, now bore him a son, Hugh surnamed Capet, the future King. |Effect of Hugh’s birth on Hugh the Great’s policy.| One can hardly doubt that the birth of his son had an effect on Hugh the Great’s policy. He would not be a King himself, but he would put no hindrance in the way of his son being a King. From this time onwards the contrast between the two dynasties, between the old and the new, between the Frank and the Frenchman, between Laon and Paris, becomes even more sharply marked than before.

Constant influence of Germany in Western affairs.

From this time onwards also we must remark another tendency which was doubtless closely connected with the one just mentioned, and of which we have already seen the beginning. I mean the continued and constantly strengthening influence of Germany, the Eastern Kingdom, in the affairs of the West. The Council of Attigny, with the two Kings of the Franks sitting and acting as colleagues, was but the first of a long series of assemblies of the like kind. It is to Otto that all parties in the Western Kingdom appeal as their natural mediator; the King appeals to him as his natural protector. If the Eastern King receives no formal homage as over-lord, still he is clearly looked on both by Lewis and by Hugh as something more than a mere neighbour and brother. Towards Lewis Otto appears as the senior colleague in a common office; in the language of the elder days of the Empire, the Saxon acts as the Augustus, while the Frank is only the Cæsar.[313] While Otto is absent on distant expeditions, his vice-gerent in Lotharingia, Duke Conrad[314] or Archbishop Bruno, is competent to |From 942 [Attigny] to 973 [death of Otto].| act in his name as moderator of the Western realm. This kind of relation between the two kingdoms lasted during the whole remainder of the reign of Otto the Great, that is, during the rest of the reign of Lewis and during the minority and early reign of his son Lothar. The changed state of things in the days of the two cousins, Otto the Second and Lothar, was undoubtedly one determining cause of the fall of the dynasty of Laon. But there was another determining cause of its fall with which we have more immediately to do. Under Rolf Normandy had stuck faithfully to the King; under William it had fluctuated backwards and |Normandy under Richard attached to France.| forwards between King and Duke. Under Richard, Normandy, becoming every day more French and more feudal, became, both in its policy and through actual feudal ties, permanently attached to the Duke and therefore commonly hostile to the King.

Events following the death of William. 943.

Great disturbances in Normandy followed on the unlooked-for death of William Longsword. A new invasion |New Danish settlement under Sihtric.| or settlement direct from the North seems to have happened nearly at the same time as the Duke’s murder; it may even possibly have happened with the Duke’s consent.[315] At any rate the heathen King Sihtric now |The Danes joined by the heathen party in Normandy.| sailed up the Seine with a fleet, and he was at once welcomed by the Danish and heathen party in the country. Large numbers of the Normans, under a chief named Thurmod, fell away from Christianity, and it appears that |Apostasy of young Richard.| the young Duke himself was persuaded or constrained to join in their heathen worship.[316] In such a state of things |The Christian party in Normandy seek French help.| we can neither wonder at nor blame the Christian party in Normandy if they drew as close as they could to their Christian neighbours, even at some risk to the independence of the duchy. To become subjects either of the King of Laon or of the Duke of Paris was better than to be eaten up by heathen wikings. Nor are we entitled to be unduly hard on either King or Duke for trying to make the most of such an opportunity for recovering |Position of Lewis and Hugh| the ground which they had lost. The Land of the Normans had been given up to Rolf by the joint act of |towards Normandy.| its immediate ruler, the father of the present Duke, and of its over-lord, the father of the present King. The grant had been made on the express condition that the Normans should become members of a Christian and Frankish commonwealth. If heathen invasions were to begin again, and to be powerfully helped by men settled on Gaulish soil, the Norman duchy was serving an object exactly opposite to that for which it was founded. In such a case both Duke and King might well feel themselves justified in getting rid of the nuisance altogether. Feudal ideas also were fast developing, and King Lewis may have already begun to entertain some dim notion that wardship over the fief of a minor vassal was a right |The Christians commend themselves, some to Hugh, some to Lewis.| which of necessity belonged to the lord. In any case, neither Hugh nor Lewis was unwilling to extend his dominions, and at first a large party in the duchy seemed ready to welcome either of them. The Christian Normans were divided between the rival attractions of the King and the Duke. The Duke, nearer and more powerful, could give the most effectual aid at the moment; the King, more distant, would be less dangerous as a permanent protector, and the kingly title still commanded a feeling of deep, if vague and unreasoning, veneration. Some of the Norman chiefs therefore commended themselves to King Lewis and others to Duke Hugh. This choice of different protectors seems to mark a difference of feeling among the Normans themselves;[317] but the relations of King and Duke were just now unusually friendly, and no immediate dissension seems to have arisen between them on this account. It was in this same year, though later than these Norman transactions, that Hugh not only acted as godfather to a daughter of the King, but was confirmed by his new spiritual brother in the possession of the duchies of France |Lewis and Hugh both enter Normandy.| and Burgundy.[318] Hugh entered Normandy; he fought several battles with the heathens and apostates, and was willingly received at Evreux, where the citizens were of |Lewis defeats the heathens and occupies Rouen.| the Christian party.[319] Meanwhile the King marched to Rouen, he gathered what forces he could, seemingly both from among his own subjects and from among the Christian Normans; he fought a battle, he utterly defeated the heathens, he killed Thurmod with his own hand, he recovered the young Duke, and left Herlwin of Montreuil as his representative at Rouen.[320] On a later visit to Rouen, he received the cession of Evreux from Hugh.[321] Herlwin now waged war against Arnulf with some success, for he slew Balzo, the actual murderer of William, and sent his hands as a trophy to the Norman capital.[322] But in the course of the year Hugh contrived to reconcile Arnulf to the King,[323] and the King reconciled Arnulf and Herlwin.

Such is the account given by the French writers; the Normans fill up the story with many further details.[324] |Norman version.| They leave out—thereby throwing the greatest doubt upon the trustworthiness of their own story—all about the homage of Richard and the other Normans, all about Sihtric and Thurmod and the deliverance of Normandy by Lewis himself. Lewis, according to them, came of his own accord to Rouen after the death of William, and was received with joy, as he was supposed to have come in order to plan an expedition against the common enemy Arnulf.[325] Still from this point it is just possible to patch the two narratives together, though I confess that I receive every detail which comes clothed in the rhetoric of Dudo with very great suspicion. Lewis then, according to this account, remains at Rouen, and a suspicion gets afloat that he is keeping the young Duke a prisoner, and that he means to seize on Normandy for himself. A popular insurrection follows, which is only quelled by the King producing Richard in public and solemnly investing him |Richard’s detention at Laon.| with the duchy.[326] After this, strange to say, the Norman regents, Bernard the Dane, Oslac, and Rudolf surnamed Torta, are won over by the craft of Lewis to allow him to take Richard to Laon and bring him up with his own children. The King is then persuaded by the bribes of Arnulf to treat Richard as a prisoner, and even to threaten |Richard’s escape.| him with a cruel mutilation.[327] By a clever stratagem of his faithful guardian Osmund, the same by which Lewis himself had been rescued in his childhood from Herbert of Vermandois,[328] Richard is saved from captivity, and carried to the safe-keeping of his great-uncle, Bernard of Senlis. A mass of perfidious and unintelligible diplomacy now follows in the Norman accounts, of which, if it ever happened at all, we get only the results in the French version. The French writers know nothing of the captivity of |Norman invasion of Britanny. 944.| young Richard, and they connect the invasion of Normandy which undoubtedly took place in the next year with certain transactions in Britanny. The Breton princes, Berengar and Alan, were at variance between themselves, a state of things which gave opportunity for a desolating invasion of the Normans, seemingly the heathen or apostate |Lewis invades Normandy in concert with Hugh. 944.| Normans.[329] Lewis now invaded Normandy in concert with Hugh. The Duke had already made peace with the Normans,[330] but he was seduced by the offer of all Normandy beyond the Seine,[331] or at any rate of the district of Bayeux.[332] Lewis accordingly, with Arnulf and Herlwin, and several Bishops of France and Burgundy, entered Normandy and occupied Rouen. We again find a division of parties in the country, some receiving the King and others withstanding him.[333] Hugh meanwhile occupied Bayeux, but Lewis required his confederate to surrender the city to him. The Duke obeyed, but he at once began again to plot against |Dissension between Lewis and Hugh.| his sovereign.[334] He now stirred up several smaller enemies against Lewis, such as Bernard of Senlis, Theobald, Count of Tours, Blois, and Chartres—of whom we shall hear again—the Vermandois princes, and Hugh, his own Archbishop |War at Rheims and elsewhere. 945.| of Rheims. Lewis meanwhile felt himself so safe in Normandy that he employed Norman troops against these various enemies;[335] and when he had made a truce with Hugh and had raised the siege of Rheims, he returned to Rouen, almost as if he intended to make that city his capital and his permanent residence.[336]

Lewis at Rouen.

Lewis had first appeared in Normandy as a deliverer. But according to the Norman writers, he now changed into a conqueror, and began to dream of exercising the extremest rights of conquest. The lands and the |His growing unpopularity and probable designs on Normandy.| women of Normandy were to be distributed among his followers; above all, the estates of the aged Bernard and his beautiful young wife were to be given to an impudent knight who asked for them.[337] It is worth noticing that, both in this case and in the former one, the evil deeds attributed to Lewis are all in intention; in the earlier tale he was going to make Richard a prisoner, he was going to mutilate him; so he is now going to give Bernard’s wife to his follower; but it does not appear that he actually did any one of these things. Still we can well believe that the Normans were tired of Lewis’s prolonged sojourn at Rouen. Foreign dominion in any shape would soon become hateful to the Norman nation, and all creeds and parties would gladly unite in an effort to get rid of it. That Lewis fully intended to keep Normandy can hardly be doubted. That great duchy, with its seven bishoprics, its flourishing capital, its fields and towns and harbours all springing into new life after their recovery from Scandinavian havoc, must indeed have been a tempting prize to the King of Laon and Compiègne. If he could not hold both Rouen and Laon, he might be well pleased to make the exchange, and to transfer the seat of his kingship to the banks of the Seine. How far any part of the Norman people was really prepared for such a transfer, how far Lewis was deceived by the false representations of men who only pretended to wish for it, it is impossible to determine. But we can well believe that all Normandy was soon united in hostility to the foreign King. And either by invitation or by accident, a most powerful and faithful ally was ready at hand to help the Normans in |Harold King of the Danes, [935–985.]| their struggle for independence. Denmark, like Sweden and Norway, had, in this age, out of an union of small principalities, become a single powerful kingdom. Gorm |son of Gorm, [840–935?]| the Old, the founder of the Danish monarchy, had died after a reign said to have been of extraordinary length,[338] and had passed on his dominion to his son Harold, surnamed Blaatand, Blue-tooth or Black-tooth. Harold was |974.| still a heathen; in later times he became a compulsory convert to Christianity; but when he had once embraced |985.| the faith, he clave stedfastly to it, and lost his crown and life in defence of his new creed.[339] And if we can at all trust the account of Harold’s conduct in Norman affairs, as given by the Norman writers, it is easy to see that, in his case at least, the seed of the Gospel was sown in the |Harold’s disinterested conduct in Normandy. 945.| fruitful field of an honest and good heart.[340] The heathen wiking, utterly unlike most of his tribe, set an example of straightforward, honest, and unselfish dealing, which shines all the brighter from its contrast with the endless aggressions and backslidings of the selfish and faithless princes of Gaul. Whatever brought Harold into Normandy, he acted there as a disinterested friend of the |He occupies the Côtentin,| Norman Duke and his subjects. He first appeared in the Côtentin, which was most probably already occupied by recent settlers from the North,[341] and he made his head-quarters |and Bayeux.| at Cherbourg—the borough of Cæsar.[342] He was next received at Bayeux,[343] and now all Normandy rose in the cause of the deliverer. That Harold defeated Lewis in |Battle by the Dive.| a battle on the banks of the Dive is allowed on both sides; that the battle was preceded by a conference is allowed on both sides. But the French writers represent the battle as a treacherous attack made by the Danes on a prince who had come in all confidence to a peaceful meeting.[344] The Normans, on the other hand, say that the fight was brought about by the imprudence or insolence of Herlwin of Montreuil.[345] He who had caused, however innocently, the death of William, he who had ruled in Rouen as the deputy of Lewis, now appeared prominently among the royal troops, and stirred up the wrath of Danes and Normans by his presence. This certainly seems a very lame story, and we may well believe that Harold, however faithful to his allies, might see no crime in practising a little of the usual Danish treachery towards an enemy. But the result of the battle is certain; the armies met, on or near ground to be afterwards made immortal by one of the chiefest exploits of the great William;[346] and, as a |Lewis defeated and taken prisoner.| fitting forerunner of the day of Varaville, the King’s army was defeated and Lewis taken prisoner.[347] The Normans add that Harold and Lewis met, man to man and King to King, and that the Dane led away the Frank as the prize of his own personal prowess. Lewis however escaped; he was accompanied, perhaps betrayed, by a Norman in whom he trusted, and, on reaching Rouen, he was imprisoned by |Harold settles the affairs of the Duchy and returns to Denmark.| other Normans in whom he trusted also. The Danish King, if we can trust a tale of such unparalleled generosity, had now done his work. He passed through the land, confirming the authority of the young Duke, and |The renewal of “Rolf’s law.”| restoring the laws of Rolf.[348] This last phrase is one which meets us constantly in our own history. After the Norman Conquest, the demand for the laws of King Eadward is familiar to every one, and in earlier times we read of demands for the laws of Eadgar or of Cnut, or whoever was the last King who was looked back to with any love.[349] What is really meant in all such cases is not so much any actual enactments as good administration instead of bad, often native administration instead of foreign. The renewal of Rolf’s law meant the wiping out of all traces of the dominion of the King of Laon. Harold then sailed away to his own islands; twenty years afterwards, unless the one story is a repetition of the other, he was equally able and willing to come again on the same errand.[350]

Lewis kept in prison by Hugh. 945–6.

King Lewis was thus a prisoner, as his father had been before him. After a certain amount of the usual treacherous diplomacy,[351] he was transferred from the hands of the Normans to those of their ally the Duke of the French. His wrongs called forth the wrath of his kinsmen in other lands. Queen Gerberga sought help alike from her own Old-Saxon brother and from her husband’s West-Saxon uncle. Æthelstan the Glorious was no more, but he had handed on his sceptre to a |Intervention of Eadmund. 946.| worthy successor in Eadmund the Magnificent. An English embassy haughtily demanded the release of the King, and received from Hugh as haughty a refusal. The Duke of the French would do nothing for fear of the threats of the English.[352] How Eadmund would have followed up this beginning it is hard to say; but the next year saw him cut off by the assassin’s dagger, and his successor Eadred had enough to do in the renewed and final struggle |Intervention of Otto. 945.| with the Northumbrian Danes. The application to Otto was more effectual. The King of the East-Franks at once determined to invade the Western Kingdom the next year.[353] He refused a personal conference with Hugh, and the conference which he allowed him to have with Conrad of Lotharingia was fruitless.[354] At last, when the German army was actually assembling, Hugh found it necessary to |Lewis obtains his liberty in exchange for the| come to terms with his royal prisoner.[355] Hugh’s terms were simple—freedom in exchange for Laon. After a while, Lewis brought himself to surrender his single |cession of Laon. 946| stronghold, his own royal city, which was still held for him by his faithful and stout-hearted Queen. The Duke of the French took possession of the city of the rock, and the King of the West-Franks was reduced to be little more than King of Compiègne. Most likely he hoped, through German and English help, soon to be again King, not only of Laon, but of Paris and Rouen as well. And as far as forms and words and outward homage went, his authority was presently restored over the whole kingdom. |Lewis’s kingship renewed.| Duke Hugh did not scruple to deprive his sovereign of liberty and dominion; but he would never be a King |Hugh and the other Princes do homage. 946.| himself, and he would always have a King over him. The royal dignity—held, it would seem, to have fallen into abeyance through the King’s imprisonment—was solemnly renewed, and Hugh the Great once more became the faithful liegeman and homager of the King whom he had just before held in bonds.[356] The other princes of the kingdom followed his example; but, if the Norman writers are to |The absolute independence of Normandy asserted by the Norman writers.| be believed, there was one marked exception. On the banks of the Epte, where the founder of the Norman state had first done homage, the Duke of the Normans was formally set free from all superiority on the part of the Frankish King.[357] Richard still bore no higher title than that of Duke; but he was a King, as far as complete authority within his own land, and absolute independence of all authority beyond its borders, could make him a King. The prince who was thus acknowledged as perfectly independent was presently persuaded, like other |Richard’s Commendation to Hugh.| allodial owners, to seek a lord, and Richard Duke of the Normans forthwith commended himself and his dominions to his neighbour and benefactor Hugh Duke of the French.[358] Now the absolute independence of Normandy, the renunciation of all homage and all superiority on the part of the crown, is an assertion for which we need some better authority than the declamation of Dudo. In his pages indeed Richard appears as a King, holding the Norman monarchy in fee of no earthly power. But in those pages he also appears as one who far more than forestalled the work of his descendant, as one who held all Gaul and all Britain, with seemingly Germany and Denmark to boot, as dependencies of his Norman monarchy.[359] By the accuracy of the one description we may perhaps judge of the accuracy of the other.

Practical character of the commendation of Richard to Hugh.

But the commendation of Normandy to the Duchy of France rests on much better authority. Norman vanity was less inclined to dwell on it than on the alleged independence of Normandy on the kingdom, but it is incomparably the better ascertained fact of the two. In the days of Richard we get our first glimpses of documentary evidence for Norman history in the form of charters, and in an extant charter Richard distinctly speaks of the Duke of the French as his lord.[360] And it is clear that homage to the Duke carried with it a much more practical relation than homage to the King. Throughout this whole period we find Normandy constantly acting as a subsidiary ally of France. Hugh is followed in his campaigns by Norman troops, seemingly as a matter of course.[361]

Double alliance, between Normandy and France and between the Eastern and Western Kings.

A double alliance was thus formed, between Normandy and France on the one hand, between the Eastern and Western Kings on the other. And the alliance of Normandy and France sealed the fate of the Carolingian kingship. That kingship lasted forty years longer, but its doom was sealed when Richard commended himself to Hugh. It did not fall when its fortunes seemed lowest. At that moment it had still a powerful protector in the Eastern King. Nor did its utter extinction suit the peculiar policy of the powerful vassal, who, as far as internal politics were concerned, held its destiny in his hands. But even the German protectorate could hardly have much longer sustained the German throne of Laon against the growing power of the new French nationality. When that protectorate was forfeited, as we shall soon see it, there was no longer any hope for the last traces of |The alliance between Normandy and France determines the fall of the Carolingian dynasty. 945–987.| Teutonic sway in the West. Again, had Normandy remained isolated and Teutonic, things might have taken a different course. Had Rouen been hostile or even doubtful, Paris might not have triumphed over Laon. Charles the Simple had been able to raise up a powerful Norman division against the rival King, which staved off his fate for a while. So, had Richard been other than Hugh Capet’s faithful vassal and loving brother, a similar Norman diversion might, for a while at least, have preserved the crown to the house of Charles. But Normandy was now the firm ally of France, and that alliance of Rouen and Paris fixed the extinction, slow, it might be, but sure, of the royalty of Laon. It was a question of time. All depended on the policy of the successive Dukes of the French. And we shall presently have to study the policy of Hugh Capet, widely different from that of his father, but quite as remarkable in its own way.

This double alliance was not slow in bearing fruit. The |War of the two Kings against the two Dukes. 946.| threats of Otto, unlike the threats of Eadmund, were carried into action. Lewis had indeed been set free; but he was set free on terms which his royal colleague and brother must have felt to be dishonouring to himself as well as to his ally. A war shortly followed, in which the two Kings appear as the common enemies of the two Dukes. But it is a war about which it is very difficult |Comparison of the French, German, and Norman accounts.| to get at the exact truth. In the part which relates to Normandy the French writers are, evidently of set purpose, meagre beyond expression. Our chief German authority, though he enlarges on one or two trifling points,[362] is, on the point which most immediately concerns us, hardly fuller than his Western fellows. The Norman legend, on the other hand, overwhelms us with details, half of which we instinctively suspect to be mythical. There is no doubt that the issue of the campaign in a military point of view was inglorious, to say the least, for the two Kings of the Franks. This was quite reason enough for the French and German writers to slur over the subject, and for the Normans to pick it out as a |Objects of Lewis and Otto; supposed intrigues of Arnulf.| subject for special rhetoric and exaggeration. In their story Arnulf, as usual, appears as the villain of the piece. He stirs up the whole strife; his scheme is for Lewis to yield to Otto all claims on Lotharingia, and to receive Normandy instead, as soon as the duchy should be conquered for him by the arms of the German King.[363] But the French and German writers know nothing of these machinations of Arnulf, and in their eyes, or at least in their writings, Normandy never assumes any such primary importance. The interference of Otto, in connexion with what went before and what followed, is intelligible enough, and it hardly needs the introduction of Arnulf to explain it. Yet it is likely enough that the scheme said to have been suggested by the wily Fleming really did form an element in the reckonings of the two Kings. It was most important to settle the endless Lotharingian question, which had formed a subject of discord between |944.| them even in the very year of Lewis’s occupation of |Probable designs of Lewis on Normandy.| Rouen.[364] And after Lewis’s defeat and imprisonment, we may be sure that the conquest or humiliation of Normandy |March of Otto; meeting of the three Kings, Otto, Lewis, and Conrad.| was an object very dear to his heart. At all events, with whatever objects, the King of the East-Franks[365] entered the Western Kingdom, and was joyfully welcomed by its King, who joined him with all his forces. A third King joined the muster, Conrad of Burgundy,[366] who followed in the wake of Otto. Of the four Carolingian kingdoms three were thus united against the upstart powers of Paris and Rouen. And among them the German King, not yet Emperor in formal rank, takes a distinct and recognized Imperial precedence. Burgundy and the Western Kingdom do not indeed seem to owe him any formal homage; but their sovereigns were far more truly his vassals, in any practical sense of the word, than the Dukes against whom they were marching were vassals of the King of |The three Kings fail before Laon, but| Compiègne. The three Kings began by an attempt to extend the despoiled monarch’s possessions by the recovery of his lost fortress of Laon.[367] This attempt failed; but they |take Rheims. 946.| took Rheims, whence they drove out Hugh, the Duke’s Archbishop, and brought back Artald, the faithful servant |They ravage France and Normandy, but fail to take either Paris or Rouen.| of King Lewis.[368] They then entered France; they ravaged the whole land, but they shrank from or failed in an attack on Paris.[369] They then harried Normandy, but they failed in an attempt on Rouen.[370] Thus much is certain; the confederate Kings were driven back from the Norman capital. The picturesque, but probably to a great extent legendary, details form a brilliant picture, for which I must refer to the Norman writers and their English interpreter.[371]

Effects of the German intervention.

The discomfiture of three Kings, the repulse of the great Otto himself, could not fail to become a favourite subject of Norman boasting. But it is by no means clear that the German intervention was altogether fruitless. We have seen the fortunes of Lewis at their |Lewis’s fortunes begin to improve. 947.| lowest ebb. We now see them very distinctly begin to rise, while those of Hugh the Great suffer a temporary depression. The Duke failed in several expeditions, while the King went on gaining both in territorial dominion |Friendship of Lewis and Otto.| and in the opinion of men.[372] The close connexion between the two Frankish Kings continued, and both Lewis and his Queen shared the hospitality of their |947, 949.| brother, and took a part in the paschal splendours of |Series of Synods.| Aachen.[373] Not the least striking feature of this period is the series of synods, synods of bishops from both the Frankish kingdoms, but to which the Eastern realm |Meeting by the Cher. 947.| naturally contributed by far the greater share. The first of the series, held on the banks of the Cher, was held along with a secular conference, and with armies at no |Synods of Verdun, (947); Mouzon, and Engelheim, (948).| great distance.[374] The later meetings, at Verdun,[375] at Mouzon,[376] and the last and most solemn, held at Engelheim[377] under the presidency of a papal legate, seem to have been essentially ecclesiastical assemblies. But the Kings were |Action of the Kings.| present, acting as royal colleagues, the Eastern King keeping his distinct superiority.[378] Otto may well have dreamed of himself as a new Constantine presiding in a new |Controversy about the see of Rheims; its political importance.| Nicene Council. The strictly ecclesiastical object of these assemblies was to decide the controversy between the rival Archbishops who disputed, and alternately occupied, the metropolitan see of Rheims. But such a point could not be dealt with as a mere matter of canon law. The real question was not whether Hugh or Artald was the more regularly elected Primate, but whether the great city of Rheims should be held by a prince devoted to the Duke or by a prince devoted to the King. The affairs of the Western Kingdom were fully discussed in an assembly of prelates, most of whom were subjects of the Eastern King. Lewis set forth the whole story of his wrongs before his brother King and the bishops, and prayed both of them to use their several arms, temporal and spiritual, against |Final Synod of Trier; Hugh the Great excommunicated. 948.| his enemy. The result was, not only that Rheims was restored to the royalist Archbishop, but that, after due notice, the Duke of the French was solemnly excommunicated in a final synod at Trier,[379] which, oddly enough, consisted mainly of Western bishops. Hugh however cared little for the excommunication; the war continued, and various places were attacked with varying success on both sides. The Normans appeared as the allies of Hugh;[380] Otto, engaged in distant affairs, entrusted the support of |Laon recovered by Lewis. 949.| Lewis to Conrad of Lotharingia.[381] By a stratagem of Rudolf, the father of the historian, Laon was recovered to the King, except the tower, which still held out for |Hugh excommunicated by Pope Agapetus. 949.| Hugh.[382] At last an excommunication pronounced by Pope Agapetus in person[383] seems to have made some impression on the stubborn mind of the Duke. Through the mediation |Hugh does homage again. 950.| of Otto, peace was made once more; Hugh again did homage in the fullest terms,[384] and restored to the King the tower of Laon, which he still held. After this, though smaller wars and bickerings still went on in Lotharingia, |His last revolt and submission. 953.| Vermandois, and elsewhere, there was for four years only one revolt of Hugh, and that one after which the great Duke found it expedient to beg for peace through the intercession of Queen Gerberga.[385] During all this time |Lewis’s progress in Aquitaine and in Burgundy. 951.| the power of Lewis was steadily growing. Whether by force or persuasion, he gained over to his side the princes of Aquitaine, who no doubt welcomed the King as a convenient rival to their nearer neighbour the Duke.[386] Lewis even passed the boundaries of his own kingdom; he visited Besançon, and received the homage of at least one prince of the royal Burgundy, Charles-Constantine of Vienne.[387] All things seemed prospering for the Carolingian King, |His death. 954.| when his strange and unexpected death cut short the hopes of his house.[388] After all his long and chequered career, he was only thirty-three years of age.

Reign of Lothar. 954–986.

The long reign of Lothar, the son and successor of Lewis, answers to only a part of the much longer reign of |The old generation of princes dies off.| Richard the Fearless. In the course of a few years most of the principalities of Gaul changed masters. Long before the reign of Lothar was over, almost before he had personally entered on his government, Richard, so lately a child, the youngest of princes, became the eldest ruler within his own world. King Lewis was dead already; |Hugh the Great. 956.| |Arnulf born 873, died 965.| Hugh the Great died two years later; Arnulf of Flanders, at an almost incredible old age, died nine years later still.[389] |Otto the Great. 973.| Otto, King and Emperor, outlived all these princes, but |Otto the Second. 983.| Richard outlived both him and his son. Richard succeeded to his duchy in the time of Eadmund of England; he outlived Eadmund, Eadred, Eadwig, and Eadgar, and lived far on into the reign of Æthelred. In France he beheld and furthered the extinction of the Carolingian dynasty, and he died in the same year as the first King of |996.| the permanent Parisian line. But this long period is, if we contrast it with that which went before it, comparatively barren of events bearing on the history of the Norman duchy. Richard wrought great changes within his own dominions, and he had many enemies to contend against without; still the greater part of his reign was no longer one incessant struggle, like the reign of his |954–962.| father and his own early days. For some years wars and disputes went on almost as vigorously as before; but for |Comparative quiet of the later years of Richard. 962–996.| many years before his death Richard seems to have enjoyed a time of comparative peace, which he devoted to the consolidation of his power within his own states, and in a great degree to the erection and enrichment of ecclesiastical foundations.

Young Lothar was chosen King without opposition by the princes of France, Aquitaine, and ducal Burgundy. Duke Hugh espoused his cause; so did Archbishop Bruno, who now ruled Lotharingia in the name of his brother King Otto.[390] But Hugh soon contrived to employ the boy whom he recognized as his sovereign as the tool of |Hugh embroils Lothar with the Aquitanian princes, but is defeated before Poitiers. 955.| his own crafty policy. As has been already said, the princes of Southern Gaul were the natural allies of the King against the Duke who was so dangerous a neighbour to both. The most powerful, at least the most prominent, among these princes, William of Poitiers, the brother-in-law of William of Normandy,[391] seems to have been on the whole a faithful vassal of Lewis,[392] and he had certainly given no recent cause of offence. But Hugh procured from Lothar a grant of the duchy of Aquitaine, in addition to those of France and Burgundy,[393] and it was doubtless in order to enforce this claim that he involved the King in a war with the Aquitanian princes. But Hugh was utterly baffled before Poitiers,[394] and, soon after this defeat, his busy and faithless life, hitherto in general so |Death of Hugh the Great.| successful, came to an end.[395] The duchy of France, like the kingdom and the duchy of Normandy, now passed to |Hugh Capet succeeds under the guardianship of Richard. 956.| a minor. Hugh, surnamed Capet, the future King, succeeded his father at the age of thirteen years. On account of his youth, he was left by his father’s will under the guardianship of the Duke of the Normans.[396] Besides the close political connexion between the two princes, Richard |Richard marries Hugh’s sister Emma. 960.| was betrothed to Emma, daughter of the elder and sister of the younger Hugh, whom some years later he married.[397] Whether Richard ever did homage to Lothar is not clear;[398] but Hugh, on his accession to manhood, did homage to |The sons of Hugh do homage to Lothar, and Richard does homage to Hugh. 960.| the King, and was invested with the duchy of France and county of Poitiers, Burgundy being assigned to his younger brother Otto.[399] The death of Otto however, before many years had passed, caused Burgundy also to revert to Hugh.[400] Richard also renewed the commendation which he had made to the elder Hugh, and became the loyal vassal of his brother-in-law.[401] Arnulf, the old enemy, was now in his last days;[402] so the functions of devil or villain are now transferred in the Norman tale to Theobald, Count |Enmity of Theobald of Chartres towards Richard.| of Tours, Chartres, and Blois. This prince, who, like Arnulf, reached an unusual age, was the son of an elder Theobald, who is said to have bought the county of Chartres of the famous wiking Hasting.[403] The second Theobald had married Liudgardis, the widow of William Longsword and step-mother of Richard; he was a vassal of the Duke of the French,[404] and, in that character, he had acted for Hugh the Great as the gaoler of King Lewis.[405] But he seems to have by no means adopted his lord’s policy towards the Normans; on the contrary he appears as the instigator of Gerberga and Lothar to every sort of hostility against Richard.[406] The French accounts, which commonly speak of Theobald with a certain tone of contempt,[407] tell us just enough to show that there is some |Theobald gains Evreux. 962.| ground of truth in all this. Theobald’s chief object seems to have been the acquisition of Evreux, which at one time he actually gained by the help of Lothar.[408] Before this, if |Supposed plot of Lothar, Bruno, and Theobald against Richard. 960.| we may trust the Norman tale, Theobald and the King had formed with Bruno, Archbishop and Duke, a treacherous plot to beguile Richard to a conference at Amiens, and there to put him to death or imprison him.[409] I confess that this sounds to me very like a Norman perversion of a fact which is much better authenticated. King Lothar had summoned to Soissons a general assembly of the chief men of his realm, an event so common in England and Germany and so rare in the Western Kingdom. Whether the Duke |Richard attempts to disperse the Assembly at Soissons. 961.| of the Normans was summoned or not does not appear; but he came with an armed force and attempted to disperse the assembly, but was beaten off by the King’s troops.[410] In the next year we find Theobald at war with Richard |Theobald defeated by Richard. 962.| and defeated by him. Being also on ill terms with his own lord Duke Hugh, he took shelter with Gerberga and |Norman version; defeat of Lothar; second intervention of Harold.| Lothar, and was kindly received by them.[411] In the Norman version this grows into a long and striking story.[412] Just as in the tale of Lewis and Harold Blaatand, a conference between Lothar and Richard developes into a battle in which Lothar, like his father, is of course utterly defeated. Yet even while thus victorious, Richard is neither satisfied nor confident. He sends again to King Harold in Denmark; Harold at once comes at his call, but he has no opportunity of renewing his old exploits. For his enemies are thoroughly afraid of him. Count Theobald at once makes peace, and restores Evreux. King Lothar begs for peace also, and craves that the terrible Danes may be sent away. But it is not so easy to send them away as to bring them in. However Duke Richard does his best; he goes in person and preaches an eloquent sermon to the pagans, exhorting them to embrace Christianity and to settle quietly in the country. This a portion of them are induced to do, while the stiffnecked heathens are persuaded to sail southwards and to ravage infidel Spain instead of Catholic Gaul. After this a peace |Peace between Lothar and Richard.| is made between Lothar and Richard,[413] which seems not to have been again broken.

It is impossible to say exactly how much of truth lurks |Comparison of the French and Norman accounts.| in all this. The French writers help us to little more than the fact that there was some measure of hostility between Lothar and Richard. Richard tries to disperse Lothar’s solemn parliament; Lothar kindly entertains Richard’s vanquished enemy. Where there was as much mutual ill-will as this, it is likely that there was much more. And while we must always allow for the inventions and exaggerations of the Norman writers, we must also allow for the evident unwillingness of the French writers to say one word more about the Normans than they could help. But the whole Norman story is strange and unlikely, and many of the events sound most temptingly like repetitions of earlier events. We seem to be reading the tale of Lewis and Harold over again with but slight changes. Yet the dates come within the life, perhaps within the memory, of our one original informant on the Norman side.[414] I leave the more minute examination and final decision of the matter to those with whom Norman history is a primary object. It is enough for my purpose that the few certain facts fall in with the more elaborate picture in the legend, so far as to bring out the same general view of Richard’s position as the firm ally of France and as the enemy of the Carolingian crown.

Later years of Lothar. 962–986.

During the latter part of the reign of Lothar things took a different turn. Hugh Capet now began personally to take the lead in affairs, and his peculiar policy impressed itself on the period. We have already seen what the |Policy of Hugh Capet different from that of his father.| policy of the elder Hugh was; he would reduce the King to the least possible amount of power and of territory, but he would himself never be more than Duke. Hugh Capet followed a different policy. He was ready to be a King as soon as he could become one quietly and with a decent pretext; but he would not hazard the prize by |General peace between the Kingdom and the Duchy of France.| clutching at it too soon. The relations between King and Duke during the last twenty years of Lothar were very unlike the relations which had existed between the father of Lothar and the father of Hugh. There was very little of open enmity, and when there was any, the wily Duke contrived that it should be the King who was outwardly in the wrong. For a long time Duke Hugh acted as the vassal and friend of King Lothar, and the friendship of Duke Hugh of course carried with it the friendship of Duke Richard. On the whole this was a time of peace, a thing hitherto so unusual, between Duke and King, so much so that the duchy actually underwent a German invasion in the royal cause. For it was now that the relations between the two kingdoms of the Franks again became of paramount importance. It was now that the folly of Lothar forfeited the German protectorate for himself and his kingdom.

Change in the relations between the two Frankish kingdoms on the death of Otto the Great. 973.

On the death of Otto the Great the relations between the Eastern and the Western Kingdoms were wholly changed.[415] Otto the uncle had been a protector; Otto the cousin was a rival. This breach of the old friendly relations with the Eastern Kingdom was undoubtedly one main cause of the fall of the Carolingian house in the Western Kingdom. The royalty of Laon was an outpost of the Teutonic interest in the West, which could hardly maintain itself without the support of the Teutonic powers to the east of it. Lothar, with a high spirit, had none of his father’s prudence. The old disputes about Lotharingia |War between Otto and Lothar.| began again;[416] war broke out, a war which, on Lothar’s side, had the approval of Duke Hugh and the other princes, an approval so cordially expressed as to suggest the suspicion |Lothar’s raid on Aachen and Otto’s invasion of France. 978.| that it was given only as a snare.[417] At any rate Lothar went on a wild and sudden raid against Aachen, which could win for him no lasting gain, but which gave him the opportunity of occupying the city of his great forefather, and of turning the eagle on his palace the wrong way.[418] But the insulted Emperor retaliated by a far more terrible invasion of the Western Kingdom, in which not only the royal domains, but those of the Duke were occupied and ravaged, and Paris itself was threatened.[419] This campaign of Otto the Second, like that of his greater father, |Peace between Otto and Lothar. 980.| was not exactly rich in military glory, but it was politically successful. Lothar, without consulting Hugh, sought for peace,[420] and gave up his claims on Lotharingia.[421] Hugh, who had hitherto stuck so faithfully by the King, was alarmed at his sudden and secret reconciliation with the |Alliance between Otto and Hugh; reconciliation of Lothar and Hugh.| Emperor. He held a council of his own vassals, and, by their advice, he determined to win over Otto to himself, which he succeeded in doing, though greatly against the will of the King.[422] Hugh and Lothar were however at last |Lewis son of Lothar elected King; his marriage and divorce. 981.| reconciled again.[423] Lewis the son of Lothar was, with the consent of Hugh and the other princes, associated in the kingdom with his father.[424] A ludicrous and unsuccessful attempt was then made to establish him at once as King in Aquitaine by marrying him to a princess of that country.[425] The notion was in itself a return to a rational policy with regard to Southern Gaul, if it had only been set about in a wiser |Death of Otto the Second. 983.| way. On the death of Otto the Second, Lothar, notwithstanding his former cession of his rights over Lotharingia, |Lothar’s further attempts on Lotharingia. 986.| took advantage of the minority of Otto the Third and the consequent anarchy in Germany again to assert his claims. He was pressing them with some success by force of arms, when his career was cut short by an early death.[426]

During all this time the narrative of our French authority tells us absolutely nothing about Normandy. Yet we may well believe that Richard took the first place in the assembly of Hugh’s vassals, and that Norman troops duly accompanied those of France in every expedition. The policy of Hugh, we may be sure, was always the policy of Richard. |Richard’s mediation in Flanders. 965.| The only thing about him which even his garrulous panegyrist has to tell us is that, after the death of the old Arnulf, when his grandson and successor the younger Arnulf refused his homage to the King, Richard stepped in as mediator. Lothar invaded Flanders, but Richard pacified King and Marquess; Arnulf rendered the homage, and his dominions were restored to him.[427]

The accession of the Parisian or Capetian dynasty.

And now we have at last reached that great revolution which extinguished the last remnants of Carolingian royalty, which decided the long strife between the German Frank and the half Celtic, half Roman, Frenchman, which raised Paris to that rank among the cities of Gaul which it has since never lost, which raised the lords of Paris to that rank which they lost within our |Reign of Lewis the Fifth. 986–987.| own day. Lothar was succeeded by his son Lewis, already his colleague in the kingdom, but his reign was short and troubled. His counsellors were divided whether he should assert his independence or should put himself under the protection of Duke Hugh.[428] He chose the safer course, and in the one act of his reign he had |He besieges Rheims and dies. 987.| Hugh to his helper. He attacked and besieged Rheims in a quarrel with the Archbishop Adalbero, whom he charged with having nine years before aided the Emperor Otto in his invasion.[429] But an accommodation was hardly brought about between the King and the Primate, when |Diet of election at Senlis. 987.| Lewis died.[430] The princes met at Senlis to elect a successor. Our French writers take care not to mention the name, but we can hardly doubt that Richard of Normandy, the most faithful and the most powerful vassal of Duke Hugh, was there ready to support the cause of his lord and brother. The choice lay between the Duke of the French and the last remaining Karling, Charles, uncle of the late King and brother of Lothar. This prince was unlucky and unpopular, and he had given special offence by accepting Lotharingia, or a part of it, as a fief of the Empire.[431] |The doctrine of elective monarchy set forth by Archbishop Adalbero.| A speech from the Primate, setting forth the merits of Hugh and the lawfulness and necessity of elective monarchy,[432] settled the minds of the waverers, if any waverers there were. Hugh was chosen King and was crowned at Noyon. |Hugh elected and crowned. 987.| Thus did an assertion of the right of election which would not have been out of place in an English Witenagemót or even in a Polish Diet become the foundation of a dynasty which was to become, more than any other in Europe, the |Permanence of his dynasty.| representative of strict hereditary succession. Adalbero raised to the throne a race in which, by a fate unparalleled in any other kingly house, the crown passed on for three hundred and fifty years from father to son, a race which, down to our own day, has never been without a |987–1328.| male heir, and in which the right of the male heir has |1338–1420.| never been disputed, save once through the ambition of a |1589.| foreign prince and once through the frenzy of religious partizanship. The crown of England and the crown of Spain have been repeatedly, by revolution or by female succession, carried away from the direct male heir to distant |Position of Rheims as the crowning-place.| kinsmen or to utter strangers. But every King of the French crowned at Rheims has been at once a Frenchman by birth and the undisputed heir of the founder of the dynasty. Hugh and his son Robert, neither of them born to royalty, were crowned, the one at Noyon the other at |1594.| Orleans. Henry the Fourth, the one King whose right was disputed, was crowned at Chartres. Rheims alone kept her proud prerogative as the crowning-place of Kings whose right was never so much as called in question. Paris, the seat of temporal dominion, has never become the ecclesiastical home of the nation, the crowning-place of lawful Kings. None but strangers and usurpers have ever taken the diadem of France in the capital of France. While Rheims has beheld the crowning of so many generations |1431.| of native Frenchmen, Paris has beheld only the |1804.| crowning of a single English King and a single Corsican tyrant.

Struggle between Hugh and Charles. 987–991.

Hugh of Paris was thus chosen King, as his great-uncle Odo of Paris had been chosen King before him. But the hundred years’ rivalry between the two dynasties was not yet over. As Odo had to struggle with Charles the Simple, so Hugh had to struggle with his grandson Charles of Lotharingia. Hugh’s election and coronation did not at once invest him with any territories beyond the limits of his own duchy. Laon, the royal city, would not at once consent either to forsake the line of its ancient princes or calmly to sink into a dependency of Paris. |Robert crowned. 987.| Hugh, after some difficulty, procured the election and coronation of his son Robert as his colleague in the kingdom,[433] and the two Kings, as they are always called, carried on a war of several years against Charles and his party.[434] The last Karling has now sunk to the position of a tyrant—a name which once was the description of Hugh’s father when he was a rebel against the father of Charles.[435] The struggle was at last ended by Charles being betrayed to the Kings by the treachery of Adalbero Bishop of Laon. The revolution was now complete, but its immediate results were |The Parisian dynasty now becomes permanent.| not very marked. The Duke of the French became the King of the French, and the same prince reigned at Paris and at Laon. King Hugh was undoubtedly considerably more powerful than King Lewis or King Lothar; but in the greater part of Gaul the change from the Carolingian |Import of the change.| to the Capetian line was hardly felt. To Hugh’s own subjects it made little practical difference whether their prince were called Duke or King. Beyond the Loire, men cared little who might reign either at Paris or at Laon. But though the immediate change was slight, the election of Hugh was a real revolution; it was the completion of the change which had been preparing for a century and a half; it was the true beginning of a new period. The Duchy of France had successfully played in Gaul the part which in Britain had been played by Wessex, which in Spain has been played by Castile, which in Scandinavia has been less thoroughly played by Sweden, which Prussia before our own eyes has played in Germany. The Carolingian, the Frankish, kingdom now comes to an end; the French duchy of Paris has taken the great step towards |Modern France now definitively begins.| the gradual absorption of all Gaul. The modern kingdom of France dates its definite existence from the election of Hugh; the successive partitions showed in what way the stream of events was running, but the election of Hugh was the full establishment of the thing itself. There now was, what till quite lately there has been ever since, a French King reigning at Paris. The Gallo-Roman land now finally shook off the last relics of that Teutonic domination under which it had been more or less completely held ever |Connexion between France and Germany ceases.| since the days of Hlodwig. The Western Kingdom now broke off all traces of its old connexion with the Eastern. Up to this time the tradition of the former unity of the whole Frankish dominion had still lingered on.[436] No such feeling remains after the final establishment of the Parisian dynasty; the German Cæsar now becomes as alien to Capetian France as his brother at Byzantium. And another |Lotharingia, hitherto| result took place. Lotharingia, the border land, the seat of loyalty to the Carolingian house, still, after the Capetian |fluctuating between Gaul and Germany, now becomes German.| revolution, kept its love for the old Imperial line. But its position was now necessarily changed. Lotharingia kept its Carolingian princes, but it kept them only by definitively becoming a fief of the Teutonic Kingdom. |Charles taken and imprisoned. 991.| Charles died in prison, but his children continued to reign in Lotharingia as vassals of the Empire. Lotharingia was thus wholly lost to France; that part of it which was kept by the descendants of Charles in the female line still preserves its freedom as part of the independent kingdom of Belgium. But the revolution was now fully accomplished; the struggle of a hundred years was over; the race and the tongue of the great Charles were finally wiped |Modern France definitively begins.| out from the Kingdom of the Western Franks. Modern, Celtic, Romance, Parisian, France was now definitively called into being. A kingdom and nation was founded, in the face of which it was for many ages the main work of every other European state to maintain its freedom, its language, and its national being, against the never-ceasing assaults, sometimes of open and high-handed violence, sometimes of plausible falsehood and gilded treachery.

§ 5. Comparison between France, England, and Normandy.

Influence of the Normans on the Capetian revolution.

The influence which the Norman Duke exercised on this great change is carefully kept out of sight by the French historians; yet we cannot doubt that the Norman writers are, this time at least, fully justified in attributing to their sovereign a most important share in the work.[437] Everything leads us to believe that Richard took a leading |Personal share of Richard.| personal share in the revolution, and it is quite certain that, but for the policy which Richard followed, that revolution never could have taken place. It was the alliance between Normandy and France which determined the fate of the Carolingian dynasty.[438] And thus we are led back to the proposition with which I started at an earlier stage |The Norman settlement made Gaul French.| of this Chapter,[439] that it was the settlement of the Scandinavians in Gaul which definitively made Gaul French. They settled just at the point of transition, when the old German state of things was beginning to give way to the new French state of things. The influence of the new comers, notwithstanding their own Teutonic blood and speech, was thrown altogether into the French scale. The Normans became French, because a variety of circumstances brought them more within the range of French influences than of any other. The connexion between Rolf and the Carolingian dynasty was something purely political, or rather personal; Rolf had done homage and sworn oaths to King Charles, and to King Charles he stuck against all pretenders. But the main object of his successors was to bring Normandy within the pale of Christianity and civilization, in such shapes as Christianity and civilization bore immediately before their eyes. This object they naturally sought by establishing a connexion with their nearest neighbours; their standard of language and manners was set by the French court of Paris, not by the German court of Laon or by the more distant, the more purely Latin, courts of Poitiers and Toulouse. The Normans thus became Frenchmen, and, with the zeal of new proselytes, they became first and foremost in everything that is characteristically French. The earliest and best productions of the new-born French |French ideas take root in Normandy.| language were the work of Norman poets. All the ideas which were then growing up in France, ideas which it is hard to express otherwise than by the vague and misleading names of feudalism and chivalry, took firm root in Normandy, and there brought forth their most abundant fruit. Had Normandy remained Danish, the Scandinavian settlement would have been a most important diversion on behalf of the Teutonic element; Romance Paris would have been in a manner hemmed in between two Teutonic lands. And if the Scandinavian settlement had never taken place at all, the French developement would at least have lost the decisive support which it gained from the enlistment of such fresh and vigorous disciples. It was the Normans, I repeat, who made Gaul French; it was the Normans who made French Paris the capital of Gaul, and who gave |The position of Normandy established by the Capetian revolution.| Gaul the French lord of Paris for her King. On the other hand, it was the Capetian revolution which gave Normandy her definite position in Gaul and in Europe. Hitherto, in the minds and mouths of good Frenchmen, and most likely of good Germans also, the Normans were still simply the Pirates, and their sovereign the Duke of the Pirates. Their presence was endured, because they were too strong to be got rid of; but the half-heathen Danish intruders were still hateful to the princes and people of Latin and Christian Gaul. With the election of Hugh Capet all was changed. The firmest ally and supporter of the new dynasty could no longer be looked on as an outcast or as an enemy. The old question as to the relation between Normandy and the Kings of Laon was buried for ever. Whatever relations had hitherto existed between the Duke of the Normans and the King of the West-Franks, there was no doubt that the Duke of the Normans was the vassal, the most powerful and the most loyal vassal, of the Duke of the French, and the Duke of the French and the King of the West-Franks were now one and the same person. Normandy was now thoroughly naturalized; the doubtful position which it had held in Carolingian times passed altogether away; it became the mightiest and noblest among the fiefs of |Comparatively friendly relations between the duchy and the crown.| the Capetian crown. And for a long while the relations between the duchy and the crown remained, on the whole, friendly. It was not till later days, till Normandy was under the sway of her greatest Duke, that the old hostility broke out afresh, and that King Henry of Paris showed himself as eager as King Lewis of Laon to dispossess the prince and people who cut off himself and his city from the mouth of the Seine. Up to the days of Henry and William the good understanding between France and Normandy was seldom broken. And, even counting the wars of Henry and William, we shall find that, considering the power of the vassal and his close neighbourhood to his lord, hostilities between Rouen and Paris were not specially frequent. The rebellions of Hugh the Great alone against the Kings whom he had set up and put down would probably be found to be more in number than the wars between France and Normandy, from the commendation of Richard to Hugh to the day when England and Normandy alike were merged in the vast dominions of the princes of Anjou.

Connexion of French history with the general subject.

The close connexion between Norman and French history, the way in which we may say that Normandy created France and that France created Normandy, must be my excuse for dwelling at an apparently disproportionate length on some subjects which are only indirectly connected with English history. In order thoroughly to understand the Norman Conquest of England, it is almost as needful to have a clear view of the condition and earlier history of Normandy as it is to have a clear view of the condition and earlier history of England. And such a clear view of Norman affairs cannot be had without constant references to French, and occasional references to German, history. And the notices of French history which are needed for this end may serve to illustrate English history |Contrast between the political condition of England and of Gaul.| in another way. The contrast between the political condition of England and that of the Western Kingdom is most striking, even at this early time. Looked at superficially, there is a certain likeness between the two. In both cases, a King of narrow limited power stands at the head of a body of princes, some of whom, in extent of dominion, might almost—on the mainland not only almost but altogether—rank as his peers. But when we come to look more narrowly into the matter, we shall see that the likeness is only superficial. In truth there is very little real likeness at all; and if we admitted a stronger likeness than there is, if we admitted that the two countries had accidentally met at the same point, still their meeting would have been wholly accidental, because the two countries were |England tending to unity, Gaul to division.| moving in exactly opposite directions. England was directly tending to unity; Gaul was directly tending to division. In the long run indeed the division to which Gaul was tending paved the way for a closer unity than England has ever reached; but, at the moment, it was |In England Princes had sunk into Governors;| to division that Gaul was directly tending. The English kingdom was formed by the gradual union of many distinct states; to independent Kings had succeeded dependent Kings, and to dependent Kings had succeeded Ealdormen appointed by the King and his Witan. Great and powerful as was an English Ealdorman, he still was not a sovereign, not even a dependent or vassal sovereign; he ruled only with a delegated authority; the King was supreme, and the Ealdorman was only a governor sent by |in Gaul governors had grown into princes.| him. In Gaul the process was directly opposite. Local governors who, under the first Carolingian Kings and Emperors, had been simple lieutenants of the sovereign, had gradually grown into hereditary princes, who at most went through the decent ceremony of receiving their dominions as a grant from a King who could not withhold them. The Dukes, Counts, and Marquesses of France, of Flanders, of Aquitaine, of Septimania, of Barcelona, had in this way grown into sovereigns. Starting from the position of an English Ealdorman, they had won the formal position, and more than the practical independence, of a vassal King of Wales or Scotland. Normandy was a real fief from the beginning; the grant to Rolf was the exact parallel of the grant to Guthrum; but during the second half of the tenth century the dominions of Rolf were ruled by a native sovereign of his own blood, while the dominions of Guthrum were administered by |Difference of the limitations on the power of the King in England and in Gaul.| Ealdormen appointed by the English King. Again, the power of the King was narrowly limited in both kingdoms, but it was limited in altogether different ways. The power of the King of the English was limited, because he could do no important act without the consent of his Witan. The power of the King of the West-Franks was limited, because he was shorn of all direct authority beyond the narrow limits of Laon and Compiègne. The King of the English, in the exercise of such authority as the law gave him, was obeyed in every corner of his kingdom. The King of the West-Franks did as he chose in his own city of Laon; at Paris and Rouen, at Poitiers and Toulouse, he received only such measures of obedience as the sovereigns of those capitals chose to yield to him. |No regular National Assembly in Gaul.| No regular assembly constantly meeting, like our Witenagemót, had authority over the whole land, and kept the whole land bound together. We read of conferences of princes; but they are rarely held, except for some great and extraordinary occasion like the election of a King. An assembly, meeting yearly or oftener, to sanction the ordinary acts of the King and to pass laws binding on the whole kingdom, was something utterly unknown.

Amount of real power retained by the later Karlings.

And yet, when we see how narrow was the immediate dominion, how small were the available resources, of the later Karlings, it strikes us with wonder throughout the whole history to see how much influence, how much real power, they still kept. The King, however many enemies may be in arms against him, is always an important person, and he commonly finds an army to bring against the rebel army. We wonder where he got his army, and where he got the resources to set his army in motion. In days when war maintained itself an army was doubtless less costly than it is now, and a victorious army might even enrich its leader. But whence did the armies come? Surely not wholly from the narrow limits of the King’s immediate territory. Nor were they likely to be formed by the spontaneous loyalty of volunteers. The influence of the royal name, the reverence attaching to the blood of the great Emperor, might do a good deal to paralyse the efforts of enemies, but they would hardly of themselves bring distant followers to the royal standard. But the King, if he had few subjects, was not wholly without |The Kings drew support from various quarters.| friends. We find hints that the lesser vassals often found it their interest to support the King against the encroachments of the great Dukes. We find that in a war with one rebellious potentate he was often supported by the rivals of that potentate, and that his more distant vassals helped him against those who were more formidable to them than he was. We find also that he could especially rely on the help of those Bishops who, holding directly of the crown, were clothed with the character of ecclesiastical princes.[440] And in the later and more peaceful |Increase of the royal power under Lothar.| times of Lothar and Hugh Capet, the King appears far more clearly than before in the character of an effective head of the kingdom. We read more commonly of consultations with the other princes, and we see the King, by common consent, wielding the forces of all his vassals, including those of the Duke of the French himself. The wily Hugh no doubt saw that it was his interest to strengthen in every way the power and reputation of the crown which he meant one day to place on his own brow. Altogether we may doubt whether the practical power of the later Carolingian Kings was not really quite as great |Power of the crown not immediately increased by the change of dynasty.| as that of the early Capetians. The power of the crown rested mainly on influence and prescription, and influence and prescription were not on the side of the Parisian dynasty. The immediate territorial dominion of the Parisian Kings was no doubt much larger than that of the later Karlings; Paris and Laon together were far greater than Laon by itself. But the connexion between the crown and the great vassals seems to have been distinctly weakened by the change of dynasty. The descendants of Robert and Hugh did not command the hereditary respect which attached to princes sprung from the blood of Charles and Pippin. Some disputed and outlying fiefs were altogether lost to the kingdom, and the King’s sphere of action was far more strictly confined than before to the lands north of the Loire. Lotharingia and the Spanish March fell away; the connexion with Flanders gradually weakened; Aquitaine scarcely acknowledged even a nominal dependence. Assemblies and conferences of the whole kingdom, rare before, seem now to go wholly out of use. Even the vassals north of the Loire, even the former vassals of the Parisian duchy, seem to have less connexion with the crown than heretofore. In fact the French Duke lost by becoming King, just as the German King lost by becoming Emperor. As Duke he had been a less dignified, but he had been a more effectual, over-lord. The Parisian Dukes themselves had done more than all the rest of the world to set forth and strengthen the doctrine that the immediate vassals of a King were entitled to practical sovereignty. Thus, while England was getting more and more united, Gaul was getting more and more divided. Under other circumstances, the Western realm might very easily have changed, step by step, from a kingdom into |Isolation in France led to closer union.| a confederation, just as Germany did.[441] But as it was, the very isolation into which the several parts of the kingdom now fell proved in the end the path to an unity such as England never has seen, such as we trust England never may see. Utter isolation paved the way for utter centralization. In England, as the different parts of the realm became more closely united, all shared in a common national freedom, without any complete sacrifice of local and municipal independence. In Gaul the crown annexed, one by one, all the dominions of its own vassals[442] and such of the dominions of its neighbours as came within its reach. Thus the whole kingdom knew no will but that of the King. Widely as a modern English Parliament differs from an ancient Witenagemót, the one has grown out of the other by gradual developement, without any sudden change. In France and throughout Gaul the ancient Teutonic assemblies died out altogether, |1302.| and the comparatively modern States General came into being as an original device of Philip the Fair.

I must now return to the more immediate affairs of Normandy. There can be no doubt that the various processes of which I have been speaking, the Christianizing, the Gallicizing, and the feudalizing process, all went on vigorously in Normandy during the reign of Richard the |Growth of the doctrine of nobility.| Fearless. The doctrine of nobility was fast growing; it was taking a form quite different from the ancient relations of eorl and ceorl, quite different from the later relations of thegn and ceorl, as they have been at any time understood in England. Hitherto mere lack of illustrious birth |Humble origin of many princely and noble houses.| did not keep a man back from the highest offices. The legend that Hugh Capet himself was the son of a butcher of Paris,[443] utterly fabulous as it is, marks the popular belief as to the origin of many of the princely houses of the time. The legends of Lyderic the Forester[444] and of Torquatius and Tertullus[445] point to no very lofty origin on the part |Origin of the Norman baronage.| of the princely houses of Flanders and Anjou. So it is in the reign of Richard that we find the beginning of the Norman baronage, and the origin of many of its members was certainly not specially illustrious. Some noble families indeed trace their descent up to old companions of Rolf, such as the house of Harcourt, which claims Bernard the Dane as its patriarch. But the larger part of the Norman nobility derived their origin from the amours or doubtful marriages of the Norman Dukes. Not only their own children, but all the kinsfolk of their wives or mistresses, were carefully promoted by ducal grants or |Children and kinsfolk of Richard.| by advantageous marriages. Thus Sprota, the mother of Richard the Fearless, during the troubles of her son’s early reign married one Asperleng, a rich miller. From this marriage sprang Rudolf Count of Ivry, a mighty man in the reign of his nephew, and also several daughters, who were of course well disposed of in marriage.[446] Richard himself, whose marriage with Emma of Paris was childless,[447] was the father of a large illegitimate or doubtful offspring. Besides undoubted bastards,[448] there was a considerable brood, including Richard, the next Duke, and Emma, the future Lady of the English, who were legitimated by Richard’s marriage with their mother. These were the children of Gunnor, a woman of Danish birth, to whom different stories attribute a noble and a plebeian origin.[449] From these children and from the kinsfolk of Gunnor, all of whom were promoted in one way or another, |Progress of feudal doctrines.| sprang a large part of the Norman nobility. Meanwhile the principles of feudalism were making fast progress both in Normandy and in France. Hugh the Great’s doctrine of commendation, practised on so magnificent a scale between the duchies of Normandy and France, was being everywhere carried out with regard to smaller possessions. Such at least is the natural inference from the general course of events; for it must be remembered that Normandy has in this age absolutely nothing to show in the way of written legislation. The wealth of the clergy |Richard’s grants to the Church.| was also largely increasing. Richard, unlike his father, was munificent in his gifts to the Church, especially to |His foundation of Fécamp. 990.| his new, or rather restored, foundation of Fécamp and to the still more famous house of Saint Michael in Peril of the Sea.[450] The original foundation of Fécamp was for secular canons.[451] It was only in the days of the second Richard that the Benedictine rule was introduced.[452] Fécamp, alone among the great monasteries of the Norman mainland, stands in the land north-east of the Seine; all the rest lie either in the valley of the river or in the true Norman districts to the west of it. Fécamp, like Westminster, Holyrood, and the Escurial, contained minster and palace in close neighbourhood; the spot became a favourite dwelling-place of Richard in his later |Dispute with Æthelred. 991.| days, and it was at last the place of his burial. The last years of his reign present only one important event, a dispute, possibly a war, with the English King Æthelred, a discussion of which I reserve for a place in the next Chapter in my more detailed narrative of English affairs. |Death of Richard. 996.| At last, Richard the Fearless, Duke of the Pirates as he is called to the last by the French historians, died of “the lesser apoplexy,” after a reign of fifty-three years.[453] As with several other princes who play a part in the world for an unusual number of years,[454] one is surprised to find that he was not much older in years than he was. Unlike his enemies, Arnulf and Theobald, whose lives were really prolonged beyond the common span of human existence, Richard the Fearless, or Richard the Old, as he was called to distinguish him from his successor, after all that he had done and undergone, after all the changes that he had wrought and beheld, had lived no longer than sixty-three years.

§ 6. Early years of Richard the Good. 996–997.

Reign of Richard the Good. 996–1026.

Richard the Fearless was succeeded by his son Richard, surnamed the Good, whose reign carries us beyond the limits of the present sketch into the essential and central portion of our history. Richard was a direct actor in the events which were the immediate causes of the Conquest. He was the uncle of Eadward the Confessor, the grandfather of William the Bastard; and he personally played a certain part in English affairs. I will therefore reserve his actions for their proper place in my general narrative, and I will here speak of one event only, which marks the complete developement of the influences which had been at work throughout the reign of his father. Richard succeeded to the government of a state in which the Danish tongue, Danish manners, perhaps even the old Danish religion, still lingered in particular spots, but which was now, in the face of other nations, a French state, a member, and the principal member, of the Capetian |Aristocratic feelings of Richard.| commonwealth. He had imbibed to the full all the new-born aristocratic feelings of feudal and chivalrous France. He would have none but gentlemen about him.[455] This is perhaps the earliest use of a word so familiar both in French and in English, but which bears such different meanings in the two languages. But, whoever was a gentleman in the language of Richard’s court, it is plain that the word took in all who could pretend to any kind of kindred or affinity, legitimate or illegitimate, with the sovereign. The way in which the exclusively aristocratic household of Richard is spoken of seems to show that his conduct in this respect was felt to be something different from that of his father. Taken in connexion with what follows, it may well have been the last pound which broke |Revolt of the peasants. 997.| the camel’s back. Popular discontent broke out in the great peasant revolt to which I had occasion to allude earlier in this chapter.[456] We may suppose that the peasantry were mainly of Celtic, Roman, or Frankish origin; that is, that they sprang from that mixture of those three elements which produced the modern French nation. But we may well believe that many a man of Scandinavian descent, many a small allodial holder who was unwilling to commend himself to a lord, threw in his lot with the insurgents. |Their regular political organization.| What is most remarkable in the story of this revolt is the regular political organization of the revolters. The systematic way in which they set to work is common enough in cities, but is exceedingly rare in rural communities. It is almost enough to place this revolt of the Norman peasantry side by side with the more famous and more fortunate revolt of the Forest Cantons against |They establish a “commune” with a representative assembly.| the encroachments of Austria. We can hardly believe what we read when we find that these rebellious villains established a regular representative parliament.[457] The peasants of each district deputed two of their number to a general assembly, the decisions of which were to be binding on the whole body.[458] The men who could devise such a system in such an age had certainly made further steps in political progress than the masters against whom they rebelled. The constitution which they established is expressly called by a name dear to the inhabitants of the cities of those ages, a name glorious in the eyes of modern political inquirers, but a name which was, beyond all other names, a word of fear to feudal barons and prelates, and to those Kings who were not clear-sighted enough to see that their own interests and the interests of their people were the same. The peasantry of Normandy, like the citizens of Le Mans in after times, “made a commune.”[459] Such a constitution could hardly have been devised offhand by mere peasants. We can hardly doubt that it had a groundwork in local institutions which the newly-grown aristocracy were trampling under foot, and that the so-called rebels were simply defending the inheritance of their fathers. We have the tale only from the mouths of enemies; but the long list of popular grievances,[460] and the testimony of enemies to the regular order with which the rebellion was carried on, are enough to show that some very promising germs of freedom were here crushed in the bud. The freedom which these men sought to establish would have been in truth more valuable, because more fairly spread over the whole country, than the liberties |The revolt crushed by Rudolf of Ivry.| won by isolated cities. But the revolt was crushed with horrible cruelty[461] by Rudolf, Count of Ivry, the Duke’s uncle, himself a churl by birth, the son of the miller who married the cast off wife or mistress of Duke William.[462] After this, we hear no more of peasant insurrections in Normandy, but it may well be that the struggle was not |Probable results of the struggle.| wholly fruitless. Villainage in Normandy was lighter, and died out earlier, than in most parts of France; and the most genuine pieces of Norman jurisprudence which abide to this day, the ancient constitutions of the Channel Islands, strange and antiquated as they seem in our eyes, breathe a spirit of freedom worthy of the air of England, of Switzerland, or of Norway.[463]

Such was the country and the people, whose history, from the beginning of the eleventh century, becomes inseparably interwoven with that of England. We will now go back to our own island, and, taking up the thread of our narrative, we will go on with a more detailed account of English affairs from the beginning of those renewed Danish invasions which paved the way for the still more eventful invasion of the Norman.

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

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, |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 |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 |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.

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 |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 |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 |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 |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, |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 |Patriotic conduct of Dunstan,| father. It was therefore a distinct sacrifice of their party to their country, when Dunstan and his fellow Archbishop |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 |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 |954.| King was overthrown by Eadred, the government of the country was entrusted to an Earl of the King’s choice. |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.

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 |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 |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 |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 |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, |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 |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]

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 |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. |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 |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 |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 |They begin again.| his attacks upon England. After six years’ intermission, |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 |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] |Plunder of Ipswich.| They plundered Ipswich and thence advanced into Essex, where the brave Ealdorman Brihtnoth met them in battle |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, |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 |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 |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. |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 |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 |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 |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 |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 |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 |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 |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 |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 |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.

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 |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 |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 |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]

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. |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]

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 |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 |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 |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] |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.

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 |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 |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 |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]

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 |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.

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 |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 |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 |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 |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. |Olaf’s confirmation and adoption.| Already baptized, he received the rite of confirmation[540] from Bishop Ælfheah, and was adopted by Æthelred as |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 |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.

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 |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. |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 |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 |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 |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 |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 |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.

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 |[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 |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 |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 |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 |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 |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]

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 |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 |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 |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 |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 |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. |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.

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 |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. |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 |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.

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] |[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 |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 |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 |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.

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 |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 |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]

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, |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 |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 |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 |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 |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, |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 |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 |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 |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 |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 |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 |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 |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 |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 |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 |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 |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 |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. |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 |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 |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 |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 |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.

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 |First Gemót of 1002.| a saint.[595] Another meeting was held early the next year, |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 |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; |Leofsige outlawed.| they took cognizance of the murder, and Leofsige was outlawed and driven out of the land for his crime.[601] All this |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 |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 |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 |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 |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 |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.

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 |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 |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 |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 |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 |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. |Swegen sacks and burns Wilton and Salisbury.| Swegen then marched to Salisbury. The Salisbury of |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 |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]

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 |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 |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 |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 |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, |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 |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 |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 |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, |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 |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 |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 |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 |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 |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.

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 |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 |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. |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 |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. |Eadric the chief favourite.| Eadric, who had probably been rising in position for some years, now appears as the reigning favourite and as the |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. |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.

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 |Death of Kenneth. 994.| of any disturbances on the part of Scotland proper. King Kenneth, the faithful vassal of Eadgar, had died in |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 |[1000.]| suffered at the hands of Æthelred in the devastation of |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. |Cowardice of Earl Waltheof.| Waltheof,[631] the reigning Earl, was old and dispirited, and, instead of meeting the invaders, he shut himself up in |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 |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] |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. |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 |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 |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] |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, |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 |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 |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 |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.

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.

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 |1003.| four years before, now vanishes from history, and his place |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.

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, |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 |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. |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 |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 |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.

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 |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.

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 |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 |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 |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 |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 |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.

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 |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. |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; |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.

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 |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 |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 |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, |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 |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 |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 |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 |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 |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. |January, 1010.| After Christmas they set out again, and plunged yet further into the heart of the country than they had ever |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]

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 |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 |April, 1010.| Æthelred. After Easter the Danish fleet sailed forth, and this time it attacked East-Anglia. They landed near |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 |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 |[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 |[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 |[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. |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 |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 |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 |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 |[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.

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 |[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 |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 |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 |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.

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 |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. |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 |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; |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 |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.

The money paid to the Danes.

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

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.

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, |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 |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 |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 |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, |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 |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 |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 |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 |[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 |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. |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. |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 |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 |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 |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 |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.

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 |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 |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. |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 |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 |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 |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 |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 |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 |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 |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 |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, |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 |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 |Outlawry of all Danish Kings.| acknowledged, and a decree was passed proclaiming every Danish King an outlaw from England.[728] The expression |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.

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, |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 |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.

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. |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 |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. |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]

Great inroad of the sea.

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

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 |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 |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, |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 |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 |1007.| he destroyed Ealdorman Ælfhelm at Shrewsbury nine |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 |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. |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 |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 |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 |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, |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 |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 |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, |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. |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 |[1013.]| Swegen, but he now gladly joined Eadmund. All men deemed that the Ætheling would raise a third army in |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 |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 |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, |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 |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 |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, |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 |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 |988–1016.| years of unutterable weakness and degradation, we now come to seven months of almost superhuman energy. |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 |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.

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 |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 |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 |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 |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 |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 |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. |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 |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 |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.

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 |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 |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 |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 |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 |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 |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 |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] |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 |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]

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 |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 |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. |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 |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.

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 |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. |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 |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]

CHAPTER VI.
THE DANISH KINGS IN ENGLAND.[818]
1017–1042.

I have thought it right to narrate the course of events by which the Danish power was established in England at nearly as great detail as I purpose to narrate the central events of my history. The Danish and Norman Conquests are so closely connected with one another as cause and effect that the history of the one is an essential part of the history of the other. I now come to a period of nineteen |Character of the reign of Cnut.| years of a widely different character. The reign of Cnut[819] was, as regards the isle of Britain, almost a repetition of the reign of Eadgar. Within the realm of England itself we do not hear of a single disturbance. And the forces of England had now but seldom to be employed against Celtic enemies within her own island. One Scottish invasion of England, one English invasion of Wales, make up nearly the whole of the warfare of this reign within our own seas. There was indeed warfare enough elsewhere, warfare in which Englishmen had their share. But the details of Cnut’s wars in the Scandinavian North are often not a little doubtful, and, even if they were far better ascertained, they would not call for any minute attention at the hands of an historian either of England or of Normandy. After Cnut’s power was once fully established in England, we have next to no purely English events to record. Still there are few periods of our history which call for more attentive study. We have to contemplate the wonderful character of the man himself, his almost unparalleled position, the general nature of his government and policy. A few particular events which directly connect English and Norman history will also need a special examination. Of one event, more important than all in its results, no man could discern the importance at the moment. While |1027 or 1028.| Cnut sat on the throne of England, William the Bastard first saw the light at Falaise.

Character of the reigns of the sons of Cnut.

The remainder of the period contained in this Chapter, taking in the reigns of the two sons of Cnut, is of a different character. The reigns of those two worthless youths were short and troubled, and the accounts which we find in our best authorities are singularly contradictory. But the seven years between the death of Cnut and the election of Eadward are highly important in many ways. Several men who were to play the most important part in the times immediately following, men formed under Cnut, but who, while he lived, were overshadowed by their sovereign, now come forth into full prominence. Foremost among them all is the renowned name of Godwine, Earl of the West-Saxons. These reigns also prepared the way for the Norman Conquest in a most remarkable, though an indirect manner. The great scheme of Cnut, the establishment of an Anglo-Scandinavian Empire, fell to pieces after his death through the divisions and misgovernment of his sons. Harold and Harthacnut disgusted Englishmen with Danish rule, and led them to fall back on one of their own countrymen as their King. But the English King thus chosen proved to be, for all practical purposes, a Frenchman, and his French tendencies directly paved the way for the coming of William. Now it is not likely that any power whatever could have permanently kept all Cnut’s crowns upon the same head. But had his sons been at all worthy of him, a powerful dynasty, perhaps none the less English in feeling because Danish in blood, might well have been established in England. Under such a dynasty it is still possible that England might have been conquered in the open field. But it is quite impossible that the path of the Conqueror should have been made ready for him in the way that it actually was by the weakness of Eadward and the intrigues of the foreign favourites with whom he surrounded himself.

§ 1. The Reign of Cnut in England. 1017–1035.

Cnut’s position at Eadmund’s death.

The death of Eadmund left Cnut without a rival.[820] He had already been twice chosen to the English crown; once by the voice of the Danish host on the death of his father |February, 1014.| Swegen,[821] and a second time, more regularly, by the vote |April, 1016.| of the majority of the English Witan after the death of Æthelred.[822] He was also most likely entitled by the Treaty of Olney to succeed to the dominions of Eadmund. He was in actual possession of the larger half of the kingdom. But Cnut, if valiant, was also wary; it might be too much, especially at this stage of his life, to attribute to him any actual shrinking from bloodshed; but he at least fully understood the value of constitutional forms, and he had no wish to resort to violence when his purpose could be better accomplished by peaceful means. He was determined to be King of all England;[823] he was equally determined not to parade the right of conquest offensively before the eyes of his new subjects, but to rest his claim to the crown on an authority which no man |Witenagemót of London. Christmas, 1016–1017.| could gainsay. He accordingly assembled the Witan of all England in London,[824] no doubt at the usual Midwinter festival. Before this assembly the King of the Mercians |Cnut claims the crown by virtue of the Treaty of Olney.| and Northumbrians[825] set forth his claim to the kingdom of Wessex and East-Anglia, as the designated successor of Eadmund according to the Treaty of Olney. The danger lay from a possible competition, not so much on the part of the infant children of Eadmund as on that of his |Testimony of the witnesses to the treaty.| brothers.[826] The witnesses of the Olney compact were brought forward and questioned by Cnut. They affirmed that no portion of the kingdom had ever been assigned to the brothers of Eadmund; those princes had received no portion during his life, and they were entitled to no right or preference at his death. As for his sons, Cnut, the adopted brother of Eadmund, had been named by him as |Cnut chosen King of all England. January, 1017.| their guardian during their minority.[827] Cnut was then formally acknowledged as King of all England, his recognition, it would seem, being accompanied by a formal exclusion of the brothers and sons of Eadmund.[828] How far the electors acted under constraint, we know not; but it is certain that no act was ever more regular in point of form, and in no recorded transaction do the popular principles of the ancient English constitution stand forth more clearly. The usual compact[829] between King and people was gone through, with a further mutual promise on the part of Danes and English to forget all old grudges. Money was, as a matter of course, to be paid to the Danish army. The new King was crowned, no doubt in Saint Paul’s minster, by Archbishop Lyfing.[830] Measures |Outlawry of the two Eadwigs.| for the security of the new dynasty were taken. With regard to the Ætheling Eadwig, who is described as a prince of high character and the object of universal esteem, the jealousy of Cnut was not satisfied with his exclusion from the crown. A decree of outlawry was passed against him, as also against another Eadwig, who is unknown to us, except that he bears the strange title of King of the Churls.[831] This last Eadwig is said to have made his peace |Murder of the Ætheling Eadwig.| with the King; but Eadwig the Ætheling—so at least the rumour of the time said—was treacherously murdered by Cnut’s order before the year was out.

In this important Gemót a division of England was made which shows how thoroughly at home the new King |Cnut’s preference for England,| already felt in his new kingdom. It is clear from the whole course of Cnut’s reign that of all his dominions England was that which he most prized. In the midst of his most brilliant victories England was always his favourite dwelling-place, better loved than his native Denmark, better loved than any of the other lands which he brought under his power. In the roll-call of his titles England held the first place. England was his home; she was, as it were, the love of his youth; her crown was the prize which he had won with his own right hand, when he had as yet neither inherited the ancestral kingship of Denmark nor spread his dominion over Norwegians, Swedes, and |and for the Saxon part of England.| Wends. And he not only made himself at home in England; he made himself specially at home in the purely Saxon part of England. Already King of the Northumbrians and Mercians, it would not have been wonderful if he had fixed the seat of his rule in his own half-Danish realm, and had dealt with East-Anglia and the Saxon shires as conquered dependencies. And we may conceive that the future history of England might have been different in many ways, if York had been permanently established by Cnut as the capital of the kingdom. But Cnut, when once chosen King by the Witan of all England, was determined to fill in everything the place of the Kings of the English who had been before him. Those Kings were primarily Kings of the West-Saxons; the other English kingdoms were dependencies of the West-Saxon state. They had gradually been more or less closely incorporated with the dominant realm, but they still remained distinct governments, each with its own Ealdorman and its own Gemót. This form of administration was continued, and was more definitely |His fourfold division of the kingdom.| organized by Cnut. England was divided into four great governments, answering to the four most powerful and permanent among the seven ancient kingdoms.[832] For his |He retains Wessex in his own hands, and appoints Earls over Northumberland, Mercia,| own immediate share he kept, not Northumberland or Mercia, but Wessex, the cradle of the royal house which he had supplanted. Over the others he appointed Earls, a title which now throughout the kingdom displaces the more ancient name of Ealdormen.[833] Thurkill obtained or |and East-Anglia. January, 1017.| kept East-Anglia. Eric the King’s brother-in-law was confirmed in, or restored to, the government of Northumberland, with which he had been invested a year before.[834] Eadric, as the reward of his treasons and murders, was again appointed to his old earldom of Mercia. But the signatures to the charters show that the title of Earl was by no means confined to these three great |Other Earls.| viceroys. As before with the title of Ealdorman, so now its equivalent Earl was the title borne alike by the governor of an ancient kingdom and by the subordinate governor of one or more shires.[835] We can trace the names of several such Earls, both English and Danish, |First appearance of Earl Godwine.| through the charters of Cnut’s reign. And among them we see, as filling a marked and special position, the name of one who was presently to become the first man in the English Empire—one who rose to power by the favour of strangers, only to become the champion of our land against strangers of every race—one who, never himself a King, was to be the maker, the kinsman, the father of Kings. From an early stage of the reign of Cnut we see a high and special place among the great men of the realm filled by the deathless name of Godwine the son of Wulfnoth.

We feel that we are at last drawing near to the real centre of our history when we bring in the name of the great champion of England against Norman influence, the father of the King who died as her champion against Norman invasion. The sudden and mysterious rise of this great man is one of the most striking features of our history, and his origin is perhaps the most obscure and difficult question of all the obscure and difficult questions |Sudden promotion of Godwine by Cnut.| which our history presents. With no certain explanation of so singular a promotion, we find, from the very beginning of the reign of Cnut, Godwine, an Englishman, whose parentage and whose rank by birth are utterly doubtful, holding high office under the Danish monarch, honoured with a connexion by marriage with the royal house, and before long distinctly marked out as the first |Different statements as to Godwine’s origin.| subject in the realm. One account makes him a kinsman of the traitor Eadric; another makes him the son of a churl, seemingly on the borders of Gloucestershire and Wiltshire, who won the favour of the Danish Earl Ulf by incidental services done to him after the battle of Sherstone.[836] But, whatever was his origin, it is clear that his advancement was one of the first acts of the reign of Cnut. |Godwine wins Cnut’s favour, and is raised to the rank of Earl. [Before 1018.]| Among the foremost men of his newly won kingdom, Godwine recommended himself to the discerning conqueror by his valour in war, his prudence in counsel, his diligence in business, his eloquence in speech, his agreeable discourse and equable temper.[837] I infer that Godwine had distinguished himself in the war on the side of Eadmund, but that he was early in offering his allegiance to the conqueror.[838] The rank of Earl—with what jurisdiction we know not—was the reward of these merits. We find him holding that dignity in the second year of Cnut’s reign,[839] and it is not unlikely to have been conferred upon him in the very Gemót of which we have just been speaking. He became a personal favourite with the King, high in his confidence, and he soon rose to greater power and dignity still.

Cnut’s marriage with Ælfgifu-Emma.

Cnut’s power now seemed firmly established; at the same time he thought it expedient to resort to more than one means of strengthening it. In the month of |July, 1017.| July in this year he contracted a marriage which is one of the most singular on record. The widow of Æthelred, Ælfgifu-Emma, was asked to share the English throne a second time. Nothing loth, she came over from Normandy, married the new King, and took up her old position as Lady of the English.[840] Fifteen years before, she had in her youth crossed the sea on the same errand; now, a mature widow, she gave herself to a man who was much younger than herself, who had overturned the throne of her first husband, and had driven her children |Motives for the marriage.| into banishment. Cnut’s motives for this singular marriage are not very clear, unless, as one historian suggests, it was part of his system of reconciliation. He wished, we are told, to win the hearts of the English, and to make as little change as possible in the appearance of the English court, by putting again in her old place a Lady to whom they were accustomed.[841] But this would seem to imply that Emma enjoyed a popularity among the English, which the foreign woman, the cause of so many evils, was not likely to have won. If a connexion with the ducal house of Normandy was all that Cnut aimed at, a marriage with one of Duke Richard’s daughters would have seemed a more natural alliance for the young conqueror than a marriage with their dowager aunt. But it is possible, after all, that personal preference may really have led to this strange match. There is some slight reason to think that Cnut and Emma may have met for the purposes of negotiation during the siege of London.[842] And Emma, though much older than Cnut, may still have kept much of the beauty which won her the title of the Gem of the Normans.[843] The marriage was, after all, less strange than one which had scandalized the West-Frankish court two generations earlier. Eadgifu, the daughter of Eadward, the sister of Æthelstan, the widow of Charles, the mother of Lewis, had, when already |951.| a grandmother of some standing, eloped with the young and handsome Count Herbert, and had bestowed two half-brothers on her royal son.[844] At any rate, whatever may have been Cnut’s motive in his marriage with the royal widow, it is certain that at the time of his forming this more exalted connexion he was, like so many of the Norman Dukes, already hampered by an earlier connexion of that doubtful kind of which I have often spoken.[845] |Cnut’s relations with Ælfgifu of Northampton.| Cnut had already taken as his concubine or Danish wife, Ælfgifu of Northampton, the daughter of Ælfhelm the murdered Earl of the Northumbrians. By her Cnut believed himself to be the father of two sons, Harold and Swegen, who after his death succeeded to two of his kingdoms. But scandal affirmed that neither of them was really of kingly birth. The barren Ælfgifu successively passed off on her confiding husband or lover two children whom she affirmed to be their common offspring, but of whom Swegen was in truth the son of a priest and Harold the son of a shoemaker. Ælfgifu was certainly living at the time of Cnut’s marriage with her namesake; whether either of her supposed sons was born after that date is not so clear. But it was doubtless the existence of one or other of these children which made Emma stipulate, as she is said to have done, that the throne should pass to Cnut’s children by her, to the exclusion of those by any other wife. The King agreed, no doubt only so far as he constitutionally could; the marriage took place, and was blessed with the births of Harthacnut and Gunhild. Emma seems to have utterly forgotten, not only the memory of Æthelred, but the existence of her children by him; her whole love was transferred to the young Danish King and to the children whom she bore to him.

The marriages of Emma would seem to have needed a bloodbath as their necessary attendant. Her bridal with Æthelred was almost immediately followed by the great massacre of the Danes;[846] her second bridal with Cnut was followed in the like sort, if not by an actual massacre, yet by a considerable slaughter of Englishmen who were felt to be dangerous to the Danish monarch. The whole course of the year was marked by executions |Fate of the children of Æthelred.| and banishments. The Ætheling Eadwig, the most dangerous of Cnut’s possible competitors, was removed as we have seen.[847] The rumour of his assassination at least implies that he died during the year in some way or other. Of the other sons of Æthelred’s first marriage we can give no account, except of those who seem to have been already dead. His children by Emma were safe in Normandy, and they did not come back to England with their mother. The romantic marriage of Eadmund Ironside with Ealdgyth the widow of Sigeferth[848] had given him two sons, Eadmund and Eadward, who were of course mere babes, and who, from the date of their |The sons of Eadmund sent to Sweden, and thence to Hungary.| mother’s marriage, would seem to have been twins. These children were now sent out of the kingdom. The scandal of the time affirmed that Eadric, the common author of all evil, counselled their death.[849] Cnut shrank from the shame of slaying them in England; but—according to one version, by the advice of Emma[850]—he sought means to have them put out of the way in some distant land. His half-brother, Olaf or James, the son of his mother Sigrid,[851] now reigned over Sweden. To him he sent the babes, begging him to put them to death. The Swede, a zealous propagator of Christianity in his own dominions,[852] abhorred the crime, but stood in fear of his brother’s power. He therefore sent the children to the King of the Hungarians, the sainted Stephen,[853] to be saved alive and brought up. Both lived, and one will appear again in our history, to become the source through which the old kingly blood of Wessex found its way into the veins of the later rulers of England and Scotland.

Executions at the Christmas Gemót of 1017–1018.

The Ætheling Eadwig, whatever was his end, clearly did not die by any judicial sentence. But the Christmas Gemót of this year, held in London,[854] was marked by the deaths of several men of high rank, some of whom at least, whatever may have been their guilt or innocence, seem to have died in a more regular way by the hand of the executioner. These were Æthelweard, the son of Æthelmær distinguished as the Great;[855] Brihtric, the son of Ælfheah of Devonshire, and Northman, the son of the Ealdorman Leofwine. This last name introduces us to a family which was to play a most important part in the times immediately before and immediately after the Norman Conquest.[856] Of Leofwine personally we know nothing; the fate of his son Northman is in one of our accounts specially connected with the fate of Eadric.[857] One thing is plain, that Northman’s offence, whatever it was, was something wholly personal to himself and in no way touched the rest of his family.[858] This fact, together with the advancement of Godwine, should be carefully borne in mind. Whatever was the justice or injustice of these executions,[859] they were at least no part of any deliberate plan for exterminating the English nobility and substituting Danes in their place.[860] We shall soon see that the policy of Cnut led him to an exactly opposite course.

Treatment of the sons-in-law of Æthelred.

The new King however kept a careful eye on all who were in any way connected with the English royal family. The sons-in-law of Æthelred seem to have awakened the suspicions of Cnut almost as strongly as his sons. Of the daughters of Æthelred three were certainly married, to Eadric, to Uhtred, and to an unknown Æthelstan.[861] A fourth is said to have been the wife of Ulfcytel, and to have passed with his East-Anglian government to the Dane Thurkill. All these men were gradually got rid of by death or banishment. Æthelstan and Ulfcytel had had the good luck to die in open battle. We have already seen how easily Cnut was led to consent to the death of |Thurkill banished. 1021.| Uhtred,[862] and we shall presently see Thurkill himself, to whom Cnut in a great measure owed his crown, driven |Eadric put to death. Christmas, 1017.| into banishment. The remaining son-in-law of Æthelred, the infamous Eadric, met the reward of all his crimes in this same Christmas Gemót. So short a time had he enjoyed the dignity which he had kept or recovered by so many treasons. That he was put to death at this time is certain, but that is nearly all that can be said. The renown, or rather infamy, of his name drew special attention to his end, and the retributive justice which lighted on the traitor became a favourite subject of romance.[863] |Motives for his execution.| The immediate cause or pretext of his death can hardly be ascertained; but the feelings of Cnut towards him may easily be guessed. Eadric, notwithstanding all his crimes, was an Englishman of the highest rank; in the absence of available male heirs, his marriage made him in some sort the nearest representative of the royal house; the very success of his repeated crimes shows that he must, somehow or other, have obtained the lead of a considerable party. In all these characters he was dangerous; Cnut must have felt that a man who had so often betrayed his former masters would have as little scruple about betraying him;[864] he could hardly avoid confirming him in his earldom in the assembly of the former winter, but he had doubtless already made up his mind to seize on the first opportunity to destroy him. We may believe that Cnut, as we are told in most versions of the story, gave himself out as the avenger of his adopted brother; but the removal of the arch-traitor was a step which prudence, as prudence was understood by Cnut at that stage of his reign, called for fully as much as justice.

Character and influence of Eadric.

The character and career of Eadric, like those of Ælfric, his predecessor in office and in crime,[865] form one of the standing puzzles of history. It is hard to understand the motives for such constant and repeated treasons on the part of one who had, solely by royal favour, risen from nothing to the highest rank in the state. It is equally difficult to understand by what sort of fascination he could have found the means either to work his treasons or to blind the eyes of those who suffered by them. That both his crimes and his influence have been much exaggerated is highly probable. It is likely enough that he has been made the scape-goat for many of the sins both of other individuals and of the whole nation. A tendency of this kind to lay all blame upon some one man is not uncommon. Thus in our Norman history we have seen all the mischief that happened attributed at one time to Arnulf of Flanders, and at another to Theobald of Chartres.[866] But exaggeration of this kind must have had some substantial ground to go upon. Without necessarily believing that Eadric personally wrought all the countless and inexplicable treasons which are laid to his charge, it is impossible to doubt that he knew how to exercise an extraordinary influence over men’s minds, and that that |Two classes of treasons ascribed to Eadric.| influence was always exerted for evil. It may be observed that the crimes attributed to him fall into two classes. His treasons on the field of battle, at Sherstone and at Assandun, were wrought openly in the sight of two armies, and, asserted as they are by contemporary writers, we |Difference in the credibility of the two kinds of charges.| cannot do otherwise than accept them. But there is another class of charges which do not rest on the same firm ground. Such are his supposed share in the deaths of Eadmund and Eadwig, his advice to destroy the children of Eadmund, and other cases where his counsel is said to have led to various crimes and mischiefs, or to have thwarted the accomplishment of wise and manly purposes. Some of these charges are not found in our best authorities, and, of those which are, some may well be merely the surmises of the time, going on the general principle that, whenever any mischief was done, Eadric must needs be the doer of it. The annalists could not well be mistaken as to Eadric’s conduct on the field of Assandun; they might easily be mistaken as to any particular piece of advice said to have been given by him to Æthelred, to Eadmund, or to Cnut. In these last cases their statements prove little more than the universal belief that Eadric was capable of every wickedness. But that universal belief, though it proves little as to this or that particular action, proves everything as to Eadric’s general character. After making every needful deduction, enough is left, not only to brand the name of Eadric with infamy, but to brand it with infamy of a peculiar kind, which holds him up as a remarkable study of human character as well for the philosopher as for the historian. We have much more both of crime and of sorrow to go through in the course of our history; it is at least some comfort that no sinner of the peculiar type of Eadric will occur again.

Leofwine succeeds Eadric in Mercia. Christmas, 1017.

By the death of Eadric his earldom of Mercia became vacant. It was most likely conferred on Leofwine, the father of the slain Northman, who had seemingly hitherto held the ealdormanship of the Hwiccas under the superior rule of Eadric.[867] And an earldom held by Northman, perhaps that of Chester, is said to have been conferred on his brother Leofric, who some years later succeeded his father in the government of all Mercia.

The next year we hear that a fleet of thirty pirate ships, seemingly coming to attack England, was cut off by Cnut. Thus, as a contemporary writer says, he who had once been the destroyer of the land had now become its |Payment of Danegeld. 1018.| defender.[868] In the same year a heavy Danegeld was paid, doubtless that which had been agreed upon in the treaty between Cnut and Eadmund at Olney.[869] London paid ten thousand five hundred[870] pounds, and the rest of England paid seventy-two thousand. This is something like a measure of the position which the great merchant city |Cnut dismisses the greater part of his fleet.| held in the kingdom. Cnut was thus able to satisfy the claims of his fleet, and he now kept only forty ships in his pay, sending the rest back to Denmark. The crews of these ships seem to have been the germ of the famous force of the Thingmen or Housecarls, of whom, and of the peculiar legislation which affected them, I shall presently have |Witenagemót of Oxford. 1018.| much to say. This same year a Witenagemót was held, which marks an æra in the reign of Cnut, and which may be looked upon as the winding up of the severities which almost necessarily followed upon the conquest. A large body of the chief men of both nations, Danish and English, assembled at Oxford, the town where a like assembly, |1015.| three years before, had been dishonoured by the murder |Renewal of “Eadgar’s Law.”| of Sigeferth and Morkere.[871] Danes and English alike united in a decree for the observance of the laws of King Eadgar.[872] This is the first time that we have met with this formula in England, though we have already come across it in Norman history, when Cnut’s grandfather |Import of the phrase.| Harold is said to have restored the laws of Rolf.[873] It has here the same meaning which it has in earlier and in later examples. The renewal of the laws of Eadgar has the same meaning as the renewal of the laws of Rolf after the expulsion of the French from Normandy, as the renewal of the laws of Cnut after the expulsion of Tostig from Northumberland, as the often promised and often evaded renewal of the laws of Eadward in the days of the Norman Kings of England. It does not always imply that the princes spoken of were specially looked on as lawgivers. Eadgar and Cnut had undoubtedly some claim to that title, but we know not that Rolf had any, and Eadward certainly had none. But the demand does not refer to codes of law issued, or believed to be issued, by any of these princes. The cry is really, as an ancient writer explains it,[874] not for the laws which such a King enacted, but for the laws which such a King observed. It is in fact a demand for good government in a time of past or expected oppression or maladministration. It is, as in this case, a demand that a foreign King should take the best of his native predecessors as his model. The name of the last King who left behind him a name for just and mild government is taken as the embodiment of all just and mild government. The people in effect demand, and the King in effect promises, that his government shall be as good as that of the popular hero whose name is put forward. Now, with a foreign conqueror for their King, with the ancient kingly house cut down to a few exiled children, with the flower of the ancient nobility cut off in the carnage of Assandun, Englishmen looked back with yearning to the days of their native rulers. The reign of Æthelred was a time which the national memory would be |The memory of Eadgar acceptable both to the English and to the Danes.| glad to deal with as a blank. English imagination leaped back to the glorious and happy days of the peaceful Basileus, when Englishmen beat their swords into ploughshares and their spears into pruning-hooks, when the mountains brought peace and the little hills righteousness, when the Lord of Wessex could boast that, within the four seas of Britain, all Kings fell down before him and all nations did him service. And the name of Eadgar was one which would be hardly less acceptable to the Danes than to the English themselves. When their King was more and more throwing off the feelings of a conqueror, when he was more and more closely making himself at one with the realm which he had won, when the Earls and Thegns of the conquered land stood around his throne on a perfect level with the proudest of their conquerors, when the mass of the victorious army had just been sent away to their own homes, the Danish followers of Cnut might well tremble, not only for their supremacy over the vanquished English, but almost for their equality with them. To them the name of Eadgar may well have represented a prince who was raised to the throne in a great measure by Danish swords, who, while he defended his island against Danish invasions, did full justice to the Dane within his own realm, who guaranteed to his Danish subjects every right that they could desire, and whose fondness for them, among other strangers, was the only fault with which Englishmen could reproach him.[875] Danes and Englishmen therefore joined in looking back to Eadgar as the ideal of kingship, and in demanding of their common sovereign that he should take that incomparable[876] example as the model of his government. Men of both nations looked back to the happy days of Eadgar, as in after days the Northumbrians, groaning under the tyranny of Tostig, looked back to the happy days of Cnut himself |Contrast between Cnut and the Norman Kings.| and demanded the renewal of his law. They looked back to them, as Englishmen under the Norman yoke looked back to the happy days of Eadward, and put forth the vain demand that their foreign lords should rule them, not merely according to the same formal enactments, but in the same spirit of justice and mercy in which the royal saint was held to have ruled. That prayer was not, and could not be, granted, till the swords of Robert Fitzwalter and Simon of Montfort had won back for us more than the laws of Eadward in another shape. The great Dane was more happily placed. With him the renewal of the ancient laws was neither an empty nor an impossible promise. If by renewing the laws of Eadgar was meant the establishment of a rule as strong and as just and as safe against foreign invasion as that of Eadgar, King Cnut fully kept his word.[877]

Cnut had now been absent from his native country for five years. He had stayed in England ever since his return |1014–5.| thither after he had been driven out by the solitary military exploit of King Æthelred the Unready.[878] It was clearly his intention to make England the seat of his empire,[879] but as he was now, by the death or deposition of his brother Harold, sovereign of Denmark,[880] and as |Cnut visits Denmark. 1019.| England was perfectly quiet and reconciled to his government, he deemed it expedient to pay a visit to the land of |He is accompanied by Godwine, who is said to have distinguished| his birth.[881] He took with him Godwine, whose conduct in this foreign journey, perhaps in one of Cnut’s northern wars, procured him a still higher degree of his sovereign’s esteem.[882] According to one account, it was by a gallant |himself in a Wendish war.| action in an expedition against the Wends that the English Earl gained Cnut’s special favour. An English contingent under Godwine’s command served in the Danish army. The two armies lay near together, and a battle was expected the next day. Godwine, without the King’s knowledge, attacked the enemy by night at the head of his countrymen, routed them utterly, and occupied their camp. In the morning Cnut missed the English portion of his army, and hastily inferred that they had deserted, or even gone over to the enemy. He marched however to the Wendish camp, and there, to his surprise, found Godwine and the English in possession, and nothing left of the Wends but their dead bodies and their spoil. This exploit, we are told, greatly raised both Godwine and the English in general in the opinion of Cnut. The tale has a mythical sound; but, whatever may be the truth or falsehood of its details, that Godwine rose still higher from the time of this Danish expedition is beyond doubt. Cnut |Godwine marries Gytha, sister of Earl Ulf.| now admitted him to his most secret counsels, and gave him in marriage Gytha, the sister of the Danish Earl Ulf, the husband of his own sister Estrith. This Ulf, the son of Thurgils Sprakaleg, is one of the most famous characters in the Danish history or romance of the time. Like some other heroes of the North, his parentage was not wholly human. The father of Thurgils, Biorn, was the offspring of a bear, who carried off a human damsel.[883] Ulf himself is said to have served in Cnut’s English wars, and according to one version, it was to him that Godwine owed his earliest introduction to Cnut.[884] But in English history he plays hardly any part.[885] His marriage we shall have to speak of again as one of the events which connect England and Denmark and Normandy; but his real or imaginary exploits and treasons,[886] and his death by order of his brother-in-law, belong wholly to |Her long and chequered life.| Scandinavian history. But his sister Gytha, the wife of the greatest of living Englishmen, became thoroughly naturalized in England. She shared the momentary banishment of her husband in the days of Norman intrigue, and she lived to undergo an eternal banishment in the days of Norman dominion. No mother was ever surrounded by a fairer or more hopeful offspring; none ever underwent a longer series of hopeless bereavements. She saw a nephew on the throne of Denmark, a daughter and a son on the throne of England. She saw her other children and kinsfolk ruling as princes in England and allying themselves with princes in foreign lands. But she also saw her brother cut off by the hand of his kinsman and sovereign; she saw one son stained with the blood of a cousin, and another son stained with treason against his house and country. Of her remaining sons she saw three cut off in one day by the most glorious of deaths, while the sole survivor dragged on his weary days in a Norman prison. No tale of Grecian tragedy ever set forth a sadder and more striking record of human vicissitudes, of brighter hopes in youth, of more utter desolation in old age, than the long and chequered life of her whom our notices are at least enough to set her before us as a wife worthy of Godwine, a mother worthy of Harold.

Cnut returns to England.

The next year Cnut came back to England as his real home and abiding-place, the seat of his Anglo-Scandinavian Empire. At Easter a Witenagemót was held at Cirencester, at which took place the last recorded instance of |Witenagemót at Cirencester. April, 1020.| severity on Cnut’s part towards any Englishman. An |Æthelweard banished.| Ealdorman Æthelweard—which, among all the bearers of that name, we can only guess—was banished.[887] But it must have been at this same Gemót that an appointment was made which showed how thoroughly at home the stranger King had made himself in his new country. The last banishment of an Englishman by the Danish conqueror was accompanied by the exaltation of another Englishman to a place in the realm second only to kingship. |Godwine appointed Earl of the West-Saxons. [1020–1052.]| It was now that Godwine received a title and office which no man had borne before him, but which, saving the few months of his banishment, he bore for the thirty-two remaining years of his life, the title and office of Earl of the West-Saxons.[888] Cnut, it will be remembered, in his fourfold division of the kingdom, while he appointed Earls over Northumberland, Mercia, and East-Anglia, kept Wessex under his own immediate government. He was now already King of two kingdoms, and he had no doubt by this time began to meditate a further extension |Nature and import of the office.| of his dominion in the North. He found, it would seem, that the King of all England and all Denmark needed a tried helper in the administration of his most cherished possession, and a representative when his presence was needed in other parts of his dominions. Wessex then, the ancient hearth and home of English kingship, now for the first time received an immediate ruler of a rank inferior to that of King. Godwine became the first, and his son Harold was the second and last, of the Earls of the West-Saxons. To reduce the ancient kingdom to an earldom was not, as has been sometimes imagined, any badge of the insolence of a conqueror; the act was in no way analogous to the change of Northumberland from a kingdom to an earldom under Eadred. The case is simply that the King of all England and all Denmark, King in a special manner of the old West-Saxon realm, found the need of a special counsellor, and in absence of a viceroy, even in this his chosen and immediate dominion. No man of the kindred or nation of the conqueror, but Godwine, the native Englishman, was found worthy of this new and exalted post. Through the whole remainder of the reign of Cnut, the great Earl of the West-Saxons ruled in uninterrupted honour and influence. The wealth which he acquired, mainly, it may be supposed, by royal grant, was enormous. His possessions extended into nearly every shire of the south and centre of England. Whether the son of the churl or the great-nephew of the traitor, he was now, three years after the completion of the Danish Conquest, beyond all doubt the first subject in the realm.

Consecration of the church on Assandun. 1020.

The year of Cnut’s return and of Godwine’s great promotion beheld the King engaged in a remarkable solemnity on the spot which had witnessed his last battle, his only distinct victory, in his great struggle with English Eadmund. On the hill of Assandun, Cnut, in partnership with Thurkill, at once as Earl of the district and as his chief comrade in the battle, had reared a church, which was consecrated, in the presence of the King and the Earl, by Wulfstan, Archbishop of York, and several other bishops. That the ceremony was performed by the Northern Metropolitan was probably owing to a vacancy in the see of Canterbury. Lyfing, who had crowned Cnut, died in the course of the year, and was succeeded by Æthelnoth the Good,[889] who had baptized or confirmed him.[890] The ceremony at Assandun doubtless took place between these two events. In Essex, a region rich in woods, but poor in good building stone, timber was largely used both in ecclesiastical and in domestic buildings for ages after this time. Cnut however employed the rarer material, and the fact that his church was built of stone and lime was looked on as something worthy of distinct record.[891] The stone church of Assandun was something remarkable in Essex, exactly as the wooden church of Glastonbury[892] was something remarkable in Somerset. But the building was small and mean, at least as compared with the stately pile which the next conqueror of England reared in memory of his victory. The foundation of Cnut and Thurkill, for a single priest,[893] was poor and scanty, compared with the lordly Abbey of Saint Martin of the Place of Battle.[894] But the minster of Battle simply spoke of the subjugation of a land by a foreign conqueror; the minster of Assandun told a nobler tale. It was reared as the hallowing of his victory, as the atonement for his earlier crimes, by a prince who, conqueror as he was, had learned to love the land which he had conquered, to feel himself one with its people, and to reign after the pattern of its noblest princes. The Abbot of Battle and his monks were strangers, brought from a foreign land to fatten on the |First appearance of Stigand, [Priest of Assandun, 1020; Bishop of Elmham, 1044; of Winchester, 1047; Archbishop of Canterbury, 1052].| spoils of England.[895] The single priest of Assandun lived to show himself one of the stoutest of Englishmen. Stigand, the first priest of Cnut’s new minster, now the friend and chaplain of the Danish conqueror, in after years displaced a Norman intruder on the throne of Augustine, and was himself hurled therefrom at the bidding of a Norman King.[896]

The consecration on Assandun might pass as the formal act of reconciliation between the Danish King and his |Later years of Cnut. 1020–1035.| English subjects. From that day the internal history of England, for the remaining fifteen years of the reign of Cnut, becomes a blank. We now hear only of the King’s wars abroad, of his acts of piety at home, of several instances in which his hand was heavy upon his own countrymen; but, after the outlawry of Æthelweard, we find no record of the death or banishment of a single |Danes make way for Englishmen.| Englishman. In fact these years form a time of the gradual substitution of Englishmen for Danes in the highest offices, while no doubt Danes of lower degree were, like their sovereign, fast changing themselves into Englishmen. Nearly all the Danish holders of earldoms whom we find at the beginning of Cnut’s reign vanish |Thurkill banished from England. November, 1021.| one by one. Of the outlawry of the two greatest of their number we find distinct accounts. The year after the ceremony at Assandun, Thurkill, the co-founder with the King, who, in the account of their joint work, appears almost as the King’s peer, was driven into banishment.[897] With him his English wife Eadgyth had to leave her country; if she was the daughter of Æthelred, and the widow of either Ulfcytel or Eadric,[898] we are almost driven to infer that the marriage was contracted after the consecration on Assandun, that the connexion with the ancient royal family awakened Cnut’s jealousy, and was in fact the cause of Thurkill’s banishment. One cannot help feeling a certain interest in the fate of one who had so long played an important and, on the whole, not a dishonourable, part in English history. The savage pirate gradually changed into the civilized warrior; if at one time he was the enemy, he was at another the defender, of England. The heathen who had striven to save a Christian martyr from his persecutors had developed the good seed within him till he grew into a founder and restorer of Christian churches. With the banishment which I have just recorded the history of Thurkill, as far as England is concerned, comes to an end. But his banishment was merely local; he was held to be dangerous in England, and he was therefore removed from the country, but his removal was little more than an honourable ostracism. He kept, or soon won back, his sovereign’s favour; there is no evidence that he ever came back to England; but two years later he was formally |Thurkill made Viceroy of Denmark. 1023.| reconciled to Cnut; he was established as his viceroy in Denmark, seemingly as guardian to one of the King’s sons who was meant to succeed him in that kingdom.[899] The only sign of suspicion shown on Cnut’s part was his bringing back the son of Thurkill with him to England, |Eric banished. 1023?| evidently as a hostage. Eric also, the Danish Earl of the Northumbrians, was banished a few years later than Thurkill, on what occasion, and at what exact time, is |Hakon banished. 1029.| unknown.[900] Somewhat later again we find the banishment of Eric’s son Hakon, “the doughty Earl.” Hakon was doubly the King’s nephew, as the son of his sister and as the husband of his niece Gunhild, the daughter of another sister and of Wyrtgeorn King of the Wends.[901] We have no details, but we are told that Cnut feared to be deprived by him of his life or kingdom.[902] Hakon seems however not to have been formally outlawed, but to have been merely sent away to fill the post which his father had held as viceroy in Norway.[903] This fact, coupled with Thurkill’s similar viceroyalty in Denmark, shows that Cnut could trust men in other countries whom he thought |His death. 1030.| dangerous in England. The year after his removal from England Hakon died at sea, or, according to another account, was killed in Orkney.[904] His widow seems to have stayed in England; she married another Danish |1046.| Earl, Harold,[905] and was herself, in her second widowhood, banished from England when England had again a native |Ulf put to death. After 1025.| King.[906] Cnut’s brother-in-law Ulf came to a worse end still; that he died by the command of Cnut there is no reason to doubt, but we have no certain information as to the circumstances. According to our Danish historian it was a perfectly righteous execution, while the romantic tale of the Norwegian saga represents it as a singularly |The banished Danish chiefs succeeded by Englishmen.| base and cold-blooded assassination.[907] The point of importance for us is that these eminent Danes had no successors of their own nation in their English offices. There remained plenty of Danish Thegns and some Danish Earls; but in the later years of Cnut the highest places were all filled by Englishmen. Ranig retained the subordinate earldom of the Magesætas; Thored was Staller, and, at least in Harthacnut’s reign, he held the earldom of the Middle-Angles.[908] But Godwine and Leofric held the first rank in southern and in central England, and, on the banishment of Eric, the government of Northumberland went back to the family of its ancient Earls.[909] It is most remarkable, in tracing the signatures to the charters, to trace how the Danish names gradually disappear, and are succeeded by English names.[910] The Danes who remain seem to have been all in quite secondary rank. No doubt Cnut had largely rewarded his followers with grants of land, and we can well believe that some of these new Danish thegns often behaved with great insolence to their English neighbours.[911] But the general principle of Cnut’s government is not affected by any local wrongs of this kind. Cnut, from the very beginning, admitted Englishmen to high office; still, in the earlier years of his reign he appears mainly as a foreign conqueror surrounded by those whose arms had won his crown for him. He gradually changes into a prince, English in all but actual birth, who could afford to dispense with the dangerous support of the chieftains of his own nation, who could venture to throw himself on the loyalty of those whom he had subdued, and to surround himself with the natural leaders of those whom he had learned to look on as his own people.

Character of Cnut.

This gradual change in the disposition of Cnut makes him one of the most remarkable, and, to an Englishman, one of the most interesting, characters in history. There is no other instance—unless Rolf in Normandy be admitted as a forerunner on a smaller scale—of a barbarian conqueror, entering a country simply as a ruthless pirate, plundering, burning, mutilating, slaughtering, without remorse, and then, as soon as he is firmly seated on the throne of the invaded land, changing into a beneficent ruler and lawgiver, and winning for himself a place side by side with the best and greatest of its native sovereigns. Cnut never became a perfect prince like Ælfred. An insatiable ambition possessed him throughout life, and occasional acts of both craft and violence disfigure the whole of his career. No man could charge him with that amiable weakness through which Eadmund lent so ready an ear to protestations of repentance and promises of amendment even from the lips of Eadric. Cnut, on the other hand, always found some means, by death, by banishment, by distant promotion, of getting rid of any one who had once awakened his suspicions. Reasons of state were as powerful with him, and led him into as many unscrupulous actions, as any more civilized despot of later times. But Englishmen were not disposed to canvass the justice of wars in which they won fame and plunder, while no enemy ever set foot on their own shores. They were as little disposed to canvass the justice of banishments and executions, when, for many years, it was invariably a Dane, never an Englishman, who was |Cnut’s position typical of that of the Danes in England.| the victim. The law by which the Dane settled in England presently became an Englishman received its highest carrying out in the person of the illustrious Danish King. As far as England and Englishmen were concerned, Cnut might seem to have acted on the principle of the Greek poet, that unrighteousness might be fittingly done in order to win a crown, but that righteousness should be done in all other times and places.[912] The throne of Cnut, established by wasting wars, by unrighteous executions, perhaps even by treacherous assassinations, was, when once established, emphatically the throne of righteousness and peace. As an English King, he fairly ranks beside |Cnut’s letter from Rome. 1027.| the noblest of his predecessors. His best epitaph is his famous letter to his people on his Roman pilgrimage.[913] Such a pilgrimage was an ordinary devotional observance according to the creed of those times. But in the eyes of Cnut it was clearly much more than a mere perfunctory ceremony. The sight of the holy places stirred him to good resolves in matters both public and private, and, as a patriotic King, he employed his meeting with the Pope, the Emperor, and the Burgundian King, to win from all of them favours which were profitable to the people of his various realms. No man could have written in the style in which Cnut writes to all classes of his English subjects, unless he were fully convinced that he possessed and deserved the love of his people. The tone of the letter is that of an absent father writing to his children. In all simplicity and confidence, he tells them the events of his journey; he tells them with what honours he had been received, and with what presents he had been loaded, by the two chiefs of Christendom, and what privileges for his subjects, both English and Danish, he had obtained at their hands. He confesses the errors of his youth, and promises reformation of anything which may still be amiss. All grievances shall be redressed; no extortions shall be allowed; King Cnut needs no money raised by injustice. These are surely no mere formal or hypocritical professions; every word plainly comes from the heart. England had more than led captive her conqueror; she had changed him into her King and father.

The Laws of Cnut. 1028–1035.

The same spirit which breathes in Cnut’s letter breathes also in the opening of his laws.[914] The precept to fear God and honour the King here takes a more personal and affectionate form. First above all things are men one God ever to love and worship, and one Christendom with one mind to hold, and Cnut King to love with right truthfulness.[915] The laws themselves deal with the usual subjects, the reformation of manners, the administration of justice, the strict discharge of all ecclesiastical duties and the strict payment of all ecclesiastical dues. The feasts of the two new national saints, Eadward the King and Dunstan the Primate, are again ordered to be kept, and the observance of the former is again made to rest in a marked way on the authority of the Witan.[916] The observance of the Lord’s day is also strongly insisted on; on that day there is to be no marketing, no hunting; even the holding of folkmotes is forbidden, except in cases of absolute necessity.[917] All heathen superstition is to be forsaken,[918] and the slave-trade is again denounced.[919] The whole fabric of English society is strictly preserved. The King legislates only with the consent of his Witan.[920] The old assemblies, the old tribunals, the old magistrates, keep all their rights and powers. The Bishop and the Ealdorman[921] still fill their place as joint presidents of the Scirgemót, and joint expounders of the laws, ecclesiastical and secular.[922] The King, as well as all inferior lords,[923] is to enjoy all that is due to him; the royal rights, differing somewhat in the West-Saxon and the Danish portions of the kingdom, are to be carefully preserved, and neither extended nor diminished in either country.[924] No distinction, except the old local one, is made between Danes and Englishmen. The local rights and customs of the Danish and English portions of the kingdom are to be strictly observed.[925] But this is only what we have already seen in the legislation of Eadgar.[926] The Danes spoken of in Cnut’s laws, as in Eadgar’s, are the long-settled Danish inhabitants of Northumberland and the other countries of the Denalagu; no kind of preference is made in favour of Cnut’s own Danish followers; we cannot doubt that a Dane who held lands in Wessex had to submit to English law, just as a West-Saxon who held lands in Northumberland must, under Eadgar no less than under Cnut, have had to submit to Danish law. On one point the legislation of the great Dane is distinctly more rational and liberal than the legislation of our own day. Trespasses on the King’s forests are strictly forbidden; but the natural right of every man to hunt on his own land is emphatically asserted.[927] And as Cnut’s theory was, so was his practice. No King was more active in what was then held to be the first duty of kingship, that of constantly going through every portion of his realm to see with his own eyes whether the laws which he enacted were duly put in force.[928] In short, after Cnut’s power was once fully established, we hear no complaint against his government |Personal traditions of Cnut.| from any trustworthy English source.[929] His hold upon the popular affection is shown by the number of personal anecdotes of which he is the hero. The man who is said, in the traditions of other lands, to have ordered the cold-blooded murder of his brother-in-law, and that in a church at the holy season of Christmas,[930] appears in English tradition as a prince whose main characteristic is devotion mingled with good humour.[931] In the best known tale of all, he rebukes the impious flattery of his courtiers, and hangs his crown on the image of the crucified Saviour.[932] He bursts into song as he hears the chant of the monks of Ely,[933] and rejoices to keep the festivals of the Church among them. He bountifully rewards the sturdy peasant who proves the thickness of the ice over which the royal sledge has to pass.[934] One tale alone sets him before us in a somewhat different light. He mocks at the supposed sanctity of Eadgyth the daughter of Eadgar; he will not believe in the holiness of any child of a father so given up to lust and tyranny. It is needless to add that the offended saint brings the blasphemer to a better mind by summary means.[935] This tale is worth noting, as it illustrates the twofold conception of the character of Eadgar which was afloat. Cnut is represented as accepting the Eadgar of the minstrels, not the Eadgar of the monks, nor yet the Eadgar of history, who is somewhat different from either. But even in this tale Cnut is described as showing something of the spirit which breathes in his Roman letter. The King who loathed the supposed tyranny of Eadgar could hardly have been conscious of any tyranny of his own.

Cnut’s ecclesiastical policy.

In ecclesiastical matters Cnut mainly, though not exclusively, favoured the monks. His ecclesiastical appointments, |1020.| especially that of good Archbishop Æthelnoth;[936] who had baptized or confirmed him, do him high honour. |His ecclesiastical foundations.| He was also, after the custom of the age, a liberal benefactor to various ecclesiastical foundations. According to one account, not Assandun only, but all his battle-fields were marked by commemorative churches.[937] But as Assandun was Cnut’s only undoubted victory on English soil, and as men do not usually commemorate their defeats, we may conclude that, in England at least, Assandun was his only foundation of that kind. That church, as we have seen, was a secular foundation, seemingly for one priest only. A more splendid object of Cnut’s munificence throws an interesting light on the workings of his mind. The special object of his reverence was Eadmund, the sainted King of the East-Angles, a King martyred by heathen Danes, a saint who was the marked object of his father’s hatred, and by whose vengeance his father was held to have come to his untimely end.[938] The Christian Dane, King of all England, was eager to wipe away the stain from his house and nation. He made provision for the restoration of all the holy places which had in any way suffered during his own or his father’s wars.[939] But the first rank among them was given to the great foundation which boasted of the resting-place of the royal martyr. |Saint Eadmund’s Bury rebuilt and the foundation changed. 1020–1032.| The minster of Saint Eadmund was rebuilt, and, in conformity with the fashionable notions of reformation, its secular canons had to make way for an Abbot and monks. Some of the new inmates came from Saint Benet at Holm,[940] another foundation which was enriched by Cnut’s bounty.[941] One hardly knows whether Cnut most avoided or incurred suspicion by his special devotion to the resting-place of |Cnut’s visit to Glastonbury. 1032.| another Eadmund. He visited Glastonbury in company with Archbishop Æthelnoth, once a monk of that house. There, in the building which tradition points to as the first Christian temple raised in these islands, the building which history recognizes as the one famous holy place of the conquered Briton which lived unhurt through the storm of English Conquest, in the “wooden basilica” hallowed by the memory of so many real and legendary saints, did the Danish King confirm every gift and privilege which his English predecessors had granted to the great Celtic sanctuary.[942] A hundred and fifty years after the visit of Cnut, the wooden basilica, which had beheld so many revolutions, gave way to the more powerful influence of a change of taste and feeling, and on its site arose one of the most exquisite specimens of the latest Romanesque art, now in its state of desolation forming one of the loveliest of monastic ruins.[943] At some distance to the east of this primæval sanctuary stood the larger minster of stone reared by Saint Dunstan. In Cnut’s days it was doubtless still deemed a wonder of art, though it was doomed before the end of the century to give way to the vaster conceptions of the Norman architects. The invention and translation of the legendary Arthur were as yet distant events, and the new tomb of King Eadmund Ironside still kept the place of honour before the high altar.[944] There the conqueror knelt and prayed, and covered the tomb of his murdered brother with a splendid robe on which the gorgeous plumage of the peacock was reproduced |Translation of Saint Ælfheah. June, 1023.| by the skilful needles of English embroideresses.[945] Equal honours were paid by Cnut to another victim of the late wars, in his devotion to whom he was expiating the crimes of his nation, though not his own or those of his father’s house. The body of the martyred Ælfheah was translated from Saint Paul’s minster in London to his own metropolitan church, in the presence, and with the personal help, of the King and of all the chief men of the realm, lay and clerical. The ceremony was further adorned with the presence of the Lady Emma and her |His gifts to Winchester, Ely, and Ramsey.| “kingly bairn” Harthacnut.[946] That the two monasteries of the royal city of Winchester came in for their share of royal bounty it is almost needless to mention. But towards them the devotion of Emma, who claimed the city as her morning-gift, seems to have been more fervent than that of her husband.[947] Cnut’s personal tastes seem to have led him to the great religious houses of the fen country, where the dead of Maldon and Assandun reposed in the choirs of Ely and Ramsey.[948] Nowhere was his memory more fondly cherished than in the great minster which boasted of the tomb of Brihtnoth. There he was not so much a formal benefactor as a personal friend. But he was held in no less honour at Ramsey, the resting-place of Æthelweard. There he built a second church,[949] and designed the foundation of a society of nuns, which he did not bring to perfection. The local historian of the house rewards his bounty with a splendid panegyric, which however is fully borne out by his recorded acts.[950] Nor was his bounty confined to England, or even to his own |Cnut plants English Bishops in Denmark.| dominions. In his native Denmark he showed himself a diligent nursing-father to the infant Church, largely providing it with bishops and other ecclesiastics from |His gifts to foreign churches, &c.| England.[951] On his Roman pilgrimage, the poor and the churches of every land through which he passed shared his bountiful alms. It is also said that, by the counsel of Archbishop Æthelnoth, he gave gifts to many foreign churches. One special object of his favour was the church of Chartres, then flourishing under its famous Bishop Fulbert.[952] Emma too, the foreign Lady, was not backward in her gifts to churches, both English and foreign. She gave to the metropolitan church of Canterbury an arm of the Apostle Bartholomew, bought of an Archbishop of Beneventum whom the fame of the wealth of England had led hither to dispose of his holy treasure.[953] She had also a great share in rebuilding the famous minster of Saint Hilary at Poitiers, where a large portion of her work still remains.[954]

Such then was Cnut’s internal government of England. The conqueror had indeed changed into a home-born King. At no earlier time had the land ever enjoyed so long a term of such unmixed prosperity. We have now to behold the great King in his relations to foreign lands. And, if a series of ambitious wars and aggressions forms a less pleasing picture than a tale of peaceful and beneficent government, we shall at least see England raised to a higher position in the general system of Christendom than she held at any earlier, perhaps at any later time.

§ 2. The foreign Relations of Cnut. 1018–1035.

Cnut had come into England as a conqueror and destroyer; but his reign, as far as the internal state of England |Unparalleled internal peace during the reign of Cnut.| is concerned, was a time of perfect peace.[955] No invasion from beyond sea, no revolt, no civil war, is recorded during the eighteen years of his government. A single Scottish inroad and victory of which we shall presently hear was wiped out by the more complete submission of the northern vassal of England. Within England itself we read of no district being ravaged either by rebels or by royal command; we read of no city undergoing, or even being threatened with, military chastisement. This is more than can be said of the reign either of Eadgar the Peaceful or of Eadward the Saint. No doubt the whole nation was weary of warfare; after a struggle of thirty-six years, England would have been glad of a season of repose, even under a far worse government than that of Cnut. But a period of seventeen years in which we cannot see that a sword was drawn within the borders of England was something altogether unparalleled in those warlike ages, something which speaks volumes in favour of the King who bestowed such a blessing on our land. It is true that the old enemies of England were now the fellow-subjects of Englishmen, and that the first attempt of her new enemies came to nought without a blow being struck. Danish invasions ceased when Denmark and England had the same King, and the first Norman invasion, as we shall presently see, ignominiously failed. But a great deal is proved by the absence of any recorded attempt on the part of any Englishman to get rid of the foreign King. No one thought of taking advantage of Cnut’s frequent absences from England in the way in which men did take advantage of the similar absences of William the Norman. It is quite impossible that England and all Cnut’s other kingdoms should have been kept down against their will by the King’s |The Housecarls or Thingmen.| Housecarls. It is now that we first hear of this famous force, the name of which will be often heard during the following reigns, even after the Norman Conquest. Hitherto England had possessed nothing that could be called a standing army. When a war had to be waged, the King or Ealdorman called on his personal followers, attached to him by the ancient tie of the comitatus, and on the general levy, the fyrd or militia, either of the whole kingdom or of some particular part of it. But no English King or Ealdorman had hitherto kept a standing military force in his pay. But Cnut now organized a regular paid force, kept constantly under arms, and ready to march at a moment’s notice.[956] These were the famous Thingmen, the Housecarls, of whom we hear so much under Cnut and under his successors. This permanent body of soldiers in the King’s personal service seems to have had its origin in the crews of the forty Danish ships which were kept by Cnut when he sent back the greater part of his fleet in the second year of his reign. In his time the force consisted of three thousand, or at most of six thousand, men, gathered from all nations. For the power and fame of Cnut drew volunteers to his |A revival of the Comitatus.| banner from all parts of Northern Europe. The force was in fact a revival of the earliest form of the comitatus, only more thoroughly and permanently organized. The immediate followers, the hearth company, of earlier Kings and Ealdormen had been attached to them by a special tie, and were bound to bear to them a special fidelity in the day of battle.[957] The Housecarls or Thingmen of Cnut were a force of this kind, larger in number, kept more constantly under arms, and subjected to a more regular discipline than had hitherto been usual. Receiving regular pay, and reinforced by volunteers of all kinds and of all nations, they doubtless gradually departed a good deal from the higher type of the comitatus, and came nearer to the level of ordinary mercenaries. So far as the force consisted of foreigners, they were mercenaries in the strictest sense; so far as it consisted of Englishmen, they were mercenaries in no other sense than that in which all paid soldiers are mercenaries. The housecarls were in fact a standing army, and a standing army was an institution which later Kings and great Earls, English as well as Danish, found it to be their interest to continue. Under Cnut they formed a kind of military guild with |The military laws of Cnut.| the King at their head. A set of most elaborate articles of war determined the minutest points of their duty.[958] Fitting punishments were decreed for all offences great and small, punishments to be awarded by tribunals formed among the members of the guild. But all the provisions of the code relate wholly to the internal discipline of the force and to the relations of its members to one another. Of the position in which they stood to the community at large we hear absolutely nothing. And it should be remembered that all our details come from Danish writers and those not contemporary. Our English authorities tell us nothing directly about the matter. |The institution continued by later Kings.| From them we could at most have inferred that some institution of the sort arose about this time; we never read of housecarls before the reign of Cnut, while we often read of them afterwards. That a body of soldiers, many of them foreigners, were guilty of occasional acts of wrong and insolence, we may take for granted even without direct evidence. That under a bad King they might sometimes be sent on oppressive errands we shall presently see on the best of evidence. But that under the great Cnut they were the instruments of any general system of oppression, that they held the nation in unwilling submission to a yoke which it was anxious to throw off, is proved by no evidence whatever. And when England was again ruled by Kings of her own blood, the housecarls became simply a national standing army, and an army of which England might well be proud. The name of the housecarls of King Harold became a name of fear in the most warlike regions of the North,[959] and it was this brave and faithful force which was ever foremost in fight and nearest to the royal person alike in the hour of victory and in the hour of overthrow.

Foreign policy of Cnut.

We have still to speak of Cnut’s relations with lands beyond the bounds of England. This subject starts several important points in the history of foreign lands; but, as far as English history is concerned, most of them may be passed by in a few words. Within our own island, we hear little of Wales, and out of it, Cnut’s wars with the other Scandinavian powers and his relations to the Empire, though highly important, have hardly any bearing on English history. The case is different with his dealings both with Scotland and with Normandy, both of which, the latter especially, call for a somewhat fuller examination.

Cnut, as King of all England, alike by formal election and by the power of the sword, of course assumed the same Imperial claims and Imperial style which had been borne by the Kings who had gone before him. As King of all England, he was also Emperor of all Britain, Lord |Relations with Wales.| of all Kings and all nations within his own island. Of his relations with his Welsh vassals we are driven to pick up what accounts we can from their own scanty annals. Early in Cnut’s reign, on what provocation we know not, |Eglaf plunders Saint David’s. 1022?| the exploit of Eadric Streona[960] was repeated. Wales was invaded by Eglaf, a Danish Earl in Cnut’s service, probably the same who had joined in Thurkill’s invasion of England, and who, according to some accounts, was brother of that more famous chief.[961] He ravaged the land of Dyfed and destroyed Saint David’s.[962] This is our sole |1035?| fact, except that in one of the last years of Cnut’s reign, a Welsh prince, Caradoc son of Rhydderch, was slain by the English.[963] Our own Chroniclers do not look on these matters as worthy of any mention. With Scotland the case is somewhat different, especially as the affairs of that kingdom are closely mixed up with those of the great |Affairs of Northumberland and Scotland.| earldom of Northumberland. We have seen that, on the fourfold division of England, the great Northern government was entrusted to the Dane Eric, who seems however |Earldom of Eric;| not to have disturbed the actual English possessors.[964] He most likely kept a superiority over them till his own banishment,[965] after which it is clear that the family of the |of Eadwulf Cutel.| former Earls remained in possession. The reigning Earl, Eadwulf, the son of the elder Waltheof and brother of Uhtred, is spoken of as a timid and cowardly man, who, according to one account, now surrendered Lothian to King Malcolm for fear that he might avenge the victories won over him by his brother.[966] But if any cession was made to the Scots at this time, it was most likely |Battle of Carham. 1018.| extorted by Malcolm by force of arms. For the second year of Cnut was marked by a Scottish invasion and a Scottish victory of unusual importance.[967] King Malcolm entered England, accompanied by Eogan or Eugenius, seemingly an Under-king of Strathclyde. A great battle took place at Carham on the Tweed, not far from the scene of the more famous fight of Flodden, in which the Scots gained a decisive victory over the whole force of the Bernician earldom. The slaughter, as usual, fell most heavily upon the English nobility. Bishop Ealdhun is said to have fallen sick on hearing the news, and to have died in a few days. His great work was all but done. The height of Durham was now crowned by a church, stately doubtless after the standard of those times, of which only a single tower lacked completion.[968] It was doubtless owing to the confusion which followed the Scottish inroad that three years passed between the death of Ealdhun and the succession of the next Bishop Eadmund.[969] According to one theory, which I shall discuss elsewhere,[970] the annexation of Lothian to the Scottish kingdom was the result of this battle. It is equally strange that a prince like Cnut should have consented to the cession of any part of his dominions, and that he should have allowed a Scottish victory to pass unrevenged. But we do not, in our English authorities, find any mention of Scottish |Affairs of Cumberland.| affairs till a much later stage of his reign. According to the Scottish account, Duncan, the grandson of Malcolm through his daughter Beatrice, who now held the under-kingdom of Cumberland or Strathclyde, refused, though often summoned, to do homage to Cnut.[971] His refusal was cloked under a show of feudal loyalty; his homage was due only to the lawful King of the English; he would do no kind of service to a Danish usurper. Cnut, after his return from his Roman pilgrimage, marched against his refractory vassal, with the intention of incorporating |Submission of Duncan.| his dominions with the English kingdom. Certain Bishops and other chief men stepped in to preserve peace, and a compromise was brought about. Duncan withdrew his claim to independence; Cnut relinquished his design of complete incorporation; the Under-king of Cumberland was again to hold his kingdom on the old terms of vassalage. Such is the Scottish story, which characteristically puts Cumberland in the foreground, and leaves out all mention both of Scotland proper and of Lothian. It may very likely be true in what it asserts; it is eminently false in what it conceals. For there is no doubt that Cnut’s dealings with his northern neighbours were by no means confined to Cumberland, but touched Scotland itself quite as nearly. It is just conceivable that both Duncan and his grandfather Malcolm refused homage to Cnut on the ground that the Dane was an usurper of the English kingdom. If so, they were perhaps brought to reason at an earlier time than would appear from our own Chronicles only. According to a French historian, an expedition of Cnut against the Scots was hindered, and peace was restored, by the intercession of the Lady Emma and her brother Duke Richard. According to a Norwegian saga, two Scottish Kings, probably Malcolm and Duncan, submitted to |Submission of Scotland. 1031.| Cnut in the early years of his reign. However all this may be, it is certain, on the highest of all authorities, that the whole kingdom of Scotland did in the end submit to his claims. Cnut, like William after him, was not minded to give up any right of the crown which he had won. The more famous ceremony of Abernethy forty |[1073.]| years later was now forestalled. As the younger Malcolm then became the man of the Norman, so now the elder Malcolm became the man of the Dane.[972] Cnut, after his return from Rome—in the very year of his return, according to those who give the later date to that event—marched into Scotland, meeting, it would seem, with no |Malcolm, Jehmarc, and Macbeth do homage to Cnut. 1031.| opposition. Malcolm now, if not before, rendered the long-delayed homage, and he was joined in his submission by two other Scottish chiefs, the lords of Argyle and of Moray, on both of whom our Chronicles bestow the title of King. With the otherwise obscure Jehmarc is coupled a name which holds no small place in history, but which is far more famous in romance. Along with the homage of the elder Malcolm King Cnut received also the homage of Macbeth.

Import of the homage of the Under-kings.

This fact that the Under-kings, or princes of whatever rank, within the kingdom of Scotland, did homage to Cnut is worthy of special notice. It seems to be a step beyond the terms of the original commendation to Eadward the Elder. It seems to be a step towards the more complete submission made by William the Lion to Henry the Second and to the homage done by all Scotland to the Lord Paramount Edward. The choice of the English King as Father and Lord over the King and people of the Scots did not make this or that Scot his “man.”[973] But now, not only King Malcolm, but Jehmarc and Macbeth became the “men” of the King of all England. Yet the fact may perhaps be explained another way. When we remember the later history, we shall perhaps be inclined to look for the cause of this change in the slight authority possessed by Malcolm over the lesser Scottish princes. His legendary character paints him as a King who granted away all his domains, and left himself nothing but the hill of Scone, the holy place of the Scottish monarchy.[974] And more authentic history shows that Jehmarc and Macbeth, princes ruling on the western and eastern shores of the island, were so far independent of the King of Scots that the homage of Malcolm alone would have been no sufficient guaranty for the retention of the Scottish kingdom in its proper submission to the Imperial crown. Macbeth indeed was the representative of a line which had claims on the Scottish crown itself. Cnut therefore prudently exacted the homage of Malcolm’s dangerous vassals as well as that of Malcolm himself. |Death of Malcolm. 1034.| Malcolm, already an old man, survived the ceremony only three years, and died in the year before the death of his far younger over-lord.[975] He was succeeded by his grandson Duncan, whose son Malcolm, surnamed Canmore, afterwards so famous, received, as usual, the apanage of Cumberland.[976]

Cnut’s Northern wars.

Cnut’s wars in the North of Europe have but little connexion with English history, and there are few events for |Authorities for their history.| which our historical materials are more unsatisfactory. Our own Chronicles help us to the dates of some of the more prominent events; the Norwegian sagas[977] and the rhetorical Latin of the Danish historian help us to abundance of details, if we could only accept them as authentic; the Danish chronicles are meagre beyond words. Happily, to unravel the difficulties and contradictions of their various statements is no part of the business of an English historian. It may be enough for our purpose to keep ourselves to those events which the contemporary chroniclers of England thought worthy of a place in our own |Revolutions of Norway.| national annals. The most important among them is the loss and reconquest of Norway by Cnut, and his wars with its renowned King Olaf the Saint.[978] Norway had, after |1000.| the death of Olaf Tryggvesson,[979] formed part of the dominions of Swegen, and it was entrusted to the government of his son-in-law Eric, who afterwards held the |1015.| earldom of Northumberland.[980] When Eric went to England with Cnut, Hakon the son of Eric remained as Earl in Norway, but was soon driven out by Olaf Haraldsson. Of this prince, afterwards canonized as a saint and martyr, we have heard somewhat already;[981] but the part assigned to him in English affairs evidently belongs to romance and not to history. His career in his own country is more |Reign of Saint Olaf. 1015–1028.| authentic and more important. The rule of Olaf was at first acceptable to the country; but both his virtues and his faults gradually raised up enemies against him. He was preeminently a reformer. His strictness in the administration of justice, the first of virtues in a prince of those times, is highly praised.[982] He was moreover a zealous Christian; his whole soul was devoted to spreading throughout his kingdom the blessings of religion and civilization, and to reforming the manners and morals of his people in every way. He brought bishops and other churchmen from England, and, not satisfied with the evangelization of his own kingdom, he employed them as missionaries in Sweden, Gothland, and the neighbouring islands.[983] But, just like the elder Olaf, his choice of means was often less praiseworthy than the excellence of his objects. The reformer tried by harshness and violence to force on a rude people manners and institutions for which they were not ready, and the Christian missionary sank into a persecutor of those who clave to the creed of their fathers. In his lofty ideas of kingly power, Olaf set little store by the rights either of the ancient chiefs or of the free peasantry of the land, and, in dealing with these enemies, he did not shrink from acts of merciless cruelty.[984] Meanwhile Cnut was keeping as careful an eye on Norway as his father had kept on England; but, like his father, he knew how to bide his time. A summons to Olaf to hold the crown of Norway as his vassal was rejected;[985] war followed, |Cnut’s defeat at the Helga. 1025.| and Cnut’s first expedition was unsuccessful. Olaf allied himself with the Swedish King Omund, and their joint forces inflicted a defeat on Cnut’s combined Danish |Cnut’s intrigues in Norway. 1027.| and English army at the river Helga in Scania.[986] Two years later, by dint of bribes and promises and by studiously taking advantage of Olaf’s growing unpopularity, Cnut contrived to raise up a powerful party in Norway which was prepared to accept his own pretensions.[987] In the next year, when Cnut sailed to Norway with fifty ships, Olaf was completely forsaken by his people, and |Cnut expels Olaf, and is chosen King of all Norway. 1028.| had to take refuge in Russia. Cnut was everywhere welcomed, and he was chosen King of all Norway by the Thing at Trondhjem, just as he had been, eleven years before, chosen King of all England by the Gemót at London.[988] A later attempt of Olaf to recover his kingdom |Olaf killed at Stikkelstad. 1030.| was resisted by the Norwegians themselves; he fell in the fight of Stikkelstad, and the Church looked on him as a martyr.[989]

Cnut’s friendly relations with the Empire.

Cnut, King of five or, as some reckon, six kingdoms, seems to have looked upon himself as Emperor of the North, and to have held himself in all respects as the peer of his Roman brother.[990] Earlier and later Danish Kings were fain to own themselves the vassals of Cæsar; but before the power of Cnut the Roman Terminus himself had to give way. With the Frankish Emperor Conrad the mighty ruler of Northern Europe was on the best terms. Cnut, as we have seen, made his acquaintance and friendship in his Imperial capital, and bore a part in the splendours of his Imperial consecration. The alliance was cemented by a treaty of marriage between their children, and by a cession of territory on the part of the potentate |Marriage of Gunhild to King Henry of Germany. 1036.| higher in formal rank. Gunhild, the daughter of Cnut and Emma, was betrothed to Conrad’s son King Henry, afterwards the renowned Emperor Henry the Third. The marriage however did not take place till after the death of the bride’s father, and Gunhild, like her predecessor Eadgyth, was destined to be neither the wife nor the mother of an Emperor. Gunhild, like Eadgyth, died before her husband succeeded to the Empire, and his successor was the offspring of his second and better known marriage with Agnes of Poitiers.[991]

Cnut recovers the frontier of the Eider.

The more strictly political result of the friendship between Cnut and Conrad was the restoration of the ancient frontier between Denmark and Germany. After the victorious expedition of Otto the Second into Denmark, a German mark had been established beyond the Eider, extending from that river to the Dannewirk, the great bulwark which Gorm and Thyra had reared against the Southern invader. This was the first step in that process which has gradually Germanized a part of Southern Jutland, |1864–6.| and which has at last handed over an unwilling Scandinavian population as the victims of Prussian greed of territorial aggrandizement. Cnut, by treaty with the Emperor, and seemingly as the price of his daughter, recovered the ancient frontier with which Charles the Great had been content, and which remained the boundary of the two realms till that general removing of ancient landmarks which belongs only to the more refined diplomacy of modern times.

Affairs of Normandy.

We have now, last of all, to look to the position of Cnut with reference to the Duchy of Normandy. I have already, in speaking of Cnut’s ecclesiastical policy, had occasion to mention the close connexion which he kept up with more than one part of Gaul. He was the special friend of Duke William of Aquitaine, surnamed the Great, a prince whose tastes were in many respects congenial with his own. He sent him embassies and gifts, among them a splendid book of devotions in golden letters.[992] But Cnut’s most important relations among the states of Gaul were with the great duchy which lay opposite to his southern shores, and where his banished stepsons were being brought up as his possible rivals. The last event in the internal history of Normandy which I recorded was the |[997.]| great revolt of the Norman peasantry at the beginning of the reign of Richard the Good. The new Duke was, in the full sense of the word, a Frenchman. Whatever had become of the original homage of Rolf, the commendation of Richard the Fearless to Hugh the Great[993] was still in |Friendly relations with France. 996–1031.| full force. Richard was the loyal vassal and faithful ally of the Parisian King; his friendship with Robert, the second King of that house, seems to have always remained unbroken, and the two princes acted together in various expeditions. The Normans were by this time thoroughly naturalized in their Gaulish possessions. In the records of the time they appear as recognized and honoured members of the French monarchy. The memory of their foreign and heathen descent is forgotten; their prince is no longer the mere Duke of Pirates,[994] whom a loyal Frenchman spoke of as seldom as he could; the cherished ally of the Parisian King is now spoken of with every respect as the Duke of Rouen.[995] The chief French historian of the time is as ready to exaggerate the external power and influence of the second Richard as ever his own Dudo was to exaggerate those of his father.[996] Richard, on the other hand, did not hesitate to have his gifts to his own Fécamp confirmed by his over-lord,[997] and he dated his public acts by the regnal years of the King.[998] And no wonder; for it is plain that the Norman Duke |Strict alliance between King Robert and Duke Richard.| was the mainstay of the French kingdom. Robert, though the most pious of men, could not avoid either temporal warfare, ecclesiastical censures, or domestic oppression.[999] In the last two classes of afflictions Norman help could hardly avail him, but in all Robert’s wars Richard proved a steady and valuable ally. The help of the Norman |1003.| Duke enabled his over-lord to maintain his claims over the ducal Burgundy,[1000] and Norman troops served along with those both of the French King and of the German Cæsar in a war against their common vassal of Flanders. The |1006.| Imperial and royal saints united their forces against the city of Valenciennes, and the more purely temporal help of |Friendly relations with Britanny.| the Norman Duke was arrayed on the same side.[1001] With his Breton neighbours or vassals Richard was on good terms. The friendship between him and the Breton Count Geoffrey was cemented by an exchange of sisters between |1008.| the two princes. Richard married Judith of Britanny,[1002] and Hadwisa of Normandy became the wife of Geoffrey, on whose death her sons, Alan and Odo, were placed under the guardianship of their uncle and lord.[1003] With another neighbour and brother-in-law Richard found it less easy to remain on friendly terms. His sister Matilda had married Odo the Second, Count of Chartres, the grandson of the old enemy Theobald. The town and part of the district of Dreux had been given to Odo as her marriage |War with Odo of Chartres.| portion,[1004] and this, on her death, he refused to give back. A war followed, which was made conspicuous by the foundation of the famous castle of Tillières,[1005] which long remained a border fortress of Normandy. Of course every effort of Odo to take or surprise the Norman outpost was rendered hopeless by Norman valour, and yet we are told that Richard found it expedient to resort to help of a very questionable kind to support him against his enemy. The Normans were now Frenchmen; Duke Richard and his court of gentlemen[1006] had doubtless quite forgotten their Scandinavian mother-tongue; some traces of the old nationality may still have lingered at Bayeux, but, as a whole, Normandy was now French in language, feeling, and religion. But the old connexion with the North was still cherished. We have already seen how the friendly reception which the Danish invaders of England met with in the Norman ports had led to hostile relations between Normandy and England.[1007] So now we have the old story of Harold Blaatand over again.[1008] Richard, like his father, does not scruple to bring heathen invaders into Gaul to help him against his Christian enemies. And, just as in the second appearance of Harold Blaatand, this shameful help is called in at a time when there seems to be no need for if, at a time when the Norman arms are completely victorious. Odo could surely have been crushed by the combined forces of Normandy and Britanny,[1009] even if King Robert was not disposed to repay |Brittany ravaged by two heathen Kings, Lacman and Olaf. 1013?| in kind the services of his loyal vassal. The tale however, as we find it, represents the Norman Duke as entering into a league with two heathen Kings, who were engaged in inflicting the most cruel ravages on his own vassals and allies of Britanny, having just taken and burned the frontier city of Dol.[1010] These Kings are described as Lacman of Sweden and Olaf of Norway. With regard to the former there must be a mistake of some kind, as no King bearing any such name occurs in Swedish |Identity of this Olaf with Saint Olaf Haraldsson.| history. But we are given to understand that the Olaf spoken of was no other than the famous Olaf Haraldsson the Saint.[1011] One story of the early life of Olaf seems to be about as mythical as another; but something is proved when two independent narratives agree. Of the busy career in England which the Northern legend assigns to Olaf not a trace is to be found in any English writer. But the presence of Olaf in Normandy is asserted alike |Richard allies himself with them.| by Norman and by Norwegian tradition. According to the Norman tale, the ravagers of Britanny left their prey, sailed to Rouen in answer to the Duke’s summons, |Mediation of King Robert.| and were there honourably received by him. But if Duke Richard did not shrink from such guests at Rouen, King Robert was naturally afraid of their appearance at Paris. After the treatment which the Bretons had received, all Gaul was endangered by their presence.[1012] The King then held, what is so rare in the history of France, so common in that of England and Germany, an assembly of the Princes of his realm.[1013] The royal summons was obeyed both by the Duke of the Normans and by the Count of Chartres. Peace was made by the mediation of the King; Count Odo kept his town of Dreux, and Duke Richard kept his new fortress of Tillières. The heathen Kings were to be got rid of as they might. Duke Richard persuaded them by rich gifts to go away then, and to promise to come again if they were wanted. One of them, Olaf, was converted to Christianity with many of his comrades. He was baptized by Archbishop Robert, and his career of sanctity begins forthwith.[1014]

Amount of truth to be found in these stories.

Stories of this kind can hardly be admitted into history without a certain amount of dread lest the historian may prove to have opened his text for the reception of a mere piece of romance. They are stories which we cannot venture unhesitatingly to accept, but which we are not at all in a position unhesitatingly to deny. They are stories of which it is safest to say that the details are sure to be mythical, but that there is likely to be some groundwork of truth at the bottom. It is impossible to read this tale of the alliance of Richard the Good with Olaf and Lacman, without a lurking feeling that it may be the tale of Richard the Fearless and Harold Blaatand moved from its old place and fitted with a new set of names. If we get thus far, it is hardly possible to avoid going a step further, and asking whether the mythical element is not strong in the tale of Harold Blaatand himself. And it is hardly less difficult to read the story of the two heathen Kings, of whom one is converted, while the other seemingly goes away stiffnecked in his old errors, without asking whether the tale is not merely a repetition of the history of the dealings of Æthelred with Swegen and Olaf Tryggvesson twenty years before.[1015] Still we are hardly justified in altogether rejecting stories which we cannot disprove, and which rest on authority, certainly not first-rate, but still such as we are generally content to accept for statements which have no inherent |Their witness to the abiding connexion between Normandy and the North.| unlikelihood about them. And after all, in this particular case, the mere existence of the stories proves something of more importance than the particular facts which they profess to relate. Whether the tales either of Harold or of Olaf be historically true or not, the fact that such tales could obtain belief, and could find a place in recognized Norman history, shows that a strong feeling of connexion between Normandy and the Scandinavian mother-land must have lived on, even after all outward traces of Scandinavian descent had passed away.

Foreign expeditions and conquests of the Normans.

Another feature in Norman history, which has its beginning in the reign of Richard the Good, is still more closely connected with our immediate subject. It was in the days of this prince that the Normans of the Norman duchy began to play an independent part beyond their own borders, and to enter on that series of foreign expeditions and foreign conquests of which the Norman Conquest of England was the last and greatest example.[1016] The earlier Dukes had founded the duchy; they had enlarged its borders; they had defended it against aggression from without, and had developed its resources within. The alliance between Richard the Good and King Robert had caused the Norman arms to be felt and dreaded throughout the length and breadth of Gaul. But now the limits both of the Norman duchy and of the French kingdom became too narrow for the energies both of the sovereigns of Normandy and of their subjects. The part played by the Normans in Europe had hitherto been partly defensive and partly secondary. They had withstood French, English, and German invasions, and they had aided their lords, ducal and royal, at Paris in a variety of military adventures. But now that no invader was to be feared, now that the Norman state held a fully established position in France and in Europe, the old Scandinavian spirit of distant enterprise and distant conquest awoke again. The Christian and French-speaking Norman was now as ready to jeopard his life and fortune in distant lands as ever his heathen and Scandinavian forefathers had been. The days of the actual crusades had not yet come, but already, while warfare of all kinds had charms, warfare against misbelievers was beginning to be clothed with a special charm in the eyes of the Christian chivalry of Normandy. As yet no distant conquest had been undertaken by any Norman Duke. Yet even under Richard the Good we find the power of Normandy employed beyond the bounds of the French kingdom, and in a cause which was not that of any immediate interest |Burgundian War. 1024.| of the Norman duchy. Besides the campaign in which Duke Richard vindicated the claim of his over-lord over the ducal Burgundy, he carried his arms beyond the frontier of the Western Kingdom into that further Burgundy which still kept its own line of Kings, and which was soon to return to its allegiance to Cæsar. Reginald, Count of the Burgundian Palatinate, had married Richard’s daughter Adeliza. Towards the end of Richard’s reign, this prince fell into the hands of his turbulent neighbour, Hugh, Count of Challon[1017] and Bishop of Auxerre. Hugh was a vassal of France, while Reginald’s dominions were held in fief of the last Burgundian King, the feeble Rudolf, himself little better than a vassal of the Emperor. But neither King nor Cæsar stepped forward to chastise the wrong-doer or to set free the captive. It was a Norman army, under the young Richard, son of the Duke, which presently taught the Count-prelate that a son-in-law of the Duke of the Normans could not be wronged with impunity.[1018]

But far greater and more enduring exploits than these were wrought during the reign of Richard, not by the public force of the Norman duchy, but by the restless energy of private Norman adventurers. An attempt to establish a Norman settlement in Spain came to nought; but in this period were laid the foundations of that great Norman settlement in Southern Italy which had such an |Exploits of Roger of Toesny in Spain. 1018.| important effect on the future history of Europe. Roger of Toesny was the first to carry the Norman arms into the Spanish peninsula. Spain had long before attracted the attention of a Norman sovereign; it was to Spain, as a heathen land, to which Richard the Fearless had persuaded the unbelieving portion of his Scandinavian allies to depart.[1019] It was in Spain, as the battle-ground of Christian and Saracen, that Roger now sought at once to wage warfare against the misbeliever and to carve out a dominion for himself. Roger was of the noblest blood of Normandy, boasting a descent from Malahulc, uncle of Rolf,[1020] and he may well have looked down upon the upstart gentlemen whose nobility had no higher source than the tardy bridal of their kinswoman Gunnor.[1021] Roger fought manfully against the infidels, and marvellous tales are told of his daring, his hard-won victories, his deeds of cannibal ferocity.[1022] He married the daughter of the widowed Countess of Barcelona, a princess whose dominions were practically Spanish, though her formal allegiance was due to the Parisian King. This marriage was doubtless designed as the beginning of a Norman principality in Spain; but the scheme failed to take any lasting root.

Norman Conquest of Apulia and Sicily. 1016–1090.

The exploits of the Normans in Italy, which began in the reign of Richard, form a theme of the highest interest, but one on which it is dangerous to enter, lest I should be drawn too far away both from my central subject and from those which directly bear upon it. On English, and even on Norman, affairs the influence of these great events was |The Conquest of England perhaps partly suggested by it.| merely indirect. One can hardly doubt that the wonderful successes of their countrymen in the South of Europe did much to suggest to the minds of those Normans who stayed at home that a still greater conquest nearer home was not wholly hopeless. The unsuccessful attempt of Duke Robert, which we shall presently have to mention, and the successful attempt of his greater son, may well have been partly suggested by the exploits of the sons of Tancred in Apulia. When private adventurers thus grew into sovereigns, what might not be done by the sovereign of Normandy himself, wielding the whole force of the land which gave birth to men like them? For it must be remembered that the Norman conquest of Apulia was no national enterprise, no conquest made in regular warfare waged by the Duke of the Normans against any other potentate. Private Norman adventurers, pilgrims returning from the Holy Land, Norman subjects under the displeasure of their own Duke,[1023] gentlemen of small estate whom the paternal acres could no longer maintain, gradually deprived the Roman Empire of the East[1024] of the remnant of its Western possessions, and won back the greatest of Mediterranean islands from the dominion of Mahomet to that of Christ. The sons of Tancred of Hauteville began as wikings who had changed their element; they gradually grew into Counts, Dukes, Kings, and Emperors. And, when the first horrors of conquest were over, no conquerors, not even Cnut himself, ever deserved better of the conquered. The noble island of Sicily, so long the battle-field of Europe and Africa, the land which Greece, Rome, Byzantium, had so long striven to guard or to recover from the incursions of the Carthaginian and the Arab, became, under her Norman Kings, the one example of really equal and tolerant government which the world could then show. Under the Norman sceptre the two most civilized races of the world,[1025] the Greek and the Saracen, could live together in peace, and could enrich their common country with the results of skill |Conquest of Sicily by Henry the Sixth. 1194–5.| and industry such as no Northern realm could rival. For once we are driven to blush for our common Teutonic blood, when we see how this favoured portion of the world, the one spot where contending creeds and races could display their best qualities under the sway of a common and impartial ruler, was enslaved and devastated and trodden under foot by the selfish ambition of a Teutonic invader.

The relations of Richard with England, his war with Æthelred,[1026] his dealings with Swegen,[1027] his reception of his fugitive brother-in-law and his children,[1028] have been already |Unbroken peace between Richard and Cnut.| spoken of. With Cnut he seems to have maintained perfect peace. His nephews, the sons of Æthelred and Emma, found shelter at his court, but only shelter. Of any attempt on their behalf, of any interference in the internal affairs of England, the wary Duke seems never to have thought. We must hasten on to the reign of another Norman prince, whose relations to our island were widely different.

Death of Richard. 1026.

Richard died after a reign of thirty years. Before his death he assembled the chief men of his duchy, and by their advice he settled the duchy itself on his eldest son Richard, and the county of Hiesmes on his second son |Reign of Richard the Third.| Robert as his brother’s vassal.[1029] Disputes arose between the brothers; Robert was besieged in his castle of Falaise, and when peace was made by the submission of Robert, the Duke did not long survive his success. After a reign of two years he died by poison,[1030] as was generally believed, |Robert succeeds. 1028.| and was succeeded by his brother.[1031] Robert, known as the Magnificent,[1032] is most familiar to us in English history as the father of the Conqueror. But he has no small claims on our notice on his own account. What the son carried out, the father had already attempted. Robert was in will, though not in deed, the first Norman conqueror of England.[1033] In the early part of his reign he had to struggle against several revolts in his own dominions. |He suppresses revolts at home.| We are not directly told what were the grounds of opposition to his government; but we are at least not surprised to hear of revolts against a prince who had attained to his sovereignty under circumstances so suspicious. But Robert overthrew all his domestic enemies,[1034] and he is at least not charged with any special cruelty in the reestablishment |He reduces Britanny to submission.| of his authority. With Britanny he did not remain on the same friendly terms as his father. His cousin Alan refused his homage, but he was brought to submission.[1035] In this warfare Neal of Saint-Saviour, who had so valiantly beaten off the English in their invasion of the Côtentin, appears side by side with a warrior whose name of Ælfred raises the strongest presumption of his English birth. The banishments of the earlier days of Cnut will easily account for so rare an event as that of an Englishman taking service under a foreign prince.[1036] But it was as the protector of unfortunate princes that Robert seems to have been most anxious to appear before the |He restores Baldwin of Flanders.| world. Baldwin of Flanders, driven from his dominions by his rebellious son, was restored by the power of the Norman Duke.[1037] A still more exalted suppliant presently implored his help. His liege lord, Henry, King of the French, was driven to claim the support of the mightiest of his vassals against foes who were of his own household. |King Robert and his sons.| King Robert had at first designed the royal succession for his eldest son Hugh, whom, according to a custom common in France, though unusual in England, he caused |Hugh is crowned and dies before him.| to be crowned in his lifetime.[1038] Hugh, a prince whose merits, we are told, were such that a party in Italy looked to him as a candidate for the Imperial crown,[1039] was, after some disputes with his father, reconciled to him, and died before him. Robert then chose as his successor his second son Henry, who was already invested with the |Henry crowned in his father’s lifetime.| duchy of Burgundy. Henry was accordingly accepted and crowned at Rheims.[1040] But the arrangement displeased Queen Constance, who was bent on the promotion of her |Death of King Robert.| third son Richard. On King Robert’s death, Constance and Richard expelled Henry, who took refuge with his |Henry expelled, and restored| Norman vassal, and was restored by his help, Richard being allowed to receive his brother’s duchy of Burgundy.[1041] |by Duke Robert. 1031.| The policy of Hugh the Great had indeed won for his house a mighty protector in the descendant of the pirates.

The English Æthelings in Normandy.

But there were other banished princes who had a nearer claim upon Duke Robert than his Flemish neighbour, a nearer personal claim than even his lord at Paris. The English Æthelings, his cousins Eadward and Ælfred, were still at his court, banished from the land of their fathers, while the Danish invader filled the throne of their fathers. Their mother had wholly forgotten them; their uncle had made no effort on their behalf; Robert, their cousin, was the first kinsman who deemed it any part of his business to assert their right to a crown which seemed to |Contradictory evidence as to the relations between Cnut and Robert.| have hopelessly passed away from their house. That Robert did make an attempt to restore them, that the relations between him and Cnut were unfriendly on other grounds, there seems no reason to doubt. But when we ask for dates and details, we are at once plunged into every kind of confusion and contradiction. The English writers are silent; from the German writers we learn next to nothing; the Scandinavian history of this age is still at least half mythical; the Norman writers never held truth to be of any moment when the relations of Normandy and England were concerned. That Robert provoked Cnut by threats or attempts to restore the Æthelings, and also by ill-treating and repudiating Cnut’s sister, seem to be facts which we may accept in the bare outline, whatever we say as to their minuter details. That Cnut retaliated by an invasion of Normandy, or that the threat of such an invasion had an effect on the conduct of the sovereigns of Normandy, are positions which are strongly asserted by various authorities. But their stories are accompanied by circumstances which directly contradict the witness of authorities which are far more trustworthy. In fact, the moment we get beyond the range of the sober contemporary Chronicles of our own land, we find ourselves in a region in which the mythical and romantic elements outweigh the historical, and moreover, in whatever comes from Norman sources, we have to be on our guard against interested invention as well as against honest error.

Marriages of Estrith with Ulf and Robert.

We have seen that Estrith, a sister of Cnut, was married to the Danish Earl Ulf, the brother-in-law of Godwine, to whom she bore the famous Swegen Estrithson, afterwards King of the Danes, one of the most renowned princes in Danish history. We are told by a crowd of authorities that, besides her marriage with Ulf, Estrith was married to the Duke of the Normans, that she was ill-treated by him in various ways, and was finally sent back with ignominy to her brother. Most of the writers who tell this story place this marriage before her marriage with Ulf, and make the Danish Earl take the divorced |Supposed wars between Cnut and Robert.| wife of the Norman Duke. With this story several writers connect another story of an invasion, or threatened invasion, of Normandy undertaken by Cnut in order to redress his sister’s wrongs. The most popular Danish writer even makes Cnut die, in contradiction to all authentic history, while besieging Rouen. We read also how the Norman Duke fled to Jerusalem or elsewhere for fear of the anger of the lord of six Northern kingdoms. Details of this kind are plainly mythical; but they point to some real quarrel, to some war, threatened if not actually waged, between Cnut and Robert. And chronology, as well as the tone of the legends, shows that the whole of these events must be placed quite late in Cnut’s reign. |Robert probably married Estrith.| The natural inference is that the marriage between Robert and Estrith took place, not before Estrith’s marriage with Ulf, but after Ulf’s death. The widow was richly |after Ulf’s death. c. 1026.| endowed; her brother had atoned for the slaughter of her husband by territorial grants which might well have moved the greed of the Norman. A superior attraction nearer his own castle may easily account for Robert’s neglect of his Scandinavian bride, a bride no doubt many years older than the young Count of Hièsmes. Within three years after Estrith’s widowhood, Robert became the father of him who was preeminently the Bastard.[1042]

Robert’s intervention on behalf of the Æthelings. 1028–1035.

It seems impossible to doubt that Robert’s intervention on behalf of his English cousins was connected with these events. The reign of Robert coincides with the last seven years of the reign of Cnut, so that any intervention of Robert in English affairs must have been in Cnut’s later days. Each prince would doubtless seize every opportunity of annoying the other; the tale clearly sets Robert before us as the aggressor; but as to the order of events we are left to guess. It would be perfectly natural, in a man of Robert’s character, if the repudiation of Estrith was accompanied, or presently followed, by the assertion of the claims of the Æthelings to her brother’s crown. The date then of the first contemplated Norman invasion of England can be fixed only within a few years; but the story, as we read it in the Norman accounts, seems credible enough in its general outline.[1043] The Duke sends an embassy to Cnut, demanding, it would seem, the cession of the whole kingdom of England to the rightful heir. That Cnut refused to surrender his crown is nothing wonderful, though the Norman writer seems shocked that the exhortation of the Norman ambassadors did not at once bring conviction to |Robert’s unsuccessful attempt| the mind of the usurper.[1044] The Duke then, in great wrath, determines to assert the claims of his kinsmen by force of |to invade England.| arms. An assembly of the Normans is held, a forerunner of the more famous assembly at Lillebonne, in which the invasion of England is determined on. A fleet is made ready with all haste, and Duke Robert and the Ætheling Eadward embark at Fécamp. But the wind was contrary; instead of being carried safely to Pevensey, the fleet was carried round the Côtentin and found itself on the coast of Jersey.[1045] All attempts were vain; the historian piously adds that they were frustrated by a special Providence, because God had determined that his servant Eadward should make his way to the English crown without the shedding of blood.[1046] The Duke accordingly gave up his enterprise on behalf of his cousin of England, and employed his fleet in a further harrying of the dominions of his cousin of Britanny.[1047] At last Robert, Archbishop of Rouen, the common uncle of Robert and Alan,[1048] reconciled the two princes, and the fleet seems now to have sailed to Rouen.[1049] Thus far we have a story, somewhat heightened in its details, but which may be taken as evidence that Robert, who had restored the fugitive sovereigns of France and Flanders, really thought of carrying on his calling of King-maker beyond the sea. Robert, a thorough knight-errant, doubtless designed the restoration of his cousin in perfect good faith, and with no more intention of any gain to himself than he had shown in the |Probable results of the success of such an invasion.| restorations of Baldwin and Henry. But if a Norman army had once landed in England, it would not have been so easy to bring it home again as it was to bring home an army which had simply marched into France or Flanders. Cnut, with no Tostig, no Harold Hardrada, to divert him from the main danger, and with the force of his other kingdoms ready to back him, would most likely have speedily crushed the invader. But had it been otherwise, one can hardly fancy that the results of the English expedition would have been of as little moment as the results of the French and the Flemish expedition. In France and Flanders Robert had simply turned the scale between two princes of the same house. But if a Norman army had set one of the sons of Æthelred on the English throne, the result would have been something more than a mere personal change of sovereign. Had Eadward held his crown by virtue of a victory won by Norman troops over Cnut’s Danes and Englishmen, the practical aspect of such a revolution could have hardly differed at all from the revolution which did take place under William. The prince thus established in his kingdom would have been, according to formal pedigrees, the cyne-hlaford, the descendant of Ælfred, Cerdic, and Woden. But half-Norman by birth, wholly Norman in feeling, raised to his throne by Norman swords, Eadward would have reigned still more thoroughly as a Frenchman than he did reign when, a few years later, he came to the crown in a more peaceable way. The storm, or whatever it was, which kept back Duke Robert from his invasion of England, put off the chances of a Norman Conquest for nearly forty years.

Cnut said to have offered the succession of Wessex to the Æthelings.

The Norman writers wind up their story with an assertion which is much less credible than their account of the expedition itself. Robert, on his return from his Breton expedition, was met in the very nick of time[1050] by ambassadors from Cnut offering half of the kingdom of England to the sons of Æthelred. The lord of Northern Europe was sick, and felt himself near his end; he therefore wished for peace during the remnant of his days.[1051] Of course this is not to be understood as an offer of an immediate surrender of any part of his dominions. What is meant is that Cnut offered to secure peace with Normandy by acknowledging Eadward as his successor in the kingdom of Wessex. The Norman and the Danish accounts may be set one against another. Any number of embassies may have passed between the two princes; any amount of mutual threatenings may have been exchanged; but Cnut’s fear of Robert and Robert’s fear of Cnut may |Improbability of the story.| be set aside as equally mythical. The Norman story is utterly improbable. Nothing could be more unlikely than a disposition made by Cnut in favour of either of his stepsons. He could have no personal motive for alienating any portion of his dominions from his own children. In almost any other case the influence of his wife would supply a natural and sufficient motive for such an arrangement. But all that we hear of Emma leads us to believe that her whole heart was set on Harthacnut and Gunhild, and that she was not at all likely to use her influence on behalf of her sons by Æthelred. And had Cnut made any such disposition in favour of Eadward or Ælfred, it could hardly have failed to leave some trace in English history. But among all the disputes which followed on the death of Cnut, we hear not a word of the claims of the Æthelings, we hear nothing of any single voice raised in their favour.[1052] Still that tale may have been the distortion of something which really happened. We must not forget that Harthacnut was Robert’s cousin no less than Eadward. It may be that some announcement or confirmation of Cnut’s intentions in his favour, as opposed to the succession of Harold or Swegen, may have been made by Cnut to the Norman Duke. Such an announcement might easily have been mistaken by Norman writers, ill informed about English affairs, for a disposition in favour of another son of Emma.

Deaths of Cnut and Robert.

Whatever the relations between Cnut and Robert may have been, the two princes died in the same year.[1053] When Cnut made his pilgrimage to Rome, religious motives were doubtless the leading cause of his journey. But the politic King knew how to make use of the errand which was to profit his soul in order to advance at once his own power and credit and the interests of the many nations over which he ruled. A fit of purer religious enthusiasm, a fierce impulse of penitence for past sins, carried Robert of Normandy on the more distant pilgrimage to Jerusalem.[1054] On his return he died at the |Robert dies at Nikaia. July 2, 1035.| Bithynian Nikaia; some say by the same fate by which he was suspected of having made away with his own brother.[1055] In his lifetime he had begun to rear the noble abbey of Cerisy, where, after many changes and mutilations, some parts still remain to witness to the severe grandeur of the taste of Robert and his age.[1056] But the bones of its founder were not destined to rest among its massive pillars or beneath the bold arches which span the width of its stately nave. The relics which he had collected in the East were borne by his chamberlain Toustain to the sanctuary which he had founded,[1057] but the great Duke of the Normans[1058] himself found his last home in the lands beyond the Hellespont, beneath the spreading cupolas of a Byzantine basilica at Nikaia.[1059] The Norman thus died a stranger and a pilgrim in a land of another tongue |Cnut dies at Shaftesbury. November 12, 1035.| and another worship. The Dane too ended his days in a land which was not his by birth; but it was in a land in which, if he had entered it as a destroyer, he had truly reigned as a father. Cnut, Emperor of six kingdoms, but in a special manner King of the old West-Saxon realm, died within the West-Saxon border, at a spot hallowed by memories of Ælfred, beneath the shadow of his minster at Shaftesbury.[1060] As an English King by adoption, if not by birth, he found a grave among the English Kings who had gone before him, in the Old Minster of his West-Saxon capital. The two rivals, if rivals they were, passed from the Western world almost at the same moment; the death of Cnut happened about the time when the death of Robert must have become known in England and in Normandy. The dominions of both rulers passed away to their spurious or doubtful offspring. The son of Herleva succeeded in Normandy; the supposed son of “the other Ælfgifu” succeeded in |Contrast between their successors.| England. But if there be a wide difference between the fame of the two fathers, it is far more than overbalanced by the difference between the fame of their sons. A reign of a few obscure years of crime and confusion forms the sole memory of the Bastard of Northampton, while the world has ever since rung, and while it lasts it can hardly ever fail to ring, with the mighty name of the Bastard of Falaise.

§ 3. The Reign of Harold the Son of Cnut. 1035–1040.

Extent of Cnut’s Empire.

The good fortune of Cnut had raised him up an Empire in Northern Europe to which there was no parallel before or after him. Setting aside descriptions of his power which are manifestly gross exaggerations, he united the kingdom of England and its dependencies with the kingdoms of Denmark and Norway. As to his intentions with regard to the disposition of these vast dominions after his death our information is unfortunately most |Comparison between the partition of the Empire of Cnut and that of Charles.| meagre. It seems clear that, like Charles the Great, he designed a partition among his children; it is not clear whether, like Charles, he designed to keep up any kind of connexion among his various kingdoms, by the investiture of one among his sons with any Imperial superiority over the others.[1061] Like Charles, he had established his sons as kings during his lifetime in his subordinate |England the centre of Cnut’s Empire.| kingdoms. I say subordinate kingdoms, because nothing can be plainer than that, in Cnut’s eyes, Denmark and Norway were little more than dependencies of England. |The Scandinavian States ruled by Under-kings.| England was the seat of his own dominion, while the Scandinavian kingdoms were entrusted to viceroys or Under-kings. Swegen, with his mother Ælfgifu, had reigned in Norway; Denmark, it would seem, had been placed at one time under Harold and at another under Harthacnut. In both countries we see signs of disaffection towards Cnut’s government, while we see none such in England. The rule of Swegen and his mother is said to have been highly oppressive in Norway. In Denmark we even hear of an attempt, headed by Earl Ulf and said to be favoured by Queen Emma, to displace Cnut in favour of Harthacnut. The reason assigned is the preference shown |Impossibility of retaining the connexion between England and Scandinavia.| by Cnut to England and Englishmen. If then Cnut had any idea of permanently annexing his Scandinavian possessions to his English Empire, any idea, in short, of reducing Denmark and Norway to the condition of Wales and Scotland, such schemes had very little chance of any lasting success. Wales and Scotland were part of the same island with England, yet to keep them in any lasting subjection was always hard; to keep countries so remote as |Ephemeral nature of such| Denmark and Norway was hopelessly impossible. Empires like those of Alexander, Charles, and Cnut are in their own |Empires in general.| nature ephemeral. The process of their formation may, as in the cases of Alexander and Charles, leave results behind it which affect the whole later history of the world; but the Empires themselves are ephemeral. As united dominions, swayed by a single will, they last only as long as there is an Alexander or a Charles at their head; they fall to pieces as soon as the sceptre of the great conqueror passes into weaker hands. So it was with the Anglo-Scandinavian Empire of the great Cnut. With our scanty knowledge, we cannot positively either assert or deny that he dreamed of preserving any kind of union |Cnut’s designs not carried out.| among his vast and widely severed dominions. If he did entertain such thoughts, his designs were scattered to the winds immediately upon his own death. When he died, Swegen was in possession of Norway, and Harthacnut in possession of Denmark. It appears that England also was designed for the son of Emma, Cnut’s specially royal offspring, the one son who was the child of a crowned King and his Lady. What provision, if any, was made for Harold by his father’s last dispositions does not appear. But things turned out far otherwise than Cnut had |Swegen expelled from Norway. 1036.| intended. Swegen was almost immediately driven out of Norway, and Magnus, the son of Saint Olaf, was received as King. In Denmark Harthacnut kept possession, though the aspect of Magnus was threatening. In England, as usual, all attempts to influence the free choice of the Witan before the vacancy came to nothing. If Cnut tried to do more than exercise that vague power of recommending a successor which the law vested in him, his bequest went for as little as the older bequest of Æthelwulf had gone.[1062]

State of England on the death of Cnut.

The events which immediately followed the death of Cnut are told with much contradiction and confusion; but, by closely attending to the most trustworthy authorities, it is not very hard to make out the general order |The West-Saxons for Harthacnut.| of events.[1063] It appears that the will of the late King in favour of Harthacnut was upheld by the West-Saxons with Godwine their Earl at their head. That the English were divided, some being for Harthacnut and some for one of the sons of Æthelred, is a statement which seems hardly to rest on sufficient authority.[1064] On the other hand, Harold, the supposed son of Cnut and of Ælfgifu of Northampton, also appeared as a candidate. |Northumberland, Mercia, and London for Harold.| He seems to have been supported by Earl Leofric of Mercia, by the great body of the thegns north of the Thames, and by the “lithsmen,” the sea-faring folk, of London. It would even seem that he ventured on a daring act, whether we call it an act of sovereignty or |Harold spoils Emma.| of violence, before the election was held. He sent to Winchester and despoiled the Lady Ælfgifu-Emma of the treasures which had been left her by Cnut.[1065] Personally, as the event proved, both candidates were equally worthless; but each had strong political motives on his side, and it is clear that men’s passions were deeply stirred by the struggle. As far as we can see, Harold was the candidate of the North, Harthacnut of the South; Harold was the candidate of the Danes, Harthacnut of |Apparent motives of the two parties.| the English. At first sight this division of parties seems exactly opposite to what might have been expected. Harthacnut, the son of a Danish father and a Norman mother, had not a drop of English blood in his veins. Harold, if he was what he professed to be, the son of Cnut by the other Ælfgifu, was English at least by the mother’s side; if he was what scandal asserted him to be, the son of a shoemaker by some nameless mother, he was doubtless English on both sides. The election of Harthacnut involved the continuation of the connexion with Denmark; the election of Harold would again make England an independent and isolated kingdom. Yet English feeling lay with Harthacnut, Danish feeling lay |Attachment of the West-Saxons to Harthacnut as the legatee of Cnut.| with Harold. The explanation is probably to be found in the personal position of Cnut towards his West-Saxon subjects. He had lived more habitually among them than among the people of any other part of his dominions; the greatest of living Englishmen had been his minister and representative; he had in every way made Wessex his home, and Wessex had flourished under his government as it had never flourished before. It was no wonder then if the wishes of Cnut with regard to the succession or to anything else were looked on by the West-Saxon people as a sacred law. Harthacnut too, if not the descendant of their ancient rulers, was at least a kingly bairn, the son of a crowned King and his Lady. Who was Harold the bastard, whose parents no one knew for certain, that he should rule over them? If Harthacnut was at this moment in Denmark, his earliest days had been spent in England, while we have seen reason to believe that the earliest days of Harold had been spent in |Aspect of the connexion with Denmark.| Denmark. The continued connexion with Denmark which was implied in the choice of Harthacnut might even appear to patriotic Englishmen as an argument in favour of the Danish King.[1066] In the later days of Cnut the connexion with Denmark had taken a form which must have been distinctly gratifying to English, and above all to West-Saxon, national feeling. The lord of all Northern Europe had worn his Imperial crown in the old West-Saxon capital; he had thence sent forth his earls and his sons to govern his dependent realms of Denmark and Norway. As it had been in the days of Cnut, so men deemed that it would be in the days of Harthacnut. Denmark, like Mercia or Northumberland, would be only another earldom whence homage, and perhaps tribute, would be paid to the Imperial court and the Imperial treasure-house at Winchester. The sons of Æthelred were strangers; no man in England had seen them since their childhood; their claims had been made the pretext for a threatened foreign invasion; no sentiment attaching to their remoter ancestry could at all counterbalance the sentiment which attached to the undoubted, the royal, the chosen, son of the King who had given England eighteen years of peace, prosperity, and foreign dominion. West-Saxon feeling therefore took the shape of loyalty to the undoubted son of the late King, of obedience to his declared wishes as to the succession. Earl Godwine and all the men of his earldom were for Harthacnut.

Motives in favour of Harold among the Danes and Northern English.

On the other hand, it is not hard to see how Harold might appeal to a very intelligible line of feeling in the minds of the Danish and half-Danish inhabitants of Northern England. His bastardy would in their eyes be no objection. Whether we look on his mother as a mere concubine or as bound to Cnut by an irregular or uncanonical marriage, her children would, according to Danish notions, be as fit to reign as the children of the Norman Lady. Indeed a powerful vein of Northumbrian sentiment might not unnaturally attach to the grandson of the murdered Earl Ælfhelm. Harold’s election might seem to be the overthrow of the West-Saxon dominion over Danes and Angles; a day might seem to be coming in which Winchester would have to bow to York. And if the son of Ælfgifu thus had a local connexion with Northumberland, he had also a local connexion with Mercia. Whether by birth, by residence, or by maternal descent, the daughter of Ælfhelm was in some way Ælfgifu of Northampton, and her son might call on Mercian local feeling to support the claims of a countryman. Again, if Harold, after having been designed for the crown of Denmark and brought up in Denmark as a future Danish King, had been deprived by his father’s later arrangements of any share in either England or Denmark, Danish and Northumbrian feelings would centre round him still more strongly. He would become the embodiment of any jealousies which had been called forth by Cnut’s open preference of England to Denmark, by his preference of the Saxon part of England to the Anglian and Danish lands. It was better to have a King who should reign over England without Denmark, better to have a King who should reign over Northumberland and Mercia without Wessex, than for a West-Saxon King, of whatever ancestry, to hold both Northumberland and Denmark as dependencies. The old provincial feelings, often concealed but never completely stifled, ever ready to break out on any strong provocation, now broke out in their fulness. The Danish provinces sided with Harold. And with them we find a new element, the “lithsmen,” the nautic multitude |Danish settlement in London.| of London. The great city still kept her voice in the election of Kings, but that voice would almost seem to have been handed over to a new class among her population. We hear now, not of the citizens, but of the sea-faring men.[1067] Every invasion, every foreign settlement of any kind within the kingdom, has in every age added a new element to the population of London. As a Norman colony settled in London later in the century, so a Danish colony settled there now. Some accounts tell us, doubtless with great exaggeration, that London had now almost become a Danish city.[1068] But it is certain that the Danish element in the city was numerous and powerful, and that its voice strongly helped to swell the cry in favour of Harold. Northumberland, Mercia, and London thus demanded that the son of Ælfgifu of Northampton should, if possible, be King over all England; in the worst case they would have him, like Eadgar and like Cnut, for King over all Northumberland and Mercia.

There was perhaps no country except England in which such a question could have been settled in that age otherwise than at the cost of a civil war. But the firmly rooted principles of English law, the habit of constant meeting and discussion, had already produced some germs of the feeling to which the great English historian of Greece has |The controversy peacefully decided in the Witenagemót.| given the name of “constitutional morality.”[1069] The controversy was a sharp one; but it was decided, not on the field of battle, but in the debates of the Witenagemót. The usual midwinter meeting may, or may not, have been |Gemót of Oxford. Christmas, 1035?| forestalled by a few weeks; certain it is that, soon after the death of Cnut, the Witan of all England met in full Gemót at Oxford. That town was, no doubt, on this as on other occasions, recommended for the purpose by its position on the frontiers of the two great divisions of the kingdom. The national council proceeded to debate |Godwine maintains the claims of Harthacnut.| the claims of the two candidates. The great Earl of the West-Saxons, supported by the whole force of his earldom, strove to play the same part which Dunstan had played in the last recorded debate of the kind in a full and free Assembly of the Wise.[1070] His eloquent tongue set forth the claims of Harthacnut, the candidate recommended alike by undoubted kingly birth and by the wishes of the glorious sovereign whom they had lost. But this time the charmer charmed in vain. All that Godwine could gain for the son of the Lady was a portion of his father’s |The division of the kingdom proposed by Leofric,| kingdom. The proposal of a division seems to have come from Leofric, now Earl over all Mercia,[1071] who on all occasions appears as a mediator between the extreme parties of the North and the South. To this course he was prompted alike by his personal temper and by the geographical position of his earldom. Godwine and his party withstood for a while even this proposal; but the majority |and voted by the assembly.| was against them; the assembly decreed the division of England between the two candidates.[1072] Once more, but now for the last time in English history, the land had two |Harthacnut reigns in Wessex; Harold reigns north of Thames,| acknowledged Kings. Harold reigned to the north of the Thames and Harthacnut to the south. We are not distinctly told whether the two Kings were to be perfectly independent of each other, or whether, as in the case of Cnut and Eadmund, any Imperial supremacy was reserved |seemingly as superior lord.| to either of the half-brothers.[1073] But several indications seem to show that such a supremacy was reserved to Harold, and this supposition may perhaps help to explain some of the difficulties in the narrative which follows. Nor are we told of any stipulations as to the succession. It would follow, almost as a matter of course, that, if either of the brothers died childless, the survivor would be elected to |Rumoured refusal of Archbishop Æthelnoth to crown Harold.| his share of the kingdom. According to one account, Archbishop Æthelnoth, the friend of Cnut, still refused to consecrate Harold as King. He placed the crown and sceptre on the altar; Harold might seize them if he dared; but while a son of Emma lived, he, Æthelnoth, would crown no King but a son of Emma, and every Bishop of his province was equally forbidden to perform the rite. If this tale be true, it was an assertion of independence on the part of the ecclesiastical power for which we might in vain seek a parallel in the English history of those times. Æthelnoth, as a member of the Gemót, might give his vote for whichever candidate he thought good; but when the election was once made, he had clearly no right as Archbishop to refuse to consecrate the King chosen by the majority. But the tale is most likely a fiction. There seems to be little doubt that Harold was regularly crowned at Oxford by Æthelnoth, either now or after his later election to the whole kingdom.[1074] But, if the tale be true, and if it belongs to this time, it plainly implies the Imperial supremacy of Harold. With a mere King of the Mercians and Northumbrians, whether an Under-king or an altogether independent sovereign, the Archbishop of Canterbury, a West-Saxon subject, could have nothing to do.

Harthacnut remains in Denmark.

The kingdom was thus divided. The King-elect of the West-Saxons was in no hurry—the affairs of his Northern kingdom did not allow him to be in a hurry—to take personal possession of the fragment of a realm which was |Regency of Emma and Godwine in Wessex. 1035–1037.| all that Godwine had been able to keep for him. Emma appears to have been invested with a kind of regency in her son’s name, while Godwine still held his office as Earl, and with it the administration of the West-Saxon kingdom. It is specially mentioned that Harthacnut’s housecarls remained with Emma.[1075] The housecarls of Harthacnut had doubtless been the housecarls of Cnut; their loyalty was personal to their master, and it would naturally pass to his widow and her son. But that their presence was allowed in the West-Saxon kingdom and capital under the administration of Godwine clearly shows that they had not been employed during the late reign as instruments of oppression, and that they were not looked on with any general hatred by the people at large.

It was in the course of the next year that an event happened of which advantage has ever since been taken by hostile tongues and pens to stain the character of the great Earl of the West-Saxons with a charge of the blackest treachery. But even in the period on which we are now entering, a period in which we have at every step to weigh the conflicting statements of national and political partizanship, there is no event as to which the various versions of the tale are more utterly at variance with each other. The story is told with every conceivable variety of time, place, and person, and even our earliest and best authorities contain statements which cannot be reconciled |Attempt in favour of the Æthelings. 1036.| with one another. Thus much seems certain; first, that, about this time, one or both of the sons of Æthelred and Emma made an attempt to recover their father’s kingdom; secondly, that Ælfred, the younger of the two Æthelings, fell into the power of Harold and was cruelly put to death; thirdly, that Godwine was suspected of being an accomplice. |Conflicting versions of the story.| But beyond this, there is hardly a detail of the story which can be asserted with any confidence.[1076] The first point, that the attempt, whatever was its nature, took place soon after the death of Cnut and the first election of Harold, is placed beyond all doubt by the complete agreement of the best authorities. But very respectable secondary authorities have altogether misplaced the date, and they have thus given occasion for a lower class of compilers to load the story with endless mythical and |Norman Version.| calumnious details. According to the Norman account, both the Æthelings had a share in the attempt. As soon as the death of Cnut was known in Normandy, Eadward |Invasion of England by Eadward.| set sail with forty ships and landed at Southampton. But the English, whether for love or for fear[1077] of their Danish King Harold, met them as enemies. Eadward fought a battle and defeated the English with great slaughter. But, reflecting how great was the strength of England and how small was the force which he had brought with him, he presently sailed away, taking with him great plunder. Soon after Eadward’s return, Ælfred set sail from Wissant[1078] and landed at Dover. As he went onwards into the country, Godwine met him, received him friendly, and seemingly did homage to him.[1079] The Earl and the Ætheling supped together, and talked over their plans. But in the night Godwine seized Ælfred, tied his hands behind his back, and thus sent him and some of his companions to London to King Harold. Others he put in prison, others he embowelled.[1080] Among those who were sent to London, Harold caused Ælfred’s chief companions to be beheaded, and the Ætheling himself to be blinded. In that state he was sent to Ely, naked and with his legs tied under his horse’s belly. He had not been long at Ely when he died, as the weapon with which his eyes had been cut out had wounded the brain.[1081]

In this version his coming is hostile.

In this Norman version the coming of Ælfred is simply part of a Norman invasion. Eadward had come with a force large enough to fight a battle; Ælfred’s force, we |Version in two of the Chronicles.| are told, was still larger.[1082] The oldest English version, which it must not be forgotten takes the form of a ballad, knows nothing of any warlike expedition, and speaks of |Ælfred’s companions slain [by Godwine].| Ælfred only. According to this account, Ælfred came to England, whence or under what circumstances we are not told, and wished to go to his mother at Winchester. In this purpose he was hindered by men who were powerful at the time, and who unjustly favoured Harold. In one version these men are nameless; in another Godwine is named as their chief.[1083] Then the Ætheling and his companions are seized; some are killed outright, some are put in bonds, some sold as slaves, others blinded or put to various tortures and horrible deaths.[1084] No worse deed had ever been done since the Danes came into the land.[1085] All this was done, according to one version, by Godwine, according to the other, by Harold. The Ætheling still lived; so he was taken to Ely in a ship, blinded while still on board, given thus blinded to the monks, with whom he lived till he died soon after, and then was buried honourably in the minster.[1086]

There is yet quite another version, that of the special panegyrist of Emma, according to whom, it must be remembered, Eadward and Ælfred are not sons of Æthelred, but younger sons of Cnut and Emma, sent over to Normandy |Harold forges a letter from Emma to the Æthelings.| for education.[1087] Harold, anxious to destroy his half-brothers, forges a letter to them in the name of their mother. She tells them that she is Lady, only in name; Harold has usurped the kingdom and is daily strengthening himself; he is winning over the chief men by gifts, threats, and prayers. Yet the feeling of the nation is still in their favour rather than in that of Harold. Let one of her sons come over to her quickly and secretly; she can then consult with him what is to be done.[1088] The Æthelings fell into the snare; Ælfred, the younger of the brothers, went with a few comrades into Flanders; there he stayed a short time with the Marquess Baldwin, and increased his company by some adventurers from Boulogne.[1089] He then set sail, and came near to some point of the English coast which is not further described. But, as the inhabitants came down to the shore with evidently hostile intentions, he changed his course to another point equally undetermined. There he landed, and tried to go to his mother; on the way he was met by Godwine, who swore oaths to him and became his man.[1090] By the Earl’s advice he turned |Ælfred received by Godwine,| aside from London,[1091] and lodged at Guildford. There Godwine quartered Ælfred’s comrades in different houses in the town, leaving a few only to attend on the Ætheling himself. He feasted Ælfred and his companions, and withdrew to his own house, evidently in or near Guildford, promising to return in the morning to do his due service |but seized by the agents of Harold.| to his lord.[1092] But in the night the emissaries of Harold suddenly appeared in the town, seized the comrades of Ælfred, and sold, slew, or tortured them according to the usual story. The Ætheling was taken to Ely; there he was first mocked by the soldiers, then loaded with heavy fetters, brought before some kind of tribunal, and, by its sentence, blinded and finally put to death.[1093] The monks of Ely took his body and buried it, and miracles were of course wrought at his tomb.

Estimate of the evidence.

These are the main versions of the tale, the details of which, as well as some other accounts, I shall discuss elsewhere. Now when we come to compare them with one another, what is the judgement to which we ought to come? That Ælfred landed, that he and his comrades were cruelly put to death, there can be no doubt; but had Godwine any share in the deed? Before we examine the evidence, we must first try and understand what the real state of the case was. The unhappy fate of Ælfred caused him, according to the universal English instinct, to be looked on as a martyr; his tale became a piece of hagiology, to which, as to other pieces of hagiology, ordinary ways of thinking were not to be applied. This way of looking at the matter began very early; but, in order really to get to the bottom of the question, we must try and understand how things must have looked at the moment of Ælfred’s landing.

Statement of the case.

First of all, whatever was the crime either of Godwine or of Harold, we must remember that, in any case, it was not the kind of crime which the exaggerated language of some of our narratives would lead us to think. Godwine might be a traitor in the sense of one who betrays any fellow-creature to his ruin; on the worst showing, he was not a traitor in the sense of one who betrays or rebels against his lawful sovereign. Ælfred was not, as the legends of his martyrdom might seem to imply, a lawful King driven from his throne. Harold was not an usurper, keeping the lawful heir out of his lawful possession. Godwine was not a rebel, conspiring to betray a prince to whom his allegiance was lawfully due. According to any version of the story, Ælfred appeared in England as the enemy of a settled government, established by a regular vote of the legislature. As such it was the part and duty of the King, of the Earl, and of the whole people, to resist him. He was a pretender to the crown entering the kingdom at the head of a foreign force, whether great or small. There has never been any time or place in which such a pretender would not have been at once arrested; there have been few times and places in which such a pretender would not have been speedily put to death. Against the arrest of Ælfred not a word can be said in any age; his execution was perhaps more deeply offensive to the public feeling of the eleventh century, a time when the shedding of blood by the sentence of law was singularly rare,[1094] than it would have been to the public feeling of the fifteenth or the sixteenth century. The real question is whether either the arrest or the execution was accompanied with any circumstances of |Ælfred’s position analogous to that of the Stewart Pretenders.| treachery or needless cruelty. The sons of Æthelred were very much in the position of the elder and younger Pretenders in the reigns of George the First and Second. In both cases the power which had a right to dispose of the crown had disposed of it, and had not disposed of it in their favour. Now no man could have blamed any officer, civil or military, in the service of King George, for arresting either James or Charles Edward Stewart. In so doing he would simply have been doing his duty to his King and country. If either Pretender had been arrested, his execution would doubtless have been a very harsh measure; but it would have been a perfectly legal measure; he was attainted, and he might have been as regularly executed as Monmouth was. Nay, the letter of the law, as the law stood till the reign of George the Third, as it was actually enforced as late as the reign of Charles the Second, would have condemned the pretended Prince of Wales to indignities and torments quite as cruel as any that Harold Harefoot inflicted on the Ætheling and his companions.[1095] To have put James or Charles Stewart to death in the horrible form which the law decreed for the traitor would doubtless have called forth as fierce a storm of righteous indignation as was called forth by the death of the Ætheling Ælfred. Still the act would have been legal; it might have inflicted undying shame on the King and his counsellors who ordered it, but it would have been no ground of blame whatever against the gaoler, the sheriff, or the executioner. So it was with the case of Ælfred. According to one account, first Eadward and then Ælfred entered the land at the head of a foreign army; they tried, in short, to repeat the exploit of Cnut, to forestall the exploit of William. In banished men, eager for a restoration to their country on any terms, such conduct may admit of many excuses. Still, on the face of it, they put themselves in the position of open enemies of their country. If Eadward really landed at the head of a Norman army, if he really fought a battle against an English force at Southampton, those who withstood him were as plainly doing their simple duty as the men who fought at Maldon or on Senlac. Even if we reject this version, if we believe that Ælfred entered the country, not with an army but with a mere escort of strangers, still he was coming, seemingly without any invitation from any party in the country, to disturb a settlement which the legislature of the kingdom had established, and which he was not likely to upset except by force of arms. Men who run such desperate risks must take the consequences. |The real question as to Godwine; Was he guilty of treachery or needless cruelty?| If Godwine, as a military commander, fought against Eadward, if, as a civil magistrate, he arrested Ælfred, he simply did his duty and nothing else. The only question would be, as I before put it, Was there any treachery or needless cruelty in the matter? Now cruelty is perhaps of all charges that which most needs to be looked at with reference to the habits and feelings of the age. What one age looks on as mildness another age looks on as barbarity. But it is clear that the cruelties which were wrought by Harold on his captives deeply revolted the public opinion of the time in which he lived. As for deliberate treachery, that is a crime in all ages alike. If then we set aside accusations which rest on mere misconception of the case, the question remains whether the evidence is enough to convict Godwine either of personal treachery towards the Ætheling or of any share in the savage cruelties of Harold.

Inconsistency of the ordinary story with the fact of the division of the Kingdom.

Now in reading any version of the story one great difficulty at once presents itself. Godwine is always described as acting a part which, in his real position at the time, he cannot have acted. Not one of the versions of the tale takes any notice of the division of the kingdom. They all seem to look on Harold as sole King and to look on Godwine as his minister, or at least as his subject. Yet we know that, at this time, Godwine was neither Harold’s minister nor Harold’s subject. Harthacnut was still the acknowledged King, at all events King-elect, of the West-Saxons; Emma was still sitting at Winchester as regent in his name; Godwine, who had secured for them this remnant of dominion, was the chief minister and general of the Lady and her son. If Godwine acted in any way in the interest of Harold, it could only have been because Harold was, as I suggested above, the superior lord of his own sovereign—because the invasion, or attempt of whatever kind, made by the Æthelings threatened not only the rights of the King of the West-Saxons, but also the rights of the Emperor of Britain. This is certainly possible, but it is rather straining a point; nothing of the sort is at all implied in the language of any of the writers who tell the tale. They all, even the best informed, seem to know nothing of the kingship of Harthacnut and the regency of Emma. This seeming ignorance of writers, some of them contemporary, on such a point shows in the most remarkable way how soon and how completely the first ephemeral reign of Harthacnut was forgotten. But their forgetfulness certainly goes a good way to lessen the trustworthiness of their own tale. In fact the story as it stands cannot be made to agree with the known facts of the history. Godwine cannot have played the part attributed to him by his enemies while the arrangement decreed by the Witenagemót of Oxford was still in force. But the historical character of that arrangement is undoubted. That the kingdom really was divided, that Godwine really was at this time not the minister of Harold but the minister of Harthacnut, are facts which cannot be gain-sayed. The details of the story of Ælfred cannot have happened in the manner and at the time in which they are said to have happened. It was perhaps a feeling of this inconsistency which led several later writers to shift the story to a later time, to the time immediately following the death, not of Cnut, but of either Harold or Harthacnut. But the part played by Harold is the most essential part of the story; the tale cannot be fitted in to a later time except by a complete change of its circumstances. |The direct evidence against Godwine fails.| Altogether I think it must be allowed that the direct evidence brought to implicate Godwine in any guilty share in the business altogether breaks down.

Early suspicions against Godwine.

On the other hand, we have to explain the fact that Godwine was suspected, that the suspicion arose early and prevailed extensively, and that it was not confined to Godwine’s foreign enemies and slanderers. Godwine indeed was not the only person who was suspected. One tale or legend accused Emma herself; another laid the guilt to the charge of Lyfing, Bishop of Devonshire, a prelate who often appears as a powerful supporter of Godwine’s policy; in another version, if Godwine was the instigator, the English people in general seem to have been his accomplices.[1096] Still Godwine was specially suspected, and suspected while the memory of the event was still fresh. His own special apologist and panegyrist seems to imply that the charge against him was a mere invention of the Norman Archbishop Robert.[1097] This however was not the case; Godwine was formally accused and formally acquitted |[1040.]| of the crime soon after the accession of Harthacnut, four years after the event. He was acquitted, as we shall presently see,[1098] by the solemn judgement of the highest court in the realm, and he is fully entitled to the benefit of that acquittal. Still the mere fact of his accusation has to be explained. The charge, brought at such a time and in such a shape, could not have been a mere Norman slander. Godwine’s accuser, in fact, was an Englishman of the highest rank. Nor would a mere Norman slander ever have been embodied in popular songs, or have found |Some ground for the suspicion must be supposed.| a place in any version of the English Chronicles. Such a suspicion—strong, early, native—proves something. Godwine, guilty or innocent, must have done some act which, to say the least, was capable of an unlucky misconstruction. By putting together one or two hints in the different accounts, we may perhaps come to a probable conjecture as to what his share in the matter really was. There is one version, and only one, which, while consistent with Godwine’s innocence, explains the early and prevalent suspicion as to his guilt. Let us look how things stood. |Probable state of the case.| It seems that the feeling which broke out openly in the next year was already beginning to show itself; men were beginning, even in Wessex, to be weary of the absent Harthacnut. Well they might; to wait so long for an absent King, who, still uncrowned, unsworn, unanointed, could not be looked on as full King, was something of which no man had seen the like. It was not wonderful if popular feeling was, as we are told, veering round, whether wrongfully or not, in favour of Harold.[1099] At such a moment, a son of Æthelred, either knowing the state of the kingdom or eager to try his chance in any case, lands in England. We of course dismiss the story which speaks of actual invasion and warfare, which is probably a mere repetition of the attempted invasion by Duke Robert. |Godwine probably met Ælfred.| But the Ætheling was in England; if Godwine really wished to preserve the settlement which gave Wessex to a son of Emma, it might well occur to him to ask whether the game could not be better played with the present son of Æthelred than with the absent son of Cnut. He may have sought an interview with the Ætheling; he may even have pledged himself to his cause. But if a son of Æthelred was at large in England, the throne of Harold would be endangered as well as the throne of Harthacnut. Harold and his emissaries would be on the alert. The prince who had, perhaps before his election, seized on Emma’s treasures at Winchester, would not, in such a case, be very scrupulous about respecting the frontiers of his brother’s kingdom. Perhaps, if he were superior lord, he might have a real right to interfere in a matter which |Ælfred probably seized by Harold without Godwine’s connivance.| clearly touched the interests of the whole Empire. At any rate, if the Ætheling and his companions were known to be lodged in a West-Saxon town not very far from the borders of the Northern kingdom, it is perfectly conceivable that they might be seized by the agents of Harold, against the will or without the knowledge of Godwine. When the Ætheling was once seized and carried off, Godwine might well think that the game was up, that the star of Harold was fairly in the ascendant, and that neither interest nor duty called on him to plunge Wessex into a war with Northumberland and Mercia either to deliver Ælfred or to revenge his wrongs. Such conduct would not be that of a sentimental and impulsive hero; it would be that of a wary and hard-headed statesman. Such conduct would involve no real treachery; but it might easily give rise to the suspicion of treachery. If Godwine received the Ætheling, if Harold’s agents afterwards seized him, it would be an easy inference that Godwine betrayed him to Harold. As soon as the tale had once got afloat, mythical details would, as ever, gather round it. When Godwine was once believed to have betrayed Ælfred, it would be an obvious improvement on the story to make him a personal agent in the barbarities to which his supposed treason had given occasion. It is clear that the ordinary narrative, as it stands, cannot be received; but in some such explanation as this we may discern the probable kernel of truth on which the fabulous details gradually fastened themselves.[1100]

Probable innocence of Godwine.

On the whole then I incline to the belief that the great Earl, every other recorded deed of whose life is the deed of an English patriot, who on every other occasion appears as conciliatory and law-abiding, who is always as strongly opposed to everything like wrong or violence as the rude age in which he lived would let him be, did not, on this one occasion, act in a manner so contrary to his whole character as to resort to fraud or needless violence to compass the destruction of a man of English birth and kingly descent. The innocence of Godwine seems to me to be most likely in itself, most consistent with the circumstances of the time, and not inconsistent with such parts of our evidence as seem most trustworthy. But in any case, even if, while casting aside palpable fables and contradictions, we take the evidence, so far as it is credible, at the worst, even then it seems to me that the great Earl is at least entitled to a verdict of Not Proven, if not of Not Guilty.

Disappointment of the hopes

The next year after the unlucky attempt of Ælfred[1101] was marked by the breaking down of the short-lived arrangement |of the West-Saxons.| which had been made between the two sons of Cnut. The West-Saxons had seemingly supported Harthacnut as the representative of that policy of his father which had raised Wessex, not only to the headship of England and of all Britain, but to the practical headship of all Northern Europe. No hope on the part of any people was ever more grievously disappointed. No contrast could be greater than the contrast between Wessex in the days of Cnut and |Degrading position of Wessex.| Wessex in these two years of Harthacnut. Wessex was no longer the chosen dominion, Winchester was no longer the chosen capital, of an Emperor of the North, whose name was dreaded on the Baltic and reverenced on the Tiber. The old Imperial kingdom had sunk to be, what it had never been before, a dependent province ruled by representatives of an absent sovereign. A King of the Danes, who did not think England worthy of his presence, held the West-Saxon kingdom, seemingly as a vassal of the King of the Mercians and Northumbrians, and entrusted it to the government of his Norman mother. It would doubtless be no excuse in English eyes that Denmark was now threatened by Magnus of Norway,[1102] and that Harthacnut’s first duty was to provide for its defence. To the West-Saxon people it would simply seem that they had chosen a King whom no entreaties on the part of his English subjects could persuade to come and take personal possession of his English kingdom. Being absent, he must have remained uncrowned, and his lack of the consecrating rite would alone, in the ideas of those times, be enough to make his government altogether uncertain and provisional. Even the influence of Godwine could not prolong—most likely it was not exerted to prolong—a state of things so essentially offensive to all patriotic feeling. It was felt that to accept the rule of Harold would be a far less evil than to keep a nominal independence which was practically a degrading bondage. Popular feeling therefore set strongly in favour of union with Mercia and Northumberland, even under the doubtful son of Ælfgifu of |Harthacnut deposed in Wessex, and Harold chosen King over all England. 1037.| Northampton. “Man chose Harold over all to King, and forsook Harthacnut, for that he was too long in Denmark.”[1103] That is, I conceive, the Witan of Wessex, in discharge of their undoubted constitutional right,[1104] deposed their King Harthacnut, and elected the King of the Mercians and Northumbrians as their immediate sovereign, the election being, as it would seem, confirmed by a vote of the Witan of all England. Harold was thus called by the universal voice of the nation to be King over the whole realm. The southern kingdom, just as at the final election of his father,[1105] was again joined to the northern. England again became one kingdom under one King, an union which since that day has never been broken.

The reign of the new King of the English was short and troubled. His first act was the banishment of the Lady |Banishment of Emma. 1037.| Emma, who was sent out of the land at the beginning of winter.[1106] She did not return to Normandy, as that country was now in all the confusion attendant on the minority of its new sovereign, the future Conqueror. She betook herself to the court of Baldwin of Flanders, which we shall henceforth find serving as the general place of refuge for English exiles. She was received with all honour by Baldwin and his Countess Adela.[1107] Two of the near kinswomen of Baldwin will play a prominent part in our future history; one of them indeed, his daughter Matilda, the wife of the great William, was destined, within thirty years, to fill the place from which Emma herself had been driven.

Character of Harold.

Of the administration of Harold himself we hear hardly anything. The tale which affirms that he reigned without the usual consecrating rite charges him also with entire neglect of Christian worship, and of choosing the hour of mass for his hunting or other amusements.[1108] Other accounts however imply that he was not wanting in the conventional piety of the age.[1109] He at least, like other Kings, kept chaplains in his personal service, so that he can hardly have been the avowed heathen or infidel which he appears in the hostile picture. Ecclesiastical affairs however do not seem to have been in a flourishing |Ecclesiastical appointments.| state under his government. We read, as to be sure we read in the reigns of Kings of greater claims to sanctity, of bishoprics being held in plurality and |Death of Archbishop Æthelnoth. 1038.| being sold for money. Good Archbishop Æthelnoth died |Eadsige succeeds.| in the second year of Harold’s sole reign, and was succeeded by Eadsige, who appears at once in the threefold character of a royal chaplain, a monk, and a suffragan Bishop in Kent.[1110] We also find another royal chaplain, |Promotion of Stigand and Lyfing.| Stigand, the priest of Assandun, appointed to a bishopric, deposed, seemingly before consecration, because another competitor was ready with a larger sum, and finally reinstated, whether by dint of the same prevailing arguments we are not told.[1111] Lyfing, Bishop of Devonshire, also received the see of Worcester in plurality.[1112] These appointments are worthy of notice, as throwing some light on the otherwise utterly obscure politics of this reign. Stigand, the old chaplain of Cnut, was the firm friend and |Reconciliation between Harold and the party of Godwine.| counsellor of his widow.[1113] Lyfing was the right hand man of Earl Godwine. That these men shared in the promotions of which Harold had an unusual number to distribute, that Lyfing especially became the King’s personal friend,[1114] seems to show that a perfect reconciliation was now brought about between Harold and the party which had opposed his original election. We may infer that Emma was sacrificed to the King’s personal dislike, a dislike which, it seems to be implied, was shared by the mass of the people.[1115] But there seems to have been no disposition on Harold’s part to bear hard in any other way on his former antagonists. A certain amount either of generosity or of policy must have found a place in his character.

It is probably a sign of degeneracy and weakness on the part of Harold’s government that the vassal kingdoms no longer remained in the same state of submission to which they had been brought during at least the later days of Cnut. North Wales was now gathering strength |Inroad of Gruffydd ap Llywelyn; battle of Rhyd-y-Groes and death of Eadwine. 1039.| under the famous Gruffydd son of Llywelyn. His first exploit was an inroad in which he reached as far as the Severn, and fought a battle at Rhyd-y-Groes, near Upton-on-Severn, a place which, perhaps owing to this event, still retains its British name. In that fight several eminent Englishmen were killed, and among them Eadwine, a brother of Earl Leofric.[1116] In the next year, the last year of |Duncan’s siege of Durham and his defeat. 1040.| the reign of Harold,[1117] Duncan, King of Scots, on what occasion we are not told, repeated the exploit of his grandfather, and with much the same success.[1118] He crossed the frontier and besieged Durham. The strength and prosperity of the city, though probably thrown back by the defeat of Carham,[1119] had vastly increased since its first |Bishop Eadmund of Durham. 1020–1042.| creation by Ealdhun. Ealdhun’s successor Eadmund, called to the see, as the story went, by a miraculous voice,[1120] had finished the work of his predecessor. The minster of Durham had been brought to perfection,[1121] and the city of Durham had gained strength and population enough to withstand an attack by its own efforts. In the invasion of Malcolm the infant settlement had been delivered by the intervention of Earl Uhtred; the invasion of Duncan was driven back by the valour of the citizens themselves. The Scots were put to flight; of the chief men of the army the greater part were killed in the battle; the remainder owed their escape to their horses. The soldiers of meaner degree, who had suffered less in the actual combat, were slaughtered without mercy in the pursuit.[1122] Northumbriam barbarism showed itself now as on the former occasion. The bloody trophies of victory were collected in the market-place of Durham, and a garland of Scottish heads again adorned the battlements of the rescued city.[1123]

Harthacnut prepares to assert his claims. 1039.

The reign and life of Harold were now drawing to an end. Harthacnut was not at all disposed to acquiesce in the arrangements which had wholly shut him out from England. His Northern possessions were now safe. A treaty had been concluded with Magnus, according to which, as in some other instances of which we have heard, each King, in case of the other dying childless, was to succeed to his kingdom.[1124] Harthacnut therefore was now able to turn his thoughts in the direction of England, and a message from his mother in Flanders is said to have further worked upon his mind.[1125] He began to make great preparations for an invasion of England,[1126] but for the present he merely sailed to Flanders with ten ships,[1127] and there passed the winter with his mother. The time however was not spent in idleness. His preparations were busily carried on, and in the course of the next year he found himself at the head of a considerable fleet.[1128] No invasion however was needed, as an event which was probably not unexpected[1129] opened the way for his accession |Death of Harold. March 17, 1040.| without difficulty or bloodshed. King Harold, who had been for some time lying sick at Oxford, died in that town in the month of March.[1130] He was buried at Westminster, a spot which is now mentioned in our Chronicles for the first time.[1131] Its mention however seems to show that the smaller monastery which preceded the great foundation of Eadward enjoyed a greater amount of reputation than we might otherwise have been led to think. Harold, who could not have been above two or three and twenty years old, left no recorded posterity. We hear nothing of wives, mistresses, or children of any kind.

§ 4. The Reign of Harthacnut. 1040–2.

Harthacnut unanimously chosen

Immediately on the burial of Harold, probably at the Easter festival, the Witan of all England, English and Danish, unanimously chose Harthacnut to the kingdom.[1132] |King. Easter? 1040.| The only undoubted, and now the only surviving, son of Cnut united all claims. No attempt seems to have been made on behalf of Eadward the surviving son of Æthelred, and the events of the last reign were not likely to have prejudiced men in his favour. The universal belief of the moment was that the choice of Harthacnut was the right and wise course.[1133] An embassy, of which Ælfweard, Bishop of London and Abbot of Evesham, was a leading member,[1134] was sent to Bruges, to invite the newly-chosen |Harthacnut lands. June 17.| King to take possession of his crown. He and his mother accordingly set sail for England in the course of June; he landed at Sandwich, and was presently crowned at Canterbury by Archbishop Eadsige.[1135]

His character.

The expectations which had been formed of Harthacnut were grievously disappointed. One worthless youth had made way for another equally worthless. Writers in the Norman interest, and members of foundations to which he was lavish, try to clothe him with various virtues.[1136] But the utmost that can be claimed for him is an easy species of munificence which showed itself on the one hand in bounty to monasteries and to the poor,[1137] and on the other in providing four meals daily for his courtiers.[1138] But all his recorded public acts set him before us as a rapacious, brutal, and bloodthirsty tyrant. His short reign is merely a repetition of the first and worst days of his father, while he could not, like his father, invoke even the tyrant’s plea of necessity in palliation of his evil deeds. Harthacnut had been unanimously chosen King; he had been received with universal joy; there was no sedition within the country, and no foreign enemy threatened it. But his conduct was that of a conqueror in a hostile land. His first act was to wring a heavy contribution from his new subjects for an object which in no way concerned them. We now learn incidentally that the standing navy of England, both under Cnut and under Harold, had consisted of sixteen ships, and eight marks were paid, seemingly yearly, either to each rower singly or to some group of rowers.[1139] |Harthacnut’s first Danegeld.| Harthacnut had come over with sixty ships, manned by Danish soldiers, and his first act was to demand eight marks for each man of their crews, a piece of extortion which at once destroyed his newly gained popularity.[1140] He then began to revenge himself on his enemies alive |Harold’s body disinterred.| and dead. His first act in this way was an act of senseless brutality towards the dead body of his half-brother the late King. The dead Harold, the Chronicles tell us, was dragged up and shot into a fen. Other writers tell the story with more detail.[1141] Some of the officers of his household, Stir his Mayor of the Palace,[1142] Eadric his dispenser, Thrond his executioner, all, we are told, men of great dignity, were sent to Westminster to dig up the body, and in their company we are surprised to find Earl Godwine and Ælfric Archbishop of York. Westminster was neither in Godwine’s earldom nor in Ælfric’s diocese, so that both these chiefs of Church and State seem out of place on such an occasion. We are however told that Ælfric was something more than an instrument in the matter; it was specially at his advice that Harthacnut was guilty of this cowardly piece of spite, one which, like the brutalities of Harold himself towards the comrades of Ælfred, did not |and buried again.| go without imitators in more polished times. The body of Harold was treated on the restoration of Harthacnut much as the body of Oliver Cromwell was treated on the restoration of Charles the Second. The late King was dug up, beheaded, and thrown, according to this account, into the Thames. The body was afterwards brought up by a fisherman, and received a second burial. The large Danish population of London had a burial-place of their own without the walls of the city, the memory of which is still retained in the name of the church of Saint Clement Danes. There Harold’s body was again buried, secretly, we may suppose, though the act is spoken of as a tribute of honour paid by the Danes of London to the King whose accession to the throne had been so largely their own doing.

No act could have been more offensive to the Danes settled in England than these insults offered to the body |Harthacnut’s second Danegeld. 1040–1.| of their own chosen prince. Harthacnut’s next act was to enrage all his subjects, English and Danish, by laying on them another enormous Danegeld of about twenty-two thousand pounds, with another sum of more than eleven thousand pounds for thirty-two ships, probably a fresh contingent which had just come from Denmark.[1143] He was now, before he had been a year on the throne, thoroughly |Godwine and Lyfing accused of the death of Ælfred. 1040.| hated.[1144] As if on purpose to increase his unpopularity, he next attacked the two leaders of the national party, Earl Godwine and Bishop Lyfing. Archbishop Ælfric, who appears almost in the character of a spiritual Eadric, is said to have accused them to the King of being concerned in the death of his brother Ælfred. Some other persons unnamed joined with him in bringing the charge.[1145] Of the two defendants the Bishop was the easier victim. Lyfing lost his bishopric of Worcester, which was given to his accuser to hold in plurality,[1146] as it was held by several Archbishops of York before and after. Lyfing however recovered Worcester in the course of the next year, as the |Trial and acquittal of Godwine.| price, we are told, of money paid to the King.[1147] Whether the deposition of Lyfing was effected with any legal forms we are not told; but the Earl of the West-Saxons certainly underwent a regular trial before the Witan. The proceedings form a curious illustration of the jurisprudence of the age. The functions of witness, judge, and juror were not yet accurately distinguished, and compurgation,[1148] whenever compurgation could be had, was looked on as the surest proof of innocence. Godwine asserted his own innocence on oath, and his solemn plea of Not Guilty was confirmed by the oaths of most of the Earls and chief thegns[1149] of England. We must not judge of the value of such an acquittal by the ideas of our own time. In a modern trial, some of Godwine’s compurgators would have had to act as his judges; some would have been examined as witnesses to the facts; others might, at least in the case of a less illustrious defendant, have appeared as witnesses to character. In the rude state of the law in those times, these distinctions were not thought of. But it does not follow that substantial justice was not done. Godwine’s acquittal was as solemn as any acquittal could be. All the chief men of England swore to their belief in his innocence. The only difference between such an acquittal and a modern acquittal on a trial before the House of Lords is that, in the ancient mode of procedure, the voices of those who of their own knowledge affirmed Godwine to be innocent, and the voices of those who accepted his innocence |Value of the acquittal.| on their witness, were all reckoned together. Godwine then was acquitted, after the most solemn trial which the jurisprudence of his own time could provide. He is in fairness entitled to the full benefit of that acquittal. The judgement of a competent tribunal is always worth something, though its worth may be overbalanced by facts or probabilities the other way. There are those who hold, in defiance of all fact and all reason, that Sir Thomas More and Anne Boleyn must have been guilty, because English courts of justice pronounced them to be guilty. I am surely asking much less if I ask that Godwine may be held to be innocent, because an English court of justice, whose verdict is outweighed by no facts or probabilities the other way, solemnly pronounced him to be innocent.[1150]

Godwine purchases the favour of Harthacnut by a magnificent ship.

One circumstance which in our days would at once throw suspicion upon the verdict proves nothing at all according to the ideas of those days. Ages after the time of Harthacnut, in times which by comparison seem as yesterday, English judges did not scruple to receive presents from their suitors, and English sovereigns did not scruple to receive presents from their subjects. It is always possible that such presents may be bribes in a guilty sense; it is always equally possible that they may not. It therefore proves nothing either way when we read that the Earl of the West-Saxons, solemnly acquitted by his peers, had still to buy his full restoration to the friendship of his highest judge at the cost of a magnificent gift. We have already seen how dear a possession a ship was in Danish eyes;[1151] we have seen how acceptable a gift it might be in English eyes.[1152] We have seen too what an astonishing amount of adornment the warriors of the North lavished upon these cherished instruments, almost companions, of their warfare.[1153] Though we hear nothing of any warlike exploits of Harthacnut,[1154] he had enough of the wiking in him for a well-equipped ship to be the most acceptable of all gifts.[1155] Godwine therefore gave Harthacnut a ship with a beak of gold, manned with eighty chosen warriors armed with all the magnificence of the full panoply of |Arms of the soldiers.| the time. Each man had on each arm a golden bracelet of sixteen ounces weight; each was clad in a triple coat of mail; each bore on his head a helmet partly gilded; each was armed with all the weapons which could be needed in warfare of any kind.[1156] Each bore on his left arm a shield with gilded boss and studs; his right hand bore the javelin, the English ategar, for the distant skirmishing at the beginning of a battle. But each too was ready for the closest and most deadly fight. Each was girded with a sword with a gilded handle, and from each man’s left shoulder hung, also adorned with |The Danish axe.| gold and silver, the most fearful weapon of all, the Danish battle-axe.[1157] This is our first mention[1158] of the weapon |1066.| which Englishmen were, twenty-six years later, to wield with such deadly prowess upon the height of Senlac, and |1203–4.| which, after the lapse of a hundred and forty years, the descendants of English exiles were still found wielding in defence of the throne of Constantine and Justinian.[1159]

The Danegeld levied by the housecarls. 1041.

Meanwhile all England was astir at the imposition of the Danegeld. Men had deemed that such imposts had passed away for ever in that Witenagemót of Oxford where Cnut the Danish conqueror changed into Cnut the English King. No enemy was in the land; Denmark, the old foe, was a sister kingdom; Normandy, the new foe, was hindered by her domestic troubles from threatening any of her neighbours; the overthrow of Duncan before Durham had taught Scotland to respect the frontiers of the Imperial state.[1160] But here was a tax such as had been heard of only in the darkest and saddest hours of the reign of Æthelred. Taxes of this kind always came in slowly,[1161] and this particular tax came in with special slowness. Military force was needed to extort payment; the housecarls, who do not seem to have been sent on such errands in the days of Cnut, were now turned into tax-gatherers, and were sent into every shire in England to collect the King’s tribute.[1162] That soldiers entrusted with such a duty behaved with insolence and violence we might take for granted in any age. In their conduct we may probably find the historical groundwork for those wonderful tales of Danish oppression in which later and rhetorical writers indulge.[1163] No doubt this collection of the Danegeld was accompanied by much oppression; but there is no evidence that it was oppression inflicted by Danes as Danes on Englishmen as Englishmen. As far as we can see, the state of things under Harthacnut must have been something like the state of England under John and Henry the Third. The natives, of whatever race, and the settlers who were fairly naturalized in the country, were all alike taxed for the sake of the mere strangers who had come in the King’s train.[1164] We cannot suppose that a Danish citizen of London, or a Danish thegn who had received a grant of lands from Cnut, was let off his share of the tribute on proof of his Danish birth. The discontent which was doubtless common to the whole kingdom at |The housecarls killed at Worcester. May 4, 1041.| last broke out in one particular quarter. The citizens of Worcester and the men of Worcestershire generally rose in revolt and attacked the housecarls. Two of their number, Feader and Thurstan, fled, like the Danes at Oxford,[1165] to a tower of the minster.[1166] The people followed them to their hiding-place, and slew them. The murder deserved legal punishment, but Harthacnut preferred a form of chastisement for which unluckily he could find precedents in the reigns of better princes than himself.[1167] He is said to have been further stirred up to vengeance by one who ought to have been the first to counsel mercy. Archbishop Ælfric had, as we have seen, received the bishopric of Worcester on the deposition of Lyfing;[1168] it would seem that the citizens refused to receive him.[1169] They were doubtless attached to their own patriotic pastor, and they may well have been unwilling to be again made an appendage to the Northumbrian metropolis. In revenge for this injury, Ælfric, we are told, counselled the terrible punishment which Harthacnut now decreed for his flock. The offending city and shire were to feel the full extremity of military vengeance; the town was to be burned, the country harried, and the inhabitants, |The Earls sent against Worcester.| as far as might be, killed. For this purpose Harthacnut sent nearly all his housecarls—unhappily we are not told their numbers—under the command of all the chief men of England. The three great Earls, Godwine of Wessex, Leofric of Mercia, Siward of Northumberland,[1170] and their subordinate Earls, among whom Thored of the Middle-Angles or Eastern part of Mercia,[1171] and Ranig of the Magesætas or Herefordshire[1172], are specially mentioned, were all sent against the one city of Worcester. Ten |[1051.]| years later, when Eadward the Confessor required the like chastisement to be inflicted on the town of Dover, Godwine utterly refused to have any hand in such a business, and distinctly asserted the right of every Englishman to a legal trial. But in that case the alleged crime had been done in Godwine’s own earldom, and no doubt Godwine’s power was much less under Harthacnut than it became under Eadward, most likely much less than it had been under Cnut. As things now stood, it was hardly possible to disobey, unless the Earls had been prepared for |The housecarls.| the extreme measure of deposing the King. England in fact in this age felt for the first time both the good and the bad consequences of the existence of a standing army. We shall hereafter see what the housecarls could do for England under a patriotic King; we now see what they could do against Englishmen at the bidding of a rapacious tyrant. It was not at the head of the forces of their several governments that the Earls were bidden to attack the offending city. Those forces would have taken some time to bring together, and, when they were brought together, they would doubtless have sympathized with their intended victims. The King had now at his command a body of Janissaries, who could march at a moment’s notice, a force bound to him by a personal tie, and ready to carry out his personal will in all things. It was no doubt deemed a great stroke of policy to implicate in the deed all the chief men of the land, English and Danish, by putting them at the head of the King’s personal force. But it seems plain that the Earls showed little zeal in the bloody errand on which they were sent. Placed as they were, they could hardly avoid doing much mischief to property, but they were evidently determined to shed as little blood as might be. |Worcester burned and the shire ravaged.| Their approach was well known[1173]—most likely they took care that it should be well known—to those against whom they were coming. The inhabitants of the shire took shelter in various places, while the men of the city itself entrenched[1174] themselves in an island of the Severn, whose name of Beverege reminds us of one of the losses which our national fauna has undergone.[1175] They held out for four days; on the fifth peace was made, and they were allowed to go where they would. But the city was burned, and the army marched away with great plunder.[1176] The vengeance of Harthacnut and Ælfric was thus partly satisfied, and the Archbishop, having thus witnessed the harrying of the diocese upon which he had been forced, seems to have been not unwilling to give back the see to its earlier possessor. As Ælfric still held it at the time of the burning of the city,[1177] it seems to follow that Lyfing’s reappointment |Patriotic Bishops of Worcester.| happened soon after this conclusion of peace. And it is a natural conjecture that the restoration of the popular prelate and the exclusion of the Northumbrian Metropolitan was one of the articles agreed on between the Earls and the citizens. Worcester has been happy in its Bishops in more than one great crisis of our history. Side by side with Godwine we find Lyfing; side by side with Harold we find Wulfstan; and in later times, when the part of Godwine is played again by Simon of Montfort, we find Walter of Cantelupe walking in the steps of Lyfing, and |[1265.]| saying mass and hearing the confession of the martyred Earl on the morning of the fight of Evesham.[1178]

Harthacnut had still another great crime in store; but the burning of Worcester seems to have set the final seal to the shame and hatred which he had drawn upon himself |Harthacnut recalls Eadward from Normandy. 1041.| among all classes of his people.[1179] It may have been a desperate effort to win back some measure of popularity which now led him to send for his half-brother Eadward out of Normandy.[1180] He could have had no personal affection for a brother whom he had never seen, and the influence of Emma would hardly have been exercised in Eadward’s favour. But the events of the next year showed that popular feeling was now veering round towards the ancient royal family. The memory of Cnut had secured the throne to two of his sons in succession; but this feeling could hardly have survived the evil deeds of Harold and Harthacnut. Harthacnut himself was childless; he was also, young as he was,[1181] in failing health.[1182] The recall of Eadward at once provided him with a successor in case of his death, and with one whose presence would be some support to him while he lived. Foreign writers tell us that he associated Eadward with him in the kingdom.[1183] For this statement there is no English authority, and it is not according to English customs. But to have given Eadward the government of a part of the kingdom, whether as Earl or as Under-king, would have been in no way wonderful. We do not however hear anything of such an arrangement; Eadward is set before us as living in great honour at his brother’s court, but no English writer describes him as holding any administrative office.[1184]

One thing however Eadward did, which, had men’s eyes been open to the future, would have seemed to them a sure sign of the evil to come. Emma had brought with her Hugh the French churl, who betrayed Exeter to the Dane.[1185] So her son, even when coming back as a private man, brought with him the advanced guard of that second swarm of strangers who were finally to bring the land into bondage. Among other Frenchmen, Eadward brought with him to England his nephew Ralph, the son of his sister Godgifu by her first husband Drogo of Mantes.[1186] He must now have been a mere youth; but he lived to be gorged with English wealth and honours, to bring his feeble force to oppose the champions of England, and to be branded in our history as “the timid Earl,”[1187] who sought to work improvements in English warfare, and himself turned and fled at the first sight of an armed enemy.

The Northumbrian Earls.

The latest internal events of the reign of Harthacnut call our thoughts once more to the great Northumbrian earldom. They set vividly before us the unrestrained barbarism of that part of the kingdom. I have already described the strange career of Uhtred, and how he at last died, by the connivance of Cnut in his early days, but by the personal vengeance of an enemy whom he had himself unwisely omitted to slay.[1188] A fate almost literally the same now overtook one of his descendants and successors, whose story introduces us more directly to one of the great actors |Eadwulf Cutel.| of the next reign. Uhtred, as we have seen, was succeeded by his brother Eadwulf Cutel, at first, it would seem, under the superiority of the Danish Eric.[1189] The reign of Eadwulf was both short and inglorious; he did not long survive the defeat of the forces of his earldom at Carham.[1190] He was succeeded, but in the Bernician earldom only, by his nephew Ealdred, son of Uhtred by the daughter |Ealdred of Bernicia puts Thurbrand to death,| of Bishop Ealdhun.[1191] The new Earl presently put to death Thurbrand the murderer of his father. Whether this was done by way of public justice or of private assassination does not appear, and the savage manners of the Northumbrian Danes most likely drew no very wide distinction between the two. But at all events the deadly feud went on from generation to generation. A bitter enmity raged between Ealdred and Thurbrand’s son Carl, evidently a powerful thegn.[1192] The two, we are told, were constantly seeking each other’s lives.[1193] Common friends contrived to reconcile them, and, like Cnut and Eadmund, they were more than reconciled; they became sworn brethren. In this character they undertook to go together on a pilgrimage to Rome; but this pious undertaking, like so many other undertakings of that age, was hindered by stress of weather.[1194] They returned to Northumberland together. The reconciliation on Ealdred’s part had been |and is murdered by Carl.| made in good faith; not so on the part of Carl. He invited the Earl to his house; he received and feasted him splendidly, and then, we are told, slew him in a wood, according to the most approved formula of assassination.[1195] |Eadwulf of Bernicia. 1038?| Ealdred was succeeded in Bernicia by his brother Eadwulf. The succession of the Earls of Yorkshire or Deira is less easy to trace, but, at some time before this year, the |Siward of Deira.| Southern earldom must have come into possession of the famous Siward, whom we have already seen acting as its Earl at the burning of Worcester.[1196] Siward, surnamed Digera or the Strong,[1197] was a Dane by birth. His gigantic stature, his vast strength and personal prowess, made him a favourite hero of romance. He boasted of the same marvellous pedigree as Ulf; perhaps indeed Siward and Ulf might claim a common forefather on the non-human side. His name is attached to several charters of the reign of Cnut, but he does not seem to have risen to Earl’s rank in his time. He married Æthelflæd,[1198] a daughter of Earl Ealdred, a marriage which seems to have been his only connexion with the house of the Northumbrian Earls. Whether he laid any claim to the Bernician earldom in right of his wife it is hard to say; he was at any rate ready to abet the criminal designs of Harthacnut against its present possessor. Eadwulf seems to have been a ruler of more vigour than his uncle of the same name; at least we hear, though rather darkly, of a devastating campaign carried on by him against the Britons, a name which here can mean only the inhabitants of Strathclyde.[1199] He was however in ill odour at the court of Harthacnut; probably he and the men of his earldom had been among the foremost in pressing the claims of Harold. He now came to make his peace with the King, and was received by him to full friendship.[1200] But Harthacnut was as little bound by his plighted faith as Carl. As Cnut had allowed or |Eadwulf murdered by Siward, who obtains all Northumberland. 1041.| commanded the slaughter of Uhtred at the hands of Thurbrand, Harthacnut now allowed or commanded the slaughter of Eadwulf at the hands of Siward the husband of his niece. The murderer forthwith obtained the whole earldom of Northumberland from the Humber to the Tweed, but it would seem from the words of a local writer that he obtained |Oswulf son of Eadwulf.| possession of it only by force.[1201] Oswulf, the young son of Eadwulf, did not obtain any share of the ancient heritage of his house, till he was invested with a subordinate |1065.| government on the very eve of the Norman Conquest.

Death of Bishop Eadmund.

The Bernician earldom was thus disposed of. Early in the next year Harthacnut had also the disposal of the |Harthacnut sells the see of Durham to Eadred. 1041–2.| Bernician bishopric. The King was, it would seem, keeping the Midwinter festival at Gloucester,[1202] and Bishop Eadmund was in attendance. He died while at the court, and his body was taken to Durham for burial. Harthacnut presently sold the see to one Eadred, who seems to have given nearly equal offence by his simony and by the fact of his being a secular priest.[1203] It is set down as a mark of divine vengeance that he did not like to take full possession of the see. At the time appointed for his |Death of Eadred. 1042.| installation, he fell suddenly ill, and died in the tenth month from his nomination.[1204]

The reign of Harthacnut was now drawing to an end. |War with Magnus; defeat of Swegen Estrithson. 1042.| As far as it is possible to make out anything from the tangled mazes of Scandinavian history and legend, it would seem that he was engaged in another war with Magnus after he had fixed himself in England.[1205] He had left as his lieutenant in Denmark his cousin Swegen, the son of Ulf and Estrith. Swegen came to England for help against Magnus,[1206] and was despatched to Denmark a second time with a fleet. He was defeated by the Norwegian King, and came back to England.[1207] But he |Death of Harthacnut. June 8, 1042.| found his royal cousin no more. Harthacnut died during his absence, by a death most befitting a prince whose chief merit was to have provided four meals a day for his courtiers. “This year,” say the Chronicles, “died Harthacnut as he at his drink stood.”[1208] It was at the marriage-feast of Tofig the Proud, a great Danish Thegn, who held the office of standard-bearer,[1209] with Gytha, the daughter of Osgod Clapa, a man who fills a considerable space in the annals of the next reign.[1210] Tofig is chiefly memorable as the first beginner of that great foundation at Waltham which is so inseparably connected with the memory of our last native King. He held large estates in Somerset, Essex, and elsewhere. According to the legend, a miraculous crucifix was found on his lordship of Lutgaresbury in Somerset, on the top of the peaked hill from which the place in later times took its name of Montacute. For the reception of this revered relic he built a church on his estate of Waltham in Essex, and made a foundation for two priests. The place was then a mere wilderness, unmarked by any town, village, or church; Tofig had only a hunting-seat in the forest. But along with the building of the church, he gathered a certain number of inhabitants on the spot, and thus, like Ealdhun at Durham, founded the town as well as the minster of Waltham.[1211] This was in the days of Cnut. Tofig must have been an elderly man at the time of his marriage with Gytha,—his eulogist indeed tells us that his youth was renewed like that of the eagle.[1212] His son Æthelstan was of an age to take a share in public affairs, and his grandson Ansgar was able to hold great offices a few years later. Gytha then can hardly fail to have been his second wife, and he seems not to have long survived his marriage. But the bridal, held at the house of Gytha’s father at Lambeth, was honoured with the presence of the King. As Harthacnut arose at the wedding-feast to propose the health of the bride,[1213] he fell to the ground in a fit accompanied by frightful struggles,[1214] and was carried out speechless by those who were near him. He died, and his body was carried to Winchester and buried by that of his father Cnut in the Old Minster.[1215] With him the direct line of Cnut came to an end. The times were such that the land could not long abide without a King. Even before the burial of Harthacnut another great national solemnity had taken place. If Swegen cherished any hopes of the English succession, they vanished when, on his return to England, |Eadward chosen King. June, 1042.| he found a son of Æthelred already called to the throne of his fathers. “Before the King buried were, all folk chose Eadward to King at London.”[1216]

End of the preliminary part of the history.

I have thus gone through the whole of that part of my history which I look upon as introductory to its main subject. We have now gone through all the events which form the remoter causes of the Norman Conquest. |The Norman Conquest begins with the election of Eadward.| The accession of Eadward at once brings us among the events which immediately led to the Conquest, or rather we may look upon his accession as the first stage of the Conquest itself. Swegen and Cnut had shown that it was possible for a foreign power to overcome England by force of arms. The misgovernment of the sons of Cnut hindered the formation of a lasting Danish dynasty in England; the throne of Cerdic was again filled by a son of Woden; but there can be no doubt that the shock given to the country by the Danish Conquest, especially the way in which the ancient nobility was cut off in the long struggle with Swegen and Cnut, directly opened the way for the coming of the Norman. Eadward did his best, wittingly or unwittingly, to make the path of the Norman still easier. This he did by accustoming Englishmen to the sight of strangers—not national kinsmen like Cnut’s Danes, but Frenchmen, men of utterly alien speech and manners—enjoying every available place of honour or profit in the country. The great national reaction under Godwine and Harold made England once more England for a few years. But this change, happy as it was, could not altogether do away with the effects of the French tastes of Eadward. With Eadward then the Norman Conquest really begins, and his election therefore forms the proper break between these two great |Position of the leading men of this and the next generation.| divisions of my subject. The men of the generation before the Conquest, the men whose eyes were not to behold the event itself, but who were to do all that they could do to hasten or to delay it, are now in the full maturity of life, in the full possession of power. Eadward is on the throne of England; Godwine, Leofric, and Siward divide among them the administration of the realm. The next generation, the warriors of Stamfordbridge and Senlac, of York and Ely, are fast growing into manhood. Harold Hardrada is already following his wild career of knight-errantry in distant lands, and is astonishing the world by his exploits in Russia and in Sicily, at Constantinople and at Jerusalem. Swegen Estrithson is still a wanderer, not startling men by wonders of prowess like Harold, but schooling himself and gathering his forces for the day when he could establish a lasting dynasty in his native land. In our own land, the younger warriors of the Conquest, Eadwine and Morkere and Waltheof and Hereward, were probably born, but they must still have been in their cradles or in their mothers’ arms. But among the leaders of Church and State, Ealdred, who lived to place the crown on the head both of Harold and of William, was already a great prelate, Abbot of the great house of Tavistock, soon to succeed the patriot Lyfing in the chair of Worcester. Stigand, climbing to greatness by slower steps, was already the chosen counsellor of Emma, a candidate for any post of dignity and influence that chance might open to him. Wulfstan, destined to outlive them all, had begun that career of quiet holiness, neither seeking for, nor shrinking from, responsibility in temporal matters, which distinguishes him among the political and military prelates of that age. In the house of Godwine that group of sons and daughters were springing up which for a moment promised to become the royal line of England. Eadgyth was growing into those charms of mind and person which perhaps failed to win for her the heart of the King who called her his wife. Gyrth and Leofwine were still boys; Tostig was on the verge of manhood; Swegen and Harold were already men, bold and vigorous, ready to march at their father’s bidding, and before long to affect the destiny of their country for evil and for good. Beyond the sea, William, still a boy in years, but a man in conduct and counsel, was holding his own among the storms of a troubled minority, and learning those arts of the statesman and the warrior which fitted him to become the wisest ruler of Normandy, the last and greatest Conqueror of England. Thus the actors in the great drama are ready for their parts; the ground is gradually clearing for the scene of their performance. The great struggle of nations and tongues and principles in which each of them had his share, the struggle in which William of Normandy and Harold of England stand forth as worthy rivals for the noblest of prizes, will form the subject of the next, the chief and central portion of my history.

APPENDIX.

NOTE A. p. 13.
The use of the word “English.”

My readers will doubtless have remarked—indeed I have, in the text, expressly called their attention to the fact—that, in speaking of the Teutonic inhabitants of Britain looked at as a whole, I always use the word “English,” never the words “Saxon” or “Anglo-Saxon,” which are more commonly in use. I do this advisedly, on more grounds than one. I hold it to be a sound rule to speak of a nation, as far as may be, by the name by which it called itself in the age of which we are speaking. This alone would be reason enough for using the word “English” and no other. But besides this, the common way of talking about “Saxons” and “Anglo-Saxons” leads to various confusions and misconceptions; it ought therefore to be avoided on that ground still more than on the other.

I am not aware of any instance in which a Teutonic inhabitant of Britain, living before the Norman Conquest, and speaking in his own tongue and in his own name of the whole nation formed by the union of the various Teutonic tribes in Britain, uses the word “Saxon.” “Engle,” “Angel-cyn,” are the words always used. The only exceptions, if we can call them exceptions, are certain charters in which the King of the English is called “King of the Anglo-Saxons.” Of these I shall presently speak (see below, p. 540, and Appendix B). But I am not aware that the word “Anglo-Saxon” is ever used in English writings except in the royal style, and even there it is excessively rare. It is quite certain that the word “Anglo-Saxon” was not used, any more than the word “Saxon,” as the ordinary name of the nation. An inhabitant of one of the real Saxon settlements might indeed call himself a Saxon as opposed to his Anglian or Jutish neighbours. But even in this case it is remarkable that we very seldom find the word “Saxon” used alone. It is almost always coupled with one of its geographical adjuncts, “West,” “East,” or “South.” Cuthred’s army at Burford (see pp. 38, 517) is not spoken of as the “Saxon” but as the “West-Saxon” host, even though its adversaries were Angles. But the word “Saxon” is never used, in the native tongue, to express either the whole nation or any part of it which was not strictly Saxon. On the other hand, the words “Engle” and “Angel-cyn” are constantly used to express, not only the whole nation, but particular parts of it which were not strictly Anglian. The Chronicles use the words in this sense from the very beginning. They expressly tell us that Hengest and Horsa were, in strictness, not Angles, but Jutes; yet their followers are called “Engle” (473), and the Teutonic settlers as a whole are called “Angel-cyn” (449). One single passage in the Chronicles (605), which has another look, I shall have presently to speak of as being most distinctly an exception which proves the rule. “Engle,” in short, in native speech, is the name of the whole nation, of which the “Seaxe” are a part.

On the other hand, for reasons which I have already stated (see p. 13), all the Teutonic settlers in Britain have always been known to their Celtic neighbours as “Saxons.” They were so in the fifth century; they are so still. In the Pictish Chronicle, for instance, Lothian is always “Saxonia.” On the continent too the word was sometimes used to describe the Teutonic settlers in Britain before they were fully consolidated into one kingdom. At the very beginning Prosper (see Appendix C) talks of Saxons, while Prokopios (see above, pp. 22, 31) talks of Ἄγγιλοι. As Gregory the Great calls the Jutish Æthelberht “Rex Anglorum” (Bæda, Hist. Eccl. i. 32), so Einhard speaks of certain Northumbrians, who therefore were strictly Angles, as Saxons. Ealhwine (Alcuin), who was certainly a Northumbrian, is called (Vita Karoli, 25) “Saxonici generis homo,” and one Ealdwulf, who seems also to have been a Northumbrian, appears (Annals, 808) as “de ipsa Britannia, natione Saxo.” But I suspect that this way of speaking was peculiar or nearly so to Einhard. A generation earlier, Paul Warnefrid has several passages which illustrate the uncertain way in which the Teutonic settlers in Britain were for a long time spoken of on the Continent. But though he uses the words “Angli” and “Saxones” as it might seem indiscriminately, there is no case in which it is clear that he applies the Saxon name to any but real Saxons, while he uses the Anglian name to take in those who were not real Angles. First of all, in ii. 6 the Saxons who joined in Alboin’s invasion of Italy are distinguished as “vetuli Saxones.” In iii. 25 he records the conversion of the English, how “Beatus Gregorius Augustinum, ... in Britanniam misit, eorumque prædicatione ad Christum Anglos convertit.” In v. 30 we read of the “ecclesiæ Anglorum;” but in c. 32 the banished prince Bertarid “ad Britanniam insulam Saxonumque regem properare disponit;” and in c. 33, “navem ascendit ut ad Britanniam insulam ad regnum Saxonum transmearet.” Here a West-Saxon King is doubtless meant. In vi. 28 we find two persons, seemingly Ine and his wife Æthelburh, described in the text as “duo reges Saxonum,” and in the heading as “duo Anglorum reges.” Lastly, in vi. 37 the fashion of pilgrimage is attributed to “multi Anglorum gentis nobiles et ignobiles;” and in the same chapter Saxones is used in its common meaning of Old-Saxons. Altogether, “Anglus” is the received and usual name even from the earliest times; it became more usual as time went on, and after the nation was consolidated, when the “Rex Anglorum” was known on the continent as a great potentate, any other way of speaking altogether died out, and foreign nations always spoke of us as we spoke of ourselves. The opposition between “Saxon” and “Norman,” so commonly made by modern writers when speaking of the days of the Conquest, is never found in any contemporary writer of any nation. The rule on this head during the period of the Conquest is very plain. In the English Chronicles, in Domesday and other legal documents, and in the Bayeux Tapestry, the opposition is made between “French” and “English.” “The King’s men, French and English,” form an exhaustive division. In Latin writers, especially those on the Norman side, the opposition is made between “Normans” and “English.” “Normans” and “Saxons” are not opposed till long after. The earliest instance that I know of the usage is in Robert of Gloucester, who opposes “Normans” and “Saxons” exactly as Thierry does, in verses which Thierry has not inappropriately chosen for the epilogue of his work;

“Of þe Normannes beþ þẏs hey men, þat beþ of þys lond,

And þe lowe men of Saxons, as ẏch understonde.”

(Vol. i. p. 363, ed. 1810.)

It is possibly owing to the comparative laxity of the foreign use of the words that even the native use is not quite so strict in Latin writings as it is in those which are composed in the native tongue. Native writers, when following, or translating from, Welsh authorities, often follow the Welsh usage, and use the word “Saxones” in positions where, if they had been speaking in their own persons, they would certainly have used the word “Angli.” There is one instance, and, as far as I know, one instance only, of this Welsh usage having made its way into the English speech. In the entry in the Chronicles under the year 605, the word “Saxon” does occur for once in the wider sense. But the word is not used by the Chronicler in his own person, nor is it put into the mouth of any Angle or Saxon. It is found in a speech of Augustine to the Welsh Bishops; “Gif Wealas nellað sibbe wið us, hy sculon æt Seaxena handa forwurðan,” a prediction which was accomplished by the invasion of the Anglian Æthelfrith. Here is a story, probably preserved by Welsh tradition, in which a Roman speaking to Welshmen is made to adopt a Welsh form of speech. The contrast between this passage and the ordinary language of the Chronicles makes the ordinary usage still more marked. In Latin the usage is more common. Asser, as a Welshman, naturally speaks of “Saxones,” and his so speaking is a strong proof of the genuineness of his work. Florence of Worcester therefore, in that part of his Chronicle in which he copies Asser, keeps Asser’s language, and speaks of “Saxones,” whereas, when speaking in his own words or translating from the English Chronicles, he speaks of “Angli” from the beginning. No doubt the subjects of Ælfred, the books, poems, &c. to which the name “Saxon” is thus applied, were strictly Saxon; but no West-Saxon, speaking in his own tongue, would have called them so. Ælfred calls his own tongue “English,” and nothing else; but Asser naturally called it “Saxon.” So Bæda, as long as he draws from Welsh sources or repeats Welsh traditions, uses the words “Angli” and “Saxones” almost indiscriminately (Hist. Eccl. i. 14, 15, 22); but, as soon as he begins fairly to speak in his own person, he always uses “Angli” (i. 23 et seqq.). Exactly the same distinction will be found in the use of the words by Æthelweard and Henry of Huntingdon, who constantly use the word “Saxones” in what we may call the Welsh stage of their histories. But Henry uses “Anglus” also from the beginning, and, when he gets fairly clear of Welsh matters, he uses it exclusively. It is most curious to see him, as in the Prologue to the fifth Book, fall back on the Welsh way of speaking when he has to make a summary of what has gone before. And as the Welsh way of speaking affected these writers, we find writers who had occasion to speak of Pictish matters affected in the like way by Pictish usage. Thus Æddi or Eddius, the biographer of Wilfrith (c. 19, 20), speaking of the relations between Picts and Northumbrians, uses the Pictish mode of speech; he speaks of “Saxones,” and says that the Picts “subjectionem Saxonum despiciebant.”

Besides these instances of Celtic influence on English speech, it is not uncommon to find in the charters the word “Saxonice” used as a definition of language, where the vernacular definition would undoubtedly have been “on Englisc.” In West-Saxon charters the usage is in truth no more than we might have looked for. The words and things spoken of were Saxon in the strict sense. Bæda too not uncommonly (iii. 7 et al.) uses “Saxon” as a description of language; but it is usually, if not always, when he is speaking of persons or places which are strictly Saxon. He may therefore mean “Saxon” as opposed to “Anglian.” But the usage certainly now and then passes these bounds, and we find the word Saxon and its derivatives applied to objects which were not strictly Saxon. Thus in a charter of Ecgfrith of Mercia in 796 (Cod. Dipl. i. 207), we find the words “celebri vico qui Saxonice vocatur æt Baðum.” Though even here it is worth remarking that the place spoken of, though at that time under Mercian rule, was in a district which was originally Saxon and which became Saxon again. So in a deed of Archbishop Oswald as late as 990 (Cod. Dipl. iii. 253) we read how a certain grant “in ista cartula Saxonicis sermonibus apparet.” But the land spoken of is in Worcestershire, also a district originally Saxon. It is more remarkable when in a charter of Archbishop Wulfred in 825 (Cod. Dipl. i. 280), the Synod of Clovesho is said to be “de diversis Saxoniæ partibus congregatum.” As the document chiefly relates to Mercian affairs, it is clear that “Saxonia” here means England generally. The word is used in the same sense at an earlier time in a petition of Wilfrith to Pope Agatho (Eddius, c. 29), in which he describes himself as “episcopus Saxoniæ.” So again in the letter—whether genuine or not, matters little—of Eleutherius of Winchester in William of Malmesbury (i. 30), he is described as “pontificatus Saxoniæ gubernacula regens.” In this passage “Saxonia” might mean Wessex; but Hwætberht, Abbot of Wearmouth (Bæda, Hist. Abb. Wiremuth, c. 14. p. 329 Hussey), also calls himself “Abbas cœnobii beatissimi apostolorum principis in Saxonia.” It should of course be remembered that these are letters addressed to foreigners, and in which a foreign mode of speech is naturally adopted. Still, when I have these examples before me, and when I remember how late it was before the names “Anglia” and “Englaland” became thoroughly established in use, I am inclined to think that “Saxonia” may be the older name of the two. We have seen (see p. 79) that the name Englaland dates only from the last period of the Danish wars; the earliest use of it that I have come across is not earlier than the reign of Æthelred, being found in the treaty with Olaf and Justin in 991 (see p. 79, and below, Note DD). Here the word Englaland, Ænglaland, is twice found. From the latter days of Æthelred and the reign of Cnut the territorial name becomes more and more commonly used. (It is needless to say that the entry in the Canterbury Chronicle for 876 and the long insertion at 995 are not contemporary.) It would seem then that the name of England was first used in opposition, not to Wales or Scotland, but to the Scandinavian lands. As opposed to the lands of the Scot and the Briton the strict territorial name was rather Saxony than England. It was only natural that it should be so. The part of Britain occupied by the Teutonic invaders, the English land as distinguished from the English people, would receive its first territorial name from the Celts of the island, and that name would naturally be, as we have seen in the case of Lothian, “Saxonia.” In dealing with foreigners, even Englishmen might, in the days of Wilfrith or Hwætberht, use the only territorial name which their country had as yet acquired, and, in the days of Wulfred, the same word might be now and then used as a rhetorical flourish. I am therefore inclined to think that there is really more authority for calling England, as a whole, “Saxony,” than there is for calling Englishmen, as a whole, “Saxons.” The Latin name Anglia is most likely older than the English Englaland. But it is hard to say when it came into contemporary use. It seems to be unknown to Bæda, but it is familiar to Æthelweard. A rarer form, “Angul-Saxonia,” “Anglo-Saxonia,” is now and then found, as in a charter of Eadward the Elder in Cod. Dipl. v. 165, and in a doubtful charter of Æthelred (see below, p. 557). So in a Frankish ecclesiastical writer in Duchesne, Rer. Franc. Scriptt. i. 665, Queen Balthild is said to come “de ultramarinis partibus Angli-Saxoniæ.” Still, whatever may have been the case in earlier times, all these usages had died out long before the time of the Norman Conquest. After all England and all Britain had been brought into subjection to a Saxon dynasty, we hear no more about “Saxons” or “Saxony.” The latest instance that I can remember of “Saxonice” being used for “on Englisc” is in a passage of Florence of Worcester (1002, see p. 306), where he says that the Norman Emma was “Saxonice Ælfgiva vocata.” The expression stands almost by itself; but it should be remembered that it is of the West-Saxon speech that it is used. During the period of the Conquest, as the people are always “Angli” and their land “Anglia,” so it is always the English language (“lingua Anglica or Anglicana”), never the Saxon, which contemporary writers oppose to the French.

The fact that the word “Saxon” is thus occasionally used in Latin, in cases where we always find “English” used in the native tongue, is, I think, mainly to be attributed to the tendency, one which has more or less influence on almost all Latin writings then and since, to use expressions which sounded in any way grander or more archaic than those which were in common use. I suspect that the occasional use of “Saxon” instead of “English” was very much of a piece with the use, not uncommon in the charters, of “Albion” to express Britain. To talk of “Saxonia,” “Saxonice,” &c. was doubtless one of the elegancies of the Kanzleistyl of those days. It is an archaism, just as when, in a charter of Eadwig (Cod. Dipl. ii. 324; cf. 391), we read of the “Gewissi,” a name which had passed out of use ages before. Once or twice we find “Teutonice” instead of either “Anglice” or “Saxonice.” The decrees of the Synod of Cealcyth in 787 (Labbe and Cossart, vi. 1873) were published “tam Latine quam Teutonice, quo omnes intelligere possent.” So in the Encomium Emmæ (ii. 18) we once find the word used where either English or Danish is intended, and the expression is an unusual and affected one as applied to either. In a most remarkable story told by Giraldus (Itin. Kamb. i. 6. p. 64 Dimock), a Welshman is said to speak to Henry the Second “quasi Teutonice,” and is presently answered “Anglice.” But Giraldus elsewhere (i. 8. p. 77), in his curious philological discussion, distinguishes “Anglice” and “Teutonice,” though his “Teutonice” does not seem to be High-Dutch. There can be no doubt that this use of “Teutonice” was simply an instance of “the grand style.” It is less clearly so when Fordun (ii. 9) says that in Scotland “duabus utuntur linguis, Scotica videlicet et Theuthonica.” For he writes at a time when men were just beginning to be unwilling to give the English name to the Teutonic speech of Scotland. But in earlier times we may be sure that, when men said either “Teutonice” or “Saxonice” instead of “Anglice,” the unusual word was chosen mainly as being finer. Still, in the great mass of instances, the use of the word “Saxon,” affected and archaistic as it is, is still accurate. It is rarely used out of the strictly Saxon districts, while “Anglus” and its derivatives are freely used out of the strictly Anglian districts. The title of “Rex Saxonum,” so common in the age of Ælfred, was, as I have elsewhere said (see p. 54), the most accurate which he could assume. Still it appears only as a Latin title; in his vernacular will and his vernacular laws he is only “King of the West-Saxons.” (See p. 52, and Cod. Dipl. ii. 114.) It might be thought to have an English equivalent in the Abingdon Chronicle under 867, where we read, “Her feng Æþered Æþelbryhtes broþor to Seaxna rice,” but as all the other copies have “West-Seaxna rice,” it is most likely a slip of the pen.

The name “Anglo-Saxon,” though rare, is a genuine and ancient description of the nation. There are some, though rare, vernacular examples of its use (see below, pp. 549, 556), to which I shall have to refer again. It is also used rather more commonly in Latin, as by Asser (M. H. B. 483 A), by Florence of Worcester (A. 1066), by Simeon of Durham (X Scriptt. 137). In the Latin charters, especially those of Eadwig, it is not uncommon (see the list in pp. 554–558). So in a charter of Eadward the Elder which has been quoted already (Cod. Dipl. v. 168, 169), as he calls the land “Angul-Saxonia,” so he twice calls himself “Angul-Saxonum rex.” The word is not uncommon in foreign writers; it occurs for instance in the singular passage of Lambert of Herzfeld (1066) in which Harold is called “Rex Angli-Saxonum.” To go back to earlier writers, it is found in Paul Warnefrid (iv. 23), where, describing the manners of the Lombards, he says, “Vestimenta eis erant laxa et maxime lintea, qualia Angli-Saxones habere solent.” In c. 37, “Cunibertus rex Hermilindam e Saxonum Anglorum genere duxit uxorem.” Here the name Eormenhild, cognate with the royal Kentish names Eormenred, Eormenburh, Eormengyth, and Eormengild, seems to show almost for certain from what part of England the Lombard King brought his wife. But presently in vi. 15 the West-Saxon Ceadwalla appears as “Cedoaldus rex Anglorum-Saxonum,” though in the heading he is “Theodebaldus rex Anglorum.” (These passages show how fast the Anglian name was spreading over the Saxon and Jutish districts.) The compound name is used also by Widukind in a very amusing passage (i. 8; cf. p. 567), where, having mentioned how certain Saxons settled in Britain, he adds, “Et quia illa insula in angulo quodam maris sita est, Anglisaxones usque hodie vocitantur.” So Prudentius of Troyes (Pertz, i. 449) calls Æthelwulf “Edilvulfus rex Anglorum-Saxonum.” Elsewhere (i. 451) he gives him his usual title of “Rex Occidentalium Saxonum.” In another passage (i. 452) he records how in 860 a Danish fleet sailed “ad Anglo-Saxones.” And in a third, under the year 844 (Pertz, i. 441), “Nortmanni Britanniam insulam ea quam maxime parte quam Angli-Saxones incolunt impetentes.” So in the Annals of Quedlinburg (Pertz, iii. 32), “Angli-Saxones in Britannia fidem percipiunt;” in those of Weissemburg, 1066 (Pertz, iii. 71), “Comes Willihelmus qui et Basthart (see vol. ii. p. 582) Anglos-Saxones et regem illorum occidit regnumque obtinuit.” In the Annales Altahenses, 1066 (Pertz, xx. 817), we hear of “Angli-Saxonici.” In the Life of Saint Boniface (Pertz, ii. 338) London or “Lundenwich” is so called “Anglorum Saxonumque vocabulo;” and in Aimon of Fleury (Pertz, ix. 375) Lewis the son of Charles the Simple flies “ad Anglo-Saxones.” All these passages remind us of the “Prisci Latini,” and all are in the plural. Orderic too once or twice uses expressions to the same effect. Thus he (666 A) makes certain Normans say “Saxones Anglos prostravimus.” Elsewhere he makes Wimund (525 B) speak of the original English conquerors as “Angli-Saxones.” Again, speaking in his own person (722 B), he recounts the Norman exploits, and adds, “Hoc Itali et Guinili Saxonesque Angli usque ad internecionem experti sunt.” And again in 887 B, where he is talking of Welsh matters and the prophecies of Merlin, he speaks of “Saxones Anglos, qui tunc pagani Christicolas Britones oppugnabant.” But these unusual phrases are clearly mere flourishes, just as when he calls the Byzantine Empire “Ionia” and its inhabitants “Danai” and “Pelasgi.” The passage reminds one of the comment of William of Poitiers (137), where, after describing the valour of the English at Senlac, he adds, “Gens equidem illa natura semper in ferrum prompta fuit, descendens ab antiqua Saxonum origine ferocissimorum hominum.” But he never calls the English of his own time “Saxons.”

“Anglo-Saxon” then, unlike “Saxon,” is a description which is fully justified by ancient authority. But it is quite clear that it is a description which never passed into common use. It is found mainly in charters and as a peculiarity of one or two writers, who doubtless thought that it had a grander or more learned sound than the usual name. The name by which our forefathers really knew themselves was “English” and none other. “Angli,” “Engle,” “Angel-cyn,” “Englisc,” are the true names by which the Teutons of Britain knew themselves and their language. The people are the English, their tongue is the English tongue, their King is the King of the English. The instances of any other use are to be found in a foreign language, and are easily accounted for by exceptional causes. And even these exceptional usages had quite died away before the stage of our history with which we are immediately concerned. The people whom William overcame at Senlac, and over whom he was crowned King at Westminster, knew themselves and were known to their conquerors by the name of English and by the name of English alone.

But it is sometimes argued that, though our forefathers confessedly called themselves English, yet we ought, in speaking of them, to call them something else; that, though Ælfred called his own tongue English, we ought to correct him and call it Saxon. Now the presumption is surely in favour of calling any people by the name by which they called themselves, especially when that name had gone on in uninterrupted use to our own days. Our national nomenclature has never changed for a thousand years. In the days of Ælfred, as now, the Englishman speaking in his own tongue called himself an Englishman. In the days of Ælfred, as now, his Celtic neighbour called him a Saxon. As we do not now speak of ourselves by the name by which Welshmen and Highlanders speak of us, some very strong reason indeed ought to be brought to show that we ought to speak of our forefathers, not as they spoke of themselves, but as Welshmen and Highlanders spoke of them. But the reason commonly given springs out of mere misconception and leads to further misconceptions. From some inscrutable cause, people fancy that the word English cannot be rightly applied to the nation, its language, or its institutions, till after the Norman element has been absorbed into it; that is, they fancy that nothing can be called English till it has become somewhat less English than it was at an earlier time. The tongue which Ælfred, in the days of its purity, called English, we must not venture to call English till the days when it had received a considerable infusion of French. This notion springs from an utterly wrong conception of the history of our nation. The refusal to call ourselves and our forefathers a thousand years back by the same name springs from a failure to take in the fact that our nation which exists now is the same nation as that which migrated from Germany to Britain in the fifth century. In the words of Sir Francis Palgrave, “I must needs here pause, and substitute henceforward the true and antient word English for the unhistorical and conventional term Anglo-Saxon, an expression conveying a most false idea in our civil history. It disguises the continuity of affairs, and substitutes the appearance of a new formation in the place of a progressive evolution.” (Normandy and England, iii. 596.) People talk of the “English” as a new nation which arose, in the thirteenth century perhaps, as a mixed race of which the “Saxons” or “Anglo-Saxons” were only one element among several. Now in a certain sense, we undoubtedly are a mixed race, but not in the sense in which popular language implies. We are a mixed race in the sense of being a people whose predominant blood and speech has incorporated and assimilated with itself more than one foreign infusion. But we are not what our High-Dutch kinsmen call a Mischvolk, a mere colluvies gentium, a mere jumble of races in which no one element is predominant. People run over the succession of the various occupants of Britain—Romans, Britons, Saxons, Danes, Normans—sometimes as if they were races each of which ate up the one before it, sometimes as if they were, each in the same sense, component elements of the modern English nation. The correct statement of the case is much clearer and simpler. A Low-Dutch people, which took as its national name the name of one of its tribes, namely the Angles, settled in Britain in the fifth and sixth centuries. It has occupied the greater part of Britain ever since. It has ever since kept its unbroken national being, its national language, its national name. But it has at different times assimilated several foreign elements. The conquered Welsh were, as far as might be, slaughtered or driven out; but a small Welsh infusion into our language, and therefore no doubt a small Welsh infusion into our blood, is owing to the fact that the women were largely spared. A small Welsh element was thus assimilated. The Danish element, far greater in extent than the Welsh, hardly needed assimilation; the ethnical difference between the Englishman and the Dane was hardly greater than the ethnical difference between one tribe of Englishmen and another. Lastly came the Norman, or rather French, element, which was also gradually assimilated, but not till it had poured a most important infusion, though still only an infusion, into our institutions and our language. Thus, besides the kindred Danes, we have assimilated two wholly foreign elements, British and French, what our forefathers called Bret-Welsh and Gal-Welsh. But these elements are not coequal with the original substance of the nation. In all these cases, the foreign element was simply incorporated and assimilated into the existing Low-Dutch stock. The small Welsh element, the large Danish and French elements, were absorbed in the predominant English mass. The Briton and the Norman gradually became Englishmen. The kindred Dane of course became an Englishman with far greater ease. All adopted the English name; all adopted, while to some extent they modified, the English tongue. If we confine the name “English” to the men, the speech, the laws, of the time after the last assimilation had become complete, if we talk of “Saxons” as only one coequal element among others, we completely misrepresent the true history of our nation and our language. Such a way of speaking cuts us off from our connexion with our forefathers; it wipes out the fact that we are the same people who came into this island fourteen hundred years back, and not another people. We have absorbed some very important elements from various quarters, but our true substance is still the same. We are like a Roman gens, some of whose members, by virtue of the law of adoption, were not Fabii or Cornelii by actual blood, but which none the less was the Fabian or Cornelian gens. If we allow ourselves to use, as people constantly do, the words “Saxon” or “Anglo-Saxon” as chronological terms, we altogether wipe out the fact of the unbroken life of our nation. People talk of “Saxons” and “Anglo-Saxons” as of races past and gone. Sometimes, especially in architectural disquisitions, they seem to fancy that all “the Saxons” lived at one time, forgetting that Harold is removed from Hengest by as many years as Charles the First is removed from Harold. A man, a word, a book, a building, earlier than 1066 is called “Saxon;” whether the same man, word, book, or building, after 1066 is “Norman,” I have never been able to find out. Waltheof, born before 1066, was of course a “Saxon;” what were the children whom he begot and the buildings which he built after 1066? This chronological use of the word “Saxon” implies one of two alternatives; either the “Saxons” were exterminated by the Normans, or else the “Saxons” turned into Normans. People talk of “the Saxon Period” and “the Norman Period,” as if they followed one another like the periods of geology, or like Hesiod’s races of men. The “Norman Period” is a phrase which may be admitted to express a time when Norman influences were politically predominant. We may speak of a Norman period, as we may speak of an Angevin period or an Hanoverian period. But, if we are to talk of a “Saxon period” at all, it is a period which began in 449 and which has not ended in 1877.

The most grotesque instance of this confused sort of nomenclature is to be found in the technical language of unscientific philologers. The gradual result of the Norman Conquest on the English language was twofold. The English language, like other languages, especially other Low-Dutch languages, was, at the time of the Conquest, already beginning to lose, in popular speech at least, the fulness and purity of its ancient inflexions. This process the Norman Conquest hastened and rendered more complete. It also brought in a great number of foreign words into the language, many of which supplanted native words. The result of these two processes is that the English of a thousand years back, like the Scandinavian or the High-Dutch of a thousand years back, is now unintelligible except to those who specially study it. But the English language has never either changed its name or lost its continuity. In the eyes of the scientific philologer, it is the same English tongue throughout all its modifications. But by unscientific philologers, the language, from some utterly mysterious cause, is not called English until the two processes of which I speak are accomplished. Before those processes begin, it is “Saxon” or “Anglo-Saxon;” while they are going on, it is “Semi-Saxon”—a name perhaps the most absurd to be found in the nomenclature of any human study. It is manifest that, with such a nomenclature as this, the true history of the English language and its relation to other Teutonic languages never can be understood.

One word as to the name “Anglo-Saxon.” I have shown that it is a real ancient name, used, though very rarely, in English documents, and somewhat more commonly in Latin ones. But it was always a mere formal description; it never became the familiar name of the nation. The meaning of the word also is commonly completely misconceived. In modern use “Anglo-” is a prefix which is used very freely, and which is certainly used in more than one meaning. We have heard of “Anglo-Saxons,” “Anglo-Normans,” “Anglo-Americans,” “Anglo-Indians,” “Anglo-Catholics.” I cannot presume to guess at the meaning of the prefix in the last formation; but I conceive “Anglo-Normans” to mean Normans settled in England, and “Anglo-Americans” to mean Englishmen settled in America. By “Anglo-Saxons,” I conceive, in the vulgar use of the word, is meant Saxons who settled in England (meaning of course in Britain), as opposed to the Old-Saxons who stayed in Germany. It is as when Henry of Huntingdon (M. H. B. 708 C) inaccurately talks of an “adventus Saxonum in Angliam,” while the accurate Bæda (Hist. Eccl. i. 23) talks of the “adventus Anglorum in Brittaniam.” And it would seem that this really was the sense in which the compound name was used by some of the foreign writers. Indeed, as soon as the Teutonic part of Britain came to be commonly known by the name of “Anglia,” some such phrase as “Anglo-Saxones” would be, from a continental point of view, not an unnatural description of the Saxons of the island as distinguished from those of the mainland. It is plain that all remembrance of continental “Angli” must have passed away from the mind of Widukind when he made the grotesque derivation—one not all peculiar to himself—which was quoted in p. 541. But this is not the meaning of the word “Anglo-Saxon” as used by Asser, Florence, and King Æthelstan. “King of the Anglo-Saxons,” as a title of Æthelstan or Eadred, meant simply “King of the Angles and Saxons,” a way of describing him which was clearly more correct, though far less usual, than the common style of “Rex Anglorum.” In the ancient Coronation Service (see vol. iii. chap. xi. and Appendix E; Selden’s Titles of Honour, 116), in the same prayer we twice read “Anglorum vel (= et) Saxonum,” once “Anglo-Saxonum.” The latter form is clearly a mere abbreviation, perhaps a mere clerical error. That, under a purely Saxon dynasty, the title of “Rex Anglorum” became regular and universal, that “Rex Saxonum” died completely out, that “Rex Anglo-Saxonum” was always rare, is the most overwhelming proof that “English” was the real and only recognized name of the united nation. “Anglo-Saxon” then, in certain positions, is a perfectly correct description. But it is dangerous to use it, because it is so extremely liable to misconstruction. Again, its correct use is so very narrow, that the term becomes almost useless. It has no real meaning except in the plural. It is quite correct to call Æthelstan “King of the Anglo-Saxons,” but to call this or that subject of Æthelstan “an Anglo-Saxon” is simply nonsense. I have as yet only once lighted on the use of the word in the singular, namely in the Vita Alchuini, 11 (Jaffé, Monumenta Alcuiniana, p. 25), where a certain priest is described as “Engelsaxo.” See Mullinger, Schools of Charles the Great, 113. As a chronological term “Anglo-Saxon” is equally objectionable with “Saxon.” The “Anglo-Saxon period,” so far as there ever was one, is going on still.

I speak therefore of our forefathers, not as “Saxons” or even as “Anglo-Saxons,” but as they spoke of themselves, as Englishmen—“Angli,” “Engle,” “Angel-cyn.” I call their language, not “Saxon” or even “Anglo-Saxon,” but, as Ælfred called it, “English.” I thus keep to the custom of the time of which I speak, and I also avoid the misconception and confusion which must follow any other way of speaking. But the different shapes which names have taken in later times allow us to make an useful distinction between the two uses of the same word. In Latin it was necessary to use the single word “Anglus” to express both the whole nation and one particular part of it. But we can now speak of the whole nation as “English,” while we can speak of the tribe from which the nation borrowed its name as “Anglian.” When I wish pointedly to distinguish the men, the language, or the institutions of the time before 1066 from those of any time after 1066, I speak distinctively of “Old-English,” as our kinsmen speak of “Alt-Deutsch.”

I now leave the subject with a reference to the golden words of Sir Francis Palgrave, England and Normandy, iii. 630–2.

NOTE B. pp. 28, 133.
The Bretwaldadom and the Imperial Titles.

It is almost impossible, after the connexion between them which Sir Francis Palgrave so earnestly strove to establish, to treat the question of the Bretwaldas apart from the question of the Imperial titles borne by the English Kings of the tenth and eleventh centuries. The unbroken connexion between the two is the very life and soul of his theory. And in discussing the matter we must never forget that it is to Sir Francis Palgrave, more than to any other scholar, that we owe the assertion of the great truth, without which all mediæval history is an insoluble puzzle, that the Roman Empire did not come to an end in the year 476, but that the Empire and Imperial ideas continued to be the very life of European politics for ages after. On this head I must refer my readers to Mr. Bryce’s brilliant Essay on the Holy Roman Empire, where the whole doctrine is drawn out with wonderful clearness and power. (See also Historical Essays, First Series, p. 126.) But Sir Francis Palgrave, as usual, made too much of his theory; his very learning and ingenuity carried him away. The Imperial doctrine itself, as put forth by him, was greatly exaggerated, and connecting, as he did, the Bretwaldadom with the later Imperial style, he was disposed to make as much as possible of the Bretwaldadom. Mr. Kemble, on the other hand, is equally disposed to make as little as possible of the Bretwaldadom, and I must say that he slurs over the question of the Imperial titles in a strange way. In both parts of the controversy, Sir Francis Palgrave may have given a wrong explanation; but he has at least given a very elaborate and ingenious explanation. Mr. Kemble leaves passages which must have some meaning without any explanation at all. For my own part, I cannot help adding that, years ago, when I first began these studies, I was altogether carried away by the fascination of Sir Francis Palgrave’s theories. I soon saw their exaggerated character, and how utterly unfounded a great part of them were. I was thus led to go too far the other way, and altogether to cast aside the notion of any Imperial sovereignty in our Kings. Later thought and study have at last brought me to an intermediate position, for which I trust that stronger grounds will be found than for either of the extremes.

The name Bretwalda comes from the well-known passage in the Chronicles under the year 827, where it is found only in the Winchester version, all the others having different spellings, Brytenwalda, Bretanenwealda, Brytenwealda, Brytenweald. The only other place that I know where any of these forms or anything like them occurs is in a charter of Æthelstan in 934, in which that King is described (Cod. Dipl. v. 218) as “Ongol-Saxna cyning and Brytænwalda eallæs ðyses iglandæs;” the Latin equivalent (p. 217) is “Angul-Saxonum necnon et totius Britanniæ rex, gratia Dei regni solio sublimatus.” Mr. Kemble (ii. 13, 20) argues that the reading Bretwalda is a false one, and that the meaning wielder, ruler, or Emperor of Britain, or of Britons, is altogether wrong. He takes the true reading to be Brytenwealda, which he derives from the adjective bryten, so as to mean wide ruler, quoting the word Bryten-cyning and other similar cognates as compound forms. As a piece of Teutonic scholarship Mr. Kemble is most likely right, but I doubt whether his correction of the etymology is of much strictly historical importance. When the entry in the Chronicles was made, the title must have been familiar, and it must have conveyed some meaning. And the forms Bretwalda and Bretanenwealda seem clearly to show that those who used those forms meant them, rightly or wrongly, to mean wielder of Britain. In the charter of Æthelstan again, though the Latin and the English do not exactly translate one another, I think it is plain that Britanniæ Rex was meant to be the equivalent to Brytænwalda. I have therefore no scruple in keeping to the more usual form and in attaching to it the commonly received meaning. Less correct as a matter of scholarship, I conceive it to be more correct as a matter of history.

But the passage in the Chronicles, as is well known, is founded on an equally well-known passage in Bæda (ii. 5). Bæda there reckons up seven Kings, Ælle of Sussex, Ceawlin of Wessex, Æthelberht of Kent, Rædwald of East-Anglia, Eadwine, Oswald, and Oswiu of Northumberland, as having a supremacy, if not over all Britain, yet at least beyond their own immediate kingdoms. This supremacy he first calls Imperium and then Ducatus. The latter somewhat lowly form may perhaps be a warning against attaching any exaggerated importance to the other. The Chroniclers translate the “Imperium hujusmodi” of Bæda by the words “þus micel rice.” They record Ecgberht’s conquest of Mercia, and say that “he wæs se eahteþa cyning se þe Bretwalda wæs.” They then give Bæda’s list of seven, with Ecgberht for the eighth. It is of course an obvious difficulty that several Kings, especially of Mercia, who seem to have been at least as powerful as any of those on the list, such as Penda and Offa, and Æthelbald, whom Henry of Huntingdon (M. H. B. 728 D) speaks of as “rex regum,” are not found on the list. The writer of the entry, a subject of Ecgberht or one of his successors, no doubt simply copied Bæda’s list and added the name of Ecgberht, unwilling perhaps to record the glories of princes of the rival kingdom. Now this objection quite upsets the old notion with which Mr. Kemble makes himself so merry, of a regular Federal monarchy under an elective Emperor or Bretwalda; nor do I attempt to be wise above what is written or to define anything with precision as to the nature of a supremacy of which we have such slight records. Still the passages both in Bæda and the Chronicles must have a meaning. They show that those seven Kings did exercise a supremacy of some kind beyond the limits of their own kingdoms, which supremacy Ecgberht was held to have continued or to have revived. This supremacy is equally a fact whether those seven princes bore any special title or not. That the Bretwaldadom of Æthelberht carried with it some real dominion beyond the limits of Kent is shown by the ease with which Augustine went and held a synod in a distant part of England and a part still heathen. (See Bæda, ii. 2.) This could hardly be except by virtue of a safe conduct from the common over-lord. Indeed Bæda’s words are explicit—“adjutorio usus Ædilbercti regis.” The supremacy of Ecgberht needs no comment, and Mr. Kemble himself (ii. 19) calls attention to the fact that Ducatus, one of the words used by Bæda, is used by Ecgberht himself in three charters (Cod. Dipl. vi. 79, 81, 84), in which Ecgberht dates the year of his Ducatus ten years later than the beginning of his reign as King, exactly like the years of the Regnum and the Imperium of the later Emperors.

I believe then there was a real, though not an abiding or a very well defined, supremacy which was often, perhaps generally, held by some one of the Teutonic princes of Britain over as many of his neighbours, Celtic and Teutonic alike, as he could extend it over. I believe that this fact was remembered in the days of Ecgberht and of Æthelstan, and that Æthelstan probably looked on himself as the successor of Ceawlin in his wider no less than in his narrower dominion. What I cannot bring myself to believe is that Ceawlin looked on himself as the successor of Maximus and Carausius. Sir Francis Palgrave (i. 398) really seems to have believed that Ælle the South-Saxon, the first recorded Bretwalda, was called to the post of Emperor of Britain by the choice of the Welsh princes. Now it is not easy to see in what Ælle’s Bretwaldadom consisted. It is possible that the Jutes of Kent, and the settlers who had already begun to make the east coast of Britain a Teutonic land, may have invested him with some sort of general leadership for the better carrying on of the Conquest. It is possible that he may have brought under tribute some Welsh tribes which he did not root out, and that he may so far have presented a dim foreshadowing of the glories of Æthelstan and Eadgar. But the days of the Commendation had not yet come. It is utterly incredible that Ælle held any authority over any Welsh tribe, save such as he won and held at the point of the sword. It is utterly incredible that any Welsh congress ever assembled to make him Cæsar, Augustus, Tyrant, Bretwalda, or anything else. Cnut and William indeed were chosen Kings of the English by electors, many of whom must have shared as unwillingly in their work as any Welsh prince could have shared in the work of investing Ælle with an Imperial crown. But the times were utterly different; Cnut and William were not mere destroyers; they took possession of an established kingdom, and it was not their policy to destroy or to change one whit more than was absolutely necessary for their own purposes. But Ælle, who did to Anderida as Joshua did to Jericho and to Ai, was little likely indeed to receive an Imperial diadem at the hands of the surviving Gibeonites. The dream of a transmission of Imperial authority from the vanquished Briton to his Teutonic conqueror seems to me the vainest of all the dreams which ingenious men have indulged in.

What then was the Bretwaldadom? As we may fairly assert that the passages which I have already quoted imply a real supremacy of some kind, so, on the other hand, we may be equally sure that whatever they imply was something of purely English growth, something in no way connected with, or derived from, any older Welsh or Roman dominion. Nothing is proved by the fact that Æthelberht imitated the coinage of Carausius and put a wolf and twins on his money. Nothing was more common than for the Teutonic states everywhere, and for the Saracen states too, to imitate the coinage which supplied them with their most obvious models. But on a coin of Carausius the wolf and twins had a most speaking meaning; on a coin of Æthelberht they had no meaning at all. It may be that Eadwine assumed some ensigns of dignity in imitation of Roman pomp; the tufa may have the special meaning attached to it, or it may not; Eadwine, with the Roman Paulinus at his elbow, might well indulge in a certain Imperial show, without any need of traditions handed on from Maximus and Carausius. These are, I believe, the only attempts at evidence to prove that the Bretwaldadom had a Roman origin; and they prove about as much as King Ælfred’s notion (see his Laws, Thorpe, i. 58) that the immemorial Teutonic (or rather Aryan, see Il. ix. 629) practice of the wergild was introduced by Christian Bishops in imitation of the mild-heartedness of Christ. The title of Bretwalda, or Brytenwealda, as borne by Æthelstan, was most likely equivalent to Imperator or Basileus; but if it was used by Ælle or Ceawlin, I cannot think that it had any such meaning in their day.

It does not however seem that the supremacy of the early Bretwaldas necessarily reached over the whole of Britain or even over the whole of the Teutonic kingdoms in Britain. A marked predominance in the island, a distinct superiority over other states than his own, seems to have been enough to win for a prince a place on the list as given by Bæda and the Chronicler, though there might be other states over which his dominion did not reach. The supremacy of Ælle, and even that of Ceawlin, must have been very far from reaching over all Britain. The supremacy of Æthelberht is expressly limited by Bæda (ii. 5) to the English states south of the Humber; “Tertius in regibus gentis Anglorum cunctis australibus eorum provinciis quæ Humbræ fluvio et contiguis ei terminis sequestrantur a borealibus, imperavit.” This excludes all the Celts and also the Northumbrians. And it is worth noting that at least this same extent of dominion is elsewhere (v. 23) attributed by Bæda to Æthelbald of Mercia, whose name does not appear on his list; “Hæ omnes provinciæ [all England east of Severn and Hereford west of it] cæteræque australes ad confinium usque Hymbræ fluminis, cum suis quæque regibus, Merciorum regi Ædilbaldo subjectæ sunt.” On the other hand, the dominion of Eadwine is distinctly said not to have taken in Kent, and it seems implied that it did not take in the Picts and Scots; “Aeduini ... majore potentia cunctis qui Brittaniam incolunt, Anglorum pariter et Brettonum populis præfuit, præter Cantuariis tantum.” Sir Francis Palgrave indeed (ii. cccix.) attributes to Eadwine a dominion over the Picts and Scots. The words of Bæda however seem to me to exclude it; I understand him as attributing to Eadwine a dominion over the Britons only, that is the Welsh (probably of Strathclyde), as distinguished from the Picts and Scots. And the words which follow might seem to imply that Oswiu was the first to extend the power of Northumberland beyond the Forth. After describing the dominion of Eadwine he adds, “Sextus Oswald et ipse Nordanhymbrorum rex Christianissimus, iisdem finibus regnum tenuit; septimus Osuiu frater ejus, æqualibus pene terminis regnum nonnullo tempore coercens, Pictorum quoque atque Scottorum gentes, quæ septemtrionales Brittaniæ fines tenent, maxima ex parte perdomuit ac tributarias fecit.” So afterwards (iii. 24), “Osuiu ... qui gentem Pictorum maxima ex parte regno Anglorum subjecit.” Yet elsewhere (iii. 6) he attributes to Oswald also a dominion over Picts and Scots; “Denique omnes nationes et provincias Brittaniæ, quæ in quatuor linguas, id est Brettonum, Pictorum, Scottorum, et Anglorum, divisæ sunt, in ditione accepit.” It should be remembered that there was a family connexion between the Pictish royal family and that of Bernicia, and the words just quoted might imply a voluntary acceptance of Oswald on the part of the northern tribes. The peculiarity of Ecgberht’s position was that he had received a formal submission from all the English princes in Britain, and that he was able to do what no other Bretwalda had done, to hand on his power to his children. This dominion Eadward and Æthelstan won back and strengthened after the Danish invasion, and extended it over Scotland and Strathclyde. Now begins the use of the Imperial style, and I accordingly go on to give some examples of the various titles assumed by our Kings from Æthelstan to Cnut. One such instance, that in which Æthelstan uses the title of “Brytenwealda,” I have already quoted (see above, p. 367). Among the others I select such as either illustrate the use of the Latin Imperial titles, or which distinctly claim a dominion beyond the English kingdom, or which are remarkable on some other ground. I shall abstain from quoting those which present nothing beyond the mere use of the word Basileus, which is almost as common as Rex. Those which are found in charters marked by Mr. Kemble with an asterisk I mark with an asterisk also.

1. Ego Æðelstanus rex Anglorum per omnipatrantis dexteram totius Britaniæ regni solio sublimatus. Cod. Dipl. ii. 159; cf. v. 193.

*2. Quinto anno ex quo nobilissime gloriosus Rex Anglo-saxones regaliter gubernabat, tertioque postquam authentice Northanhumbrorum Cumbrorumque blanda mirifici conditoris benevolentia patrocinando sceptrinæ gubernaculum perceperat virgæ, ii. 160.

Ego Æþelstan rex et rector totius Britanniæ cæterarumque Deo concedente gubernator provinciarum. ii. 161; cf. v. 215.

*3. Ego Æðelstanus ipsius [altitonantis sc.] munificentia Basileus Anglorum, simul et Imperator regum et nationum infra fines Brittanniæ commorantium. ii. 164.

*4. Ego Æðelstanus divinæ dispensationis providentia tam super Britannicæ gentis quam super aliarum nationum huic subditarum imperium elevatus Rex. ii. 167.

5. Ego Æðelstanus florentis Brytaniæ monarchia præditus rex. ii. 173.

6. Ego Æðelstanus rex monarchus totius Bryttanniæ insulæ, flante Domino. ii. 204.

7. Ego Æþelstanus divina mihi adridente gratia rex Anglorum et curagulus totius Bryttanniæ. ii. 215.

8. Ego Æðelstanus Angulsaxonum rex non modica infulatus sublimatus dignitate. v. 187.

9. Ego Æðelstan, Christo conferente rex et primicerius totius Albionis, regni fastigium humili præsidens animo. v. 201, 204.

10. Ego Æðelstanus, omnicreantis disponente clementia Angligenarum omniumque gentium undique secus habitantium rex. v. 214.

11. Ego Æðelstanus ... favente superno numine Basileus industrius Anglorum cunctarumque gentium in circuitu persistentium. v. 229.

12. Æðelstanus, divina favente clementia, rex Anglorum et æque totius Britanniæ orbis curagulus. v. 231.

*13. Ego Eadmundus divina favente gratia Basyleos Anglorum cæterarumque provinciarum in circuitu persistentium primatum regalis regiminis obtinens. ii. 220.

14. Ego Eadmundus rex Anglorum necnon et Merciorum. ii. 265.

15. Eadmundi regis qui regimina regnorum Angulsaxna et Norðhymbra, Paganorum Brettonumque septem annorum intervallo regaliter gubernabat. ii. 268.

16. Hoc apparet proculdubio in rege Anglorum gloriosissimo beato Dei opere pretio Eadredo, quem Norðhymbra Paganorumque ceu cæterarum sceptro provinciarum rex regum Omnipotens sublimavit, quique præfatus Imperator semper Deo grates dignissimas largâ manu subministrat. ii. 292.

17. Ego Eadred rex divina gratia totius Albionis monarchus et primicerius. ii. 294.

18. Eadredus rex Anglorum, gloriosissimus rectorque, Norþanhymbra et Paganorum Imperator, Brittonumque propugnator, ii. 296.

19. En onomatos cyrion doxa. Al wísdóm ge for Gode ge for werolde is gestaðelad on ðæm hefonlícan goldhorde almæhtiges Godes per Jesum Christum, cooperante gratiâ Spiritûs Sancti. He hafað geweorðad mid cynedóme Angulseaxna Eádred cyning and cásere totius Britanniæ Deo gratias· for ðem weolegað and árað gehádade and lǽwede ða ðe mid rihte magon geærnian. &c., &c. ii. 303.

20. Ego Eadredus Basileos Anglorum hujusque insulæ barbarorum. ii. 305.

21. Ego Eadred gratia Dei Occidentalium Saxonum rex. v. 323.

22. Ego Eadwig industrius Anglorum rex cæterarumque gentium in circuitu persistentium gubernator et rector, primo anno imperii mei. ii. 308; cf. 329, 348.

23. Ego Eadwig divina dispositione gentis Angligenæ et diversarum nationum industrius rex. ii. 316.

24. Ego Eadwig egregius Angulsaxonum Basileus cæterarumque plebium hinc inde habitantium. ii. 318; cf. v. 344, 354.

25. Ego Eadwig totius Albionis insulæ illustrissimus archons. ii. 323; cf. iii. 24.

26. Eadwig numine cœlesti gentis Gewissorum, Orientaliumque necnon Occidentalium etiam Aquilonalium Saxonum archons. ii. 324; cf. v. 349.

27. Eadwi Rex, nutu Dei Angulsæxna et Norðanhumbrorum Imperator, Paganorum gubernator, Breotonumque propugnator, ii. 325.

*28. Anno secundo imperii Eadwiges totius Albionis insulæ imperantis. ii. 341.

29. Ego Eadwi rex omnium gentium huic insulæ cohærentium. v. 341.

30. Ego Eadwig non solum Angul-Saxonum Basileus, verum etiam totius Albionis insulæ gratia Dei sceptro fungens, v. 361.

31. Ego Eadwig imperiali Anglo-Saxonum diademate infulatus, v. 379.

32. Ego Eadwig rex Saxonum. v. 395.

33. Ego Eadgar Britanniæ Anglorum monarchus. ii. 374.

*34. Ego Eadgarus Anglorum Basileus, omniumque regum insularum oceani quæ Britanniam circumjacent, cunctarumque nationum quæ infra eum includuntur Imperator et dominus ... monarchiam totius Angliæ ... Anglorum imperio ... Ego Eadgar Basileus Anglorum et Imperator regum gentium. ii. 404–6.

35. Ic Eádgár cyning éac þurh his [Godes] gife ofer Engla þeóde nú úp árǽred, and he hæfð nú gewẏld tó minum anwealde Scottas and Cumbras and éac swylce Bryttas and eal ðǽt ðis igland him on innan hæfd. iii. 59.

36. Ego Eadgar divina allubescente gratia totius Albionis Imperator Augustus. iii. 64.

*37. Signum Eadgari et serenissimi Anglorum Imperatoris. iii. 109.

38. Ego Eadgar gratia Dei rex Merciorum cæterarumque circumquaque nationum. vi. 3.

39. Ego Eadgarus gentis Anglorum et barbarorum atque gentilium Rex ac prædux. vi. 69.

*40. Ego Æðelred Dei gratia Anglorum rex imperiosus. iii. 204.

*41. Ego Æðelredus famosus totius Brittannicæ insulæ Imperator. iii. 251.

42. Ego Æðelredus totius Albionis Dei providentia Imperator. iii. 290.

43. Ego Æþelred rex totius insulæ. Ego Æþelred rex et rector angul sexna. iii. 316, 317.

44. Ego Æðelred gentis gubernator Angligenæ totiusque insulæ corregulus Britannicæ et cæterarum insularum in circuitu adjacentium. iii. 323.

45. Ego Æðelredus ipsius [celsitonantis Dei] opitulante gratia Brittaniarum Rex. iii. 337.

*46. Ego Æðelredus Anglorum Induperator.

Ic Æðelred mid Godes gyfe Angelþeóde cyning and wealdend eác óðra iglanda ðe hér ábútan licgað. iii. 348.

*47. Ego gratia summi Tonantis Angligenûm, Orcadarum, necne in gyro jacentium monarchus Æðelredus. iii. 346.

*48. Ego Æðelredus totius Britanniæ Induperator. iii. 355.

49. Prædicta Augusta [Ælgifu-Emma]. iii. 358.

*50. Æðelred rex Anglo-Saxoniæ atque Norðhymbrensis gubernator monarchiæ, paganorumque propugnator, ac Bretonum cæterarumque provinciarum Imperator. vi. 166.

51. Æðelredus, gratia Dei sublimatus rex et monarchus totius Albionis. vi. 167.

52. Ego Cnut totius Britanniæ monarchus. vi. 179.

53. Ego Imperator Knuto, a Christo Rege regum regiminis Anglici in insula potitus. iv. 1.

54. Ego Knut telluris Britanniæ totius largiflua Dei gratia subpetente subthronizatus rex ac rector. iv. 7.

55. Ego Cnut Basileon Angelsaxonum disponente clementia creantis. iv. 18.

*56. Ic Cnut þurh Godes geve Ænglelandes kining and ealre ðáre eglande ðe ðǽrtó licgeð. iv. 23.

57. Ego Cnut rex totius Albionis cæterarumque gentium triviatim persistentium Basileus. iv. 35.

58. Ego Cnut, misericordia Dei Basileus, omnis Britaniæ regimen adeptus. iv. 45.

Of these forms, Nos. 10, 11, 13 are used over and over again with various slight changes. The forms “totius Britanniæ” or “Albionis rex” or “Basileus” occur constantly. They are distinctly more common than the simple “Anglorum rex.” “Anglorum Basileus” and forms to the like effect are also common. In fact a charter which does not in one way or the other assert a dominion beyond the simple royalty of the English nation is rather the exception. On the other hand we now and then, as in Nos. 21, 32, come upon forms which are startling from their very simplicity. No. 32, I suppose, belongs to the days when Eadwig was reduced to the kingdom of Wessex. Meanwhile Eadgar in his Mercian charter, No. 38, seems to claim, what doubtless was the case, the external dominion of the crown as belonging to himself rather than to his West-Saxon brother. Nos. 14, 15, 16, 18, 27, 50 are remarkable for the use of the word “Angli” and “Angulseaxe” in a sense excluding Northumberland. In No. 14 indeed “Angli” excludes the Mercians. It might be almost rendered “Saxons.” So completely had “Anglus” become the national name, even in the most purely Saxon parts of the country.

Some of these titles call for some special notice. Brytenwealda I have already spoken of. No. 19 is remarkable as the only one in which the title of Cæsar occurs in any shape. Casere is the regular English description of the continental Emperors, but I know no other instance of its application to an English King. (Perhaps the most striking instance of its use is where Alfred in his Boetius calls Odysseus “án cyning þæs nama Aulixes, se hæfde twa þioda under þam kasere ... and þæs kaseres nama wæs Agamemnon.”) This solitary English use of the word is a remarkable contrast to the fact that Kaiser altogether displaced König as the title of the German sovereign. In fact none of these titles ever came into common use, even in Latin, much less in English. Basileus, so common in charters, is very rare anywhere else. It occurs twice in Florence, once (975) where Eadgar is called “Anglici orbis Basileus,” and again (1016) where Eadric at Sherstone is made to talk of “dominus vester Eadmundus Basileus;” and once in the Ramsey History, c. 87, where the writer speaks of “Ædgari victoriosissimi Anglorum Basilei munificentia regalis.” Imperator, less rare than Cæsar, is less usual than Basileus. Prædux in No. 39 reminds one of the ducatus of Bæda and of Ecgberht’s charters (see above, p. 551). The oddest titles of all are Primicerius and Curagulus or Coregulus. Probably Curagulus means caretaker, but with the idea of Rex or Regulus floating in the mind of the scribe, which accounts for the spelling Coregulus. I am uncertain whether the words monarchus, monarchia, are to be reckoned as strictly Imperial. They are so used by Dante in his famous treatise “De Monarchia;” but it is clear that they have no such special meaning in the rhetoric of Dudo. They may have been used with equal vagueness in the kindred rhetoric of our charters. Thus for instance in a doubtful grant of Eadgar, dated 958, in possession of the Chapter of Wells, Eadgar is made to call himself “Rex Merciorum et Norðanhymbrorum atque Brettonum;” and afterwards, “divina favente gratia totius regni Merciorum monarchiam obtinens.”

That of these titles Casere, Basileus, and Imperator are meant to be Imperial in the strictest sense I have no doubt. If the title of Basileus stood alone, it might possibly be merely an instance of the prevalent fondness for Greek titles; the King might be called Basileus only in the same vague way in which his Ealdormen are called satrapæ and archontes. Yet even this would be unlikely; satrapa and archon were not established titles, assumed by a single potentate in a special sense, and which the diplomacy of the age confined to that potentate. But Basileus was simply Greek for Imperator. To be addressed as Imperator and Basileus by the ambassadors of Nikêphoros (Einhard, an. 812. “Laudes et dixerunt, Imperatorem eum et Basileum appellantes”) is reckoned among the most brilliant triumphs of Charles the Great. It was the formal acknowledgment of the claims of the Western Cæsar at the hands of his Eastern colleague or rival. So, later in the ninth century, the title of Basileus became the subject of a curious diplomatic controversy between the rival claimants of the dignity which it denoted, Basil of the New, and Lewis of the Old, Rome, and the Western disputant went very deep into the matter indeed. (See the letter of Lewis, “Imperator Augustus Romanorum,” to Basil, “æque Imperator Novæ Romæ,” in the Chronicle of Salerno, cap. 93 et seqq.; Muratori, t. ii. p. ii. p. 243. See Comparative Politics, 49, 353.) So Liudprand (Legatio, c. 2) complains that the Nikêphoros of his day refused the title to Otto; “Ipse enim vos non Imperatorem, id est βασιλέα sua lingua, sed ob indignationem ῥῆγα, id est Regem nostra vocabat.” So late as John Kinnamos, lib. v. 9 (pp. 228, 229, ed. Bonn), Frederick Barbarossa is only ῥὴξ Ἀλαμανῶν; the Eastern Emperor alone is βασιλεύς and αὐτοκράτωρ. That the titles Casere and Imperator are strictly Imperial hardly needs proof; the only question is whether we are to look for a strictly Imperial meaning in every instance of the use of the noun imperium and the verb imperare.

The use of Basileus seems more common in England than anywhere else; yet we find it in Abbo (i. 43) of Charles the Third;

“Urbs mandata fuit Karolo nobis Basileo,

Imperio cujus regitur totus prope kosmus,

Post Dominum, regem dominatoremque potentem.”

Imperator (see Ducange, in voc.) seems to have been used by several Kings of Castile, on precisely the same ground on which it was used in England, namely that they were Emperors, independent of Rome or Byzantium, but holding an Imperial power over princes within their own peninsula. So Robert de Monte, 1153 (Pertz, vi. 503), “Quia principatur regulis Arragonum et Galliciæ, Imperatorem Hispaniarum appellant.” The West-Frankish and French instances which Ducange quotes seem very doubtful. Charles the Bald, it must be remembered, really was Emperor in his last years. The oddest thing of all is the fact that the Saxon Kings Henry and Otto were saluted Imperator by their soldiers in the sense of the days of the Roman Republic. See Widukind, i. 39; iii. 49. Henry was “pater patriæ, rerum dominus et Imperator ab exercitu appellatus;” Otto “triumpho celebri rex factus gloriosus, ab exercitu pater patriæ Imperatorque appellatus est.” (See p. 143.) In this sense not only Cæsar, but Cicero also was Emperor. Perhaps the strangest description of all is that of Charles the Fat in Will. Malms. ii. 111, “Ego Karolus imperator, gratuito Dei dono rex Germanorum et patricius Romanorum, atque imperator Francorum.”

It is worth noticing that, though some of the most distinctly Imperial descriptions are found in charters whose genuineness is undoubted, yet the proportion of them which are found in doubtful or spurious charters is remarkably large. This fact in no way tells against the Imperial theory, but rather in its favour. A forger will naturally reproduce whatever he thinks most characteristic of the class of documents which he is imitating; but, in so doing, he is likely somewhat to overdo matters. A forger, thus attempting to copy the style of a charter of Eadgar or Æthelred, perhaps actually reproducing a genuine charter from memory, would naturally fill his composition with the most high-sounding of all the titles that he had ever seen in any genuine charter. The most purely Imperial style would thus find its way into forgeries in greater abundance than into genuine charters. Still the spurious documents are, in this way, evidence just as much as the genuine ones. The doubtful and spurious charters have therefore a certain value; their formulæ are part of the case, and I have not scrupled to add them to my list.

With regard to the assertion of the Imperial character of English royalty in later times, the doubtful title of “monarcha” or “monarches” still goes on. Thus in the charter of William Rufus to John of Tours, preserved in manuscript at Wells, the King is described as “Willelmus Willelmi regis filius, Dei dispositione monarches Britanniæ.” So, long after, in a letter from Henry the Sixth to James the Second of Scotland (correspondence of Thomas Bekynton, ii. 141), the English King is made to say, “verum et notorium est supremum jus et directum dominium regni Scotiæ ad regem Angliæ utpote totius Britanniæ monarcham de jure pertinere.” So in i. 119 of the same collection, where Henry the Sixth petitions Pope Eugenius the Fourth for the canonization of Ælfred, the West-Saxon King is described as “Sanctus et Deo devotissimus rex Aluredus, qui incliti regni Angliæ primus monarcha erat.” It was also held necessary at various times to deny any superiority of the continental Emperors over England. Thus it was declared in Edward the Second’s reign (1330), “Quod regnum Angliæ ab omni subjectione Imperiali sit liberrimum” (Selden, Titles of Honour, p. 21. b. i. c. 2). And in 1416 a renunciation of all supremacy was required from Sigismund, King of the Romans, before he was allowed to land in England (see Selden, u. s.; Lingard, iii. 505; Bryce, 207. But the account in Redman, p. 49, and Elmham, Liber. Metr. p. 133, is much less explicit). So late as Elizabeth’s reign, Sir Thomas Smith, in his Commonwealth of England (10), describing the union of the English kingdoms into one, goes on to explain that “neither anyone of those Kings, neither he who first had all, tooke any investiture at the hands of the Emperor of Rome, or of any other superiour or forraine Prince, but held of God to himselfe, and by his sword, his people, and crowne, acknowledging no Prince in earth his superiour, and so it is kept and holden at this day.” But beside this denial of all Imperial supremacy anywhere else, we also find the Imperial character of our sovereigns from Edward the First to Elizabeth from time to time directly asserted. Thus there are two cases in which the title of Emperor is given to Edward the First, in both cases with distinct reference to his supremacy over Scotland. The elder Robert Bruce (Palgrave, Documents, p. 29) claimed the kingdom from Edward the First as Emperor. “Sire Robert de Brus ... prie a nostre Seignur le Rey, come son sovereyn Seigneur e son Empeur.” So when the question is raised whether the controversy between the candidates for the Scottish crown should be judged by the Imperial law or by any other, one of the Prelates consulted (“episcopus Bibliensis,” perhaps a Bishop of Byblos in partibus) answers that the King of England must follow the law of his own realm because “he is Emperor here” (Rishanger, Riley, p. 255). “Dixit quod dominus rex secundum leges per quas judicat subjectos suos debet procedere in casu isto, quia hic censetur Imperator.” So Professor Stubbs (Const. Hist. ii. 491) quotes a statute of 1397 in which Richard the Second is described as “entier emperour de son roialme.” The title is also challenged for Henry the Fifth in a negociation at the siege of Rouen. In the riming Chronicle of John Page (Historical Collections of a Citizen of London, Camden Society, 1876) an English knight is made to say of his own King,

“And he ys kyng excellent,

And unto non othyr obedyent,

That levythe here in erthe be ryght,

But only unto God almyght,

With-yn hys owne Emperoure,

And also kyng and conqueroure.”

In Henry the Eighth’s time the words “Empire” and “Imperial Crown” are constantly used in a way which cannot fail to be of set purpose. The Statute of Appeals of 1537, in renouncing all jurisdiction on the part of the Roman Pontiff, clothed the renunciation in words whose force can hardly be misunderstood, and which seem designed expressly to exclude the supremacy of the Roman Cæsar as well. The emphatic words run thus; “Whereas by divers and sundry old authentic histories and chronicles, it is manifestly declared and expressed that this realm of England is an Empire, and so hath been accepted in the world; governed by one supreme head and King, having the dignity and royal estate of the Imperial Crown of the same ... without restraint, or provocation to any foreign prince or potentate of the world.” So again, “to keep it from the annoyance as well of the See of Rome as from the authority of other foreign potentates attempting the diminution or violation thereof” (Selden, p. 18; Froude, Hist. Eng. i. 410–412). In an Irish Act of the same reign a further step is taken, and the King is distinctly spoken of as Emperor. As Selden (u. s.) puts it, “The Crown of England in other Parliaments of later times is titled the Imperial Crown; the Kings of England being also in the express words of an Irish Parliament titled Kings and Emperours of the Realm of England and of the Land of Ireland, and that before the title of Lord of Ireland was allied with King.” As for Elizabeth, at her coronation her herald formally proclaimed her as “most worthy Empress from the Orcade isles to the mountains Pyrenee.” (See Strickland’s Life of Elizabeth, p. 166, where a very strange interpretation is put on the words.) “The mountains Pyrenee” are a flourish which seems to have come from the days of Henry the Second, when Gilbert Foliot (Ralph of Diss, X Scriptt. 542) speaks of “dominationis suæ loca quæ ab boreali oceano Pirenæum usque porrecta sunt.” (So William of Newburgh, i. 94.) And the special mention of the “Orcade isles” might seem to come out of a charter of Æthelred (Cod. Dipl. iii. 346); “Angligenum, Orcadarum necne in gyro jacentium monarchus.” So in 1559, in the debate on restoring to the Crown the ecclesiastical jurisdiction surrendered under Mary, those who opposed Elizabeth’s spiritual claims still pointedly admitted her Imperial position in temporal matters. Archbishop Heath says, “She being our Sovereign Lord and Lady, our King and Queen, our Emperor and Empress, other Kings and Princes of duty ought to pay tribute unto her, she being free from them all” (Strype’s Annals, I. Append. No. 6). And in the first English translation of Camden’s Britannia (London, 1625), the title of the book is given as “The true and Royall history of the famous Empresse Elizabeth, Queen of England.”

Lastly, a pamphlet was published in 1706, when the Union with Scotland was under debate, headed, “The Queen an Empress, and her three kingdoms an Empire,” proposing a curious scheme for a British Empire, with subordinate Kings, Princes, and a Patriarch of London. It is of course an imitation of the constitution of the Empire, but the writer refers once or twice to the days of Eadgar for precedents.

The Imperial position of the English King seemed naturally (see p. 134) to carry with it the Papal position of the English Primate. Britain is another world, a world beyond the sea, distinct from the “orbis Romanus.” On this head I have collected a good many extracts in Comparative Politics, 351. So Eumenius Constantio, Pan. Vet. v. 11; “Quam Cæsar, ille auctor vestri nominis, eum Romanorum primus intrasset, alium se orbem terrarum scripsit reperisse, tantæ magnitudinis arbitratus, ut non circumfusa oceano sed complexa ipsum oceanum videretur.” (Cf. R. de Diceto, i. 438, ed. Stubbs.) As another world then, Britain is entitled to its own Cæsar, “mundi dominus” within his own four seas, and no less to its own Pontiff. As Florence (see above, p. 559) calls Eadgar “Anglici orbis Basileus,” and as in No. 12 of our extracts we heard of “totius Britanniæ orbis,” evidently in this sense, so Pope Urban (Eadmer, Vit. Ans. ii. c. 4) salutes Anselm with an analogous title, as “comparem vel ut alterius orbis apostolicum et patriarcham jure venerandum,” or as William of Malmesbury (Gest. Pont. ap. Scriptt. p. Bed. 127) puts it still more strongly, “Includamus hunc in orbe nostro, quasi alterius orbis papam.” The same idea, one degree less strongly expressed, is found in William of Jumièges’ (vi. 9) description of Lanfranc as “gentium transmarinarum summus pontifex.” This of course connects itself with the not uncommon description of England and the English King as “partes transmarinæ,” “rex transmarinus,” &c. See for instance Flodoard, A. 945. So, on the other side, in the Fulda Annals, 876 (Pertz, i. 389), “Karolus ... ablato regis nomine, se Imperatorem et Augustum omnium regem cis mare consistentium appellare præcepit.”

I have thus, I trust, brought together quite evidence enough to show what was the meaning and purpose of the Imperial style which was anciently adopted by our Kings, and distinct traces of which still survive in more than one familiar expression to this day. I do not doubt that other scholars, in their several lines of study, must often light on other passages bearing on the subject. I will wind up with one more, not the least remarkable of the number, that in which Abbot Baldric, the poetical panegyrist of the great men of his day, describes (Duchesne, Rer. Franc. Scriptt. iv. 257) the great William as one

“Qui dux Normannis, qui Cæsar præfuit Anglis.”

NOTE C. p. 30.
The Early Relations between England and the Continent.

The notices of Britain between the time of the English Conquest and the conversion of the English to Christianity are indeed few and far between. They are chiefly to be found in an episode of Prokopios (Bell. Goth. iv. 20), from which I have made two quotations in the text (pp. 22, 30). That the Brittia of Prokopios is Britain, and not, as Dr. Latham (Dict. Geog., art. Britannicæ Insulæ) fancies, Heligoland, Rugen, or some other island, I have no kind of doubt, and Mr. Kemble seems not to have entertained any. The difficulty is what his Brettania is. It strikes me that he had heard both of the continental and the insular Britannia, and that he fancied them to be two islands. His Brittia therefore is Britain and his Brettania is Britanny. (Cf. Zeuss, Die Deutschen, 362; “Βριττία, Britannia, und Βριταννία, Hibernia, wahrscheinlich durch Vermengung mit Britannia cismarina, Bretagne.”) John Kinnamos (ii. 12, p. 67 ed. Bonn), ranks Βρίττιοι καὶ Βρετανοί among the Crusaders. Allowing for the primary error of fancying Britanny to be an island, his geographical description is really not so monstrous as might be thought. His well-known story about the souls of the dead being ferried over to Brittia, and his confused and marvellous account of the Roman wall, show how strange and mysterious a land Britain had already become. But the two passages which I have quoted are distinct and intelligible. For an island inhabited by Angles, Frisians, and Britons we need not go far afield.

Prokopios tells us nothing of the process by which these three nations came into the island. There is, as far as I know, only one foreign notice of the English Conquest, which is however probably contemporary with one stage or another of it. This is in the Chronicon Imperiale of Prosper (see Dict. Biog. and Potthast’s Wegweiser in Prosper), written either in the fifth or in the sixth century. Here we have two entries (Duchesne, Rer. Franc. Scriptt. i. 198, 199; M. H. B. lxxxii.); the former saying that “hac tempestate [the time of Constantine the Tyrant, 407–411; cf. Zôsimos, vi. 5], præ valitudine Romanorum, vires funditus attenuatæ Britanniæ.” The other says that, some time before the death of Aëtius in 454, “Britanniæ usque ad hoc tempus variis cladibus eventibusque laceratæ, in ditionem Saxonum rediguntur.” I am however not sure that Prokopios has not a dark and confused allusion to the Armorican migration when he speaks of vast numbers of people coming from Britain to settle in the land of the Franks, on the strength of which it was that the Frankish Kings claimed the dominion of the island (τοσαύτη ἡ τῶνδε τῶν ἐθνῶν πολυανθρωπία φαίνεται οὖσα ὥστε ἀνὰ πᾶν ἔτος κατὰ πολλοὺς ἐνθένδε μετανιστάμενοι ξὺν γυναιξὶ καὶ παισὶν ἐς Φράγγους χωροῦσιν. οἱ δὲ αὐτοὺς ἐνοικίζουσιν ἐν γῆς τῆς σφετέρας τὴν ἐρημοτέραν δοκοῦσαν εἶναι, καὶ ἀπ’ αὐτοῦ τὴν νῆσον προσποιεῖσθαί φασιν). In an earlier passage Prokopios makes Belisarios (ii. 6) make the Goths the offer of Bretannia as an island much larger than Sicily. This is evidently in mockery, and it seems to imply that both Britain and Britanny were looked on as lands which had quite passed out of all practical reckoning on the part of the Empire.

Prokopios goes on, in the same chapter, to tell a long story, which is discussed by Mr. Kemble (Saxons in England, i. 23; cf. Zeuss, Die Deutschen, 362), of an English princess (παρθένου κόρης, γένους Βριττίας ... ἧσπερ ἀδελφὸς βασιλεὺς ἦν τότε Ἀγγίλων τοῦ ἔθνους), who was betrothed to Radiger, son of the King of the Varni, who, on his father’s death, instead of fulfilling his engagement, married his father’s widow, a sister of Theodberht, King of the Franks, who reigned from 534 to 537. The incestuous marriage, which was repeated in after days by Eadbald of Kent and Æthelbald of Wessex, is expressly said to have been contracted in obedience to the dying commands of Radiger’s father (cf. Soph. Trach. 1199–1207), by the advice of his chief men, and in conformity with the custom of the nation (καθάπερ ὁ πάτριος ἡμῖν ἐφίησι νόμος). The English princess however gathers a vast fleet and army, takes with her one of her brothers, not the King, as its commander, sails to the mouth of the Rhine, fights a battle, defeats Radiger, and compels him to send away his step-mother and marry her. The tale, which is told in great detail, is doubtless mythical in its details; but we may, with Mr. Kemble, accept it as pointing to the possibility of some intercourse, both peaceful and warlike, between the insular and the continental Teutons. But I cannot follow Mr. Kemble when he goes on (i. 25) to build up, on the expressions of a German ecclesiastical writer, a theory of insular Saxons aiding the Frank Theodoric in a war with the Thuringians. The author of the Translation of Saint Alexander (Pertz, ii. 674) is not speaking of any particular detachment of Saxons from Britain coming over to Germany to take a part in a particular war. By a strange perversion, this writer of the ninth century derives the continental Saxons, as a nation, from the English in Britain; “Saxonum gens, sicut tradit antiquitas, ab Anglis Britanniæ incolis egressa, per Oceanum navigans Germaniæ litoribus studio et necessitate quærendarum sedium appulsa est.” On this the editor remarks, “More solito traditio res gestas invertit, ita ut Saxones non e Saxonia Britanniam, sed ex Britannia Saxoniam appulisse dicantur.” The legend is no doubt a corruption of the legendary origin of the Saxons given by Widukind, i. 3–6. On the sense in which the English had a better right to the name of “Old-Saxons” than the Saxons on the continent, see Zeuss, Die Deutschen, 188.

It is worth remarking that Jordanes, though he devotes his second chapter to a description of Britain, simply gives an account patched up from Cæsar, Livy, Strabo, and Dio, and seems to describe the Britons as still the inhabitants of the island, without any reference to the settlement of the English. He makes another reference to Britain in his fifth chapter, but it is of a purely mythical kind.

I doubt whether there is any mention of England in Gregory of Tours, except in the two passages where he records the marriage of Æthelberht with the daughter of Chariberht. He does not use the words Saxon, Angle, or Britain, but he speaks of Kent as if the name were familiarly known. “Charibertus ... filiam habuit quæ postea in Cantiam, virum accipiens, est deducta” (iv. 26). So afterwards (ix. 26) he speaks of “filiam unicam quam in Cantia regis cujusdam filius matrimonio copulavit.”

Coming down later among continental writers, there is a well known passage in the Annals of Einhard (A. 786) in which he speaks of the English Conquest and of the Armorican migration as its consequence. Charles leads his army “in Brittanniam cismarinam,” and the Annalist goes on to explain; “Nam quum ab Anglis ac Saxonibus Brittannia insula fuisset invasa, magna pars incolarum ejus mare trajiciens in ultimis Galliæ finibus Venetorum et Coriosolitarum regiones occupavit.” There is another mention of the Armorican migration in Ermoldus Nigellus, iii. 11 (Pertz, ii. 490). Lantpreht (Lambert), whose command lies in Britanny, is thus described;

“Prævidet hic fines, quos olim gens inimica

Trans mare lintre volans ceperat insidiis.

Hic populus veniens supremo ex orbe Britanni,

Quos modo Brittones Francica lingua vocat.

Nam telluris egens, vento jactatus et imbri,

Arva capit prorsus, atque tributa parat.

Tempore nempe illo hoc rus quoque Gallus habebat,

Quando idem populus fluctibus actus adest.”

On the whole it would seem that a certain amount of intercourse was kept up between the Franks in Gaul and the Southern English states, but that to the world in general Britain had become an unknown land about which any fables might be put forth.

NOTE D. p. 38.
The Relations of Charles the Great with Mercia and Northumberland.

All the passages bearing on the relations of Charles the Great with Mercia, Northumberland, and Scotland are collected by Sir Francis Palgrave, English Commonwealth, i. 484 et seqq. The cream of the matter is contained in the account given by Einhard, A. 808; “Interea rex Nordanhumbrorum de Brittania insula, nomine Eardulf, regno et patria pulsus, ad Imperatorem dum adhuc Noviomagi moraretur venit, et patefacto adventûs sui negotio, Romam proficiscitur Romaque rediens, per legatos Romani pontificis et domni Imperatoris in regnum suum reducitur.” One of the legates was “Aldulfus diaconus de ipsa Brittania, natione Saxo,” spoken of in p. 534. That Eardwulf became the man of Charles there seems no doubt. Pope Leo says “vester semper fidelis exstitit.” The submission of the Scots is also mentioned by Einhard in the Life of Charles, c. 16; “Scotorum quoque reges sic habuit ad suam voluntatem per munificentiam inclinatos, ut eum numquam aliter nisi dominum, seque subditos et servos ejus, pronunciarent.” One would suppose that the Scots both of Ireland and of Britain are included. This mention of the Scots comes between the dealings of Charles with Alfonso of Gallicia and those with Haroun al Rashid. The relation both of the Scots and of the Northumbrians seems to have been a relation of commendation, a term on which I shall presently have much to say. The Scots doing homage to Charles on account of his gifts is not unlike the homage which we shall find done by certain French princes to Eadward the Confessor.

The relations between Charles and Offa, and their temporary difference, are also fully explained in the passages collected by Sir Francis Palgrave. A number of important letters will be found in Haddan and Stubbs, Councils and Ecclesiastical Documents, iii. 486 et seqq.; Jaffé, Monumenta Alcuiniana, 155, 167, 290, et al. There is a long mythical account of it in the Vita Offæ Secundi, pp. 13 et seqq. From thence Sir F. Palgrave quotes the story that Archbishop Janberht had promised to admit a Frankish army into England (Vita Offæ, 21). This is doubtless a good deal exaggerated, but notice should be taken of a very remarkable expression in the account given in Cod. Dipl. i. 281 of the relations between Offa’s successor Cenwulf and Archbishop Wulfred. It is plain that a deep impression had been made on the minds of Englishmen by the dealings of Charles in the matters of Eardwulf, Ealhwine, and Janberht; “Tunc in eodem concilio cum maxima districtione illi episcopo mandavit quod omnibus rebus quæ illius dominationis sunt dispoliatus debuisset fieri, omnique de patria ista esse profugus, et numquam nec verbis domni Papæ nec Cæsaris seu alterius alicujus gradu huc in patriam iterum recipisse.” Cenwulf clearly held that neither the Bishop of Rome nor the Emperor of Rome either had any jurisdiction in his realm of Mercia. The odd description of Offa as the Western and Charles as the Eastern potentate comes from a very suspicious source, namely the Life of Offa, p. 21; “Ego Karolus regum Christianorum orientalium potentissimus, vos, O Offane, regum occidentalium Christianorum potentissime, cupio lætificare,” &c. But the expression is singular enough to be worth quoting, if only on account of its very singularity, as it is the sort of thing which one can hardly fancy a forger inventing.

The influence of Charles in English affairs is strangely exaggerated in a passage of John of Wallingford (Gale, 529); “Rex Pipinus obiit regni ejus anno xii. Successitque Karolus filius ejus anno ab Incarnatione Domini DCCLXIX. Porro iste, sicut alia regna, sic et Angliam tempore hujus regis Offæ sibi subegit.”

The description of Offa in the Chronicle of Saint Wandrille (Pertz, ii. 291) as “Rex Anglorum sive Merciorum potentissimus” should be noticed.

NOTE E. p. 48.
The Changes in Nomenclature produced by the Danish Settlement.

Mr. Kemble has gone (Saxons in England, i. 77–84) very minutely into the subject of the old divisions of England, and he has collected a great number of names, some of which can be easily identified, while others can only be guessed at and some are quite hopeless. But it is plain (see Kemble, i. 78, 79) that the West-Saxon names, Wilsætas, Sumorsætas, Dornsætas, are all older than Ælfred’s time, while the names of the present Mercian shires are later than Ælfred, and have supplanted earlier names, as appears from Mr. Kemble’s list of old Mercian shires (i. 81), some of which are quite unintelligible. One or two very obvious instances will be enough for my purpose. Thus the principality of the Hwiccas has long formed two whole shires, Worcester and Gloucester, and part of another, Warwick. The Magesætas seem to be divided between Herefordshire and Shropshire. Lincolnshire contains several principalities, Gainas, Lindisfaras, &c., but the traces of their original independence are not wholly lost even at the present day.

In Wessex most of the shires, Berkshire, Somerset, Dorset, Devonshire, are clearly not called from towns. Somerset and Dorset have cognate towns in Somerton and Dorchester; but they are merely cognate; the shire is not called after the town. But Hampshire, the County of Southampton, is simply Hamtunscír, from the town of Hampton. Hampshire was the first conquest; no doubt it had originally no local name like the other shires, but was simply Westseaxe or Westseaxnarice. When therefore it became a mere shire, it had to take a new name, and was named from the town. It may be asked why the shire which contained the capital was called from the town of Hampton and not from the royal city of Winchester. I can only suggest that some prerogative of the crown or some privilege of the citizens may have kept the capital more distant from the body of the shire than Hampton was.

Wiltshire is a case intermediate between Hampshire and Somerset. The Wilsætas are a tribe, and have their chief town Wilton. But the form Wiltunscír shows that the shire is immediately called from the town, whence the t in the modern form Wiltshire.

In Mercia, on the other hand, all the shires are now called from towns with one, perhaps two exceptions. Shropshire seems to be rather cognate with Shrewsbury than directly derived from it, and alongside of Scrobbesbyrigscír the Scrobsœtas continue to be heard of. Rutland, at once the smallest and the most modern of Mercian shires, is, oddly enough, the only one which has a distinct territorial name, not even cognate with that of any town. Rutland, as a distinct shire, is later than Domesday, where it appears, strangely enough, as a kind of appendage to Nottingham. How it gained the rank of a shire, while the adjoining and larger district of Holland did not, would be an interesting question for local antiquaries.

I have no doubt that the Mercian shires were mapped out afresh after the reconquest. That the redistribution was not made by the Danish invaders is plain from the fact that the boundary laid down between Guthrum and Ælfred is not attended to in marking out the divisions of the shires. We may conceive that the work was begun by Ælfred, or rather perhaps by Æthelred and Æthelflæd in that part of Mercia which was assigned to them by the peace with Guthrum, and that it was further carried on by Eadward the Elder after the recovery of Danish Mercia. In this we may see the groundwork of the legendary belief that Ælfred first divided England into shires and hundreds. With the shires within his own kingdom there was no need to meddle. Gneist (Englische Verwaltungsrecht, i. 56) enlarges on the share of Ælfred in this matter, but leaves out Eadward.

As for the nomenclature of towns and villages, it would seem that places were more commonly named directly after individuals in the course of the Danish Conquest than they had been by the earlier English occupiers. At least, among the names given during the English occupation, those which are formed from the proper name itself are less common than those which are formed from the patronymic ending in -ing. These last again raise the question, how far they are called after historical individuals and how far they are tribe-names called after some mythical patriarch. This last view will be found discussed at length by Kemble, Saxons in England, i. 59 and Appendix A. (See also Comparative Politics, 395.) Names like Tooting, Bensington, Gillingham, give the typical forms. On the other hand (see Kemble’s note, p. 60), it should be remembered that this familiar form ing, being so familiar, has often swallowed up others; thus Ethandún, Æbbandún, Huntandún, forms of quite different origin, have been corrupted into Edington, Abingdon, Huntingdon. Birmingham again has been thought to to be a corruption of Bromicham, but Mr. Kemble (i. 457) admits it as a genuine patronymic from the Beormingas. On the other hand, Glæstingabyrig, a genuine patronymic, has been corrupted into Glastonbury, and a wrong derivation given to the name.

An exact parallel to the Danish system of nomenclature is supplied by a later and less known, though very remarkable, settlement of the same kind, the Flemish occupation of Pembrokeshire in the twelfth century. The villages in the Teutonic part of that county bear names exactly analogous to those of Lincolnshire, only ending in the English ton instead of the Danish by. Such are Johnston, Williamston, Herbrandston, and a crowd of others.

NOTE F. p. 54.
Æthelred and Æthelflæd of Mercia.

The Chronicles speak of Æthelred as Ealdorman of that part of Mercia which was kept by Ælfred, in 886, when London was entrusted to his keeping. See also the extract from Asser in Florence, where he is described as “Merciorum comes.” He married Ælfred’s daughter Æthelflæd, and he appears, even in the older state of things in Mercia, to have held a special position under Burhred, as in a charter in Cod. Dipl. ii. 99, confirmed by “Burhred rex Merciorum,” he describes himself as “Æðelred Deo adjuvante Merciorum dux,” a title which suggests those of “Francorum” and “Anglorum dux.” His reappointment by Ælfred must have been one of the King’s first acts after the peace with Guthrum, as we find a charter of his of the year 880 in Cod. Dipl. ii. 107, in which his style runs thus; “Ego Æðelred, gratia Domini largiflua concedente, dux et patricius gentis Merciorum cum licentia et impositione manûs Ælfredi regis, una cum testimonio et consensu seniorum ejusdem gentis episcoporum vel principum, pro redemptione animarum nostrarum et pro sospitate necnon et stabilitate regni Merciorum.” So in a charter of 883 (Cod. Dipl. ii. 110), which begins in Latin and goes on in English, and which even in the English part comes nearer than usual to the inflated style of the Latin documents; “Ic Æðelræd ealdorman inbyrdendre Godes gefe gewelegod and gewlenced mid sume dæle Mercna rices ... mid Ælfredes cyninges leafe and gewitnesse, and mid ealra Myrcna witena godcundra hada and woroldcundra.” The words “sume dæle” seem to mark Æthelred as holding a smaller territorial jurisdiction under Ælfred than he had held under Burhred, and the formula reminds one of Cnut’s style (Florence 1031); “Rex totius Angliæ et Denemarciæ et Norreganorum et partis Suanorum.” Mercia however is still a kingdom, like Ireland up to 1801, and Æthelred looks very like a Lord Lieutenant holding an Irish Parliament. Heming’s Worcester Cartulary (93) records another Mercian Gemót held by Æthelred; “Þa ðe gere gebeon Æðelred alderman alle Mercna weotan to somne to Gleaweceastre biscopas and aldermen and all his duguðe, and þæt dyde be Ælfredes cyninges gewitnesse and leafe.”

The position of Æthelred in Mercia is thus described by William of Malmesbury (ii. 125); “Ille [Elfredus] duo regna Merciorum et West-Saxonum conjunxerit, Merciorum nomine tenus, quippe commendatum duci Etheredo, tenens.” He had already said (ii. 121), “Londoniam, caput regni Merciorum [“caput regni, Merciorum”?] cuidam primario Etheredo in fidelitatem suam cum filia Ethelflædi concessit.” This use of “regnum” is like the use of the same word as applied to Bavaria under the Agilolfing Dukes. (See Waitz, iii. 302.)

It may perhaps be thought that Æthelred and the Lady felt themselves more nearly on an equality with their brother than they had done with their father; at least in a charter of 901 (Cod. Dipl. ii. 136) they seem to assume a more royal style; “Æðelred Æð[elflædque o]pitulante gratuita Dei gratia monarchiam Merciorum tenentes honorificeque gubernantes et defendentes.” And it may be a sign of a higher rank that Æthelred, who in Ælfred’s time (as in 886) is called only Ealdorman, in Eadward’s reign is twice called “Myrcna hlaford” in the Chronicles. One time is in 911, when his death is recorded (though he is called “Ealdorman” in other entries of the same event), and again in 919, when his daughter Ælfwyn is spoken of. Florence too in 912 calls him “dux et patricius, dominus et subregulus Merciorum;” and again in 919, “subregulus.” This last title he also gives him in Ælfred’s time in 894, but in 886 he is only “comes.” However this may be, in another charter of 904 (Cod. Dipl. ii. 148), granted to a subordinate Ealdorman Æthelfrith, the supremacy of Eadward is distinctly recognized; “prædictus dux rogavit Eaduuardum regem et Æðelredum quoque et Æðelflædam qui tunc principatum et potestatem gentis Merciorum sub prædicto rege tenuerunt, omnes etiam senatores Merciorum.”

As Æthelred is “Myrcna hlaford,” so Æthelflæd always appears in the Chronicles as “Myrcna hlæfdige,” and in Florence as “Merciorum domina.” Lady, I need hardly say, was in Wessex the highest female title, being reserved for the King’s wife. But in Mercia, as not being affected by the crime and punishment of Eadburh, the title of Queen seems to have gone on. In the Chronicles (888) we read of Ælfred’s sister, the widow of Burhred, as “Æðelswið cwén.” “Hlæfdige” therefore may perhaps have been meant as a title less distinctly royal; but in the Annales Cambriæ (917) we read, “Ælfled regina obiit.”

On the whole it seems plain that the position of Æthelred, and still more the position of his widow, was something above that of an ordinary Ealdorman. It should be remembered that he was the first Ealdorman of what had not long before been a mighty kingdom, and this quasi-royal position was a natural stage in the process of incorporation.

NOTE G. pp. 58, 119.
The Commendation of 924.

My narrative of the relations between England and Scotland, and my view of the dependence of the Scottish crown on the English Empire from 924 to 1328, are grounded on what I believe to be the sure witness of ancient authorities, read to a great extent under the guidance of Sir Francis Palgrave. All notion of any legal or permanent dependence such as I assert is cast aside by the late Mr. E. W. Robertson in his book entitled “Scotland under Early Kings.” That book is one which, though I hold many of its views to be erroneous, cannot be passed by without notice. It is a work of deep research and ability, and Mr. Robertson has the advantage of an acquaintance with Celtic literature to which I can make no pretensions. And I find with especial pleasure that, on several points where our theories do not clash, Mr. Robertson and myself have come independently to the same conclusions. Still on the points at issue I confess that, after reading Mr. Robertson’s arguments, I remain of the same opinion as I was before. He has thrown a certain amount of doubt on a few details which are not absolutely essential, but I think that he has utterly failed to upset those clear passages of the Chronicles on which the belief which I share with Sir Francis Palgrave mainly rests. Unluckily the scheme of my work does not allow me to grapple in detail with all Mr. Robertson’s arguments as to the earliest stages of the question. But I confess that I feel strongly inclined to enter minutely into them in some other shape. The subject is one excellently suited for a monograph. I have myself dealt with some parts of it somewhat more fully in my Historical Essays (First Series, p. 56). But I feel that the question is very far from being exhausted, and I trust that some other champion of the rights of Eadward and Æthelstan may be forthcoming.

The point which forms the immediate subject of this Note is the Commendation of Scotland to Eadward in 924, the most important point in the whole dispute. The choosing of Eadward as Father and Lord by the King of Scots and the whole people of the Scots is, both in the thirteenth and in the nineteenth century, the primary fact from which the English controversialist starts. William of Malmesbury, or even Florence of Worcester, may have blundered or exaggerated about Eadgar’s triumph at Chester or about any other point of detail, but, as long as the fact of the great Commendation is admitted, the case of the West-Saxon Emperors of Britain stands firm. That Commendation is recorded, as clearly as words can record it, not in a ballad or in a saga, not in the inflated rhetoric of a Latin charter, but in the honest English of the Winchester Chronicle. Than its words no words can be plainer; “And hine geces þa to fæder and to hlaforde Scotta cyning and eall Scotta þeod, and Rægnald and Eadulfes suna and ealle þa þe on Norþhymbrum, bugeaþ, ægþer ge Englisce, ge Denisce, ge Norþmen, ge oþre, and eac Stræcled Weala cyning, and ealle Stræcled Wealas.” I add the translation of Florence, who places the event in 921, not however as holding that it adds anything to the authority of the original record; “Eo tempore rex Scottorum cum tota gente sua, Reignoldus rex Danorum cum Anglis et Danis Northhymbriam incolentibus, rex etiam Streatcledwalorum cum suis, regem Eadwardum seniorem sibi in patrem et dominum elegerunt, firmumque cum eo fœdus pepigerunt.” Now if we are not to believe a fact on such evidence as this, there is nothing in those times which we can believe. It is strange that, in the obvious place for treating of the subject, in the text of his history at vol. i. p. 59, Mr. Robertson has not a word to say about the matter, but passes over the year 924 as if it were bare of events. But in an Appendix (vol. ii. p. 394) he discusses the matter at some length. To the truth of the famous record which I have quoted at pp. 58, 119 of my own text Mr. Robertson makes several objections.

First, he alleges that the Northumbrian Danes did not submit to Eadward. It is almost enough to answer that this passage is evidence that they did. If we are not to accept the distinct statements of the Chronicles, we are altogether at sea in the history of these times. Mr. Robertson’s reason for doubting the truth of the statement is that it is inconsistent with certain passages in other English writers—he might have added in the Chronicles themselves—which attribute the first annexation of Northumberland to Æthelstan in 926. But there is nothing irreconcileable in the two statements. I gave the explanation in the text of my first edition without having heard of Mr. Robertson’s objections; “Eadward’s immediate kingdom reached to the Humber, and his over-lordship extended over the whole island” (p. 58). But, from 926 onwards, the object of Æthelstan and his successors was to extend, not their over-lordship but their immediate sovereignty, over the whole of Northumberland. “Æthelstan cyning feng to Norðhymbra rice.” He became the immediate King of the country, whereas Eadward had been only Father and Lord to its Kings and people. After 926 Northumbrian Kings were often set up, but, except the lords of Bamburgh, of whom I shall speak in another Note, no Northumbrian prince was admitted by Æthelstan to vassalage. He asserted and maintained an immediate dominion over the country. This system was followed by his successors, except during the momentary recognition of Olaf and Rægnald by Eadmund in 943. There is therefore no contradiction. Eadward introduced one state of things in Northumberland and Æthelstan introduced another.

Secondly, Mr. Robertson objects that the Chronicles represent the Commendation to have been made at Bakewell in the Peakland, and that this is inconsistent “with the words which Simeon and Florence place in the mouth of Malcolm Ceanmore” in 1092 (it should be 1093), which “show that, in the opinion of that age, no Scottish King had ever met an Anglo-Saxon sovereign except upon their mutual [sic] frontiers.” Now, if there were any real inconsistency between the two statements, the direct statement of the Chronicle under the year 924 is surely much better authority for the events of the year 924 than an inference made by Mr. Robertson from a speech attributed to Malcolm in 1093. If Malcolm’s speech contradicts the facts of history, so much the worse for Malcolm and his speech. But there is really no inconsistency at all. The Chronicle in no way implies that the Commendation was made at Bakewell, and Malcolm in no way implies that it was not made at Bakewell. The Chronicler puts the Commendation of the King of Scots and the other princes in the same year as the building of the fortress of Bakewell; he may even imply that Eadward’s progress towards the North, of which the fortification of Bakewell was a part, had a share in bringing about the submission of all these Northern Kings. But he does not say that any of them came to Bakewell to make the Commendation. Malcolm says only that the Kings of Scots had been used to “do their duty” (rectitudinem facere) to the Kings of the English only on the confines of their dominions. The assertion may be true or false; but it is quite another thing from asserting that no King of Scots had ever met an English King anywhere but on the frontier. The first place of meeting need not have been the same as that which was usual 169 years later. There is in short nothing to show whether the Commendation took place at Bakewell or anywhere else.

Lastly, Mr. Robertson objects that Rægnald or Regenwald, who is described as one of the princes who submitted in 924, died in 921. I presume that, along with the Commendation of Rægnald in 924, Mr. Robertson sets aside his taking of York, which the Chronicles place in 923. This is asking us to give up a good deal out of deference to his Irish guides. But here again there is no necessary inconsistency. Mr. Robertson refers to the Annals of Ulster. Those Annals (Ant. Celt. Norm. p. 66) undoubtedly kill “Reginald O’Ivar,” not in 921 but in 920; but the name was a common one, and I see no evidence that the two Rægnalds need be the same. The Annals of Ulster themselves show that there was another person of the same name, “Reginald Mac Beolach,” living in the same part of the world in 917, and it would be worth inquiring whether any of these Rægnalds—the name is spelt in endless ways—can be the same as the Rægnald who figures at this time in the history of Gaul (see p. 163). I will not rely on the signatures of two charters of 930 by Regenwald or Reinwald (Cod. Dipl. ii. 168–171), because Mr. Kemble marks them as doubtful. Anyhow I see no proof of error in our Chronicles. There is no real contradiction between the English and Irish authorities; and if there be, I really do not see why the Englishman must needs go to the wall. But granting that Rægnald’s name was wrongly inserted, such a mistake would not touch the main fact of the Commendation. Such a fact as the Commendation of Scotland and Strathclyde is a thing about which there could be no mistake. It is either an historical truth or a barefaced lie. But in mentioning several minor princes who commended themselves at the same time, a wrong name might easily slip in without any evil intention. Several Northumbrian chiefs commended themselves; Rægnald was a famous Northumbrian name; a scribe might easily put Rægnald instead of some other name. The blunder would not be so bad as when Thietmar calls Ælfheah Dunstan (see Appendix OO), or as the utter confusion which the Scandinavian writers make of the names and order both of English Kings and of Norman Dukes.

I have examined this question in full, because it is the root of the whole matter. Other questions raised by Mr. Robertson I must pass by, or reserve for some other opportunity for discussion. I certainly think that the Commendation of 924 is in no way touched by Mr. Robertson’s objections, and I feel sure, from the acuteness which Mr. Robertson displays in other parts of his work, that he would never have satisfied himself with such futile arguments except under the influence of strong national partiality.

Another point, which I have briefly mentioned at pp. 131, 451, is worth notice. The fact that the people, as well as the King, choose Eadward as their lord does not seem to me to imply that he became lord to each particular man. In cases where the relation was much closer than between Scotland and England, the arrière vassal was not the man of the over-lord. Thus John of Joinville, as a vassal of the Count of Champagne, refused to do homage to the King of the French, because he was not his man. When Henry the Second exacted an oath of fealty from the vassals of William the Lion, the claim was a novelty, and it was given up by Richard the First, a renunciation which has been perverted into a renunciation of all superiority over Scotland.

But when we reach the final quarrel between Edward the First and John of Balliol, it turns on a question which looks very like a claim on the part of the King of England to jurisdiction in internal Scottish affairs. That is to say, Edward the First, as a feudal superior, received appeals from the courts of the King of Scots, exactly as the King of the French, Edward’s own feudal superior for the duchy of Aquitaine, received appeals from Edward’s courts in that duchy. We can hardly suppose that any such right was contemplated in the original Commendation; it is a notion essentially belonging to a later time. But it was no arbitrary invention of Edward; he did but receive the appeals which Scottish suitors brought before him of their own accord. The truth is that, when the commendatory relation had, in the ideas of both sides, changed into a strictly feudal one, the right of appeal would seem to follow as a matter of course, and neither side would stop to ask whether such a right was really implied in the ancient Commendation.

NOTE H. pp. 63, 125.
The Grant of Cumberland.

Nothing can be plainer than the entry on this head in the Chronicles (945), “Her Eadmund cyning ofer hergode eal Cumbraland, and hit let eal to Malculme Scotta cyninge on þæt gerad þæt he wære his midwyrhta ægþer ge on sæ ge on lande.”

Florence simply translates, except that a slight tinge of the later feudalism is perhaps thrown in when he expresses the word “midwyrhta” by “fidelis.” Henry of Huntingdon (M. H. B. 746 C), though bringing in some rather vague matter, is more literal in his version on this point; “Sequenti vero anno totam Cumberland, quia gentem provinciæ illius perfidam et legibus insolitam ad plenum domare nequibat, prædavit et contrivit et commendavit eam Malculmo regi Scotiæ hoc pacto, quod in auxilio sibi foret terra et mari.” William of Malmesbury (ii. 141) merely says, “Provincia quæ vocatur Cumberland regi Scottorum Malcolmo, sub fidelitate jurisjurandi commendata.” Roger of Wendover (ii. 398) adds the two important details, which he could hardly have invented, that Eadmund was helped in his expedition by Llywelyn of Dyfed, and that the sons of Dummail or Donald were blinded; “Eodem anno rex Eadmundus, adjutorio Leolini regis Demetiæ fretus, Cumbriam totam cunctis opibus spoliavit, ac duobus filiis Dummail, ejusdem provinciæ regis, oculorum luce privatis, regnum illud Malcolmo, Scotorum regi, de se tenendum concessit, ut aquilonales Angliæ partes terra marique ab hostium adventantium incursione tueretur.”

The Scottish writers, as I have said in the text, in no way deny the fact of the grant; they are indeed rather inclined, for obvious reasons, to make too much rather than too little of it. Fordun (iv. 24) is more explicit than any of the English writers, and uses the most distinctly feudal language; “Provinciam, quæ vocatur Cumbreland, regi Scotorum Malcolmo rex sub fidelitate jurisjurandi commendavit, hæc ille. Postmodum vero statim inter eos concordatum est, et amborum consilio decretum, ut in futurum, pro bono continuandæ pacis utriusque regni, Malcolmi regis proximus hæres Indulfus, cæterorumque regum Scotorum hæredes qui pro tempore fuerint, Edmundo regi suisque successoribus Anglis regibus homagium pro Cumbria facerent, ac fidelitatis sacramentum.” He goes on to say, in language which seems to come from the same source as the words of Henry of Huntingdon, that neither King was ever to take the Cumbrians, “barbaram aquilonis et perfidam gentem,” into his direct favour or homage, a promise which was afterwards broken on both sides.

The fact of the grant is also admitted in the book called “Extracta ex Cronicis Scocie,” pp. 49, 50, though the compiler vigorously asserts a former Scottish possession which was lost through the Scottish defeat at Brunanburh. Of King Gregory (875–892) we read (p. 46), “Hic etiam strenue totam subjugavit Hiberniam et pene totam Angliam.” Of Constantine (p. 47), “Hic rex xl annis regnavit, et quamvis contra eum bellabant reges Anglorum, Eadwinus [sic] et filius suus nothus Adelstanus successive regnantes, et contra Scotos cum Danis pactum et pacem inierunt, qui post iv annos rumpitur, et Angli a Scotis veniam precantes iterum Scotos sibi reconciliarunt. Quo toto tempore rex Constantinus Cumbriam et ceteras terras in Anglia possedit, et regni sui anno xvi dedit Eugenio filio Dovenaldi sperato successori dimidium regni Cumbri hereditarie possidendum.” It is curious to see the frame of mind in which he approaches the mention of Brunanburh; “Infaustus ille dies Scotis, nam quæque dominia temporibus Gregorii et hactenus conquesta, necnon liv annis possessa, quidam scribunt Constantinum regem hoc bello perdidisse.”

So we find it also in Hector Boece (218 b), by whose time the story had got further confused, and the grant, or rather treaty, is now attributed to Æthelstan instead of Eadmund; “Secundum legationem omnibus consentientibus fœdus inter Anglos Scotosque veteribus conditionibus est ictum, hac unica adjecta, ut Anglis Northumbria, Danico tum sanguine pene referto, cederent; Cumbria ac Vestmaria Scotis; ea lege, ut Scotorum princeps (ita eum qui secundum regem vita functum summum obiturus est magistratum, uti est significatum antea, vocant nostrates) in verba Anglorum regis ea pro regione juraret.” This passage is worth notice, as showing that the modern use of the word Prince, as equivalent to Ætheling, was coming into use in Boece’s time, but that it still needed explanation.

As to the fact and the nature of the grant to Malcolm there can, I think, be no doubt. It was probably the earliest instance in Britain of a fief in the strictest sense, as opposed to a case of commendation. But I wish to keep myself as clear as possible from all mazes as to the ever fluctuating boundaries of Strathclyde or Cumberland. On the whole matter, I would refer to Palgrave, English Commonwealth, i. 440 et seqq.

NOTE I. p. 65.
The Cession of Lothian.

The question with regard to Lothian is briefly this. Was the cession of that part of Northumberland to the Scottish crown a grant from Eadgar to his faithful vassal Kenneth? Or was the district wrung by Malcolm from the fears of Eadwulf Cutel, or won by force of arms after the battle of Carham in 1018?

Mr. Robertson (Scotland under Early Kings, i. 96; ii. 390 et seqq., 426 et seqq.), consistently with his theory, strongly adopts the latter view, and maintains the former to be a mere “fabrication.” To me the question seems a very difficult one, about which it will be well to go minutely through all the authorities.

The Chronicles, Florence, William of Malmesbury, Simeon of Durham in his main history, are all silent as to any transfer of Lothian from English to Scottish dominion. And yet nothing is more certain than that Lothian was at one time English and that at a later time it became Scottish. The only question is as to the date of the change. The first beginnings of the Scottish occupation of Lothian are certainly older than either of the dates given above. Indulf, who reigned from 954 to 962, occupied Edinburgh, Eadwinesburh, the frontier fortress of the great Northumbrian Bretwalda, which ever after remained in the power of the Scots. This does not seem to have been a conquest made in war. The English forsook the post. “In hujus tempore,” says the Pictish Chronicler (Ant. Celt. Norm. p. 142), “oppidum Eden vacuatum est, ac relictum est Scottis usque in hodiernum diem.” Possibly Edinburgh was a grant made by Eadred on his final acquisition of Northumberland in 954. Eadred’s relations with Scotland were friendly. The Scots made full submission to him on his election in 946; they acted as his allies in his wars with the rebellious Northumbrians; Scots and English, “the men of Alba and the Saxons,” were, according to the Four Masters (vol. ii. p. 668), defeated by the “foreigners”—doubtless the Danes—in 951. If Eadred rewarded his Scottish ally with the grant of Edinburgh, the step would be very like the grant of Cumberland to Malcolm in 945. On the other hand, it is quite possible that the relinquishment of Edinburgh by the English may have been less wholly an act of free will than the grant of Cumberland; it may have been found difficult or useless to maintain so distant a fortress during the troubles of the reign of Eadwig. But on any showing, the event of Indulf’s reign was simply a relinquishment of the single fortress of Edinburgh, though such a relinquishment may well have been felt, especially on the Scottish side, to be merely a step towards the transfer of the whole province. For the date of the great cession our authorities are John of Wallingford (p. 544) and Roger of Wendover (i. 416), who give the earlier date, and Simeon of Durham in his Tract on the Northumbrian Earls (X Scriptt. 81), who gives the later.

According to John of Wallingford, Eadgar (see p. 266 and Appendix KK), in a meeting of the Northumbrian Witan at York (“barones Northumbrenses in concilium convocans apud Eboracum”), divided the ancient kingdom into two earldoms, giving Deira to Oslac and Bernicia (which John confusedly calls Deira) to Eadwulf “Evelchild.” The name of Eadwulf is seemingly due to some confusion with Oswulf, whom John fancies to be dead. But Lothian, the northern part of Bernicia, lying exposed to the incursions of the Scots, was little valued by the English Kings. The King of Scots moreover asserted a claim to it by hereditary right. Kenneth accordingly went to London, accompanied by the two Northumbrian Earls and by Ælfsige Bishop of Lindisfarne, to seek a conference with Eadgar. Eadgar received him friendly, and Kenneth opened his case, praying for Lothian as an ancient possession of the Scottish Kings. Eadgar referred the matter to his Witan (“caussam curiæ suæ intimavit”), by whose consent the province was granted in fief—I cannot avoid the terms of a later jurisprudence—to Kenneth, who did homage for it. Kenneth also promised that the ancient laws and customs of the country should be preserved and the English language retained, an engagement which was strictly carried out (“sub cautione multa promittens quod populo partis illius antiquas consuetudines non negaret, et sub nomine et lingua Anglicana permanerent. Quod usque hodie firmum manet”). Thus the old dispute about Lothian was settled, though new ones often arose (“sicque determinata est vetus querela de Louthion, et adhuc nova sæpe intentatur”).

Roger of Wendover is briefer. He tells how Earl Eadwulf—he does not mention Oslac—and Bishop Ælfsige took the Scottish King to the court of Eadgar; how the King of the English gave Kenneth many magnificent presents, and granted to him the whole land of Lothian. The tenure was that, each year, on the great feasts when the King wore his crown (see the Peterborough Chronicle under the year 1087), the King of Scots should come to his court with the other princes of his realm. Eadgar also assigned to his royal vassal and his successors several houses at different points of the road, at which they could be entertained on their way to the English court, which mansions the Kings of Scots retained down to the time of Henry the Second.

Simeon places the cession after the death of Uhtred in 1016 (see p. 448);

“Quo [Ucthredo] occiso, frater ipsius Eadulf cognomento Cudel, ignavus valde et timidus, et successit in comitatum. Timens autem ne Scotti mortem suorum quos frater ejus, ut supradictum est [see p. 329], occiderat, in se vindicarent, totum Lodoneium ob satisfactionem et firmam concordiam eis donavit. Hoc modo Lodoneium adjectum est regno Scottorum.”

Now, looking at our authorities in the abstract, there is no doubt as to the infinite superiority of Simeon, our very best authority for Northumbrian affairs, over two late and often inaccurate writers like John of Wallingford and Roger of Wendover. If there is an irreconcileable contradiction between the two stories, Simeon’s story is to be preferred without hesitation. I hold that Simeon’s statement distinctly proves that some cession of Lothian was made by Eadwulf, and, if so, we can hardly be wrong in setting down that cession as a result of the battle of Carham. The question is whether this can be admitted, and at the same time some kernel of truth be recognized in the story told by John and Roger. Let us first see what the witness of those writers is worth in itself.

I need hardly say that secondary writers of this sort, even the best of them, must be subjected to much severer tests than any that we apply to the Chronicles, to Florence, or even to William of Malmesbury. We accept nothing, strictly speaking, on their authority. We weigh their statements and judge what they are worth, both according to the laws of internal evidence and according to the way in which they may incidentally fall in with or incidentally contradict the statements of better writers. We put very little faith in their details, which are more likely than not to be romantic additions. Still in all cases we acknowledge the likelihood that there is some kernel of truth round which the romantic details have grown. John of Wallingford is undoubtedly a writer whom it is not safe to trust, unless his statements have some strong confirmation, internal or external. Of his way of dealing with matters, I have given some specimens in the course of this volume (see Note GG). Still he is not to be cast aside as wholly worthless. A few pages before the passage with which we are concerned (pp. 535, 540), he shows a good deal of critical acumen in pointing out the chronological impossibility of the tale which makes Rolf an ally of the great Æthelstan (see above, p. 165). Roger of Wendover is, on the whole, a more trustworthy writer than John, and when he comes nearer to his own time, he becomes a very valuable authority; but for times so far removed from their own days, John and Roger must be set down as writers belonging essentially to the same class. Now in comparing their two statements as to the cession of Lothian by Eadgar, we are at once struck by the fact that the two accounts seem quite independent of each other. There is no sign that either narrative is borrowed from the other, no sign that the two are borrowed from some common source. The two stories do not directly contradict one another; but they have nothing in common, except the bare facts that Kenneth received the province from Eadgar, and that Earl Eadwulf and Bishop Ælfsige had a hand in the business. They are two independent witnesses, pointing, as it seems to me, to two independent sources of tradition or lost record. And of the two, the narrative of John of Wallingford certainly has the clearer inherent signs of trustworthiness. If there is any ground to suspect fabrication with a motive—not necessarily in the historian himself, but in those whom he followed—it certainly appears in the narrative of Roger rather than in that of John. Roger gives no account of the circumstances of the grant, he assigns no intelligible political motive for it, he describes no intelligible tenure by which the fief was to be held; he dwells mainly on the magnificence of the presents made by Eadgar to Kenneth, and on points bearing on questions which, when he wrote, were matters of recent controversy and negotiation. The points brought out into the greatest prominence are the duty of the King of Scots to attend at the English court, and the signs at once of English munificence and of Scottish submission displayed in the preparations made for the due reception of the royal vassal. These were points of no small interest in the times when Roger was young, and which were not forgotten when he wrote. There is nothing of this kind in the narrative of John of Wallingford. He has undoubtedly made a false step on ground on which it is very easy to make a false step, namely in the succession of the Northumbrian Earls. Even the accurate Simeon, writing so much nearer to the place and to the time, has himself, in one case at least, done the like (see Note LLL). John’s Eadwulf Evelchild ought to be Oswulf, just as Simeon’s Uhtred, in the account of the battle of Carham, ought to be Eadwulf. But John’s main story fits in very well with the facts of the case. Mr. Robertson (ii. 391) objects that there was no “old quarrel about Lothian.” But the facts show that there was. Surely Lothian was an old Pictish possession which had been conquered by the Angles, and which was sometimes partially won back by its old owners. The wars of Æthelfrith (Bæda, i. 34) and of Ecgfrith (iv. 26) surely make up a very old “querela de Louthion,” but one not too old for Celtic memories to bear in mind. The acquisition of Edinburgh, however made, shows that the Scottish Kings in the tenth century were looking steadily in the direction of Lothian. Kenneth himself, friendly as he now was to Eadgar, had made at least one foray into the country. The Pictish Chronicle (Ant. Celt. Norm. 143) says, “Primo anno perrexit Cinadius et prædavit Saxoniam [Lothian] et traduxit filium regis Saxonum” (see p. 65). The captivity of an English Ætheling is a grotesque exaggeration; but we may accept the fact that Kenneth had some border skirmishes with the local Earl, who in 971, the first year of Kenneth, would be Oswulf. All this shows that the acquisition of Lothian was at this time a favourite object of Scottish ambition. And now that Eadgar and Kenneth were on friendly terms, a grant of the country, like the undoubted grant of Cumberland, like the probable grant of Edinburgh, might be an act of thoroughly good policy on the part of England. A distant province, which it was hard to keep as an integral part of the kingdom, might be prudently granted as a fief to the prince by whom it was claimed, and to whose incursions it lay open. That the conditions spoken of by John of Wallingford, the retention of the laws and language of Lothian, were strictly kept, is proved by the whole later history. The laws and language of Lothian became the laws and language of the historic Scotland.

The cession recorded by John of Wallingford seems therefore to be in itself highly probable. But is it inconsistent with the later, and undoubtedly better authenticated, cession recorded by Simeon of Durham? It does not seem to me to be so; neither did it to Sir Francis Palgrave (Engl. Comm. i. 474, 477) or to Dr. Lappenberg (ii. 141, 207, p. 473 of the original). It may be that the word Lothian, a somewhat vague name, has a slightly different meaning in the two passages; it may be that a cession was made to Kenneth by Eadgar, and a further cession by Eadwulf Cutel to Malcolm. It is less easy to believe, with Sir Francis Palgrave, that Eadwulf’s cession was a cession of the rights of the local Earl, reserved, or not formally surrendered, at the time of the earlier grant by the King. The simplest explanation is to suppose that Lothian was recovered by the English after the great victory of Uhtred in 1006, that it was occupied again by the Scots after their victory at Carham, and that then the cowardly Eadwulf gave up all claim to it. Cnut however, in 1031, if not before (see p. 450 and Note LLL), set matters straight. In that year at least, “Scotta cyng him to beah,” “and wearð his mann”—Malcolm then became the liegeman of the King of all England for Scotland and Lothian and all that he had.

This I believe to be the most probable explanation of this difficult question. The silence of the Chronicles proves nothing either way; it has to be accounted for equally on either view of the story. No transfer of Lothian at any time is mentioned in the Chronicles, yet we know that a transfer did take place at some time. The positive argument from the statement of the Chronicles is always the strongest that can be found; the negative argument from their silence is, under varying circumstances, of every degree of strength and weakness. Here it seems easily accounted for. The Chroniclers are at all times somewhat capricious in their mention or neglect of Scottish affairs. They mention neither the victory of Durham nor the defeat of Carham. And the reigns of Eadgar and Cnut, the periods with which we are immediately concerned, are periods in which the Chronicles are decidedly meagre, as compared with their minute narratives of the reigns of Æthelred and of Eadward the Confessor.

How thoroughly English Lothian was held to be long after either date assigned to the cession appears from the words of the Chronicler, 1091; “Melcolm ... for mid his fyrde ut of Scotlande into Loðene on Englaland.” Florence translates “Northymbriam invasit.” One would like to know whether the “xii. villæ quas in Anglia sub patre illius [Willelmi Rufi sc.] habuerat [Malcolmus]” (Flor. Wig. 1091) were in Lothian or where.

NOTE K. pp. 75, 117.
Ealdormen and Kings.

The description of the oldest Teutonic constitution given by Cæsar (Bell. Gall. vi. 23) tells us, “In pace nullus est communis magistratus; sed principes regionum atque pagorum inter suos jus dicunt.” This seems to imply a government by Ealdormen as distinguished from one by Kings. Pagus is the Gau or Shire. So Dio (lxxi. 11), describing the German embassies to Marcus, says, οἱ μὲν κατὰ γένη, οἱ δὲ καὶ κατὰ ἔθνη ἐπρεσβεύσαντο. But Tacitus (Germ. 25, 44) seems to distinguish the tribes “quæ regnantur” from others. So Arminius was suspected of aiming at royalty (Ann. ii. 88); “Regnum adfectans, libertatem popularium adversam habuit.” So Bæda (v. 10) describes the Old-Saxons at the end of the seventh century. They had no King, but Satraps, that is doubtless Ealdormen; in war-time one Satrap was chosen as a common commander, but his superiority ended with the conclusion of peace. “Non enim habent regem iidem Antiqui Saxones, sed satrapas plurimos suæ genti præpositos, qui ingruente belli articulo mittunt æqualiter sortes, et quemcumque sors ostenderit, hunc tempore belli ducem omnes sequuntur, huic obtemperant; peracto autem bello, rursum æqualis potentiæ omnes fiunt satrapæ.” I have collected some other analogous cases in the Growth of the English Constitution, 172–3 (3rd ed.), and Comparative Politics, 414. In Zosimos (iv. 34) Athanaric is ἄρχων and Frithgar ἡγεμών. We may compare the description of the Alemanni at the battle of Strassburg in Ammianus, xvi. 12. Chnodomarius, the Bretwalda, so to speak, comes first, then some other chiefs by name; “Hos sequebantur potestate proximi reges numero quinque, regalesque decem et optimatum series magna.” Are the regales Æthelings, or are they subreguli, undercyningas, ealdormen?

With regard to the Kentishmen and the West-Saxons, the case seems perfectly clear. We read of the Jutes in the Chronicles, 449, “Heora heretogan wæron twegen gebroðra, Hengest and Horsa.” Here heretogan translates the duces of Bæda, i. 15. And of the West-Saxons in 495, “Her comen twegen ealdormen on Brytene Cerdic and Cynric his súnu.” Afterwards in 519 we find nearly the same words applied to them as to Ida, “Her Cerdic and Cynric Westseaxena rice onfengon.” The word rice I take to mark the change from ealdormanship to kingship. Between the two dates, in 514, is placed the reinforcement under Stuf and Wihtgar. The temporary change from Kings back again to Ealdormen is distinctly asserted by Bæda, iv. 12; “Quumque mortuus esset Coinvalch ... acceperunt subreguli regnum gentis, et divisum inter se tenuerunt annis circiter decem.... Devictis atque amotis subregulis, Cædualla suscepit imperium.” The Chronicles however give an uninterrupted succession of Kings during this time. In 672 Cenwealh dies; his widow Sexburh succeeds—a most rare case of a female reign. Then follow Æscwine in 674, Centwine in 676, Ceadwalla in 685. The change from Ealdormen to Kings in Mercia and East-Anglia is also plainly marked in the remarkable passage of Henry of Huntingdon which I quoted in page 26. And we may with all likelihood, as I there said, assert much the same of Northumberland. But between the case of Wessex and the case of Mercia or Northumberland there would be this difference. In Mercia, and probably in Northumberland, a number of small but quite independent kingdoms or ealdormanships were brought in under the power of a single conqueror, while in Wessex, though there were several Kings at once, a certain national unity was never lost. The change therefore from Kings back again to Ealdormen was possible in Wessex, where it was merely a change in the form of government; in Mercia it would have been the utter dissolution of every tie between the different parts of the country.

The history of the Lombards affords in this respect a singular parallel to the history of the West-Saxons. According to Paul Warnefrid (Gest. Langob. i. 14, ap. Muratori, i. 413), they were at first governed by Dukes, but afterwards they chose a King; “Nolentes jam ultra Langobardi esse sub ducibus, regem sibi ad ceterarum instar gentium statuerunt.” There is no reason to doubt the fact, though it is placed in a mythical age, and though Paul the Deacon is evidently thinking of Saul and the Hebrews. Indeed the change from Judges and “Dukes” to Kings among the Hebrews and Edomites is only another instance of the same law. At a later time, after their settlement in Italy, the Lombards fell back again from Kings to Dukes or Ealdormen. Paul Warn. ii. 32; “Post cujus [Cleph] mortem, Langobardi per annos decem regem non habentes sub ducibus fuerunt. Unusquisque enim ducum [there were thirty of them] suam civitatem obtinebat.” (See Allen, Royal Prerogative, 165.) In comparing these Lombard revolutions with those of the West-Saxons and Old-Saxons, it should not be forgotten that a considerable body of Saxons is said (Paul Warn. ii. 6) to have taken a part in the Lombard invasion of Italy. But parallels may be found in very distant times and places. Compare the twelve Kings of Egypt in the second Book of Herodotus.

That Heretoga and Ealdorman express the same office in different aspects, there can, I think, be no doubt. See Kemble, Saxons in England, ii. 126. I do not however understand Mr. Kemble’s meaning when he says; “The word Heretoga is nowhere found in the Saxon Chronicle, and, to the best of my remembrance, but once in the Charters.” Besides the passage above quoted, it is found in the Chronicles under the years 794 (of Danish pirates), 993 (of English commanders), 1003 (in a proverb), 1121 (of a Duke of Lotharingia). I have not looked through all the Charters for the purpose, but it is used in three successive grants of Bishop Oswald (Cod. Dipl. iii. 259, 260, 262) to express an Ealdorman of the Mercians.

We have just seen Heretoga used in English to translate the High-Dutch Herzog; but the Dukes and Counts of Gaul commonly appear in the Chronicles as Eorlas. Eorl however, as the later equivalent of Ealdorman, is also equivalent to Heretoga. Ælfred uses Heretoga to translate the Latin Consul, just as, in return, Gaulish Counts and English Ealdormen are constantly spoken of as Consules.

On the use of Ealdor, Ealdorman, Yldestan þegnas, to express simply rank and office without any reference to actual age, and for analogous uses in other languages, see Kemble, ii. 128; Heywood’s Ranks of the People, 53; Schmid’s Glossary under Eald, Ealdorman, &c.; Comparative Politics, 366. We have Ealdorapostol, Ealdorbiscop, and even, if I mistake not, Ealdordeofol. Kemble compares the use of Senatus, γέρων, πρεσβύτερος, and the feudal use of Senior, Seigneur. Πρέσβυς in the sense of Ambassador may be added to the list, and the Latin Patres, Patricius, express the same general idea. In the same spirit the Ealdorman’s deputy is called his Younger; see Ælfred’s Laws, 38, § 2 (Schmid, 92); “gif þises hwæt beforan cyninges ealdormonnes gingran gelimpe, oððe cyninges preôste,” etc. So Lewis the Pious (Waitz, iv. 262, 368) speaks to his officials of “vos et juniores vestri, juniores et ministeriales vestri.”

Hlaford, as equivalent, or perhaps something more than equivalent, to Ealdorman, seems peculiar to Æthelred of Mercia (see above, p. 382), though of course the word may be applied to an Ealdorman, as it is to Brihtnoth in the Song of Maldon, with reference to those persons to whom he was personally hlaford. Eorl, I need hardly say, supplanted Ealdorman in later times. The older English meaning of the word Eorl has been already explained. The later special sense in which it is equivalent to Ealdorman came in with the Danes, whose leaders had always been called Jarls. The governors of Northumberland, after the incorporation under Eadred, certainly bore the Danish title. Urm, Andcol, Uhtred (the ancestor of a long line of Northumberland Earls), Grim, and Scule, all seemingly Northumbrian chiefs, sign a charter of Eadred in 949 (Cod. Dipl. ii. 292) with the title of Eorl. The same title is applied to Oslac both in the Chronicles under 975 (“Oslac se mæra eorl”), and in the laws of Eadgar (Thorpe, i. 278), where the Earl Oslac seems to be pointedly distinguished from the Ealdormen Ælfhere of Mercia and Æthelwine of East-Anglia. So in the Chronicles for 992 “Ælfric ealdorman” (the well-known Ælfric, of whom more in Note CC) is no less pointedly distinguished from “Þored eorl.” But when the word Eorl is found in this sense in the Chronicles at an earlier date, it is always a sign of later insertion. (See Earle, p. 38.) Whether the title was in use throughout the Denalagu is less clear. Brihtnoth is called Eorl in the poem of Maldon; but this may be a poetical use. He is also called Ealdor in the wide sense in the poem itself, as well as Ealdorman in various documents and in the Chronicles. On the other hand the Chronicles constantly speak of Ealdormen, even in Danish districts like Lindesey; but this may be an accommodation to Southern language, and they do so even when speaking of Northumberland. In the purely Saxon districts there can be no doubt that the ancient title of Ealdorman went on uninterruptedly, till, under Cnut, Eorl gradually supplanted it everywhere. See p. 407.

That birth was of less importance in the case of an Ealdorman than in the case of a King appears from the well-known words of Tacitus (Germ. 7), “Reges ex nobilitate, Duces ex virtute sumunt.” This is most curiously illustrated in the Song of Brunanburh, where seven earls of the Danes are killed and five young kings (“Fife lagon On ðæm campstede Ciningas geonge”). The King ruling “ex nobilitate” might be young; the Earl ruling “ex virtute” was likely to be old.

On this whole subject of the origin and growth of kingship see the Authorities and Illustrations to Allen on the Royal Prerogative.

NOTE L. p. 78.
Origin of the Word King.

It is enough for my purpose that the word Cyning is closely connected with the word Cyn. (See Allen, Royal Prerogative, 176; Kemble, i. 153.) That the two words are of the same origin, as is shown by a whole crowd of cognates, cynebarn, cynecyn, cynedom, cynehelm, cyne-hlaford (used in the Chronicles, a. 1014, as equivalent to gecynde hlaford), cynelice, cynerice, cynestol. (I copy from Mr. Earle’s Glossarial Index.) In all these words cyn has the meaning of royal. What little I venture to say on the remote Aryan affinities of the word I have said in Comparative Politics, 450, Growth of the English Constitution, 172.

The modern High-Dutch König is an odd corruption; but the elder form is Chuninc. The word has never had an English feminine; Queen is simply cwen, woman, wife, the same as the Greek γυνή, but in Wessex, from the days of Beorhtric to those of William, Cwen most rarely occurs (Chron. 855 and Chron. Petrib. 1043, though in both these passages it may simply mean wife); Hlæfdige (see above, p. 575) is the regular title.

Sir Francis Palgrave’s attempt (ii. cccxli.) to derive the word from a Celtic root Cen (head), to say nothing of other objections, could not account for the use of the word among the Teutonic nations on the Continent. Still more ludicrous is the notion of the King being the canning or cunning man, an idea which could have occurred only to a mind on which all Teutonic philology was thrown away. It is however as old as Sir Thomas Smith, who, in the Commonwealth of England (pp. 9, 10) says, “That which we cal in one sillable king in English, the old Englishmen, and the Saxons, from whom our tongue is derived, to this day call in two sillables, cyning, which whether it commeth of cen or ken, which betokeneth to know and understand, or can, which betokeneth to be able, or to have power, I cannot tel.”

The connexion of Cyning with Cyn is closely analogous to the connexion of the word Þeoden (the Gothic Þiudans) with Þeod (see Kemble, i. 152) and that of Drihten with Driht. In all these cases the ruler takes his name from those whom he rules.

The origin of the word is curiously illustrated in Cardinal Pole’s exposition of the nature of kingship, quoted in Froude’s History of England, iii. 34. “‘What is a king?’ he asks. ‘A king exists for the sake of his people; he is an outcome from Nature in labour [partus naturæ laborantis]; an institution for the defence of material and temporal interests.... In human society are three grades—the people—the priesthood, the head and husband of the people—the king, who is the child [populus enim regem procreat], the creature, and minister of the other two.’”

One can hardly suspect Pole of any Teutonic scholarship, but if he had not the true derivation of the word king before his eyes, the coincidence is remarkable. Not very unlike is the speech of Philip Pot, Great Seneschal of Burgundy in the States General of Tours in 1484. “La royauté est une dignité et non un héritage. Dans l’origine, le peuple souverain créa des rois pour son utilité.” De Cherrier, Histoire de Charles VIII. i. 76.

NOTE M. p. 78.
King of England or King of the English?

It is most curious to see how very modern are those territorial titles which, for some centuries past, European Kings have thought good to assume. In Greek we always find a national sovereign described by the national style; it is always Λακεδαιμονίων, Μακεδόνων, even Περσῶν and Μήδων, βασιλεύς. In Livy (xxxi. 14, xxxv. 13) we no doubt read of “Antiochus rex Syriæ” and “Ptolemæus rex Ægypti.” But this is of course, because the kingship of the Ptolemies and Seleucidæ was so utterly unnational that any but a territorial description would have been absurd. In fact it is a description and not a title. As a description of this kind, the words “Rex Franciæ” actually occur as early as the tenth century. (Flodoard, A. 924.) But this is not a formal title; it is merely the annalist’s vague way of describing or pointing at a prince who had as yet no formal title. If one Rudolf is “Rex Franciæ,” in the very same year another Rudolf is “Cisalpinæ rex Galliæ,” which certainly never was the formal title of any man. The truth is that, throughout the ninth and tenth centuries, the various Frankish Kings had no formal title beyond the vague “Rex Francorum,” common to all of them. The Chroniclers had therefore to describe each King as they might, just as the sons of Charles the Great are indifferently called “Rex super Aquitaniam,” or “Italiam,” Ann. Laur. 781 (Pertz, i. 32); “Rex in Aquitania,” Ann. Egin. 781, and “Aquitaniæ Rex” (ib. 813). But when the French Kings adopted a formal title, Rex Francorum Christianissimus was the style down to the end of the line of Valois. Franciæ et Navarræ Rex came in with Henry of Bourbon. When the ancient style was revived in 1791, and again in 1830, many people seem to have thought it a strange innovation.

In both Empires, down to the last days of each, the style is always “Romanorum Imperator,” Ῥωμαίων βασιλεύς. It is only late in the thirteenth century, and when a prince has to be described by his dominions, that we find such a title as the Trapezuntine style πιστὸς βασιλεὺs καὶ αὐτοκράτωρ Ἀνατολής, Ἰβήρων, καὶ Περατείας. (Finlay, Mediæval Greece and Trebizond, 370.) In earlier days Charles the Great was “Patricius Romanorum.”

In England it would seem that Cnut, and Cnut alone before the Norman Conquest, did call himself “King of England.” In the Preface to his Laws (Thorpe, i. 358; Schmid, 250) he is called “Cnut cyningc, ealles Englalandes cyningc, and Dena cyningc and Norðrigena cyningc.” In the letter from Rome in Florence (1031) he calls himself “Rex totius Angliæ et Denemarciæ et Norreganorum et partis Suanorum.” In a doubtful charter (Cod. Dipl. iv. 50) he is “Rex totius Angliæ regni atque Danorum;” “Cing ealles Englelandes and ealre Dene.” In two most doubtful charters (Cod. Dipl. iv. 25, 41) he is “Kining of Ænglelande,” and “Rex totius Angliæ et Danmarchiæ et Norwagiæ et magnæ partis Swavorum.” In other charters he is either “Rex Anglorum” (as Florence calls him when speaking in his own person) or else he assumes the Imperial style.

It has been suggested that Cnut took up his territorial style as being a conqueror of the land, not a native monarch of the people. But the above instances show that, though he fluctuates between the two forms, he makes no consistent distinction between his hereditary and his acquired kingdoms. Moreover Cnut, like William, was formally elected King, and he was even less likely than William to assume any title which would be offensive to his English subjects. This makes one inclined to look a little further. In the most authentic documents, Anglia, Englaland, does not occur without a qualification; the words are “totius Angliæ,” “ealles Englalandes.” Is this description so distinctly and unmistakeably territorial as the later forms, “Rex Angliæ,” “King of England”? The totius, the ealles, strikes me as making a difference. It may show that what is meant is, not “King of England” in the later sense, but “King over the whole land of the English,” as distinguished from Cnut’s earlier and narrower dominion while the kingdom was divided between him and Eadmund. But anyhow Cnut stands alone before the Norman Conquest in the use of this style. After the Conquest “Rex Angliæ” begins to creep in, but at first very rarely. William himself is all but invariably “Rex Anglorum.” Richard is the first King who is systematically “Rex Angliæ” in his charters, and even he is “Rex Anglorum” on his seal. And during his reign his mother stuck to the old style “Regina Anglorum.” The final innovation of “Rex Angliæ” on the seal is due to King John. See Allen, p. 51.

In everything, in short, belonging to our old days it is the people who stand forth and not the mere land. In fact, except in the case of old geographical names like Gaul and Britain, the land can hardly be said to have a being or a name apart from the people. The land is simply called by the name of the people, like Lokroi and Leontinoi in Greek geography, like Franken and Hessen in Germany. So in our Chronicles, in the year 774, we read “gefuhton Myrce and Cantwara,” where Myrce is clearly the people; but in 796 we read “hine læddon on Myrce,” where we must take Myrce for the country. On the use of the name Englaland I shall speak in Note T.

On this modern notion of “territorial sovereignty,” see Maine, Ancient Law, 103. He remarks that “territorial titles were not unknown, but they seem at first to have come into use only as a convenient mode of describing the ruler of a portion; the king of a whole tribe was king of his people, not of his people’s lands.” This is, I suppose, the “rex super Aquitaniam,” and the like.

NOTE N. pp. 91, 122.
Commendation.

On the subject of Commendation a good deal will be found in Hallam’s Middle Ages (i. 114, edition 1846), and still more in the Supplementary Notes (p. 118; and see specially Waitz, iv. 204). By the time of Æthelstan a lordless man seems to have become something exceptional, and to have needed special legislation (see Æthelstan’s Laws in Schmid, 132. “Be hlâfordleâsum mannum”). The passages from the Capitularies quoted by Hallam imply the necessity of every man seeking a lord, though they leave to him the right of choosing what lord he will seek. There is another remarkable Capitulary of Lewis the Pious in the year 815 (Baluz. i. 552), in which the Emperor grants the power of Commendation, as an accustomed right of his own subjects, to the Spanish Christians who had taken refuge within his dominions from the oppression of the Saracens; “Noverint tamen iidem Hispani sibi licentiam a nobis esse concessam ut se in vassaticum commitibus nostris more solito commendet. Et si beneficium aliquod quisquam eorum ab eo cui se commendavit fuerit consequutus, sciat se de illo tali obsequium seniori suo exhibere debere quale nostrates homines de simili beneficio senioribus suis exhibere solent.” This is remarkable as showing the distinction between the personal Commendation of a man to his lord and the grant of a feudal benefice by that lord. The grant is not necessarily implied, but it is looked on as something which is likely to follow. “Commendati homines” are often mentioned in Domesday, and there are numberless phrases which come to the same thing, though the exact words are not used. There is one very curious story in Hertfordshire (136 b), where a certain Godwine held lands for a life or lives of the church of Westminster, but after his death his widow illegally transferred the lordship of the lands to Eadgifu the Fair. “Hanc terram tenuit Godwinus de ecclesia Sancti Petri; non potuit vendere, sed post mortem ejus debebat ad ecclesiam redire, ut hundreda testatur; sed uxor ejus cum hac terra vertit se per vim ad Eddevam pulcram, et tenebat ea die qua Edwardus rex fuit vivus et mortuus.” This Godwine who could not sell his land is distinguished from various “homines” of Eadgifu “qui potuerunt vendere.” See more in vol. v. p. 885.

This process of seeking a lord we find described in the Laws of Ælfred (37, Schmid 90), where the proper formalities are described; “Gif mon wille of bold-getale in oðer bold-getæl hlâford sêcan, dô þæt mid þæs ealdormonnes gewitnesse þe he ǽr in his scire folgode.” And this phrase of seeking or choosing a lord is the very phrase which is used to express the international commendation of Wales and Scotland to the English King. In the Chronicles, 922, we read of Eadward, “and þa cyningas on Norþ Wealum, Howel and Cledauc and Ieoþwel, and eall Norþ Weallcyn hine sohton him to hlaforde.” And in the famous passage which describes the great commendation of 924 (see above, p. 576) the words are, “hine geces þa to fæder and to hlaforde Scotta cyning,” &c.

Of the use of the word as applied on an international scale there is an early instance in the letter of Pope Stephen to Pippin (Waitz, iii. 84; cf. 87), where he says, “tam ipsi Spoletani quamque etiam Beneventani omnes se commendare per nos a Deo servatæ excellentiæ tuæ cupiunt.” But the best setting forth of the doctrine between sovereign princes is to be found in the words which Dudo (128 D) puts into the mouth of Hugh the Great, when he explains to young Richard the need of seeking a lord; “Hugo vero Magnus intelligens animadvertisse utrumque affectum voluntatis suæ, aperta cordis sui intentione dicitur respondisse: ‘Non est quippe mos Franciæ, ut quislibet princeps duxve constipatus abundantius tanto milite perseveret cunctis diebus taliter in dominio ditionis suæ, ut non aut famulatu voluntatis suæ, aut coactus vi et potestate, incumbat acclivius Imperatori, vel regi, ducive: et si forte perseveraverit in temeritate audaciæ suæ, ut non famularetur alicui volenter præcopiosa ubertate sufficientiæ suæ; solent ei rixæ dissentionesque atque casus innumerabilis detrimenti sæpissime accidere. Quapropter si placuisset Richardo duci tuo nepoti seipsum flectere ut militaret mihi, vestro saluberrimo consilio sponte filiam meam connubio illi jungerem; et terræ, quam hereditario jure possidet, continuus defensor et adjutor contra omnes adessem.’”

NOTE O. p. 91.
Growth of the Thegnhood.

I cannot forbear transcribing the passage in which Mr. Kemble (Saxons in England, i. 183) sums up the general results of the growth of the Thegnhood. “As the royal power steadily advanced by his assistance, and the old, national nobility of birth, as well as the old, landed freeman sunk into a lower rank, the gesið found himself rising in power and consideration proportioned to that of his chief: the offices which had passed from the election of the freemen to the gift of the crown, were now conferred upon him, and the ealdorman, duke, geréfa, judge, and even the bishop, were at length selected from the ranks of the comitatus. Finally, the nobles by birth themselves became absorbed in the ever-widening whirlpool; day by day the freemen, deprived of their old national defences, wringing with difficulty a precarious subsistence from incessant labour, sullenly yielded to a yoke which they could not shake off, and commended themselves (such was the phrase) to the protection of a lord; till a complete change having thus been operated in the opinions of men, and consequently in every relation of society, a new order of things was consummated, in which the honours and security of service became more anxiously desired than a needy and unsafe freedom; and the alods being finally surrendered, to be taken back as beneficia, under mediate lords, the foundations of the royal, feudal system were securely laid on every side.”

The supplanting of an older by a newer form of nobility has several parallels in history. The distinction between patricii and nobiles at Rome has some analogies to the distinction between eorlas and þegnas in England. The plebeian could not become patrician, but he could become noble; and this plebeian nobility, derived from the possession of curule magistracies, answered to our thegnhood in being a nobility of office, though in this case it was office conferred by the people and not by a King or other lord. See more in Comparative Politics, 246–270. On the growth of the official comitatus in the courts of the Frankish Kings and Emperors see the chapter of Waitz (iii. 410), “Der Hof und die Reichsversammlung.” He comments on the difference between this and the earlier comitatus; but both are instances of the same principle. See also iv. 278 of the same work, “Dabei wird immer auch auf Abstammung, Ansehn des Geschlechtes Werth gelegt; aber ein bestimmter rechtlicher Vorzug war damit nicht verbunden.” He has collected a great number of cases of the use of the word nobilis and other equivalent words in the Carolingian age, that is to say, just at the point when the old notion of nobility had come to an end and when the new one had not fully developed itself. In that immediate stage nobility means simply to have meant free birth, or at all events free birth combined with the possession of land.

NOTE P. p. 95.
Grants of Folkland.

I hope to say something more in my fifth volume about the tenure of land in England. I will here only give one or two specimens of the form of these grants.

In 977 (Cod. Dipl. iii. 157) King Eadward makes a grant to Ælfric (which Ælfric?) in these terms; “Aliquam partem terræ juris mei perpetuali donatione libenter concedo cuidam fideli meo ministro [þegn] vocitato nomine Ælfric, ob illius amabile obsequium dignatus sum largiri.” He is to have it in full property, with the right of bequest, and to hold it free of all services “exceptis istis tribus, expeditione, pontis arcisve munitione.” So Æthelred in 982 (Cod. Dipl. iii. 188) grants “ruris quamdam sed communem portionem, quam hujus nationis indigenæ usitato æt Stoce nuncupant onomate, cuipiam mihi pisticâ [one thinks of the πιστοί in the Persians of Æschylus] devotione subnixo vocitamine Leofrico.” The grantee is to have full power of bequest, and to hold the land “ab omni terrenæ servitutis jugo liberum, excepta expeditione, pontis arcisve restauratione.” Fearful curses are imprecated on any one who shall disturb the grantees in their possessions.

Bishops make grants to their own thegns of Church lands to be held for one, two, or three lives, and then to revert to the Church. The Codex contains a great many grants of this kind made by Bishop Oswald, the grant being made by leave of the King and of the reigning Ealdorman of the Mercians. In one, in English, which immediately follows the grant to Ælfric (iii. 159), we find the trinoda necessitas duly excepted. “Sie hit ǽlces þinges freoh búton ferdfare and walgeworc and brygcgeworc and cyrcanláde.”

The consent of the Witan is marked in the grant to Leofric by the words “his testibus consentientibus quorum inferius nomina caraxantur.” So Eadgar (iii. 153) makes a grant “optimatum meorum utens consilio,” &c., &c.

The Codex Diplomaticus is of course the great storehouse of knowledge on this subject.

NOTE Q. p. 101.
The Constitution of the Witenagemót.

I conceive that my notions about the Witenagemót do not differ essentially from those of Mr. Kemble. The process by which a primary Assembly in a large country naturally shrinks up into a small official or aristocratic body could not be better drawn out than they are in his chapter on the Witenagemót (Saxons in England, ii. 191 et seqq.). He winds up (p. 195) with the words; “At what exact period the change I have attempted to describe was effected, is neither very easy to determine nor very material. It was probably very gradual, and very partial; indeed it may never have been formally recognized, for here and there we find evident traces of the people’s being present at, and ratifying the decisions of the Witan.” In a note on the next page Mr. Kemble goes on to refute the strange notion of Sir Francis Palgrave (ii. ccclxxxvi.) that a property qualification was needed for a seat in the Witenagemót. In fact Mr. Kemble’s remarks are all that could be wished, if he had only brought forward more clearly some of those “evident traces” to which he cursorily alludes.

I will try, partly at least, to fill up the gap. Take for instance the very beginning of recorded English legislation, the Dooms of Æthelberht (Thorpe, i. 2); “Gif cyning his leode to him gehated.” Leode here surely means people in the widest sense. So in the Preface to the Laws of Wihtræd (p. 36); “Ðær þa eadigan fundon mid ealra gemedum þas domas.” The great men propose, the people accept, just as in the concilia described by Tacitus. So the deposition of Sigeberht in 755 (of which more in the next Note) was, according to Henry of Huntingdon (M. H. B. 729 C), who is clearly following some earlier writer, the act of the whole West-Saxon people; “Congregati sunt proceres et populus totius regni, et provida deliberatione et unanimi consensu omnium expulsus est a regno. Kinewlf vero, juvenis egregius de regia stirpe oriundus, electus est in regem.” So the “Decretum Episcoporum et aliorum sapientum de Kancia,” addressed to Æthelstan (Thorpe, i. 216), whatever its exact bearing, is drawn up in the name of the “thaini, comites [eorlas], et villani [ceorlas].” So the “Judicia Civitatis Lundoniæ” (p. 228, Schmid, 156) are confirmed by all, “ægder ge eorlisce ge ceorlisce,” in the Latin “comites et villani.” So in the Chronicles a popular element is often mentioned in the election of Kings and in other national acts. In 959 Eadgar was, according to Florence, “ab omni Anglorum populo electus.” In 1016 Eadmund is chosen by the Witan and the citizens (burhwaru) of London. So in 1036 Harold the First is chosen by most of the thegns north of Thames and by the liðsmen or sailors of London. In 1041 “all folk chose Eadward to King.” So in 1066 Harold took the kingdom “as men chose him thereto.” So in 1048, when Godwine proposes to interfere in the wars of the North, “hit þuhte unræd eallum folce.” So too Godwine, on his return in 1052, makes his speech in the Mycel Gemót “wið Eadward cyng his hlaford and wið ealle landleodan.” So with regard to a local body, in the account of a Scirgemót of Herefordshire in Cod. Dipl. iv. 54, though the thegns (“ealle ða þegnas on Herefordscíre”) are mentioned in a special way, yet the final judgement is given by the popular voice—“be ealles ðæs folces leáfe and gewitnesse.” With regard to the action of the citizens of London, the case no doubt simply was that they, being on the spot, could assert this right, which others at a distance could not do. But it must be remembered that till the eleventh century the Witan did not commonly meet either in London or in any other of the chief towns. Possibly, when a Gemót was held at Winchester or Exeter, the citizens of those towns would hold the same position as the Londoners did when the Gemót was held in their city. Something of this kind seems to be referred to in a charter of Æthelstan (Cod. Dipl. ii. 194) of the year 934—a charter remarkable on other grounds from the vast number of signatures, including four vassal Kings, and evidently passed in what was indeed a Mycel Gemót. It is given “in civitate opinatissima [sic] quæ Winteceaster nuncupatur, tota populi generalitate sub alis regiæ dapsilitatis ovanti.” The citizens both of London and of Winchester seem to be mentioned as electors of Kings as late as the accession of Stephen. (See W. Malms., Hist. Nov. i. 11.) Even as late as 1461, Edward Earl of March was elected King by a tumultuous assembly of the citizens of London, and the citizens were foremost in the revolution which placed Richard the Third on the throne in 1483. These elections are fully described in Hall’s Chronicle, pp. 253, 372. (See Growth of English Constitution, 204.) And that of Edward comes out well in the Collections of a London Citizen (Camden Society), 215, where we read how the Earl of March “enteryed unto the cytte of London, and there he toke uppon hym the crowne of Inglond by the avysse of the lordys spyrytual and temporalle, and by the elexyon of the comyns. And so he be-gan hys rayne.” These are plainly the last traces of the right which the citizens had more regularly exercised in the elections of Eadmund Ironside and of Harold the son of Cnut.

These passages seem distinctly to imply that every freeman had a theoretical right to attend. Some of the expressions used might be applied without impropriety to a representative assembly; but they could not be applied to a body not representative, unless, in theory at least, it took in the whole nation. These passages prove also that some form of demanding the assent of the people at large was always retained. But the retention of some such usage is almost proved, without going any further, by the custom which still exists of presenting the King at his coronation for the acceptance of the people (see vol. iii. Appendix E). This is at once the last trace of our elective monarchy, and the last vestige of the ancient right of the Teutonic freeman to take a direct part in the affairs of the nation. We may see the working of the same process on the continent in what Waitz, iii. 56, says of the Frankish Assemblies under the Karlings; “Das Volk, oder die Grossen, welche auf den allgemeinen Versammlungen im Namen des Volkes handelten.” But in the quasi-official language of Einhard (Vita Kar. 1) it is “publicus populi sui conventus,” and the Continuator of Fredegar (117 a, 752) speaks of the change of dynasty as made “cum consilio omnium Francorum.”

The charter of 934, which I have just quoted, starts a point of quite another kind, namely the question as to the attendance of the vassal Celtic princes in the English Witenagemót. On this I have said something in p. 132. The attendance of the Welsh Kings is not uncommon, especially in the reign of Æthelstan. They often sign charters with the titles of subregulus or undercyning. See the signatures, ranging from 930 to 956 (Cod. Dipl. ii. 170, 173, 193, 196, 203, 292, 304, 326, 413; v. 199, 208, 217), of the subreguli Howel, Morcant, Owen, Juthwal, Tudor, Syferth, Jacob, Jukil, and Wurgeat. The Cumbrian signatures are rarer, but we have those of Eugenius in 931 (v. 199) and 937 (ii. 203), and of Malcolm in 966 and 970 (ii. 413, iii. 59). The signature of Kenneth of Scotland is attached to three charters (Cod. Dipl. ii. 413, iii. 69; Palgrave, ii. ccli. cclii.), but the authenticity of all three has been suspected. Still his presence at the great ceremony at Chester shows that the appearance of the King of Scots in the Witenagemót was a thing that might be looked for. The treaty between Richard the First and William the Lion, by which the novel claims of Henry the Second were given up, contains elaborate rules for the reception of the King of Scots on his way to the King’s court as due of ancient custom (Palgrave, ii. cccxxxix.).

NOTE R. p. 106.
The Right of the Witan to depose the King.

Mr. Kemble (ii. 219) formally reckons among the powers of the Witan that they “had the power to depose the King, if his government was not conducted for the benefit of the people.” He adds that “it is obvious that the very existence of this power would render its exercise an event of very rare occurrence.” He then goes on to discuss the case of Sigeberht at length, and adds, “I have little doubt that an equally formal, though hardly equally justifiable, proceeding severed Mercia from Eádwig’s kingdom, and reconstituted it as a separate state under Eádgár; and lastly from Simeon of Durham we learn that the Northumbrian Alchred was deposed and exiled, with the counsel and consent of all his people.”

This last Northumbrian case is worth notice, as showing that a perfectly legal proceeding may lurk under words which at first sight seem to imply mere violence. The two Chronicles, Worcester and Peterborough, which record the deposition of Ealhred in the year 774, use the words, “Her Norðhymbra fordrifon heora cyning Alchred of Eoforwic on Eastertid, and genamon Æþelred Molles sunu him to hlaforde.” So Florence, “Festi paschalis tempore Northymbrenses regem suum Alhredum, Molli regis successorem, Eboraco expulere, filiumque ejusdem regis Molli, Æthelberhtum, in regem levavere.” This might suggest the notion of a mere revolutionary act; but the words of Simeon bring out the legal character of the deposition much more strongly; “Alcredus rex, consilio et consensu suorum omnium, regiæ familiæ ac principum destitutus societate, exilio imperii mutavit majestatem.” With this new light before us, we better understand the force of the words of the Chronicles, “of Eoforwic on Eastertid.” It is plain that Ealhred was deposed by the Easter Gemót of his kingdom assembled in his capital. Simeon then goes on to speak of Æthelred as “tanto honore coronatus;” and it should be noticed that in 779, when he records the expulsion of Æthelred himself, richly deserved as it was by the treacherous murder of three of his Ealdormen, he does not use the same legal language; “Ethelredo expulso de regali solio et in exilio fugato, cogitur mœstos inire modos miserasque habere querelas. Elfwald vero filius Oswlfi, Ethelredo expulso, regnum Northanhymbrorum suscepit.” So in the Chronicles (778), “And þa feng Alfwold to rice and Æþeldred bedraf on lande.”

To turn to the case of Sigeberht, I have already quoted (see above, p. 400) the words of Henry of Huntingdon, in whose account the legal action of the nation stands out most clearly; but the consent of the Witan appears also in all the other accounts. In the Chronicles (755) we read, “Her Cynewulf benam Sigebryhte his mæge his rices and Wæst-seaxna witan for unrihtum dædum butan Hamtunscire.” So Florence, “Cynewlfus, de prosapia Cerdici regis oriundus, auxilium sibi ferentibus West-Saxonicis primatibus, regem illorum Sigebertum, ob multitudinem suorum iniquorum factorum, regno exterminavit, et loco ejus regnavit; unam tamen provinciam, quæ Hantunscire dicitur, eidem concessit.” And even Æthelweard (ii. 17), who seems to tell the story with a certain royalist leaning against Cynewulf, witnesses to the same facts; “Post decursum unius anni ex quo Sigebryht regnare cœperat, cujus regnum invadens Cynulf abstraxit ab eo, et sapientes totius partis occidentalis facietenus traxit cum eo propter inconditos actus supradicti regis; nec illi derelicta pars potestatis nisi provincia una quæ Hamtunscire nuncupatur.” In this case, as in the case of Ealhred, we may remark the different colourings given to the same action. The deposition of Sigeberht was clearly a legal act, but it might be spoken of as an “invasio,” just as equally legal acts later in our history could be also spoken of as “invasiones.”

With regard to the separation of Mercia from the kingdom of Eadwig, spoken of by Mr. Kemble, the whole of Eadwig’s reign is shrouded in such darkness that, as it forms no part of my immediate subject, I have rather avoided going into it. But at any rate that separation would present one point of difference from any of the other cases. As Eadgar seems to have been Under-king of the Mercians from the death of Eadred, the act by which the Mercians threw off the authority of Eadwig was rather the rejection of the supremacy of an over-lord than the deposition of an immediate sovereign.

Of the other cases which I have mentioned in the text, those which come within the range of my History I have discussed in their proper places. Among the later cases, some may have expected to see the names of Henry the Sixth and Charles the First. But neither of these Kings were, in strictness of speech, deposed. By deposition I understand an act by which a King, whose right to be King is acknowledged up to that time, is, by virtue of such act, declared to be no longer King. This was not exactly the case with Henry the Sixth. When Richard Duke of York claimed the crown in preference to Henry, a compromise was made, by which Henry was to keep the crown for life and Richard was to become his heir-apparent. It was therefore the Yorkist theory that Henry reigned by virtue of this agreement, and that, when he afterwards, as was alleged, broke the agreement, the Crown was thereby forfeited and the Duke became de jure King. (See Growth of the English Constitution, p. 149.) Yet, as we have seen, a kind of popular election was thought needful to confirm the rights of his son. Charles the First, it is still more clear, was not deposed. He was tried and executed being King, a process of which English history supplies no other example. The depositions of Edward the Second and Richard the Second are too plain to need comment. James the Second was clearly deposed in Scotland; whether the vote against him in England could be strictly called a vote of deposition is less clear. On the character of this famous vote, logically so absurd, yet practically so thoroughly adapted to all the circumstances of the time, see Macaulay, Hist. of Eng. ii. 623. So on the vote of the Scottish Estates, iii. 285.

I have spoken in the text of that milder form of deposition by which the King was removed from his authority without being formally removed from his office. Of this process the simpler forms of our early constitution will hardly supply an instance, unless we see an approach to it in the engagement (see p. 368) entered into by Æthelred on his restoration to rule in all things by the advice of his Witan. But it was done in the cases of Henry the Third, Edward the Second, and Richard the Second; in the two latter cases the act was a kind of forewarning of the severer punishment which was to follow.

It must be remembered that throughout this argument I am dealing with the legal right of deposition, not with the justice of its exercise in any particular case. As to Sigeberht, and as to Ealhred too, both of them clearly deserved their fate, but how far in either case the West-Saxon and Northumbrian Witan may have been influenced by any personal intrigues of Cynewulf or Æthelred, who play in the two stories respectively the part of Henry of Bolingbroke or William of Orange, is not to the purpose. So too with the later fates of the deposed Kings, with the certain murder of Edward, the all but certain murder of Richard, the constitutional question has nothing to do. The deposed prince was let off the most easily in the earliest case. Sigeberht, deposed from the kingdom of Wessex, was allowed to retain Hampshire as Under-king. Having murdered one of his Ealdormen, he was banished altogether by Cynewulf, the new head King, and he was afterwards killed by a private enemy.

For instances of deposition among other Teutonic nations see Kemble, ii. 221. The most famous case of all, the deposition of Childeric and election of Pippin, was somewhat spoiled by the application to the Bishop of Rome about a matter which it clearly lay within the power of the Frankish nation to settle without his interference.

NOTE S. p. 107.
The Election of Kings.

Some passages bearing on the election of Kings by the Witan, that is in truth by the people, have been already quoted (see above, p. 602). At every stage of my history I shall have to call attention to the way in which the right of free election was carried out in practice. But it is worth while to point out how long the old Teutonic feeling survived, and at how late a time it was still formally put forth as a constitutional principle. Nowhere can a better exposition of the ancient doctrine as to the election of Kings be found than in the speech which Matthew Paris (Chronica Majora, ii. 454, ed. Luard) puts into the mouth of Archbishop Hubert at the election of King John. Whether the speech is Hubert’s or Matthew’s matters little; or rather, if it be Matthew’s own, it is the more valuable, as carrying on the ancient tradition still later. No one has any right to be King unless he be chosen by the whole people of the land on account of his merits (“nullus prævia ratione alii succedere habet regnum, nisi ab universitate regni unanimiter, invocata Spiritus gratia, electus”), but if any member of the royal family be worthy, he is to be preferred to any one else (“verum si quis ex stirpe regis defuncti aliis præpolleret, pronius et promptius in electionem ejus est consentiendum”). The preamble is excellent, but the practical inference is strange, namely that Duke John, for his many virtues, should be chosen King. With this speech, made by, or attributed to, an English Archbishop, we may compare the similar doctrine of elective monarchy laid down by a French Archbishop, Adalbero of Rheims, at the election of Hugh Capet in 987; “Non ignoramus Karolum fautores suos habere, qui eum dignum regno ex parentum collatione contendant. Sed si de hoc agitur, nec regnum jure hæreditario adquiritur, nec in regnum promovendus est nisi quem non solum corporis nobilitas, sed et animi sapientia illustrat, fides munit, magnanimitas firmat. Legimus in annalibus, clarissimi generis Imperatoribus ignavia ab dignitate præcipitatis, alios modo pares, modo impares successisse.” (Richer, iv. 11.) So again the combination of the elective and hereditary principles, as found in all the old Teutonic kingdoms, is well set forth by Rudolf Glaber, i. 3; “Totius regni primates elegerunt Ludovicum, filium videlicet prædicti regis Caroli, unguentes eum super se regem hæreditario jure regnaturum.” We shall find as nearly as possible the same words in an important passage of our Chronicles (A. 1042).

NOTE T. p. 151.
Names of Kingdoms and Nations.

It should be carefully borne in mind that, throughout the times with which we are dealing, two systems of geographical nomenclature were in use, we might say in rival use. The ancient names, Roman or ante-Roman, still survived, as many of them survive still, as purely geographical descriptions, and the new names, the names of states and kingdoms named after their inhabitants, were still only in process of forming. I have said something of this in an earlier Note (see above, p. 596) with regard to the nomenclature of our own island; the nomenclature of continental countries we shall find to be still more confused. But the two classes of names can be clearly distinguished. Gallia and Britannia were doubtless in their origin names derived from a people, no less than Francia and Anglia; but, in the times with which we have to deal, Gallia and Britannia had become purely geographical terms, simply expressing a certain extent of territory on the map, while Francia and Anglia (if the latter name was used at all) were political names, expressing the territory occupied or ruled by Franci and Angli. The shifting of names of this latter class are frequent and well known. The modern kingdom of Saxony, for instance, has not an inch of ground in common with the Saxony which was conquered by Charles the Great, and the various meanings of the word Burgundy have become a proverb among the learned and a touchstone to bewray the half-learned. Another cause of confusion is that the ancient geographical names were constantly used, not only in their straightforward geographical sense, but also by way of fine writing, in which case they are constantly used affectedly, and often inaccurately. This is especially the case with Richer. Take for instance the opening of his second book, where he describes the political parties of his own day in the geographical language of Cæsar, “Galli namque Celtæ cum Aquitanis Hugonem Rotberti regis filium, Belgæ vero Ludovicum Karoli sequebantur.” Here we get a real distinction of race and language. The Celtæ and Aquitani are the nations of the Romance tongues, the forerunners of the future French and the future Provençal, while the Belgæ mark the still Teutonic part of the kingdom, whose inhabitants Richer elsewhere (i. 47) distinctly calls Germani. But none would guess this from the antiquated phraseology which he chooses. A still more remarkable instance of Richers way of misusing antiquated terms will be found in a passage which seems to have misled Sir Francis Palgrave. Sir Francis, describing the campaign of 944 (see p. 225) says (ii. 543), “Among other vassals or dependants ... Otho was joined by Conrad ‘King of Geneva,’ under which style we might have some difficulty in recognizing the King of Burgundy, yet the title is not undeserving of notice, as embodying the very few remaining recollections of a kingdom practically effaced from historical memory.” This I do not understand. As Sir Francis gives no references, I cannot undertake to deny that Conrad may be called “King of Geneva” somewhere, but he certainly is not so called in any of the most obvious authorities for this campaign. Widukind does not mention him at all. In Flodoard (A. 946) he is, as usual, “Cisalpinæ Galliæ rex.” In Richer (ii. 53) he is “Rex Genaunorum.” (Did Sir Francis read “Genevanorum”?) It is strange geography of Richer to place the Genauni in Burgundy, but we find again in ii. 98, “urbem Vesontium, quæ est metropolis Genaunorum, cui etiam in Alpibus sitæ Aldis Dubis præterfluit.” The ecclesiastical province of Besançon answers almost exactly to Transjurane Burgundy. In iii. 86 the same Conrad is, still more wonderfully, made into “Rex Alemannorum.” Richer, in short, despised the geography of his own age, and used his obsolete names without much discretion.

But this affectation extends to better writers than Richer. Lambert himself constantly uses the word Galliæ in a vague sort of way, or rather as equivalent to Germany. Thus, for instance, we hear of the church of Fulda as one of the chief churches of the Gauls “illius monasterii opes usque ad id temporis florentissimæ erant cunctisque Galliarum ecclesiis eminebant.” A 1063), while Mainz (A. 1074) is “caput et princeps Gallicarum urbium.” And the word is used in the same sense in several other passages under those two years. So, as I have implied in discussing Richer’s description of Conrad, the name “Gallia Cisalpina,” as used by Flodoard, always, I cannot conceive why, means the kingdom of Burgundy or some part of it (see A. 924, 937, 939, 946). Of these the third is the passage referred to in p. 203. M. Gaudet in his note on Richer takes the “Hugo Cisalpinus” there spoken of for Hugh the Black, one of the Princes of the ducal Burgundy who is mentioned by Flodoard the next year. But there can be no doubt that the person meant is Hugh of Provence, the famous King of Italy.

But the great source, not so much of confusion as of vague and strange descriptions or rather indications of kingdoms and states, arises from the fact that none of the states formed by the division of the Carolingian Empire, none at least of those north of the Alps, had as yet won for itself a geographical name. There were old national names in abundance, Saxony, Bavaria, Aquitaine, Britanny, but there were no general names to express the kingdoms of Charles, Lothar, and Lewis, respectively. Each King was a King of the Franks; he reigned over so much of the old Frankish dominion as he could get hold of; he had no distinct and recognized national or territorial title; he and his kingdom had to be described, or rather pointed out, as they might be. We nowhere see this better than in the way in which our own Chronicles under the year 887 record the division of the Empire after the deposition of Charles the Third. The four kingdoms are clearly marked out, but not one of the four has a territorial name; the three which lie north of the Alps are simply pointed to geographically; “Earnulf wunode on þam lande be æstan Rine; and Hroðulf þa feng to þam middel rice, and Oda to þam west dæle, and Beorngar and Wiða to Langbeardna lande.” This is at least clearer than the description given by Erchempert (Hist. Langobardorum, 11; Pertz, iii. 245) of the earlier division between the sons of Lewis the Pious; “Ab hoc Francorum divisum est regnum, quoniam Lutharius Aquensem et Italicum, Ludoguicus [this form, with the gu for the w, is worth noting philologically] autem Baioarium, Karlus vero, ex alia ortus genitrice, Aquitaneum regebat imperium.” Here, in the hopelessness of finding a name for Lothar’s kingdom, we find an unique “regnum” or “imperium Aquense,” while Saxony and the rest of Germany are merged in Bavaria, and Neustria is merged in Aquitaine. Another way of distinguishing kingdoms and their inhabitants was to describe them by the names of their rulers, as in the passage of Widukind (i. 29) quoted in p. 155; “Unde usque hodie certamen est de regno Karolorum stirpi et posteris Odonis, concertatio quoque regibus Karolorum et Orientalium Francorum super regno Lotharii.” Here “regnum Lotharii” is of course Lotharingia, Lothringen, Lorraine, though it must be remembered that the name takes in a far wider territory than the modern duchy. So Gregory the Seventh (Jaffé, Mon. Greg. 465) speaks of “regnum Lotharii” and Bonitho (ib. 631) of “Lothariorum regnum.” And in the continuation of Regino (Pertz, i. 618) “Lothariensi regnum” is opposed to Gallia Romana. But it should also be noticed that the Western Kingdom also has no name; its Kings are “reges Karolorum;” it was quite a chance that France was not permanently called Carolingia to match Lotharingia. So in Widukind (iii. 2) the Western kingdom is “regnum Karoli,” though in the reign of a Lewis; so, still more distinctly, in the Gesta Episcoporum Cameracensium (i. 55, iii. 50; Pertz, vii. 421, 481) the inhabitants of France and Lotharingia are distinguished as “Karlenses” and “Lotharienses.” So in the same work (i. 116; Pertz, vii. 452) “Robertus rex Karlensium” is coupled with “Richardus rex Rotomagensium.” And strangest of all, in the Chronicle of the Counts of Flanders (Corp. Chron. Fland. i. 86) the Emperor Henry the Third is spoken of as “Rex Lothariensis, qui et Cæsar Imperator Augustus appellatus est.” (So in our own Chronicle, 1126, “þone kasere Heanri of Loherenge;” in the next year we hear of “ðes Caseres wif of Sexlande.”) This way of describing countries by their rulers is very common just at this time, when divisions were springing up for which there were no received geographical names. Thus Germany is sometimes “Terra Heinrici” (Flodoard, 933); Flanders and Normandy are, in our own Chronicles, “Baldwines land” and “Ricardes rice.” But Lotharingia, perhaps as the name of the most purely artificial division of all, is the only name of the class which has survived.

This same passage leads us to the way which (except in the case of Lotharingia, a kingdom which almost always bore the name of its founder) became more usual, that of distinguishing the kingdoms and their inhabitants by some distinctive epithet of race or language, or by some word which simply points to them geographically. The difficulty, as I have already hinted, arises from the still abiding notion of the existence of a single Frankish kingdom, however many might be the Kings among whom its administration was divided. None of the Kings, nor yet the subjects of any of the Kings, would give up their right to be at least one of the Kings of the Franks, to be at least part of the people of the Franks. While such a state of feeling was rife, it was impossible that any King or kingdom should bear any title distinctly and permanently recognized. A King most commonly describes himself simply as “Rex;” any more particular description might have been construed either as a surrender of his own rights or as an infringement of the rights of some other prince. Thus it has often been remarked that in the act of election (see Pertz, Legg. i. 547, cf. the election of Lewis at p. 558) by which Boso was raised to the kingship of Burgundy—the “middel rice” of our Chronicles—he is simply made King without any particular title, and without any particular geographical extent being traced out for his kingdom. It was not so while the Frankish dominions remained undivided. In the days of the early Karlings, the King had a title and his dominions had a name. His dominions were Francia; he himself was the Rex Francorum. In Einhard, Francia means the whole territory occupied or ruled by the Franks and their King. This comes out very strongly in the Life of Charles, c. 2; “Pater ejus [Pippini] Karolus, qui tyrannos per totam Franciam dominatum sibi vindicantes oppressit, et Sarracenos Galliam occupare tentantes duobus magnis prœliis, uno in Aquitania apud Pictavium civitatem, altero juxta Narbonam apud Birram fluvium devicit.” Here, with the strictest precision, Gallia is a part of Francia and Aquitania is a part of Gallia. And this will be found to be the common use throughout the Life and Annals. So the Monk of Saint Gallen (Gesta Karoli, i. 10; Pertz, ii. 735) defines Francia in the widest sense to take in “omnes Cis-alpinas provincias.” But the name Francia gradually came to be confined to two portions of the original Francia, one on each side of the Rhine, those where the name still survives alike in France and in Franken or Franconia. These two had therefore to be distinguished by various epithets. Thus we find “Francia Teutonica” opposed to “Francia Latina” and “Francia Orientalis” opposed to “Francia Occidentalis.” Sometimes “Francia” and “Gallia” are opposed, as in Ann. Xant. 877 (Pertz, ii. 234), and the use is not uncommon in the Annals of Fulda, as 880 (i. 393). See too specially Bruno, Bell. Sax. 36 (Pertz, v. 342), and Liudprand (Antapodosis, i. 14, 16), who talks of “Franciam quam Romanam dicunt,” and elsewhere (iii. 20) of “Francorum genus Teutonicorum.” See also Widukind, i. 16, 29; Wipo, Vit. Chuon. 1, 6, 27, and especially c. 2, where he describes the Rhine as the frontier of “Gallia” and “Germania,” and reckons up the nations in both countries which formed the kingdom of Conrad, among which are “Franci Orientales,” and “Franci qui supra Rhenum habitant,” an unusual distinction. See also Otto of Freising, Gest. Frid. i. 34, where he speaks of “Orientalis Francia,” and Ann. vii. 5, where he distinguishes “Franci Romani et Teutonici.” In the Annals of Saint Vedast, 887 (Pertz, ii. 203), we find “Franci Australes” and “inferiores;” but in those Annals “Franci” and “Francia” commonly mean the Western kingdom. The word is sometimes used in this sense in the phrases “rex Franciæ” and “regnum Franciæ” (see above, p. 595, and Dudo, 97 D). But Francia, as used by writers within the Western kingdom, commonly means the Parisian duchy, and it is only through the successive conquests of the Parisian Kings that the word France has gained that modern meaning which now takes in the old Western kingdom and something more. The ordinary meaning of the word Francia in Flodoard and Richer is plain from such passages as Flodoard, A. 923, 926. It means the dominion of the “Dux Francorum,” whether he be “Rex Francorum” as well or not. In the latter passage, we find a Danegeld levied “per Franciam et Burgundiam,” where Burgundia does not mean the kingdom of Boso, but the duchy which did homage to the West-Frankish King. So in the Vita Hludowici, 49, we find “Francia, Burgundia, Aquitania, et Germania.” Francia, in short, as used by these writers, excludes Lotharingia and all the Burgundies; it excludes Aquitaine, Normandy, and Britanny; and it has further to be distinguished as “Latina” or “Occidentalis” from the other Francia east of the Rhine.

In the like sort, we read in the Chronica Regum Francorum, ap. Pertz, iii. 214; “Hic [at the deposition of Charles the Third] divisio facta est inter Teutones Francos et Latinos Francos.” But it is remarkable to trace how early, especially within the Western Francia, the word Franci began to mean the Western as opposed to the Eastern Franks. Thus the Astronomer (ap. Pertz, ii. 617) speaks of Lewis the Pious as “monitus tam a Francis quamque a Germanis,” and again (p. 633), “diffidens Francis, magisque se credens Germanis.” So Liudprand (Antapod. i. 14, 17) uses “Rex Galliæ” and “Rex Francorum” as synonymous. And the word seems to be used in the same sense by Nithard, i. 5, ii. 3, in the former of which passages Francia seems to be opposed to “universi qui trans Renum morabantur.” So Wipo (31) distinguishes the Western kingdom as “Galliæ Francorum,” and Lambert (1073), unlike Bruno, allows the title of “Rex Francorum” to the Western potentate. Still in Germany Franci kept its natural meaning down to the days of Frederick Barbarossa. “Sic emitur a Francis Imperium,” says Otto of Freising (Gest. Frid. ii. 22). Yet elsewhere (i. 58) he speaks of “Rex Francorum” and “Rex Franciæ” in the other sense. So William of Malmesbury (i. 68), in a passage the whole of which is worth study, says, “Lotharingi et Alemanni, et cæteri Transrhenani populi qui Imperatori Teutonicorum subjecti sunt, magis proprie se Francos appellari jubent; et eos quos nos Francos putamus, Galwalas antiquo vocabulo [did William know the force of the walas?] quasi Gallos nuncupant. Quibus et ego assensum commodo,” &c. Elsewhere (iv. 360) he says, “Romanum Imperium prius ad Francos, post ad Teutones, declinavit;” he yet more strangely adds, “orientale apud Persas semper durat.”

In other cases the words Franci or Francia are altogether left out. “Occidentales” alone is used as equivalent to West-Frankish or French, and “Orientales” is used as equivalent to German. Perhaps the most remarkable case of this use is to be found in the treaty between Charles the Simple and Henry of Saxony in 921 (Pertz, Legg. i. 567). Here the two Kings of the Franks are geographically distinguished, as “Gloriosissimus rex Francorum Occidentalium, Karolus” and “Magnificentissimus rex Francorum Orientalium Heinricus.” But in the text of the treaty, where Charles speaks in his own person, he says, “Ego Karolus, divina propitiante clementia, rex Francorum Occidentalium, amodo ero huic amico meo regi Orientali Heinrico amicus.” We find the same use in Dudo, 130 B, and in a very remarkable passage of Richer (iv. 12, 13), where he gives two descriptions of the extent of the Western kingdom in the tenth century. Hugh Capet is made King over “Galli, Britanni, Dahi [doubtless Dani, i.e. the Normans], Aquitani, Gothi, Hispani [the county of Barcelona], Wascones.” He then associates his son Robert in the kingdom—“a Mosa fluvio usque Oceanum Occidentalibus regem præfecit et ordinavit.” So in the extract from Thietmar in p. 175, “Occiduæ partes” is the German writer’s description of the kingdom of Charles the Simple. In other passages a King is simply, as it were, pointed at. In Flodoard, 938, Otto is “Rex Transrhenensis,” in Richer, i. 20, his father is simply “Heinricus Transrhenensis,” and in Dudo, 130 B, where the Germans are still “Orientales,” their King is still “Rex Transrhenanus.” So “Rex Orientalis” is opposed to “Rex Galliæ,” Ann. Xant. 873 (Pertz, ii. 235). More curious still is the description of no less a person than Hugh the Great in Flodoard, A. 960; “Richardus, filius Willelmi Nortmannorum principis, filiam Hugonis trans Sequanam [or ‘Transsequani’] quondam principis, duxit uxorem.” So in 946 our Eadmund is “Edmundus rex transmarinus.” See above, p. 565. This way of describing suggests some of those curious mediæval verbs, “transfretare,” “transpadare,” and the like.

Germany in fact was longer than any of the other countries of which we have been speaking in getting a true territorial name for itself, and a true territorial title for its sovereign. We have seen several instances of the use of Germania; but then Germania, like Gallia, is a purely geographical name, and the Eastern kingdom took in a large part of Gallia. The kingdom itself is commonly “Regnum Teutonicum” (Lambert, 1073), a phrase which is the more remarkable when we find it coupled with the geographical name Italia, as in Gregory’s anathema in Muratori, iii. 336. Lewis the son of Lewis the Pious is repeatedly called “Rex Germanorum” by Prudentius of Troyes (Pertz, i. 441, 443), and “Rex Germaniæ” by Hincmar (Pertz, i. 458). So Henry is “Germaniæ princeps” in Flodoard, 928. But these are mere descriptions, and no such formal title seems to be found earlier than the days of Maximilian. Indeed the German kingdom was so soon swallowed up by the Roman Empire that a distinct title for its King was hardly needed. The kingdom of Boso, on the other hand, though he and his electors shrank from giving it a name, soon found one in common use. Liudprand (Ant. ii. 60) tells how “Rodulfus rex superbissimus Burgundionibus imperabat,” and Wipo speaks familiarly (15, 19) of “Rex Burgundiæ” and “Burgundionum.” Flodoard, however, besides his favourite flourish about Cisalpine Gaul, tells us of “Rex Jurensis” under the years 935 and 940.

Lastly, the Norman duchy, as I have once or twice implied in the text, was also slow in gaining for itself any distinct territorial name. There is no trace of any such name in Flodoard or in Richer. In Dudo’s time the country is beginning, but only beginning to have a name; it is sometimes “Northmannia,” sometimes only “Terra Northmannorum,” “Northmannica regio,” and the like. In the next century the people have become “Normanni,” and their land has become “Normannia,” “Normendie.” “Northmannia,” with Einhard, meant Denmark. In Adam of Bremen “Nortmannia” means distinctively Norway, though he also uses the word “Norvegia.” With him “Nortmanni” always means Norwegians, except in ii. 52, where Richard is described as “Comes Nortmannorum” and his duchy as “Nortmannia.” It is perhaps needless to add that in our own Northumbrian geography the local names Normanton and Normanby point to Northmen, not to Normans, just as the word “Norþmen” is used in our own Chronicles in describing the Commendation of 923.

NOTE V. p. 158.
Notices of Language in the Tenth Century.

The notices of language which we come across in our authors are often highly curious. The Romance languages are now just beginning to be felt to be really languages, and not mere vulgar dialects of Latin. We get perhaps our first glimpse of this feeling in Nithard’s description (iii. 5) of the famous oath of Strassburg in 842. The two languages, the parents of modern High-Dutch and modern French, are distinguished as “lingua Teudisca” and “lingua Romana.” Charles the Bald himself spoke Lingua Romana; Pertz, Legg. i. 472. “Romana,” Romance, is the usual description of the new language, as distinguished from the classical “Latina,” though we have seen (see p. 182) at least one instance where “Latinus sermo” means the popular Romance. In the course of the next century the language became nationalized, and in Richer (iv. 100) it appears as “lingua Gallica,” which becomes its usual later name. I leave to professed philologers to fix the exact relation of the “lingua Romana” of Nithard to French and to Provençal respectively. For my purpose it is enough that it is Romance, as distinguished both from Latin and from Teutonic.

We also in the course of the narratives of Flodoard and Richer come across several curious passages where the Romance and Teutonic languages are opposed to each other. Thus Charles the Simple has a conference at Worms with Henry of Saxony (“Heinricus Transrhenensis”), when (Richer, i. 20) “Germanorum Gallorumque juvenes, linguarum idiomate offensi, ut eorum mos est, cum multa animositate maledictis sese lacessire cœperunt.” In 948 Lewis and Otto attend a synod, where letters are read in Latin, and are translated “propter reges juxta Teutiscam linguam.” (Flod. in an.; Pertz, iii. 396.) Lewis therefore spoke German no less than Otto. Otto however (see Widukind, ii. 36) could speak French on occasion (“Romana lingua Slavanicaque loqui scit”), which makes the employment of German still more important. In 981 Hugh Capet and Otto the Second met. Otto spoke Latin, and a Bishop translated his speech to Hugh. (Richer, iii. 85.) Hugh therefore did not understand German, and the Romance which he spoke had departed so far from Latin that Latin needed an interpreter. In 996 certain Gaulish and German Bishops meet (Richer, iv. 100), and the Bishop of Verdun is chosen to speak “eo quod linguam Gallicam norat.” The Lotharingian prelate could doubtless speak both languages. These passages seem enough to make out the view which I have everywhere maintained, that throughout the tenth century the Carolingian Kings at Laon were a strictly German dynasty, speaking German as their mother-tongue, while the Dukes and Kings of Paris were already French.

Sir Francis Palgrave’s assertion (i. 72) that “the German Ritterschaft of Otho the Great raised the war-cry in French” is an evident misconception of the passage in Widukind (ii. 17) on which it seems to be grounded. The historian is clearly speaking of the Lotharingian borderers who spoke both languages. His words are simply, “Ex nostris etiam fuere, qui Gallica lingua ex parte loqui sciebant, qui clamore in altum Gallice levato, exhortati sunt adversarios ad fugam.”

Of the speed with which French displaced Danish as the language of Normandy, I have said something in p. 181. For the retention of the ancient speech at Bayeux, after it had been forgotten at Rouen, our chief authority is Dudo, 112 D; “Quoniam quidem Rotomagensis civitas Romana potius quam Dacisca utitur eloquentia, et Baiocacensis fruitur frequentius Dacisca lingua quam Romana; volo igitur ut ad Baiocacensia deferatur quantocius mœnia, et ibi volo ut sit, Botho, sub tua custodia, et enutriatur et educetur cum magna diligentia, fervens loquacitate Dacisca, tamque discens tenaci memoria, ut queat sermocinari profusius olim contra Dacigenas.” (“Contra sermocinari,” in Dudo’s language, is simply to converse with.) So Benoît, 11520;

“Si à Roem le faz garder

E norir, gaires longement

Il ne saura parlier neient

Daneis, kar nul l’i parole.

Si voil qu’il seit a tele escole

Ou l’en le sache endoctriner

Que as Daneis sache parler.

Ci ne sevent riens fors romanz;

Mais à Baiues en a tanz

Qui ne sevent si Daneis non:

E pur ceo, sire quens Boton,

Voil que vos l’aiez ensemble od vos.”

Wace (Roman de Rou, 2502) says only

“Richart sout en Daneiz, en Normant parler.”

Here “Normant” can mean nothing but French, but it is less clear what he means by it in v. 2377, where we read,

“Cosne sout en Thioiz et en Normant parler.”

Wace probably meant French, but he seems to have misunderstood a passage of Dudo (99, 100) which contains a curious notice of the use of the Danish language, the force of which Dudo himself seems hardly to have understood. William is at a conference with Henry of Germany (really with Otto). Certain Lotharingians and Saxons talk to their own chief Cono; William, by his knowledge of Danish, understands them (“per Daciscam linguam quæ dicebant subsannantes, intelligendo subaudit”). The Saxon Duke Hermann afterwards speaks to William in Danish, and being asked how the Saxons came to understand that language, explains the fact by the constant incursions of the Northmen. Duke Hermann might very well understand Danish, and might speak Danish to William; but the Saxons and Lotharingians would not speak Danish to Cono. What the story seems to point to is that the Low-Dutch of Saxony and Lower Lorraine was so far intelligible to one who understood Danish that he could guess at the general meaning of what was said.

But the most remarkable notice of language at all is to be found in the Tours Chronicle in Duchesne, Rer. Franc. Scriptt. iii. 360, which records the homage of Rolf to Charles (see p. 168), and the traditional origin of the name Bigot as applied to the Normans. When Rolf is called on to kiss the King’s feet, “lingua Anglica respondit, Ne se bigoth, quod interpretatur, non per Deum, rex vero et sui illum deridentes, et sermonem ejus corrupte referentes, illum vocaverunt Bigoth. Unde Normanni adhuc Bigothi dicuntur” (see Wace, 9907, et seqq.). Here we read that this famous refusal of Rolf to abase himself was made in a language which by Frankish hearers was looked upon as English. That Rolf spoke English in any strict sense is most unlikely; the tongue in which he answered was doubtless his native Danish. Nor is it enough to say, with Sir F. Palgrave (i. 700), that any Teutonic speech was loosely called English by the French; for Rolf was speaking in the presence of a prince whose native speech was undoubtedly Teutonic. But Charles the Frank spoke High-Dutch; Rolf the Dane spoke a language which, in a wide sense of the words, might be called Low-Dutch. England was the most famous and most familiar country of the Low-Dutch speech, and the Scandinavian talk of Rolf was by his Frankish hearers accordingly set down as English.

NOTE W. pp. 168, 222.
The Vassalage of Normandy.

That Rolf became in the strictest sense the “man” of King Charles, I have no doubt whatever. Against plain facts and probabilities we have nothing to set except the shirkings and twistings of Dudo’s rhetoric. Thus he tells us (83 D); “Dedit itaque [Karolus] filiam suam Gislam nomine uxorem illi Duci, terramque determinatam in alodo, et in fundo, a flumine Eptæ usque ad mare, totamque Britanniam, de qua posset vivere.” And again (84 A); “Ceterum Karolus rex, duxque Rotbertus, comitesque et proceres, præsules et abbates, juraverunt sacramento Catholicæ fidei patricio Rolloni vitam suam, et membra, et honorem totius regni, insuper terram denominatam,” &c. See Palgrave, ii. 361. And he is rather fond of speaking of Normandy as a kingdom or a monarchy; “Tenet sicuti rex monarchiam Northmannicæ regionis;” “Regnum Northmannicæ Britonicæque regionis.” (110 D; 128 B, C; 136 C.) Still the homage of Rolf is perfectly plain, and so is the homage of his son William Longsword. (See pp. 168, 196.) The testimony of Flodoard (927, cf. 933) is express; “Se filius Rollonis Karolo committit.” But whether Richard the Fearless ever did homage to Lewis or Lothar is not so clear. Richard may be included among the “cæteri regni primores” who (see p. 221) did homage to Lewis in 946. Dudo however (126 C) seems very anxious to except him; “Venit rex supra fluvium Eptæ contra Northmannos, cum magno duce Hugone.... Propriis verbis fecit securitatem regni quod suus avus Rollo vi ac potestate, armis et præliis sibi acquisivit. Ipseque et omnes episcopi, comites, et abbates reverendi, principesque Franciæ regni Richardo puero innocenti, ut teneat et possideat, et nullis nisi Deo servitium ipse et successio ejus reddat, et si quis perversæ invasionis rixatione contra eum congredi, vel alicujus rixationis congressione invadere regnum, maluerit, fidissimus adjutor in omni adversæ inopportunitatis necessitate per omnia exstiterit.” As for any homage to Lothar (see p. 232), I suspect that no such homage was ever rendered. The French writers do not mention it, though they would doubtless have been glad to mention it if it had happened. And Flodoard’s way of speaking of Richard is remarkable. William was “the Prince of the Normans;” Richard is only “the son of William Prince of the Normans” (“filius Willelmi Northmannorum principis;” see p. 232, note 3). But I have no doubt that the homage was lawfully due, and it was most likely its refusal which led to the differences between Lothar and Richard. On the other hand, the Commendation of Richard to Hugh the Great (see p. 222) seems to be quite authentic, and it is clear that it was renewed to Hugh’s son. This appears from a charter, which I am obliged to quote at secondhand from Lappenberg, Norman Kings, p. 30. Richard there uses the words, “cum assensu senioris mei, Hugonis, Francorum principis.” The date is 968; the lord therefore is Hugh Capet.

With regard to this matter a remarkable passage of Sir Francis Palgrave (ii. 494–5) must be quoted and commented on. His words are, “A perfect reciprocity was established between France and the ‘Norman Monarchy,’ ... That Dominion which Rollo the Grandsire had won by so many battles, Richard shall henceforward have and hold, owing service to none but God.... Should any enemy attempt to disturb the right of the Norman Sovereign, the King of France shall be his help and aid in all things.... No other service shall Normandy render unless the King should grant the Duke some Benefice within the Kingdom of France. Therefore, as it was explained in after-time, the Duke of Normandy doth no more than promise faith and homage to the King of France. In like manner doth the King of France render the same fealty to the Duke of Normandy; nor is there any other difference between them, save that the King of France doth not render homage to the Duke of Normandy like as the Duke of Normandy doth to the King.”

If I rightly understand Sir Francis Palgrave, his meaning is that the Duke of the Normans ceased from that time to be the man of the King of the French; that he merely entered into a treaty on equal terms with his former lord; that by voluntary commendation he became the man of the Duke of the French; that the later vassalage of Normandy to France was due, not to the kingdom of France but to the duchy, that it had its beginning in the homage done by Richard the Fearless to Duke Hugh, not in the homage done by Rolf to King Charles. I say, if I rightly understand Sir Francis, because I cannot quite reconcile his statements with one another. In one page there “is perfect reciprocity established between France and the Norman monarchy.” Richard has and holds his dominion, owing service to none but God,—yet directly afterwards it is allowed that “the Duke of Normandy promises fealty and homage to the King of France.” It is dangerous to dispute with Sir Francis Palgrave on a question of feudal law, and the more so, as the relations between Normandy and France at once awaken the whole controversy about “liege” and “simple” homage. But surely, even in a case of simple homage, there is not “perfect reciprocity” between him who pays and him who receives the homage; and certainly, in the tale as I read it, I see nothing but the simple relation of lord and man, only clouded over by the big words of Dudo. And as for reciprocity, surely reciprocity of a certain kind was the essence of the feudal relation. Lord and vassal were each to help and defend the other. No one denies that Henry the Second was the vassal of King Lewis the Seventh, if not for Normandy, at any rate for his other continental possessions, but an equal obligation is imposed, in their mutual oath, on Lewis to defend Henry “sicut fidelem suum” and on Henry to defend Lewis “dominum suum.” See Roger of Wendover, ii. 388.

The notion of the independence of Normandy on France comes out very strongly in the speech which Henry of Huntingdon puts into the mouth of William the Conqueror before the Battle of Senlac (M. H. B. 762 D). A much later instance will be found in William of Worcester’s Collections (Stevenson’s Wars in France, ii. 522), when the relations between Normandy and France had again begun to interest Englishmen. We there read of “Normandy, which ducdom, as yt ys sayde by auncyent wrytyng, holdeth of noone higher souverayn in chief but of God.”

The exact relations between Richard the Fearless and the two—if any one cares to reckon the last Lewis, the three—last Karlings I must be content to leave doubtful. When the Duke of the French—the undoubted over-lord of Normandy—became also King of the French the question ceased to be a practical one. As I have said in p. 246, the French King was the lord of the Norman Duke in some character, whether in that of Duke or of King it mattered little. The question was not likely to be stirred again till that change in the relations and mutual feelings between France and Normandy which marked the days of King Henry and Duke William.

NOTE X. p. 180.
Danish Marriages.

The “mos Danicus” with regard to marriage or concubinage, or rather with regard to some third state between marriage and concubinage, is often mentioned in the Norman history of the time. And, though I do not remember the exact words being used in England, yet something of the same kind seems to have existed there also. The ease with which Earl Uhtred (see p. 329) parts with two successive wives, the relations between Cnut and his two Ælfgifus (see p. 411), perhaps the relation between Harold the son of Godwine and the East-Anglian Eadgyth Swanneshals (see vol. iii. Appendix NN), all seem to point to a practice of the same kind. Indeed we shall find (see below, Note SS) that it is by no means clear whether the first wife of Æthelred, the mother of his heroic son, was not in the same way cast aside to make room for the Norman Lady. Instances of the same sort might indeed be found very much later in German, in French, and in English history, and we find a relation essentially the same as far as we can go back in the history of the Aryan race. The “mos Danicus” might just as well be called “mos Achaicus;” the relation between Rolf and Popa at once reminds one of the relation of Briseis to Achilleus, or of Andromachê to Neoptolemos. Briseis is a captive; but she receives the honourable appellation of ἄλοχος (II. ix. 336, 340); she has hopes of becoming even κουριδίη ἄλοχος (II. xix. 298). Still Achilleus’ relation to her in no way hinders him from taking another wife (II. ix. 394), any more than it hinders Diomêdê (ib. 661) from taking her place during her constrained absence. In just the same way, Popa is put away to make room for King Charles’s daughter; but afterwards we read (Will. Gem. ii. 22), “Repudiatam Popam ... iterum repetens sibi copulavit.” (See more in detail, Benoît, v. 7954, and Roman de Rou, 2037.) The “mos Danicus” is opposed to the “mos Christianus.” The tardy bridal of Richard and Gunnor (see p. 253) was done Christian fashion; “Virginem [viraginem?] ... sibi in matrimonium Christiano more desponsavit.” So says William of Jumièges (iv. 18), and he even thinks it necessary to guarantee (v. 5) that the marriage of Alan of Britanny and Hadwisa the daughter of Richard the Good was celebrated “Christiano more.” The expressions used with regard to Sprota herself are many and various. She is in Dudo, 97 A, “conjux dilectissima;” in 110 D, “matrona venerabilis,” a description which, I need hardly say, proves nothing as to her age. In Flodoard, A. 943, her son is “natus de concubina Britanna.” King Lewis, if we may believe William of Jumièges (iv. 3), went a step further, and called young Richard “meretricis filium ultro virum alienum rapientis.” This is mere Billingsgate, as Richard was certainly born before William’s marriage with Liudgardis, though from the Roman de Rou (v. 2073, 2251) one might be led to think otherwise. Elsewhere (iii. 2), in announcing the birth of Richard, William calls her “nobilissima puella, Danico more sibi [William Longsword] juncta, nomine Sprota.” And so Benoît, 8872;

“Icele ama mult e tint chere;

Mais à la Danesche manere

La vout aveir, non autrement,

Ce dit l’estorie qui ne ment.”

The last line is most likely meant as a compliment to William of Jumièges.

The essence of this kind of connexion seems to be that the woman is the man’s wife but that the man is not the woman’s husband. He can evidently leave her at pleasure, but there is no recorded instance of her leaving him. This difference may however be simply the result of the difference of rank between the parties in all the cases with which we have to deal. The wife or mistress of a prince is obviously less likely to forsake him than he is to forsake her. And from a modern Scandinavian writer I gather that Scandinavian manners, at a somewhat later time, allowed of a connexion of nearly the same kind, but one which put the sexes more on a level.

“The term fylgikona (literally companion-woman), which frequently occurs in the Sagas, must have originally meant the same as frilla. Later on, in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, it received a more honourable import, as it was applied to a free woman living with a man in connubial intercourse according to the terms of a formal contract, but without the observance of the usual wedding ceremonies, and especially without consecration by the Church. Connexions of this kind seem to have been rather common, especially in Iceland, and dated from the time when the Church began to lay greater hindrances in the way of obtaining a divorce than had formerly been the case. This connexion would be dissolved at the wish of either of the parties, or in accordance with the terms which had been previously agreed upon, without the intervention of the Church, a result which was not in accordance with Christian views, and could not be applied to marriages proper.... The fylgikona frequently occupied the position of house-wife.” Keyser’s Private Life of the Old Northmen, pp. 35, 36.

As for earlier Frankish laxity, among many strange examples I choose the strangest. “Luxuriæ supra modum deditus [Dagobertus] tres habebat ad instar Salomonis reginas, maxime et plurimas concubinas. Reginæ vero hæ erant, Nantechildis, Wlfegundis, et Berchildis. Nomina concubinarum, eo quod plures fuissent, increvit huic chronicæ inseri.” Fredegar, c. 60.

NOTE Y. p. 197.
The Election of Lewis.

We have two main accounts of the election of Lewis. Flodoard (A. 936) tells the tale very briefly; Richer (ii. 1–4), as usual, is much fuller. But the longer version only expands, and in no way contradicts, the shorter one. The main points, that Hugh the Great was the chief mover in the business and that application had to be made to King Æthelstan in England, come out equally in both accounts. Flodoard tells us, in his dry annalistic way, “Hugo comes trans mare mittit pro accersiendo ad apicem regni suscipiendum Ludowico Karoli filio, quem rex Alstanus avunculus ipsius, accepto prius jurejurando a Francorum legatis, in Franciam cum quibusdam episcopis et aliis fidelibus suis dirigit.” We may here note how completely the words “trans mare” had got to mean England and nothing else, and also that Francia seems to be used in a wider sense than usual (see above, p. 614), though not necessarily in a sense taking in the whole of the Western kingdom. Lewis is met at Boulogne by Hugh and the other princes (“cæteri Francorum proceres”), who do homage to him on the sea-shore (“in ipsis litoreis arenis apud Bononiam sese committunt, ut erat utrimque depactum”). He then goes to Laon, and is crowned. Richer (ii. 1) first gives us that geographical distribution of parties which I have mentioned in the text, and of which I have also spoken in an earlier Note (see above, p. 609). He distinctly mentions Hugh’s unwillingness to assume the crown; “Quum Hugo patrem ob insolentiam periisse reminiscebatur, et ob hoc regnare formidaret” (cf. c. 73, where King Lewis says the same), and adds that, through the absence of Lewis and the unwillingness of Hugh, the choice of a King at least seemed freer than usual (“Galli itaque in regis promotione liberiores videri laborantes”). They meet under the presidency of Duke Hugh (“sub Hugone duce deliberaturi de rege creando collecti sunt”). The Duke makes a speech, which we may safely set down as the composition of the historian. Hugh, we cannot doubt, really had a superstitious feeling against taking the title of King, but he is not likely to have made the strong legitimist harangue which is put into his mouth by Richer. He deplores the sin of his father in reigning, even though he had been chosen to reign by the common voice of the nation; “Pater meus vestra quondam omnium voluntate rex creatus, non sine magno regnavit facinore, quum is cui soli jura regnandi debebantur viveret, et vivens carcere clauderetur. Quod credite Deo non acceptum fuisse. Unde et absit ut ego patris loco restituar.” He then goes on to speak of the reign of Rudolf as teaching the same lesson (“quum ejus tempore visum sit, quid nunc innasci possit, contemptus videlicet regis ac per hoc principum dissensus”). He therefore counsels a return to the lawful royal stock (“repetatur ergo interrupta paullulum regiæ generationis linea”). The rest agree, and the embassy is sent to England in the name of the Duke and the other princes (“Ducis benevolentia atque omnium qui in Galliis potiores sunt”).

The real importance of this speech, like that of many other speeches, consists in its setting forth the feelings of Richer, not the feelings of Duke Hugh. It points to a strong royalist tone as prevailing at Rheims when this part of Richer’s history was written, and it is curious to contrast his language now with the language which he uses after the revolution of 987. See p. 240.

William of Normandy is not mentioned in either of these accounts. Dudo (97 D) has quite another story, in which, as I hinted in the text, the first step is taken by Æthelstan, who prays Duke William to restore his nephew. “Audiens autem Alstemus, rex Anglorum pacificus, quod præcellebat Willelmus virtute et potentia Franciscæ nationis omnibus, misit ad eum legatos suos cum donis præmaximis et muneribus, deprecans ut Ludovicum nepotem suum, Karoli capti regis morte jam in captione præoccupati filium, revocaret ad Franciæ regnum,” &c., &c.

It is in recording this election of Lewis that Rudolf Glaber (i. 3) uses those expressions, so well setting forth the union of election and hereditary right, which I have quoted elsewhere (see above, p. 609). He does not mention Hugh at all, though he had just before enlarged on his share in the election of Rudolf.

NOTE Z. p. 205.
The Death of William Longsword.

Our accounts of the circumstances which led to the death of William Longsword differ widely from each other. Flodoard (943) simply tells us that Arnulf invited him to a conference, and there caused him to be put to death. “Arnulfus comes Willelmum Nortmannorum principem ad colloquium evocatum dolo perimi fecit.” Thus much we may accept as certain; but the oldest French and Norman versions of the events immediately going before are remarkably unlike, and in later writers we find quite another version of the whole affair.

Richer (ii. 30 et seqq.) connects the murder of William with an insult offered by him to King Otto in the Council held by Otto and Lewis at Attigny. William, whether by accident or by design, was not admitted at the beginning of the meeting. After waiting for some time, he forced his way in in great wrath, and his indignation was further heightened at what he then saw. The two Kings were sitting on a raised couch, the Eastern King, the truer successor of Charles, taking the seat of honour. Below them, on two chairs, sat Hugh the Great and Arnulf. William had lately renewed his homage to Lewis, and was filled with zeal for the honour of his over-lord. He bade Lewis rise, and he himself took his seat immediately below Otto. It was not fit that the Western King should allow any man to sit above him (“ipse resedit, dixitque indecens esse regem inferiorem, alium vero quemlibet superiorem videri”). He then made Otto rise, and made Lewis take the seat left empty by Otto, he himself keeping the place immediately below Lewis, that where Lewis himself had been seated at first; “Quapropter oportere Ottonem inde amoliri, regique cedere. Otto pudore affectus surgit ac regi cedit. Rex itaque superior, at Wilelmus inferior consederunt.” William thus set forth his theory of precedence; the King of the West-Franks first, the Duke of the Normans second, the Teutonic King and the other princes of Gaul seemingly nowhere. Such a doctrine was naturally unacceptable alike to Otto, Hugh, and Arnulf. They dissembled their anger at the time; but, when the council had broken up, and when Lewis and William had gone away together, they met and discussed their wrongs privately. Otto in vague terms (c. 31) exhorted Hugh and Arnulf to vengeance against William; he who had not spared him, King Otto, would certainly not spare them (“qui sibi regi non indulsit, minus illis indulturum”). Richer however does not charge Otto with counselling the assassination of William, unless such a charge is implied in the words, “conceptum facinus variis verborum coloribus obvelat.” Hugh and Arnulf then met together and determined on the murder of William. His death was expedient, because it would enable them to get Lewis altogether into their power, whereas now William supported the King against them (“regem etiam ad quodcumque volent facilius inflexuros, si is solum pereat, quo rex fretus ad quæque flecti nequeat.” c. 32). The plot was laid; Arnulf invited William to the conference at Picquigny; the Norman Duke was there killed by some of the conspirators whose names are not given, but not in the presence or by the avowed orders of the Count of Flanders.

Dudo’s story (pp. 104 et seqq.) is quite different. He knows nothing of the Council of Attigny, nothing of King Otto as having even an involuntary share in William’s murder. With him the first deviser of the scheme is Arnulf, to whom all mischief is as naturally attributed at this stage of Norman history as, at a later stage of English history, it is attributed first to Ælfric and then to Eadric. Arnulf’s quarrel with William arises wholly out of the affair of Herlwin of Montreuil (see p. 201). But certain French princes who are not named join with Arnulf in the conspiracy; “Arnulfus dux Flandrensium supra memoratus, veneno vipereæ calliditatis nequiter repletus astuque diabolicæ fraudis exitialiter illectus, gentisque Franciscæ quorumdam principum subdolo consilio et malignitate atrociter exhortatus, cœpit meditari et tractare lugubrem mortem ejus Willelmi.” From this point the two tales are nearly the same; only Dudo of course throws Arnulf’s talk with William into a characteristic Dudonian shape. Arnulf is not only ready to make up his differences with Herlwin; he asks for William’s protection against King Lewis, Duke Hugh, and Count Herbert; he is ready to become William’s vassal during life, and to make him his successor at his death; “Quamdiu superstes fuero ero tibi tributarius, meique servient tibi ut domino servus. Post meæ resolutionis excessum, possidebis meæ ditionis regnum” (105 A). No one but Dudo could have thought of putting such words into Arnulf’s mouth, even by way of a blind. The assassination itself is described in much the same way as it is by Richer; Dudo also gives us the names of the actual murderers. They are Eric, Balzo, Robert, and Ridulf or Riulf.

Now these two versions, though at first sight so utterly different, do not formally contradict one another. It is quite possible that Arnulf may have been led to his crime by a combination of causes, of which Richer has enlarged on one part and Dudo on another, according to their several points of view. Arnulf may well have had a grudge against William, both on account of the wrong done to him in the matter of Montreuil and also on account of the insult offered to him at Attigny. And in fact the two narratives to a certain degree incidentally coincide. Richer (ii. 31) implies that Arnulf and his confederates already had a grudge against William before the meeting at Attigny; “Quæ oratio [Ottonis sc.] plurimam invidiam paravit, ac amicos in odium Wilelmi incitavit, quum et ipsi, quamvis latenter, ei admodum inviderent.” Dudo, as we have seen, speaks of a conspiracy of Arnulf with other princes of Gaul. It was not at all unnatural that the affair of Attigny should be of primary importance in the eyes of Richer, and that the affair of Montreuil should be of primary importance in the eyes of Dudo. Attigny lay quite beyond the reach of ordinary Norman vision, and William’s doings there might not seem very meritorious in Norman eyes. It was certainly something to have put an open affront upon the Eastern King; but it was perhaps hardly becoming in the independent lord of the Norman monarchy (see page 221, and above, p. 621) to show such ostentatious deference to the Western King. It is therefore quite possible to put together a very probable narrative, taking in the main statements both of Richer and of Dudo, but of course allowing for the rhetorical and exaggerated form into which both of them throw their details. This is very much what is done by Sir Francis Palgrave (Normandy and England, ii. 299 et seqq.), only in one or two places he gives the story a strange colouring of his own. I can find nothing about William being himself too late, either on purpose or by accident. The statement of Richer, as I read it, is simply that, whether by design or by accident, he was shut out of the council-chamber. Again, Sir Francis simply says that William “compelled King Otho to rise;” he says not a word about William’s motive for so doing or about the exaggerated loyalty which he displayed towards Lewis.

One can hardly doubt, on the authority of Flodoard and Richer, that William was really killed at Picquigny by the machinations of Arnulf. But there is quite another story, briefly alluded to by Sir Francis Palgrave in two places (pp. 298, 303), which transfers the scene of the murder from the Somme to the Seine. This version turns up in several shapes. We get it in Rudolf Glaber (iii. 9. Duchesne, vol. iv. p. 38), according to whom the chief criminal was Theobald of Chartres. Theobald the Tricker is the first to devise the plot, and he is also the actual murderer. In concert with Arnulf, William is invited by Theobald to a conference somewhere on the Seine. Rudolf is not clear whether the summons was sent in the name of the King or of the Duke of the French (“promittens se ex parte regis Francorum seu Hugonis Magni, qui fuerat filius Roberti regis, quem Otto dux Saxonum, postea vero Imperator Romanorum, Suessionis interfecit”); that is to say, Rudolf already failed to understand that there had been a time when the Rex Francorum was quite a different person from the lord of Paris and the Seine. The story of the murder then follows much as before, with the Seine for the Somme and Theobald for Arnulf; only Theobald kills William with his own hand.

In the Tours Chronicle (Duchesne, Rer. Franc, iii. 360) we find another version; “Guillelmus filius Rollonis ducis Normanniæ a Balzone Curto in medio Sequanæ occisus est, propter mortem Riulfi et filii sui Anchetilli.” Now we found Balzo in Dudo’s account as the name of one of William’s murderers, but we had no account of the man or of his motives. He here appears as the avenger of Riulf, doubtless the Riulf who headed the revolt against William in 932 (see p. 189). We then however heard nothing of Riulf’s death, the statement of Dudo (96 D) being that “Riulfus fugiendo evanuit.” But who is Anchetillus, Anquetil, Anscytel, a palpable Dane like our own Thurcytels and Ulfcytels? And why should Balzo avenge either Ancytel or Riulf? Here comes in the story of William of Malmesbury, which he first tells (ii. 145) as if he fully believed it, and then adds, as more trustworthy (“veraciores literæ dicunt”), an abridgement of Dudo’s story. Anscytel (Oscytel) is the son of Riulf, a Norman chief who had somehow incurred William Longsword’s displeasure, and who greatly troubled him with his revolts. But Anscytel is the faithful soldier of Duke William, and he carries his loyalty so far as to take his father prisoner and to hand him over to the Duke. He does however exact a promise that Riulf shall suffer no punishment worse than bonds. But, not long after, Anscytel is sent by Duke William to Pavia with a letter for a potentate described as the Duke of Italy, asking that the bearer may be put to death (“Comes Anschetillum in Papiam dirigit, epistolam de sua ipsius nece ad ducem Italiæ portantem”). This, I need hardly say, is a story as old as Bellerophontês (Il. vi. 168) and as modern as Godwine (see Note EEE). The Duke of Italy of course abhors the crime, and, equally of course, is in dread of the power of his brother of Normandy. A thousand horsemen are sent to attack Anscytel and his companions as soon as they are out of the city. Anscytel, like the Homeric Tydeus, was small in stature but valiant in war (“vir exigui corporis sed immanis fortitudinis”—μικρὸς ἔην δέμας, ἀλλὰ μαχητής· Il. v. 801), whence his surname Curtus. But, less successful than Tydeus (Il. iv. 387; v. 803 et seqq.) or Bellerophontês (Il. vi. 188), Anscytel and his comrades indeed slay all their enemies, but they are also all slain themselves, except Balzo. This sole survivor, unlike Othryadês (Herod, i. 82), does not kill himself, but at once accuses his immediate lord Duke William in the court of his over-lord the King. Besides the treachery practised against Anscytel, Riulf too, contrary to Duke William’s promise, had been blinded in prison. The Duke of the Normans is summoned by his over-lord to answer for the crime, and, somewhat strangely, the court of the Carolingian King of Laon is held at Paris. Thither Duke William humbly comes, and there he is, like Uhtred (see p. 379) and Eadwulf (see p. 527), killed by Balzo under the pretext of a conference.

I need hardly say that this tale, as it stands, is a mere romance; but it is an instructive romance, because it is so easy to trace out the mythical elements out of which it is made up. Still, like most other such stories, it most likely contains its kernel of truth. Balzo may have been one of Riulf’s followers in the Côtentin, who took an opportunity to revenge his chieftain’s defeat. More than this it would be rash to infer. So the story in Rudolf Glaber may justify us in adding Theobald of Chartres to the list of conspirators against William, and the same story falls in with the charge against Hugh brought by Richer. But there is no kind of need to breathe the least suspicion against King Lewis; William was just then his firm friend, and any mention of the King as having a hand in the business seems to be owing only to the fact that the later writers had forgotten what were the true relations between Laon and Paris in the days of William Longsword.

NOTE AA. p. 263.
Leading Men in England at the Death of Eadgar.

Ælfhere of Mercia is called by Florence (983) “Regis Anglorum Eadgari propinquus,” which most likely means kindred by the mother’s side. His name is affixed to most of the charters of the time, and many acts in Mercia are stated to be done by his consent. See, for instance, a charter of Bishop Oswald (Cod. Dipl. iii. 5), where he bears the title of “heretoga.” The Chronicles (A. 975), followed by Henry of Huntingdon (M. H. B. 748 C), who calls him “consul nequissimus,” charge him with actually destroying monasteries. Florence speaks only of his bringing in married priests and their wives. In some cases it appears that former owners of lands then in monastic occupation laid legal claims to them as having been taken from them unjustly. See Hist. El. lib. i. c. 5, 8; Gale, pp. 465, 467. It is curious to find among these claimants against the monastery of Ely no less a person than Ealdorman Æthelwine himself (Hist. El. lib. i. c. 5). Æthelwine, worshipped at Ramsey, was thought much less highly of at Ely, just as we shall find Harold spoken of very differently at Wells and at Waltham.

Of the house of the Ealdormen of the East-Angles, of whom Æthelwine, who has just been mentioned, was the most famous, we can get a still more distinct idea. See Florence, A. 975, 991; Hist. Rams. 387, Gale. Æthelwine was the youngest son of Æthelstan, surnamed the Half-king (Hist. Rams., u. s.), Ealdorman of the East-Angles, who seems to have died about 967, when we find his last signature (Cod. Dipl. iii. 16). He married (Hist. El. ii. 8; Gale, p. 495) Æthelflæd, daughter of Brihthelm, and sister of the famous Ealdorman Brihtnoth, of whom we shall hear more presently. They had four sons, Æthelwold, Ælfwold, Æthelsige, and Æthelwine. Of these, the eldest and youngest were in turn joined with their father in the government of East-Anglia. Æthelwold, whose widow Ælfthryth married King Eadgar in 964 (when Florence calls him “gloriosus dux Orientalium Anglorum”), signs several charters as dux down to 962, probably the year of his death. From that year his youngest brother (see Florence, 992) Æthelwine takes his place. It is not easy to see why Ælfwold was excluded, as he lived on in a private station, and was on good terms with his brother the Ealdorman (Fl. Wig. A. 975). Æthelsige also, the third brother, signs many charters with the title of “minister,” that is, Thegn. Æthelwine died in 992 (Fl. Wig. 992). The portentous title of “totius [Orientalis?] Angliæ aldermannus,” said (see Hist. Rams. p. 462) to have been inscribed on his grave, is hardly credible, but it has its parallels in the title of “Dux Francorum,” borne by the contemporary Lords of Paris, in that of “Princeps Francorum” borne by the Mayors of the Palace in earlier days (Ann. Mett. 621; Pertz, i. 320, &c.), and in that of “Dux Anglorum” given by the Bayeux Tapestry to Harold when Earl of the West-Saxons. Who succeeded him in his earldom is not very clear. He had a son Æthelweard, who died at Assandun in 1016. Florence calls him “Æthelwardus dux, filius ducis East-Anglorum Æthelwini Dei amici,” but the Chronicles call him simply “Æþlweard Æþelwines sunu ealdormannes.” The testimony of Florence shows that “Æþelwines,” the reading of the Abingdon Chronicle, is the right one. Worcester has “Ælfwines,” Peterborough, more remarkably, “Æðelsiges.” The question as to the right of this Æthelweard to the title of “dux” at once leads us to the position of the famous Ulfcytel of East-Anglia, of whom see below, Note HH. With regard to Æthelsige, the question at once arises whether this is the Æthelsige of whom Æthelred speaks in a charter of 999 (Cod. Dipl. iii. 305) as having beguiled him into his spoliation of the see of Rochester. See above, p. 267. This Æthelsige, he complains, corrupted his innocent youth, and he draws a fearful picture of his evil deeds in various ways. He was at last punished by the loss of all his own honours and property. This is no doubt the Æthelsige who signs many of the earlier charters of Æthelred (Cod. Dipl. iii. 171, 190, 202, 212, 216, 222, 224, 228, 280); but it is not clear either whether this is our Æthelsige, or whether either of them is the same as the captain who ravaged South Wales in 991.

Of Brihtnoth, the uncle and ally of Æthelwine, we shall hear again as the hero of Maldon (see p. 270). Of the many ways of spelling his name and kindred names, Brihtric and the like, Brihtnoth is the one which I prefer. Beorht is the older, briht the later form of the word; so that Beorhtnoth and Brihtnoth are the correct earlier and later forms of the name. Byrhtnoth and other spellings are simply transitional and irregular.

Brihtnoth, we learn from the Song of Maldon, was the son of Brihthelm. I take him to be the same as Brihtnoth the Thegn, to whom a grant of land is made by Eadgar in 967 (Cod. Dipl. iii. 15), and who signs as “minister,” another man of the same name signing as “dux.” This elder Ealdorman Brithnoth can be traced back to the beginning of Eadgar’s reign. It is not easy to say to which of these two Brihtnoths the signatures of “Brihtnoth dux” in the latter years of Eadgar belong. Nor is it clear which of the two it is to whom Eadgar makes another grant of land in 967 (Cod. Dipl. vi. 82). But it is certain that our Brihtnoth had attained the rank of Ealdorman before the death of Eadgar in 975. In 991 he was an old man, “Hár hilderinc.” It should be noticed that Brihtnoth the Thegn gives the lands granted him by the King to the church of Worcester, an act eminently characteristic of our Brihtnoth.

There is another notice of Brihtnoth in a charter of Æthelred of 1005 (Cod. Dipl. iii. 339), which seems to contain a reference to a genuine will of his. In the confirmation charter of Eynsham abbey the King—“ego Eðelredus, multiplici Dei clementia indulgente, Angul-Saxonum antedictus rex, cæterarumque gentium longe lateque per circuitum gubernator et rector”—records among other gifts, “villam quæ Scipford dicitur dedit vir prædictus [the founder Æthelmar] ad monasterium antedictum, quam ei Leofwinus suus consanguineus spiritu in ultimo constitutus donavit, quam Birhtnoðus antea dux præclarus ab Eadgaro patre meo dignis præmium pro meritis accipere lætabatur; Micclantun similiter ad monasterium dedit, quam ille Birhtnoðus dux prædictus ultimo commisit dono ab Eadgaro quoque ei antea donatam et in cartula firmiter commendatam.” We here see the favour in which Brihtnoth stood with Eadgar.

Brihtnoth appears also in the will of Æthelflæd (recited in that of Ælflæd, Cod. Dipl. iii. 271), a document of the reign of Eadgar. Large bequests are made to the Ealdorman by Æthelflæd; but his death seems to have hindered their taking effect, as a different disposal of the property is made by Ælflæd. Mr. Thorpe (Dipl. Ang. 519) identifies this Æthelflæd with the widow of King Eadmund, but his reference to the Chronicles should be 946 instead of 925. Brihtnoth had married Æthelflæd’s sister. As his own widow bore the same name, was she a second wife, or were there two sisters both called Æthelflæd? We find another case of three Æthelflæds in one family, p. 521. In the alleged will of Brihtnoth himself in Palgrave, ii. ccxxiii., I put very little faith.

The accounts of Brihtnoth in the Histories of Ely and Ramsey seem to be mixed up with a good deal of fable. They both (Ramsey, c. lxxi.; Gale, p. 422; Ely, lib. ii. c. 6; Gale, p. 493) tell a story how the Ealdorman, on his march against the Danes, came to Ramsey and asked for food for his army. The niggardly Abbot Wulfsige was ready to entertain the Ealdorman and a few select companions, but he would not undertake to feed the whole host. Brihtnoth, like Alexander, will partake of nothing in which all his soldiers cannot share, and marches on to Ely, where Abbot Ælfsige receives the whole multitude. Brihtnoth accordingly gives to the abbey of Ely certain lands which he had intended for that of Ramsey. This is hardly history; we see too clearly the stories of Gideon and the elders of Succoth and of David and Abiathar the Priest. It is also hard to see how a march to Maldon from any part of Brihtnoth’s government could lead him by either Ramsey or Ely. The Ely History escapes this difficulty by making him Earl of the Northumbrians instead of the East-Saxons, and by making two battles of Maldon. Brihtnoth, victorious in the former, returns to Northumberland; the Danes land again; Brihtnoth comes from Northumberland, taking the two abbeys on his march; he then fights the second battle, in which, after fourteen days of combat, he is killed.

Of the three Thegns of Lindesey or Deira, who played such a cowardly part in 993 (see p. 283), two at least are known to us by the charters of Eadgar’s reign. The account of the affair in the Chronicles is simply, “Þa onstealdon þa heretogan ærest þone fleam· þæt wæs Fræna and Godwine and Friðegist.” Florence expands somewhat; “Duces exercitus, Frana videlicet, Frithogist, et Godwinus, quia ex paterno genere Danici fuerunt, suis insidiantes, auctores fugæ primitus exstiterunt.” The words “ex paterno genere” would imply that the earlier Danish settlers, like the followers of Cnut and of William afterwards, often took English wives. Also Florence translates “heretogan” by “duces exercitus,” lest “heretogan” should be taken to imply the permanent rank of Ealdorman. Neither Fræna nor Frithegist ever held that rank. They sign charters in abundance, from the days of Eadgar onwards, but never with any higher rank than that of “minister” or “miles.” Fræna signs a great many charters long after this. In 995 he signs two of Æscwig, Bishop of Dorchester (Cod. Dipl. iii. 286, 288), which probably implies that he belonged to Lindesey and not to Deira. Of Godwine we may suspect that he also was of Lindesey, that he reformed, and rose to the rank of Ealdorman. Godwine, Ealdorman of Lindesey, who died at Assandun in 1016, is most likely the man here spoken of; but Godwine is so common a name that it is impossible to say to whom all the signatures of “Godwine minister” belong. Sometimes two or more Godwines sign without further distinction.

These are the chief men of the days of Eadgar who are also heard of under Æthelred, with the exception of those who are connected with Northumberland, of whom I shall speak in a separate Note (KK). It would also be easy, by the help of the charters, to trace the succession and promotions of several men of less renown.

NOTE BB. p. 265.
The Election of Eadward the Martyr.

The Chronicles do not, either in prose or in verse, say anything about the disputed election which is said to have followed the death of Eadgar, though three of them notice in verse that the crown passed to a minor. Eadgar dies,

“And feng his bearn syððan

Tó cynerice,

Cild únweaxen.

Eorla ealdor;

Þam wæs Eadweard nama.”

Either there is here a play on the words “ealdor” and “cild únweaxen,” or else the passage is a sign how utterly the word “ealdor” had lost its primitive sense.

Florence describes the disputed election very clearly;

“De rege eligendo magna inter regni primores oborta est dissensio; quidam namque regis filium Edwardum, quidam vero fratrem illius elegerunt Ægelredum. Quam ob caussam archipræsules Dunstanus et Oswaldus, cum coepiscopis, abbatibus, ducibusque quam plurimis, in unum convenerunt, et Eadwardum, ut pater suus præceperat, elegerunt; electum consecraverunt et in regem unxerunt.”

William of Malmesbury (ii. 161) makes Eadward be supported by Dunstan and certain Bishops in opposition to the Lady Ælfthryth and a party of the nobles; “contra voluntatem quorumdam, ut aiunt, optimatum et novercæ, quæ vixdum septem annorum puerulum Egelredum filium provehere conabatur, ut ipsa potius sub ejus nomine imperitaret.”

Osbern, the biographer of Dunstan (Anglia Sacra, ii. 113), speaks of Eadward as the heir, but says that some of the chief nobles objected to his election (“in cujus electione dum quidam principes palatini adquiescere nollent”) because of their fears from his supposed character (“existimantes juvenem regem inhumanum futurum, consilia sapientum non curaturum, sed pro libidine omnia acturum”). Eadmer, in his Life of Dunstan (Ang. Sac. ii. 220), makes them dread his severe justice (“quia morum illius severitatem, qua in suorum excessus acriter sævire consueverat, suspectam habebat”). They also object that he was not the son of a crowned King and his Lady (“quia matrem ejus, licet legaliter nuptam, in regnum tamen non magis quam patrem ejus dum eum genuit sacratam fuisse sciebant”). Waitz (iii. 65) remarks, when Pope Stephen anointed the sons of Pippin along with their father, “dass dies geschehen sei, um den vor der Wahl gebornen Söhnen das volle Erbrecht zu geben und die Möglichkeit zu entfernen, dass man etwa später gebornen Söhnen einen Vorrang beilege.” In both these accounts the matter is brought to an issue by the vigorous action of Dunstan.

One would like to know how far there is any truth in these statements of the objections brought against Eadward. One would have thought that there could not have been much to fear from either the virtues or the vices of a boy of his years. But the objection brought against him on the ground of his not being of kingly birth is much more likely to be a piece of genuine tradition. The difficulty about it is that, as Lappenberg remarks, it was an objection which told just as much against Æthelred as against Eadward. For the meaning can hardly be other than that Eadward was born before his father’s coronation at Bath in 974, which Æthelred was also. Otherwise the objection would really be a good one, and it was used long after on behalf of Henry the First against his elder brothers. (Cf. Herod. vii. 2–3.) Perhaps all that was meant was to deny that Eadward had any preference over his half-brother, so that the two boys might be candidates on equal terms.

I may add that the Bath coronation of Eadgar is to me one of the most puzzling things in our history. I should have taken it to be, according to one story, a mere taking again of the crown after the penance for the matter of Wulfthryth; only the Chronicles, which have hitherto freely called Eadgar King, in recording the coronation pointedly call him Ætheling.

NOTE CC. p. 278.
The Two Ælfrics.

Who was Ælfric, and how many Ælfrics were there? An Ælfric, son of Ælfhere of Mercia, had, as we have seen, succeeded his father in the government of that country, and had been banished five years before (see p. 268) the time which we have reached. An Ealdorman Ælfric died fighting for his country twenty-five years later (see p. 293). Most likely these are three distinct persons; but, as the Ælfric of whom we are now speaking was pardoned after crimes which might seem unpardonable, he might easily be thought to be the same as the already banished son of Ælfhere. At the same time it should be noticed that Florence in no way identifies the Ælfric of 991 with the banished Ælfric of 986, while he takes great pains to show that the Ælfric of 991 is the same as the traitor of 992 (“Alfricum cujus supra meminimus”) and of 1003 (“Alfricus dux supra memoratus”). The charters also seem to show that Ælfric the son of Ælfhere and the Ælfric of 991 are two distinct persons. In 983 (Cod. Dipl. iii. 196) we have the signatures of “Ælfhere dux,” “Ælfric dux.” In another charter of the same year we find these two signatures and also those of two persons called “Ælfric minister.” In 984 (Cod. Dipl. iii. 202) we find two signatures of “Ælfric dux” and one of “Ælfric minister.” In 984 (Cod. Dipl. iii. 203) we find “Ælfric ealdorman” addressed along with “ealle þa þegenas on Hámtúnscire.” A mention of Bishop Ælfheah in the charter shows that this means Hampshire and not Northamptonshire, and Ælfric the traitor seems to command the men of Hampshire in 1003 (see p. 318). In Cod. Dipl. iii. 292 we have mention of an “Ælfric ealdorman” who seems to have jurisdiction in Berkshire; his government may easily have taken in the two adjoining shires. I infer, then, that Ælfric the traitor was not Ealdorman of the Mercians, but of Hampshire and Berkshire, and that he was appointed in or before 983, when we find his signature along with that of Ælfhere. Ælfric the son of Ælfhere succeeded his father in Mercia in 983; in 984 therefore there were two Ealdormen of the name, and we find the signatures of both.

Another argument to the same effect is supplied by two charters which evidently refer to the banishment of Ælfric the son of Ælfhere. One in Cod. Dipl. vi. 174, attributed to the year 993, granting certain lands to the monastery of Abingdon, says, “Has terrarum portiones Alfric cognomento puer a quadam vidua Eadfled appellata violenter abstraxit, ac deinde quum in ducatu suo contra me et contra omnem gentem meam reus exsisteret ... quando ad synodale concilium ad Cyrneceastre universi optimates mei simul in unum convenerunt, et eumdem Alfricum majestatis reum de hac patria profugum expulerunt.” The other charter, of 999 (Cod. Dipl. iii. 312, Hist. Abingdon. i. 373), states much the same of a person described as “comes vocitamine Ælfric.” This charter is signed by an “Ælfric dux,” that is, no doubt, Ælfric of Hampshire. “Alfricus cyld,” that is, of course, “cognomento puer,” is spoken of also in the Ely History (i. 12, Gale) as a man of importance, as the son of Ealdorman Ælfhere would be, before Æthelred was King (969–979). The description of the Witenagemót at Cirencester reads very like the banishment in 986.

As for the hero of Assandun, I can only say that the name Ælfric is exceedingly common, and that it is open to us to identify him with any of the men who sign as “Ælfric minister.”

I am thankful that I have only to deal with the lay Ælfrics. There is an ecclesiastical difficulty of the same kind which I cheerfully leave in the hands of Professor Stubbs.

NOTE DD. p. 279.
The Treaty with Olaf and Justin.

The text of the Treaty is given in Thorpe, i. 284; Schmid, 204. It is drawn up between King Æthelred and his Witan on the one side and the invading army on the other. “Þis synd þâ frið-mâl and þâ forword, þe Æðelred cyng and ealle his witan wið þone here gedôn habbað, þe Anlaf and Justin and Guðmund Stegitan sunu mid wæ̂ron.” It must belong to this year, and, if so, it seems to prove that Olaf Tryggvesson was present, and also that he was not yet either King or catechumen. Had the document belonged to the later dealings with Olaf, he would hardly have been placed alongside with Justin and Guthmund, but some notice would have been taken both of his Christianity and of his royal rank. Compare the different language of the treaties of Ælfred with the first and of Eadward with the second Guthrum, Thorpe, i. 152, 166; Schmid, 106, 118. The treaty between Ælfred and Guthrum is drawn up between “Ælfred cynincg and Gŷðrûm cyning and ealles Angelcynnes witan and eal seô þeôd þe on Eâst-Englum beôð.” That between Eadward and the second Guthrum is between “Eadward cyng and Gûðrûm cyng,” and the Christianity of both sides is distinctly set forth. Schmid (p. li.) supposes, either that the Anlaf here spoken of was another person from Olaf Tryggvesson, or else that the name Anlaf is an interpolation in the text. But surely these suppositions are rather violent, when the matter can be explained without recourse to them.

By this treaty provision is made for wergilds, for the reception of merchants, and for various civil contingencies, which clearly imply that a long stay was expected on the part of the Northmen. Neither side is to receive the other’s thieves, foes, or Welshmen (Schmid, 208). “And þæt naðor ne hy ne we underfon oðres Wealh ne oðres þeof ne oðres gefan.” The Wealas of the Northmen must have been simply their prisoners or servants of any kind, many of them perhaps Englishmen. So completely had the word shared the fate of the word Slave, as is still more plainly the case with the feminine form Wylne.

On the use of the word Englaland in the treaty, see above, p. 538.

NOTE EE. pp. 285, 302.
The Relations of Æthelred with Normandy.

The English Chronicles, and also Florence, are silent as to any intercourse, whether friendly or hostile, between England and Normandy earlier than the marriage of Æthelred and Emma. The one passage which has been sometimes thought to refer to one of the events recorded in the text cannot possibly have that meaning. The entry in the Chronicles in the year 1000, “And se unfrið flota wæs ðæs sumeres gewend to Ricardes rice,” can refer only to the Danish fleet. “Unfrið flota” must be taken in the same sense as “unfrið here” in the year 1009. And so it is taken by Florence; “Danorum classis præfata hoc anno Nortmanniam petit.” We are thus left wholly to the testimony of inferior authorities, and we must get such an amount of truth out of them as we can.

I have, in my text, after some hesitation, described two disputes between Æthelred and the Norman Dukes. The first quarrel was with Richard the Fearless in 991, which was appeased by the intervention of Pope John the Fifteenth; the second was with Richard the Good in 1000, which led to open hostilities which are described as an English invasion of the Côtentin. The stories rest respectively on the authority of William of Malmesbury (ii. 165, 6), and of William of Jumièges (v. 4). It is open to any one to reject both stories. It is still more open to any one to reject the second story, the exaggerated character of which is manifest, and the chronology of which must be a year or two wrong. But I do not think that it is safe to take them, with Sir Francis Palgrave (England and Normandy, iii. 103), and Dr. Lappenberg (p. 421 of the original, ii. 154 Thorpe), as different versions of one event, still less to fix, with Sir Francis, that event to the later date of the two.

William of Malmesbury tells us very little in his own name. He says only that Richard the Fearless had provoked Æthelred in various ways (“vir eximius, qui etiam Edelredum sæpe injuriis pulsaverit”), and that Pope John, wishing to hinder war among Christians (“non passa sedes apostolica duos Christianos digladiari”), sent Leo Bishop of Trier into England to make peace. A document then follows, described as the “legationis epistola” of this prelate, which contains an account of his mission, and gives the terms of the peace between Æthelred and Richard, and the names of the plenipotentiaries on both sides. The document is very strange in point of form, as it begins in the name of the Pope, while the latter part clearly gives the actual words of the treaty. Sir Francis Palgrave (iii. 106) objects to the genuineness of the letter that its style is unusual, if not unparalleled, which it certainly is. It runs thus; “Johannes quintus decimus, sanctæ Romanæ ecclesiæ Papa, omnibus fidelibus.” Sir Francis does not mention another objection, namely, that neither in 991 nor in 1001 was the Archbishop of Trier named Leo. The reigning Archbishop in 991 was Eckebert; before 1000 he had been succeeded by Ludolf (Gesta Treverorum, ap. Pertz, viii. 169–171). But Sir Francis (iii. 107) adds, “While we reject the convention in the shape now presented, we accept its import.—The quarrel and the reconciliation are unquestionable verities.” But the quarrel and reconciliation recorded by William of Malmesbury are a quarrel and reconciliation between Æthelred and Richard the Fearless in a definite year 991. They cannot be turned into a quarrel and reconciliation between Æthelred and Richard the Good nine years later. The apparently wrong name of the papal legate is a difficulty either way, but it is not a very formidable one. Lappenberg (p. 422 of the original German) calls Leo “Vicebischof von Trier,” which Mr. Thorpe (ii. 154) translates simply “Bishop.” Lappenberg gives no reference for his description of Leo; but a fact in German history may be safely accepted on his authority, and the local history of Trier which I have just referred to contains a statement which curiously fits in with our story. Archbishop Eckebert (977–993), son of Theodoric, Count of Holland, was the son of an English mother, and he kept up a close connexion with England. It is therefore quite natural that either he or an officer of his church should enter with zeal into a scheme for the advantage of a country which Eckebert seems almost to have looked on as his own. The other names are accurately given. John the Fifteenth was Pope, and Æthelsige was Bishop of Sherborne, in 991. Both were dead in 1000. I think it follows that the account in William of Malmesbury cannot possibly refer to a transaction with Richard the Good in 1000. The story is definitely fixed to the year 991.

Is then William of Malmesbury’s account ground enough for accepting a quarrel between Æthelred and Richard the Fearless, and a reconciliation brought about by Pope John Fifteenth? On the whole, I think it is. It is not the kind of transaction which any one would invent, if nothing of the sort happened at all, and it is hard to see to what other transaction the account can refer. The story also, as it seems to me, fits in well with the circumstances of the times. The “legationis epistola” can hardly be genuine in its actual shape as a letter of the Pope, but it seems to be made out of two genuine documents, a letter of Pope John and the text of the treaty. The unusual style might be simply the bungling attempt of a compiler to show which of all the Popes named John was the one here meant. The treaty itself bears every sign of genuineness, and the names of the plenipotentiaries are distinctly in its favour. One of the Norman signatures is that of “Rogerus episcopus,” and there was a Roger Bishop of Lisieux from 990 to 1024. The lesser Norman plenipotentiaries I cannot identify, but on the English side, as the Bishop is right, the Thegns also are right. A mere forger would not have inserted such names as those of Leofstan and Æthelnoth. He would either have put in names quite at a venture, or else have picked out the names of some famous Ealdormen of the time. There could be no temptation for a forger to pitch on Leofstan and Æthelnoth, real contemporary men, but men of no special celebrity.

The reader has still to determine whether, accepting this account of Æthelred’s quarrel with the elder Richard, he will go on to admit a second quarrel with the younger Richard. The only question is whether the story in William of Jumièges is pure invention, or whether its manifestly exaggerated details contain some such kernel of truth as I have supposed in the text. It certainly seems to me that to set the whole affair down as a mere lie is attributing too much even to the Norman power of lying, which I certainly have no wish to underrate. The story, in its general outline, seems to fit in well with the position of things at the time, and even with the character of Æthelred. But if we accept it as thus far true, we must suppose that William of Jumièges transposed the invasion of the Côtentin and the marriage of Emma. He places the latter event first. Now the marriage would follow very naturally on the conclusion of peace, while the invasion would not be at all likely to follow the marriage. Sir Francis Palgrave silently transposes the two events in the same way that I have done. He also connects the invasion, as I have done, with the reception of Danish vessels in the Norman havens. If this was, as I suppose, a breach of the treaty of 991, the wrath of Æthelred becomes still more intelligible. In this view of the matter, looking at the entry in the Chronicles under the year 1000, we can hardly fail to fix the event in that year.

Lappenberg, whose note (p. 422) should be read in the original text, takes the opposite view to Sir Francis Palgrave. He accepts the account of the transaction in 991, but carries back the invasion of the Côtentin to that year. This is at least more probable than Sir Francis’ version, and perhaps some readers may be inclined to accept it rather than my notion of two distinct disputes. But the narrative of William of Jumièges connects the invasion in a marked way with the marriage of Emma, though he has clearly confounded the order of events.

Roger of Wendover (i. 427) boldly carries back the marriage of Emma to some date earlier than 990, and makes the quarrel between Æthelred and her father arise out of his ill-treatment of her. He was misled by William of Malmesbury’s characteristic contempt for chronological order.

NOTE FF. p. 300.
Æthelred’s Invasion of Cumberland.

The Chronicles, followed by Florence, state the fact of Æthelred’s expedition against Cumberland without any explanation of its motives; “Her on þisum geare se cyning ferde in to Cumerlande, and hit swiðe neah eall forheregode.” So Florence; “Rex Ægelredus terram Cumbrorum fere totam depopulatus est.” For the motive of this unusual piece of energy we have, in default of any better authority, to go to Fordun, iv. 35 (vol. i. p. 179 ed. Skene). He attributes it to Malcolm’s refusal to contribute to the Danegeld. Having spoken of several of the payments made to the Danes, he thus goes on;

“Unde rex Ethelredus regulo Cumbriæ supradicto Malcolmo scribens per nuntium mandavit quod suos Cumbrenses tributa solvere cogeret, sicut cæteri faciunt provinciales. Quod ille protinus contradicens rescripsit suos aliud nullatenus debere vectigal, præterquam ad edictum regium, quandocumque sibi placuerit, cum cæteris semper fore paratos ad bellandum.... Hac caussa quidem, et sicut rex in ira motus asseruit, eo quod regulus contra sacramentum sibi debitum Danis favebat, maximam ex Cumbria prædam arripuit. Postea tamen concordes per omnia statim effecti, pace firma de cætero convenerunt.”

This account seems so likely in itself that I have not scrupled to adopt it in the text. But it must be compared with an account given by Henry of Huntingdon (M. H. B. 750 A), which at first sight sounds very different; “Exinde rex Edelred ivit in Cumberland cum exercitu gravissimo, ubi maxima mansio Dacorum erat, vicitque Dacos bello maximo, totamque fere Cumberland prædando vastavit.” Here is no mention of Malcolm, and the Danes are described as being actually in possession of the country, of which the other accounts give us no hint. But that Malcolm was reigning in Cumberland at this time there is no doubt, and if any Danes were settled there, they must have been settled by Malcolm’s consent, willing or constrained. It is of course possible that one ground of Æthelred’s wrath against Malcolm may have been that he had not only refused to pay Danegeld, but had allowed Danes to settle in his dominions. And it may be that we may here have lighted on the clew to the great puzzle of Cumbrian ethnology. That Cumberland and Westmoreland are to this day largely Scandinavian needs no proof. But we have no record of the process by which they became so. In Northumberland and East-Anglia we know when the Danes settled, and we know something of the dynasties which they founded. But the Scandinavian settlement in Cumberland—Norwegian no doubt rather than Danish—we know only by its results. We have no statement as to its date, and we know that no Scandinavian dynasty was founded there. The settlement must therefore have been more peaceful and more gradual than the settlements in Northumberland and East-Anglia, and the reign of Malcolm may have been the time when it happened.

As I understand the story about the ships, the fleet, which had doubtless been gathered in some of the southern ports, was to assemble at Chester, and thence to sail to support the King’s land-force in Cumberland. “His scypu,” say the Chronicles, “wendon ut abutan Lægceaster, and sceoldon cuman ongean hyne: ac hî ne meahton.” But to get to Chester they had to sail round Wales, which Florence expresses by the words “mandavit ut, circumnavigata septemtrionali Brytannia, in loco constituto sibi occurreret.” Lappenberg (430) takes “Monege” in the Chronicles to be Anglesey; his translator (ii. 162), rightly I think, substitutes Man, but he adds the strange assertion, of which there is no trace in the original, that the fleet “was ordered to sail round the north of the island,” as if “septemtrionalis Britannia” meant Caithness. See p. 41, and the Winchester Chronicle, 922.

NOTE GG. p. 315.
The Massacre of Saint Brice.

The account of the massacre in the Chronicles stands thus; “On þam geare se cyng hét ofslean ealle þa Deniscan men þa on Angelcynne wæron. Ðis wæs gedon on Britius mæssedæg, forðam þam cynge wæs gecyd þæt hi woldon hine besyrewan æt his life, and siððan ealle his witan, and habban siððan þis rice.”

To this account I have in the present edition ventured to add one piece of local detail, namely the story of the Danes at Oxford who took refuge in Saint Frithswyth’s minster. This is recorded in the charter of Æthelred in Cod. Dipl. iii. 327, which is marked by Mr. Kemble as spurious or doubtful, but which I am now inclined to follow Mr. James Parker (Historical Notices of Oxford, p. 20) in accepting as at all events recording a real fact. The story runs thus; “Omnibus in hac patria degentibus sat constat fore notissimum, quoddam a me decretum cum concilio optimatum satrapumque meorum exivit ut cuncti Dani qui in hac insula, velut lolium inter triticum, pullulando emerserant justissima examinatione necarentur, hocque decretum morte tenus ad effectum perduceretur, ipsi quique in præfata urbe [Oxonefordæ] morabantur Dani mortem evadere nitentes, hoc Christi sacrarium, fractis per vim valvis et pessulis, intrantes, asylum sibi propugnaculumque contra urbanos suburbanosque ibi fieri decreverunt; sed cum populus omnis insequens, necessitate compulsus, eos ejicere niteretur nec valeret, igne tabulis injecto hanc ecclesiam, ut liquet, cum munimentis ac libris combusserunt.” I am now inclined to accept this story, and to hold that it has been wrongly transferred by William of Malmesbury to the time of the murder of Sigeferth and Morkere at Oxford in 1015. His story runs thus (ii. 179). After describing the murder of the two Thegns, much as in the Chronicle, but with some further details, he adds, “clientuli eorum, dominorum necem vindicare conantes, armis repulsi et in turrim ecclesiæ Sanctæ Frideswidæ coacti, unde dum ejici nequirent, incendio conflagrati. Sed mox regis pœnitentia, eliminata spurcitia, sacrarium reparatum; legi ego scriptum quod in archivo ejusdem ecclesiæ continetur index facti.” This certainly looks very much as if William had seen the original of the charter, which records the reparation of the church (“Dei adjutorio a me et a meis constat renovata”), and had put the story at a wrong time. That this is so is almost proved by the date. Æthelred could have had no time for church restoration between the Gemót of 1015 and his death in 1016. Between the massacre in 1002 and the date of the charter in 1004, though the state of things was not very favourable for such works, he had rather more time. The confusion between the two stories was easy. Sigeferth and Morkere and their followers, though not Danes in the same sense as the victims of Saint Brice, were almost certainly of Danish descent.

In Florence we get the first touch of amplification in the general story. The rest of the passage he merely translates, but the words “ealle þa Deniscan men þa on Angelcynne wæron” become “omnes Danos Angliam incolentes, majores et minores, utriusque sexus.” This is the first hint of any slaughter of women, and it is confined to Danish women.

William of Malmesbury directly mentions the massacre twice. The first time (ii. 165) it comes in almost incidentally, in a rhetorical passage about the character of Æthelred and the wretchedness of his reign. He speaks of “Danos, quos levibus suspicionibus omnes uno die in tota Anglia trucidari jusserat, ubi fuit videre miseriam, dum quisque carissimos hospites, quos etiam arctissima necessitudo dulciores effecerat, cogeretur prodere et amplexus gladio deturbare.” We begin here to get a dim vision of Danes possessed of English wives or mistresses. In the other passage (ii. 177) he describes the slaughter of Pallig, Gunhild, and their son, which is again brought in incidentally, as the moving cause of Swegen’s great invasion in 1013. Gunhild, “non illepidæ formæ virago,” had given herself as a hostage on the conclusion of peace with the Danes (“accepta Christianitate, obsidem se Danicæ pacis fecerat”). She was beheaded by order of Eadric (“eam cum cæteris Danis infaustus furor Edrici decapitari jusserat”), and, before her own death, she had to see her husband killed in some undescribed way, and her son, a promising lad, pierced with four spears (“occiso prius ante ora marito, et filio, commodæ indolis puero, quattuor lanceis forato”).

I suspect, as I said in the text, that the notion of a massacre of women, which we find even in Florence, arose out of this one tale of Gunhild. In William of Jumièges (v. 6) we get some soul-harrowing details;

“Edelredus, Anglorum rex, regnum, quod sub magna potentissimorum regum gloria diu floruerat, tanto nefariæ proditionis scelere regiminis sui tempore polluit, ut et pagani tam exsecrabile nefas horrendum judicarent. Nam Danos per omne regnum unanimi concordia secum cohabitantes, mortis periculum minime suspicantes, subito furore sub una die perimi, mulieres quoque alvo tenus terræ esse defossas, et ferocissimis canibus concitatis mamillas ab earum pectoribus crudeliter extorqueri, lactentes vero pueros ad domorum postes allisos excerebrari jussit, nullis criminum existentibus culpis.”

Here we have only Danish women and Danish children. In the Roman de Rou (6352 et seqq.) we get the first hint of a massacre of English women. It is not directly asserted, but it seems to be implied.

“En Engleterre erent Daneis

Cumunément od li Engleis,

Des Englesches fames perneient,

Filz et filles asez aveient.”

(vv. 6358–6361.)

Then we read an account of nearly the same horrors as in William of Jumièges, with some improvements. The details of the throat-cutting are given more minutely; we hear also of embowelling (“et as auquanz esbueloent”), and not only dogs but bears are employed to tear off the breasts of the women.

“Li dames è li dameseiles

Enfoient tresk ’as mameles,

Poiz amenoient li gainuns,

Ors enchaenez è brohuns,

Ki lur traient li cerveles

E desrumpeient li mameles.”

(vv. 6384–6389.)

In both accounts the destruction is all but complete; certain young men, two or more—“quidam juvenes” in William of Jumièges, “douz valez” in Wace—escape—according to William—in a ship which they found in the Thames, and carry the news to King Swegen in Denmark.

We now turn to John of Wallingford, who died in 1214, and who (Gale, ii. 547) knows much more about the matter. The Danes were far from being such comfortable neighbours to the English as they appear in the two Norman accounts. They held all the chief towns and did much mischief; “optima terræ municipia vel occupaverant vel præparaverant, et genti terræ multas molestias inferebant.” But the chief evil was the way in which they made themselves too agreeable to the English women. They took great care of their persons; they changed their clothes often, they combed their hair every day, and took a bath every Saturday; “habebant ex consuetudine patriæ unoquoque die comam pectere, sabbatis balneare, sæpe etiam vestituram mutare, et formam corporis multis talibus frivolis adjuvare.” The consequence was that many English matrons broke their marriage vows and many noble maidens became mistresses of Danes. Many wars and confusions arose out of these and the other evil deeds of the Danes, till it was settled that each province should get rid of its own Danes; “ut quælibet provincia suos Danos occideret.” They were accordingly all killed on Saturday, their bathing-day. John of Wallingford does not mention the day of Saint Brice, but in 1002 that festival would really fall on a Saturday. Here we get the destruction of women and children; but they are now distinctly the English women who had yielded to the seductions of the Danes and the children who were born of these unlawful unions; “ipsas mulieres suas, quæ luxuriæ eorum consenserant, et pueros, qui ex fœditate adulterii nati erant.” John of Wallingford does not employ either dogs or bears for the torture of the women; he is satisfied with cutting off their breasts; but those who had their breasts cut off and those who were put in the ground—in Italian phrase “planted”—now form two classes, while before there was only one; “mammas quarumdam absciderunt, alias vivas terræ infoderunt.” The number of young men who escape is raised to twelve.

I must now go back a generation or two to Henry of Huntingdon. He was living in 1154, yet he seems to profess to get his information from contemporaries—“de quo scelere in pueritia nostra quosdam vetustissimos loqui audivimus.” Æthelred, according to his account (M. H. B. 752 A), was puffed up with his marriage with Emma (“quo proventu rex Adelred in superbiam elatus”), and so massacred the Danes. He sent letters secretly to every town, ordering them to be put to death at one and the same hour, which was done on Saint Brice’s day. Some were slain with the sword, others were burned; “vel gladiis truncaverunt inpræmeditatos, vel igne simul cremaverunt subito comprehensos.” There is no mention of women, not even of Gunhild. This account of Henry of Huntingdon appears in an abridged form in Æthelred of Rievaux (Gen. Regg. X Scriptt. 362), who sarcastically adds that his royal namesake was “fortior solito,” though directly after he calls him, seemingly in earnest, “rex strenuissimus.”

Roger of Wendover (i. 444) transfers the story to the year 1012. In his version Swegen is present in England at the time of the death of Ælfheah; the tribute is paid; on its payment the Danes and English made a league of brotherhood to have but one heart and one soul; Swegen goes back to Denmark; then comes the massacre, on which Swegen comes back for his last invasion. The instigator of the massacre was “Huna quidam, regis Ethelredi militiæ princeps, vir strenuus et bellicosus.” The relations between Danes and English women are here, as in John of Wallingford, a chief ground of offence, but they take a somewhat different form; “Dani ... per totam Angliam adeo invaluerant, quod uxores virorum nobilium regni et filias violenter opprimere et ubique ludibrio tradere præsumpserunt.” We hear nothing of the Saturday bath and the other attractions of the Danes. Huna—a man who does not appear in history, but of whom we shall hear again in romance—complains of this state of things, and, by his advice, letters for a general massacre on Saint Brice’s day are sent to all parts, much as in Henry of Huntingdon. The Danes, “qui paullo ante cum Anglis, additio juramento, fuerant confœderati ut pacifice cum illis habitarent,” are massacred; the women too—what women we are not told—are killed with their children, but now both are killed by being dashed against door-posts; “mulieres cum parvulis ad postes domorum allisæ animas miserabiliter effuderunt.” Young men (“quidam juvenes”) take the news to Swegen as before.

Immediately after this, Roger goes on to tell the story of Gunhild in a form founded on that of William of Malmesbury, but with some improvements. Not only Gunhild herself, but her husband and son are hostages (“virago prudentissima, inter Danos et Anglos pacis mediatrix exsistens, obsidem sese cum viro et unico quem habebat filio, Ethelredo regi ad pacis securitatem dedit”), a thing plainly impossible in the case of Pallig. William of Malmesbury had mentioned Eadric in connexion with her death, probably because he looked on Eadric as the author of the whole scheme of massacre. But, as Huna fills that post in Roger’s story, Eadric becomes the special gaoler of Gunhild; “hæc quum fuisset a rege Eadrico duci”—which he was in 1012, though not in 1002—“ad custodiendum commissa.” Her death, by Eadric’s order, and that of Pallig and their son, follow much as in William of Malmesbury.

Here is a good case of the growth of legend, but the growth of legend is not all. It is easy to see from this last account that the massacre of Saint Brice got mixed up with quite different stories belonging to quite different dates, of which I shall have to speak again.

The massacre of Saint Brice may be compared with the two massacres of the Goths recorded by Ammianus, xxxi. 16; Zôsimos, iv. 26, 27, v. 35. The former, which was done “datis tectioribus litteris,” is distinctly approved by both historians; they speak of the “consilium prudens” and ἀγχινοία of Julius, the Eadric of the story, who took care that Theodosius, unlike Æthelred, should not know of his scheme. The second is a massacre of women and children.

NOTE HH. p. 322.
Ulfcytel of East-Anglia.

I have some doubt as to the formal position of Ulfcytel. The Latin writers all give him titles equivalent to Earl or Ealdorman. In Florence (1004) he is “magnæ strenuitatis dux East-Anglorum Ulfketel.” So Henry of Huntingdon (M. H. B. 752 C) calls him “Wlfketel dux illius provinciæ,” and William of Malmesbury (ii. 165) “comes Orientalium Anglorum Ulfkillus.” But the Chronicles introduce him at this point without any title, and though he signs several charters, as in this year in Cod. Dipl. iii. 334, in 1005 (iii. 346), and in 1012 (iii. 358), he uses no higher titles than “minister” and “miles.” On the other hand the Chronicles, in recording his death in 1016, seem to call him Ealdorman by implication; “Godwine ealdorman on Lindesige and Ulfcytel on East-Anglum.” And, as we find him gathering the forces of the earldom and summoning and consulting the local Witan, it is plain that he acted with the full authority of an Ealdorman. It has sometimes struck me that he may have been in some way a deputy of Æthelweard who died along with him at Assandun, the son of the former Ealdorman Æthelwine. See Appendix AA.

William of Malmesbury (u. s.) gives Ulfcytel the praise of being one who “solus ex omnibus ... impigre contra invasores restitit.” He evidently made a great impression on the Danes themselves. We see this, not only from the passage in our own Chronicles quoted in p. 321, but from the mention of him in the Sagas. They speak of him, as William of Malmesbury does, by the contracted form Ulfkill or Ulfkell, as Thurcytel becomes Thurkill. He bears the surname of Snilling, the Bold or Quick, and is described in the Knytlinga Saga, c. 15 (Johnstone, 138), as “mikill höfdingi.” His battle of Ringmere in 1010 (see p. 344) is there strangely transferred to the war of Cnut and Eadmund in 1016. He appears again in the Saga of Saint Olaf (Laing, ii. 11; Johnstone, 93), where the battle of Ringmere is mixed up with the apocryphal and unintelligible exploits of Olaf. It should be marked that East-Anglia is called “Ulfkelsland,” just as our Chronicles talk of “Ricardes rice” and “Baldwines land.” We meet him again in the Jomsvikinga Saga, c. 51 (Johnstone, 101), where he is described as ruler of the whole North of England, and as married to Wulfhild daughter of King Æthelred (“Nordr red fyrir Englandi Ulfkell Snillingr, hann átti Ulfhildi dottur Adalrads konungs”). See Appendix SS.

NOTE II. p. 326.
The Rise of Eadric.

I describe Eadric as I find him described in contemporary writers. I fully admit that there is much in his character, actions, and general position which is extremely puzzling; but I cannot undertake to be wise above what is written, or to put a theory of my own in the place of the unanimous witness of all our authorities. It has been ingeniously argued that Eadric was simply a forerunner of Leofric, that he represents a Mercian, therefore an intermediate, policy, which was misunderstood or misrepresented by West-Saxon writers. But all our authorities, West-Saxon as well as Mercian, agree in giving Leofric a very good character; all our authorities, Mercian as well as West-Saxon, agree in giving Eadric a very bad character. He has been called a “Trimmer,” and, as such, he has been likened, not only to the Leofric of the generation following his own, but to the Halifax of a much later age. The obvious answer is that neither Leofric nor Halifax was ever charged with going about murdering people in various parts of the kingdom. Now, as I have already said (see p. 417), many of the particular crimes laid to the charge of Eadric are open to much doubt; but the evident general belief that, whenever any mischief was done, Eadric must have been the doer of it, points to an universal estimate of his general character which cannot have been mistaken.

The first mention of Eadric in the Chronicles is on his appointment to the Ealdormanship of Mercia in 1007. He there comes in without any notice of his character or parentage, but the opinion which the Chroniclers had of him is shown plainly enough in other passages, as when the death of Sigeferth and Morkere is described in 1015 and the battle of Assandun in 1016. Florence first introduces him as “dolosus et perfidus Edricus Streona,” in 1006, when he records the murder of Ælfhelm. William of Malmesbury, as we have seen in the last Note, attributes to him the murder of Gunhild in 1002, and perhaps the whole plot for the destruction of the Danes. Florence gives a fuller character of him in 1007, when recording his appointment as Ealdorman. It runs as follows;

“Rex Edricum supra memoratum, Ægelrici filium, hominem humili quidem genere, sed cui lingua divitias ac nobilitatem comparaverat, callentem ingenio, suavem eloquio, et qui omnes id temporis mortales, tum invidia atque perfidia, tum superbia et crudelitate, superavit, Merciorum constituit ducem.”

These words of Florence seem to have been before William of Malmesbury, when, in his general picture of the reign of Æthelred (ii. 165), after speaking of the treasons of Ælfric, whom he confounds with the son of Ælfhere, he goes on,

“Erat in talibus improbe idoneus Edricus, quem rex comitatui Merciorum præfecerat; fæx hominum et dedecus Anglorum, flagitiosus helluo, versutus nebulo, cui non nobilitas opes pepererat, sed lingua et audacia comparaverat [“non” and “sed” are left out in some manuscripts, but they are clearly needed to make up the sense]. Hic dissimulare cautus, fingere paratus, consilia regis ut fidelis venabatur, ut proditor disseminabat. Sæpe, ad hostes missus pacis mediator, pugnam accendit. Cujus perfidia, quum crebro hujus regis tempore, tum vel maxime sequentis apparuit.”

Henry of Huntingdon too, whose authority is of the most varying degrees of value, but who always represents an independent tradition, says (M. H. B. 752 E), in recording Eadric’s appointment to the ealdormanship, “Dei providentia ad perniciem Anglorum factus est Edricus dux super Merce, proditor novus sed maximus.”

The surname of Streona comes, as we have just seen, from Florence. Eadric also appears as Heinrekr or Airekr Strióna in Snorro (Johnstone, 98), and in another Saga (101), where we are astounded at finding him made a brother of Emma. (The name Henry, in any of its forms, is hardly English, but we find in Cod. Dipl. iii. 87 a “Heanric minister,” perhaps one of the Old-Saxons favoured by Eadgar.) In Orderic too (506 B) a later Eadric is said to be “nepos Edrici pestiferi ducis cognomento Streone, id est acquisitoris.” The nickname evidently alludes to his great accumulations of property.

To trace Eadric and his father Æthelric by the charters is not easy, as neither name is uncommon. Thus we find in Cod. Dipl. iii. 304, a will of a certain Æthelric in Essex, made in 997, in which an Eadric is mentioned, who however seems not to be his son but his tenant. This Æthelric lay under suspicion of treasonable dealings with Swegen at the time of his first invasion in 994 (“ðam kincge wæs gesæd ðæt he wǽre on ðám unrǽde, ðæt man sceolde on Eást-Sexon Swegen underfón ða he ǽrest þyder mid flotan com”). See Cod. Dipl. iii. 314, a document which the combined signatures of Archbishop Ælfric (see p. 292) and Ealdorman Leofsige (see p. 313) fix to some date between 995 and 1002. Another Æthelric distinguished himself in quite an opposite way in the same part of the world, for he appears as one of the heroes of Maldon (see Thorpe, Analecta, p. 139). This last is probably the Æthelric “minister” and “miles,” who signs many charters from 987 to 1006 (see Cod. Dipl. iii. 228–351). In the last charter, if it be genuine, he describes himself as “the old”—“Æðelric ealda trywe gewitnys.” This is not unlikely to be the Æthelric who appears as a legatee in the will of Wulfric Spot, Cod. Dipl. vi. 148. Then there are one or more churchmen of the name, who, with the titles of “clericus,” “diaconus,” and “monachus” sign a vast number of documents of Archbishop Oswald and his successor Ealdwulf from 977 to 996 (Cod. Dipl. iii. 159–296), and one of whom possibly goes on till 1017 (see Cod. Dipl. vi. 177). I almost suspect that it is in one of these clerical Æthelrics that we are to look for the father of Eadric. It is certain that, among the many persons to whom Archbishop Oswald grants Church lands on the usual terms for three lives, three separate grants are made to a Thegn of his named Eadric. See Cod. Dipl. iii. 164, 216, 241. The dates are 977, 985, 988. May not these be the beginnings of the traitor? An Eadric also appears in Cod. Dipl. iii. 293, and another in vi. 127; but the latter at least is not our Eadric, as he was dead before 993.

The first signature which seems likely to be that of the future Ealdorman is one in 1001 (Cod. Dipl. iii. 317) as “Eadric minister.” He signs many charters by that title, including two (vi. 143) in company with a namesake of the same rank. In 1007 (vi. 157, 159) he of course begins to sign as “dux.” The charter of 1004 (vi. 151) where he appears as “dux” cannot be genuine, as King Æthelred, Archbishop Æthelnoth, and Ealdorman Brihtnoth are made to sign together. Lappenberg also (431, note 2. The passage is left out in Mr. Thorpe’s translation) quotes a charter of Eadgar in 970 (Cod. Dipl. iii. 56) as containing the signatures of Eadric and most of his brothers. But it is quite impossible that this can be our Eadric. Mr. Kemble marks the Latin version, in which alone the signatures occur, as spurious. The English version, which he accepts, has no signatures.

That Eadric rose to power by the fall of Wulfgeat is nowhere said in so many words; but the confiscation of the goods of Wulfgeat and the first mention of Eadric are put by Florence significantly near to one another. Wulfgeat signs a great many charters from 986 to 1005 (Cod. Dipl. iii. 224–345 and vi. 154). But he nowhere appears with any higher title than “minister,” except in one document of 996 (Cod. Dipl. vi. 136) where he appears as “dux.” I suspect that Wulfgeat, as well as Eadric, rose in the beginning through the favour of Archbishop Oswald. At least Oswald grants lands in Worcestershire to a knight of his of that name (“sumum cnihte ðám is Wulfgeat noma,” Cod. Dipl. iii. 259). This was in the reign of Eadward. The confiscation of Wulfgeat’s goods is recorded in the Chronicles for 1006 without remark; “And on þam ilcan geare wæs Wulfgeate eall his ár óngenumen.” Florence says, “Rex Ægelredus Wlfgeatum Leovecæ filium, quem pene omnibus plus dilexerat, propter injusta judicia et superba quæ gesserat opera, possessionibus omnique honore privavit.” There is also a charter of 1006 (Cod. Dipl. vi. 160), in which we find a notice of Wulfgeat as marrying one Ælfgifu the widow of Ælfgar (was this Ælfgar the son of Ælfric?) and as holding some lands which had been taken by Ælfgar from the monastery of Abingdon. His wife is described as sharing both in his crimes and in his fall; “Qui ambo crimine pessimo juste ab omni incusati sunt populo caussa suæ machinationis propriæ, de qua modo non est dicendum per singula, propter quam vero machinationem quæ injuste adquisierunt omnia juste perdiderunt.” Another charter of 1015 (Cod. Dipl. vi. 169) is more express. In this Æthelred grants to Brihtwold the Bishop of the diocese (who succeeded in the year of Wulfgeat’s disgrace), the lands of Wulfgeat at Chilton in Berkshire (“illo in loco ubi solicolæ appellativo usu Cildatun nominant”). Here we read, “Nam quidam minister Wulfget vulgari relatu nomine præfatam terram aliquando possederat; sed quia inimicis regis se in insidiis socium applicavit, et in facinore inficiendi etiam legis satisfactio ei defecit, ideo hæreditatis suberam penitus amisit, et ex ea prænominatus episcopus præscriptam villulam, me concedente, suscepit.” The estate was not given to the see, but to Brihtwold personally, with power to bequeath it. I cannot identify Wulfgeat’s father, which makes it the more probable that he was, like Eadric, a man of low birth.

The appointment of Eadric to the Mercian ealdormanship in 1007 is distinct in all the Chronicles and in Florence. His marriage with the King’s daughter Eadgyth took place before 1009, when Florence speaks of him as the Kings son-in-law, “gener ejus, habuit enim in conjugio filiam ejus Edgitham.” His elevation to the ealdormanship is the most natural date for the marriage. There may perhaps be some reference to this marriage in the wonderful declamation of Walter Map against Æthelred (De Nugis, 202). He charges him with systematically preferring slaves to freemen, and giving the daughters of nobles to “rustici,” that is, in the language of his day, villains. By “servi” and “rustici” he most likely means merely ceorls. “Superbus servi oculus et insatiabile cor in ipsius beneplacito ministrabat.”

NOTE KK. p. 329.
The Succession of the Northumbrian Earls.

I did not come across Mr. Robertson’s “Scotland under Early Kings” till the greater part of the first edition of my first volume was printed. I had therefore no opportunity, till towards the end of the volume, of making any use of his excellent note on the Danelage (ii. 430), which is one of the best parts of his work. The history of Northumberland from the ninth century onwards is there traced out with greater clearness and probability than I have ever seen it dealt with elsewhere. His great point, which he seems to me fully to establish, is, that at the great conquest of Northumberland in Ælfred’s time, Deira only was actually divided and occupied by the Danes, while Bernicia, into whatever degree of subjection it may have been brought to the Danish power, still remained occupied by Englishmen, and under the immediate government of English rulers. The local nomenclature, as Mr. Robertson shows, bears out this view, and it also explains the otherwise puzzling fact that that part of old Northumberland which is quite away from the Humber has kept the name of Northumberland to this day, an usage which certainly began as early as the eleventh century (see Chron. Wig. 1065 and Sim. Dun. 80). Indeed Simeon (147) distinguishes “Eboracum” and “Northimbri” as early as 883; but he is doubtless using the language of his own time, as he is not following the earlier Northumbrian Chronicle. With these Anglian rulers of Bernicia I have no concern till the Commendation of 924, when the “son of Eadwulf,” and again in 926 “Ealdred Eadulfing,” appears among the princes who submitted to Æthelstan. Ealdred’s son was Oswulf, who signs two charters of Eadred in 949 as lord of Bamburgh, “Osulf ad bebb. hehgr̃” (Cod. Dipl. ii. 292), and “Osulf bebb.” (ii. 296). The abbreviation “hehgr̃” stands, according to Mr. Robertson, for heah-gerefa. And I can certainly suggest nothing better, though it is strange to find so purely ministerial a title applied to one who seems to have been rather a vassal prince than a mere magistrate. In 954, on the final conquest of Northumberland by Eadred, Oswulf seems to have exchanged this infinitesimal kind of kingship for the earldom over both provinces. See Sim. Dun. 204, who goes on to mention the division of the two earldoms between Oswulf and Oslac; “Qui [Osulfus] postea regnante Eadgaro socium accepit Oslacum. Deinde Osulfus ad aquilonalem plagam Tinæ, Oslac vero super Eboracum et ejus fines curas administrabat.” The appointment of Oslac is noticed by three of the Chronicles in the year 966, and his banishment in 975 is recorded in prose and lamented in verse. The next Earl was Waltheof, who seems to have been a son of Oswulf, and I gather from the words of Simeon (204)—“His [Osulfo et Oslaco] successit “Walthef senior””—that he again held both earldoms. But they must have been again dismembered at some time before 993, when Ælfhelm, who had signed as “minister” in 985 (Cod. Dipl. vi. 121), begins to sign as “dux” (iii. 271). An earlier signature as “Comes” in 990 (iii. 251) is doubtful. Cf. iii. 253. In 997 (iii. 304) he signs as “Norðanhumbrensium provinciarum dux.” The only signature of Waltheof himself that I know of is one of “Wælðeof dux” in 994 (iii. 280). That Uhtred (p. 329) held both earldoms on the deposition of his father and the murder of Ælfhelm seems plain from the words of Simeon (80), “Rex Ethelredus, vocato ad se juvene præfato, vivente adhuc patre Waltheof, pro merito suæ strenuitatis et bello quod tam viriliter peregerat, dedit ei comitatum patris sui, adjungens etiam Eboracensem comitatum.” This last was evidently the earldom made void by the death of Ælfhelm.

The death of Uhtred and the bestowal of the Northumbrian earldom on Eric the Dane by Cnut I have mentioned at pp. 379, 524. Mr. Robertson (i. 95, ii. 442) seems to confine the Northumbrian government of Eric to Deira, while he extends his frontier southward as far as Watling-Street. But the fourfold division of England implies that Eric ruled over all Northumberland. On the other hand, Simeon (81), speaking in his own person (see Stubbs, Preface to R. Howden, i. xxx), in a marked way confines the government of Ealdred, the successor of Eadwulf, to Bernicia. “Aldredus, quem prædictus comes Ucthredus genuerat ex Ecfrida Alduni episcopi filia, ... solius Northumbriæ comitatum suscepit, patrisque sui interfectorem interfecit Turebrandum.” “Northumbria,” it will be seen, is here used in the most modern sense. The obvious inference is that Eadwulf ruled at first in Bernicia only and under the superiority of Eric, but that, on Eric’s banishment, he succeeded to the government of all Northumberland immediately under the King. Simeon gives us no dates, and Siward’s accession to Deira may have followed the death of Eadwulf Cutel. Everything looks as if the reign of Ealdred was very short.

One question remains as to Thored, who signs as “dux” in 979, 983, and 988 (Cod. Dipl. iii. 171, 198, 237), and in the Chronicles (992) is distinguished as “Þored eorl” from “Ælfric ealdorman.” He was therefore in all probability Earl of Deira or Yorkshire (see Robertson, ii. 441). He is doubtless the same as Thored the son of Gunner, who, according to the Chronicles, harried Westmorland in 966, and, according to some accounts (see below, Note SS), he was the father of Æthelred’s first wife. He was no doubt succeeded by Ælfhelm in 993, and he must himself have been appointed as early as 979. Mr. Robertson conjectures that he succeeded on the banishment of Oslac in 975. But we have seen that Waltheof then succeeded to both earldoms. My conjecture therefore is that the two earldoms were again separated on the accession of Æthelred, Deira being given to Thored. If Æthelred really married Thored’s daughter, this is still more likely.

There can be no doubt that Eorl (see p. 407) is the proper title of a governor of Deira (see Cod. Dipl. ii. 293, and the Laws of Eadgar, Schmid, 198). But the Chronicles do not always observe the distinction. The pointed marking out of Thored as “eorl” and Ælfric as “ealdorman” is an unusual piece of accuracy, and though Oslac, when his banishment in 975 is recorded, is called “se mæra eorl,” yet his appointment in 966 is expressed by the words “feng to ealdordome.”

NOTE LL. p. 339.
The Assessment of 1008.

The Abingdon and Peterborough Chronicles for 1008 have, “Hér bebead se cyng þæt mán sceolde ofer eall Angelcyn scypu fæstlice wyrcan; þæt is ðonne; of þrim hund hidum and óf tynum ænne scegð, and of viii hidum helm and byrnan.”

So Florence; “Rex Anglorum Ægelredus de cccx cassatis unam trierem, de novem vero loricam et cassidem fieri, et per totam Angliam naves intente præcepit fabricari.” So Henry of Huntingdon (M. H. B. 753 A) and Lappenberg, ii. 170.

But the Worcester Chronicle (Cott. Tib. B. iv.) reads “of þrym hund scipum and x bé tynum anne scægð.” I quote Mr. Earle’s note, without confidently pledging myself to his interpretation, further than that I feel sure that the assessment must have been made by shires in some shape or other. If anything else were needed to prove it, the bequest of Ælfric so appositely quoted by Mr. Earle, and which I have not scrupled to mention in the text, would alone be enough.

“In this rating of land for raising a navy, the numbers are so unconformable to the statistical numbers preserved elsewhere, and so incommensurate with each other, that they must be received with suspicion. All the texts agree, except D [the Worcester Chronicle], which, of all extant texts, is probably the nearest to the source. In the confusion of the text of D, may possibly be found materials for a future emendation.

“But, taken at its worst, the annal is rich in interest. We learn the curious fact, that it was incumbent on each of the landed subdivisions, to provide the king with a ship and its armour. The government did not levy ship-money, but required each county to find its quota of ships. This would apply as well to the inland districts, as to those on the sea-board. And here we find the explanation of an otherwise inexplicable bequest of good Abp. Ælfric, who died two years before this date. He gave one ship to the folk of Kent, and one to Wiltshire. The will is in Cod. Dipl. 716 [iii. 351]. Doubtless, in each of the cases, the bequest was intended as an alleviation of the heavy imposts under which the people groaned. His gift being to the shire, is an argument that the assessment was by shires. It appears to me probable that each shire had to furnish one ship for every three Hundreds contained in the shire. Thus a shire containing thirty Hundreds would have to furnish ten ships. (Accordingly, D may be right: of þrym hund scipum: ? = of three Hundreds—Hundertschaften.) This burden would fall on the whole body of the people, according to their rating. But the wealthy landowners had a special burden besides. He who had property up to or over the extent of ten hides, would have to furnish a scegð—and every thane under ten hides, had to furnish a helmet and breastplate.”

The scegð, according to Mr. Earle and Dr. Schmid, seems to be a smaller kind of vessel. It is a pity that even Florence was so far carried away by the wish to appear classical as to talk about triremes, instead of using words which might express the different kinds of vessels spoken of.

On Mr. Earle’s showing, the special imposts laid on the great landowners would exactly answer to the Attic λειτουργίαι. But it tells somewhat against his interpretation that both Florence and Henry of Huntingdon follow the reading of the other manuscripts. In any case I must confess that I do not clearly understand about the helm and breastplate.

NOTE MM. p. 343.
Wulfnoth of Sussex.

Most writers assume that “Wulfnoth Child the South-Saxon,” as he is called in all the Chronicles, was at once the nephew of Eadric and the father of Earl Godwine. These questions I shall discuss in a later Note, specially devoted to the origin of the Earl. I will only say here that it seems to me that, whoever was the father of Godwine, Florence did not intend to identify the Wulfnoth who, he says, was nephew to Eadric, with Child Wulfnoth the South-Saxon.

That Brihtric, the accuser of Wulfnoth, was a brother of Eadric rests on the authority of all the Chronicles. They all call him “Brihtric, Eadrices broðor ealdormannes.” Florence gives him the character of being “homo lubricus, ambitiosus, et superbus,” and adds that the accusation was unjust. He had also just before given the following list of the brothers of Eadric or sons of Æthelric; “cujus fratres exstiterunt Brihtricus, Ælfricus, Goda, Ægelwinus, Ægelwardus, Ægelmærus, pater Wlnothi, patris West-Saxonum ducis Godwini.” The charters are full—take for instance Cod. Dipl. iii. 355 and vi. 164, 166—of signatures which may be the signatures of those brothers. But all the names are common, except perhaps Goda, unless it be a short form of Godric or Godwine. For instance, one charter in Cod. Dipl. iii. 345, 346 is signed by three distinct Brihtrics, all with the rank of “minister.” In one place (iii. 351), if the document be genuine, “Byrhtríc cinges þegen gewitnys” signs between Eadric and one who may be their father (see above, p. 656). In vi. 155 we have a “Bríhtric reáda” in Dorsetshire, and in the Chronicles (1017) a “Brihtric Ælfehes suna on Defenascire,” who may be the same as the Brihtric of Dorset, but who is of course different from the brother of Eadric. Of Æthelweards we find several in the early days of Cnut. It seems in vain to try to make out anything more about the family; except that, according to Orderic (506 B), Eadric the Wild, so famous sixty years later, was Eadric’s nephew or grandson—“nepos Edrici pestiferi ducis.”

The title of “cild” or “child” given to Wulfnoth is a puzzling one. Florence translates it by “minister,” as if it were the same as Thegn; Henry of Huntingdon by “puer nobilis.” It is found in one other place only in the Chronicles, namely in 1074, where it is applied to the younger Eadgar, as if it were the same as Æðeling. We have seen it (see above, p. 641) as the title of one of the Ælfrics, who in English is “cild” and in Latin “cognomento Puer.” Several men bear the title in Domesday, as “Alnod cilt” (2 et al.), Eadwine, miscalled Godwine, Abbot of Westminster (146), Edward “cilt,” a man of Earl Harold (146, 148, 212, 336b, 340), and several others, Brixi, Eadwig, Leofric, Leofwine, and others, whom I do not profess to identify. See Ellis, ii. 68. In a deed of Bishop Ælfwold T. R. E. in Cod. Dipl. vi. 196, we find the signature of a “Dodda cild” (see vol. ii. Appendix G), seemingly a kinsman of Earl Odda. From all these examples, and from the later use of the word, “Childe Waters” and the like, one would think that “cild” was in some way or other a title of honour, though it is not at all easy to see exactly what it implied in the way of rank or office. On the other hand we find an Æthelric (Æilricus) “cild,” as also an Eadwine “cniht,” among the inferior tenants of Battle Abbey. Chron. de Bello, 14, 15.

The story of Wulfnoth, as well as his personality, is puzzling. We hear nothing of the nature of the charge against him or of the punishment which seems to have been designed for him. In the Chronicles we simply read that the accusation was brought and that Wulfnoth took to flight and began to plunder. Florence says “ne caperetur, mox fugam iniit.” Henry of Huntingdon, who does not mention the charge brought by Brihtric, says “Rex exsulaverat Wlnod.” So William of Malmesbury (ii. 165), who brings the story in only casually, in his general picture of the reign of Æthelred. He says nothing of the flight of Wulfnoth or the pursuit of Brihtric. He mentions the storm and adds, “Paucæ de reliquiis multarum factæ, impetu cujusdam Wulnodi, quem rex exlegatum ejecerat, submersæ vel incensæ.” Nor have we the least hint given as to whither Wulfnoth went, or what he did, after he had burned the hundred ships. He may have joined the Danes or have done anything else in the wiking line; I cannot believe that he went and lived quietly in Gloucestershire. In this uncertainty, modern writers seem to have thought that they had full licence to give play to their imaginations, and the results are remarkable. Mr. St. John for instance and M. de Bonnechose display a minute knowledge of the actions and motives of all parties which certainly cannot be got by the dull process of groping in the Chronicles. Let us hear Mr. St. John (Four Conquests, ii. 21);

“About the vicious and bewildered king, the earl of Mercia and his brethren clung like the fabled serpents about Laocoon. They were seven in all—Edric, Brihtric, Elfric, Goda, Ethelwine, Ethelward, and Ethelmere—and between them was incessantly carried on a reckless struggle for pre-eminence. Being all desirous of monopolizing the favour of Ethelred, they plotted against each other, and pursued their designs with relentless vindictiveness.

“Ethelmere, the youngest of the brothers, had a son, Wulfnoth, who for his courage and capacity had been made Childe of the South-Saxons, a post of great honour and distinction. This excited rancorous envy in the breast of his uncle Brihtric, who, in order to compass his overthrow, accused him of treason to the king. Familiar with the cruel and capricious temper of Ethelred, the young earl effected his escape from London.”

The French writer, M. Emile de Bonnechose (Quatre Conquêtes de l’Angleterre, ii. 17), is almost more remarkable than Mr. St. John. “De nouvelles défections anéantirent bientôt les forces navales des Anglo-Saxons: un de leurs chefs, nommé Wulnoth, père du fameux comte Godwin, prit la fuite avec vingt vaisseaux. Britric, commandant de la flotte, poursuivit le fugitif.” No hint whatever why Wulfnoth fled. Presently (ii. 56) we read of “le service que ce Wulnoth rendit au roi Sweyn en lui livrant une partie de la flotte qu’il commandait et en brûlant le reste,” events of which the Chronicles preserve no mention whatever. More amazing than all, Wulfnoth is elsewhere described (ii. 54) as “churl ou chef des Saxons du sud,” much as if one were to talk of a man being “Roturier or Duke of Montmorency.”

NOTE NN. p. 344.
Thurkill the Dane.

This name, like many others, appears in a fuller form in England than in Denmark. The English bearers of it, all doubtless of Danish descent, are always called Thurcytel. The famous Dane himself always appears, whether in Latin, English, or Danish, in a shortened form, Thurkill or something like it, in various spellings.

Our Thurkill comes before us in very different lights in different accounts. In the Chronicles we first hear of him as commanding the fleet which came in 1009. The three Chronicles all agree in saying that soon after Lammas an innumerable fleet came to Sandwich (“þá cóm sona æfter lafmæssam [“hlammessan,” Petrib.] se úngemætlica únfrið here to Sandwic”), but Abingdon alone adds “þe we heton Ðurkilles here.” Florence distinguishes the fleet of Thurkill from the fleet of Heming and Eglaf (“Danicus comes Turkillus sua cum classe ad Angliam venit: exinde mense Augusto alia classis Danorum innumerabilis, cui præerant duces Hemingus et Eglafus,” &c.). But the two fleets meet in Thanet and sail together to Sandwich. We then hear no more of Thurkill by name till 1013, but it is plain that all the ravages done up to Swegen’s invasion in that year were done by “Ðurkilles here.” In 1013 (see p. 360) we suddenly find him on the English side. He is in London with Æthelred (“forðan þær wæs inge sé cyng Æþelred and Þurcyl mid him”), and directly after (see p. 361) we find him and Æthelred together in the fleet in the Thames. This makes it plain that the forty-five ships which went over to Æthelred in 1012 (see p. 356) were Thurkill’s ships or a part of them. It was plainly then that he changed sides. We hear of his fleet again in 1014, when a Danegeld was paid to it (see p. 371); and again in 1015, when Eadric seduced “the forty ships from the King’s service” (“Eadric ealdorman aspeon þa fowertig scipa fram þam cyningc”). But Thurkill’s name is not mentioned again till 1017 (see p. 407) when Cnut gives him one of the four great Earldoms, namely East-Anglia. In 1020 (see p. 426) he appears along with Cnut at the consecration on Assandun; in 1021 (see p. 428) he is outlawed; in 1023 (see p. 429) he is reconciled to the King and seems to become his lieutenant in Denmark, but we hear no more of him in England.

Florence mentions Thurkill whenever he is mentioned in the Chronicles, except in the account of his reconciliation with Cnut, which appears in the Abingdon Chronicle only. He makes matters somewhat plainer about “the forty ships” in 1015, saying that Eadric “de regia classe xl naves, Danicis militibus instructas, sibi allexit.” He also, in recording Thurkill’s banishment in 1021, adds the name of his wife; “Canutus rex ... Turkillum supra dictum comitem cum uxore sua Edgitha expulit Anglia.” It should be noticed that neither in the Chronicles nor in Florence is there any mention of Thurkill during the wars of Cnut and Eadmund in 1016.

As for the charters we can hardly expect to find him signing during the reign of Æthelred. In Cnut’s time, 1018–1019, we find him signing as “dux” (Cod. Dipl. iv. 1, 3, 6, 9). His signature to the document of Healðegen Scearpa in 1026 (Cod. Dipl. iv. 32) is more puzzling, as it would imply a return of Thurkill to England, of which there is no other trace. But that document, though not marked doubtful or spurious by Mr. Kemble, seems to me most suspicious. Godwine signs as “þegen,” but before all the Earls, and the Earls who sign are Siward, Ælfgar, Thurkill, Leofric, Swegen, Tostig, and Eadred. I cannot identify any Earls Ælfgar and Swegen in the time of Cnut, and the Tostig of those days (see Note WWW) is a half-mythical person. It is very doubtful too (see Note CCC) whether Leofric was an Earl so early as 1026, and Siward seems not to have been an Earl till Harthacnut’s time. I cannot help thinking that an unskilful forger adapted the names from some charter of Eadward, and that Swegen and Tostig are the sons of Godwine moved out of their places. I do not think that we can bring Thurkill back to England without some better evidence than this. We must also take care to distinguish Earl Thurkill from several contemporary Thurkills of lesser degree. There is, for instance, a “Ðurkill minister” who signs in 1023 (iv. 27), and a Thurkill the White (“Ðurcil hwíta”) who figures in a private document at iv. 54. He goes into Herefordshire on the King’s errand along with Tofig the Proud. Of another Thurkill, or the same, there is a long story in the Ramsey History, c. 84.

William of Malmesbury seems to have a special dislike to Thurkill. He mentions him only twice (ii. 176, 181), and both times charges him with being the chief instigator of the murder of Ælfheah, which, from the better authority of Thietmar (see Note PP), we know that he tried to hinder. The first passage runs thus;

“Resederat in Anglia Turkillus Danus, qui fuerat incentor ut lapidaretur archiepiscopus, habebatque Orientales Anglos suæ voluntati parentes. Tam cæteri, dato ab Anglis octo millium librarum tributo, per urbes et agros, quo quisque commodius poterat, dilapsi: quindecim eorum naves cum hominibus regis fidem sequutæ. Turkillus interea regem patriæ suæ Suanum nuntiis accersit ut Angliam veniat.”

This is followed by a rhetorical description, put into Thurkill’s mouth, of the vices and weakness of Æthelred and of England. Here are several manifest misstatements; besides the misrepresentation as to the death of Ælfheah, nothing is plainer than that Thurkill, who stood by Æthelred to the last, did not invite Swegen into England. The only question is whether any trace of truth lurks in the words which seem to attribute to Thurkill a settlement in East-Anglia earlier than his investiture with that earldom by Cnut. The other passage is equally unfair. The removal of Thurkill from England is thus described; “Succedente tempore Turkillus et Iricius, ab Anglia captatis occasionibus eliminati, natale solum petierunt; quorum primus, qui incentor necis beati Elfegi fuerat, statim ut Danemarchiæ littus attigit a ducibus oppressus est.” This last statement is directly contradicted by the Chronicles; but it shows us where William of Malmesbury got his notion of Thurkill, namely from the two tracts of Osbern on the martyrdom of Ælfheah and his Translation. In the latter (Anglia Sacra, i. 144) we get a wonderful account of Thurkill. He is “male audax princeps malorum Thyrkyllus, pauco tempore prædo futurus, sed in æternum damnati spiritus præda mansurus”—a hard fate for the co-founder of Assandun and benefactor of Saint Eadmund’s. He remains in England after the death of Ælfheah, but presently Cnut comes, seemingly on the errand of getting rid of Thurkill and his followers (“Cnut ... diffidens ab illo propter quasdam res male ac perfide actas, quidquid residuum infandi populi esse poterat, sicut tabulæ stilo deleri solent, delevit, ipsumque ducem sex tantummodo navibus munitum in Danamarcam fugavit”). Thurkill goes to Denmark; being suspected of a design to stir up civil wars, he is hunted down and killed, and his body is left unburied (“ne intestina bella moliretur, statim per cuncta regionis illius loca agitatus, ad ultimum ab ignobili vulgo occisus, ferisque et avibus est miserabiliter projectus”). This is plainly the source whence William of Malmesbury got his account of Thurkill’s death; still he knew the history too well to accept Osbern’s introduction of Thurkill (ii. 131) as at first a joint commander with Swegen, and then, after Swegen’s death, his successor (“piratæ ... ducibus Swano et Thurkyllo, principibus Danorum fortissimis, nonnullam terræ Anglorum maculam intulerant. Sed Swano ab omnipotenti Deo terribiliter occiso, Thyrkillus malignæ hæreditatis principatum sortitus est”). Osbern evidently looked on Thurkill as the author of all evil, but he does not again mention him by name. It is worth thinking whether William of Malmesbury’s notion of Thurkill’s settlement in East-Anglia at this time arose from any confusion with the partition which, according to Osbern (see Note PP), was to be made between Eadric and the Danes.

William of Malmesbury’s statement that Thurkill invited Swegen into England probably comes from some confusion with the narrative of the Encomiast. This last writer makes (i. 2) Thurkill go to England by Swegen’s leave to avenge the death of a brother who had been killed there, perhaps in the massacre of Saint Brice. But, once in England, he goes over to the English side, and seemingly obtains some establishment in the country (“meridianam partem provinciæ victor obtinet”). One main object of Swegen’s expedition is said to be to win back, by force or persuasion, Thurkill himself and the forty ships of which he has defrauded his sovereign. We hear however nothing more of him till Swegen is dead. When Cnut goes back to Denmark, Thurkill stays in England (ii. 1). His motives are described at length. He then (ii. 3) goes to Cnut with nine ships, leaving thirty in England, to make his peace with him (“memor quod Sueino fecerat, et quod tunc in terra absque licentia domini sui Cnutonis inconsulte remanserat, cum novem navibus earumque exercitu dominum suum requisivit, ut ei patefaceret quia non contra ejus salutem se recedente remanserit”), and to exhort him to a renewed invasion of England. Cnut accordingly comes, and Thurkill is his right hand man throughout the war with Eadmund.

I do not know whether our Thurkill is the same as “Þorkell Hasi,” brother of Heming and son of Earl Strut-Harold, who accompanies Cnut to England in the Knytlinga Saga, c. 8 (Johnstone, 105). This may be the Heming of Florence, 1009.

The history of Thurkill in our Chronicles seems to hang very well together. Patching it up from Thietmar, I infer that he embraced Christianity before the death of Ælfheah, which he strove to hinder. He then took service under Æthelred, and served him faithfully against Swegen. But I do not know how to cast aside the assertion of the Encomiast that Thurkill was prominent on Cnut’s side during the war with Eadmund. Fabulous as are many of the details, this can hardly be mere invention. He may have changed sides when Eadric beguiled the Danes in the English service in 1015 (see above, p. 376), or after Æthelred’s death, at the Southampton election of Cnut.

Thurkill married (see Florence, 1021) an Englishwoman named Eadgyth. Lappenberg (ii. 197, 207) makes her the widow of Ulfcytel, therefore a daughter of Æthelred. But the name of Ulfcytel’s wife seems to have been Wulfhild (see above, p. 654, and Lappenberg, ii. 168), while Eadgyth the daughter of Æthelred was certainly the wife of Eadric. I suspect that it was Eadric’s widow whom Thurkill married. At the same time I cannot lay my hand on any authority for Thurkill’s wife being a daughter of Æthelred; but it is very likely, and such a connexion would account for Cnut’s jealousy of him (see p. 415).

NOTE OO. p. 347.
Wulfric Spot.

Wulfric appears in the Chronicles simply as “Wulfric Leofwines sunu” without any further description. So in Florence he is simply “Wlfricus Leofwini filius.” He signs a charter of 1002 (Cod. Dipl. vi. 146) as “minister.” In the confirmation of his will by Æthelred (Cod. Dipl. iii. 332) he is described as “nobilis progeniei minister Wlfricus.” He and all the other men who were slain at Ringmere all come in the Chronicles under the head of “feala oðera godra þegna.” I should infer from this that he never held the rank of Ealdorman; but he is called “consul” by Henry of Huntingdon (M. H. B. 753 C) and Bromton (X Scriptt. 888). So the Burton Chronicle printed in the Monasticon, iii. 47, calls him “illustris et præpotens consul ac comes Merciorum Wulfricus Spott regali propinquus prosapiæ.” The Burton Annals however (Luard, Ann. Mon. i. 183) are satisfied with calling him “quidam nobilis nomine Wlfricus cognomento Spot.” He cannot possibly have been Ealdorman of all Mercia, and if he were a subordinate Ealdorman of one of the shires in which his property lay, he could hardly fail to have been somewhere spoken of as “dux” or “comes.” Sir Francis Palgrave (ii. ccxciii.) suggests that he was Ealdorman of Lancaster, on the strength of his possession of lands between the Ribble and the Mersey. This comes from his will, which is printed in Cod. Dipl. vi. 147. But Lancashire, as a shire, is later than Domesday. The lands between Mersey and Ribble appear there as an appendage to Cheshire, while Lancaster is in Yorkshire. Wulfric’s lands between the Ribble and the Mersey are left to Ælfhelm and Wulfheah, no doubt the murdered Ealdorman and his son, to both of whom other bequests are made as well as to Ælfhelm’s other son Ufegeat. A little way on, he leaves lands “Ælfhelme mínan meáge,” and he afterwards speaks of “Ælfhelm mín bróðor.” This may raise some question as to whether he is speaking of one Ælfhelm or more.

Sir Francis Palgrave (ii. ccxci.) makes Wulfric the son of the person called Leofric the Second, brother of Ealdorman Leofwine and uncle of the famous Earl Leofric. But I do not find this even in the very mythical document on which his genealogical table is founded, and of which I shall have again to speak (see Appendix CCC). The Chronicles distinctly describe Wulfric as the son of Leofwine, that is, not the Ealdorman of that name, but one of the many Thegns who bore it. Thus in Cod. Dipl. iii. 322 (a charter signed by Wulfric himself), we have “Leofwine dux,” as distinguished from “Leofwine minister;” and the confirmation charter of Wulfric’s own foundation is signed by “Leofwine dux” and by two several men described as “Leofwine minister.” It would seem from what I have just quoted that Wulfric was a brother of Earl Ælfhelm, and the Burton Chronicle gives him another brother “dux Alwinus,” that is, Ælfwine or Æthelwine, two not uncommon names, both of which will be found among the signatures, as in Cod. Dipl. iii. 345–6, a document which, I may add, is signed by three Leofwines besides the Ealdorman. Wulfric also makes bequests to a daughter of Morkere and Ealdgyth who was his goddaughter (“ic geann mínre goddóhtor Mórcares and Ealdgyðe ðæt lande” etc.). He mentions only one child of his own, who is spoken of rather mysteriously, without any name, as “my poor daughter” (“ic gean mínre earman dehter”), with a hint that there was something wrong about her. She is to hold the land only while she deserves it (“hwile ðe heo hit geearnian cann”), and Ælfhelm is appointed guardian both of her and of the land. The name of Wulfric’s wife, according to the local Chronicle, was Ealhswith.

The foundation of Burton took place, according to the local Chronicles, in 1004, which is the year of the confirmation charter. Wulfric was buried within his own monastery, not however in the church, but in the cloister; “in claustro monasterii sui antedicti sub arcu lapideo juxta ostium ecclesiæ superioris” (Mon. iii. 47). Ealhswith, who seems to have died before him, as she is not mentioned in the will, was also buried in the cloister, “juxta ostium ecclesiæ inferioris.” It seems then that the cloister had one door into the choir and one door into the nave, that is to say, the ritual choir was west of the crossing. The first Abbot Wulfgeat and his monks came from Winchester; he is said to have lived till 1026, but I doubt whether he signs any charters.

NOTE PP. p. 352.
The Taking of Canterbury and the Martyrdom of Ælfheah.

Of the siege of Canterbury and the martyrdom of Ælfheah—the Alphege of hagiology—we have four distinct accounts. That in the Chronicles of course claims the first place. It was written before 1023, as it speaks of Ælfheah’s body being still at Saint Paul’s and working miracles there, whereas it was translated to Canterbury in 1023. The witness of the Chronicles I of course accept unhesitatingly. And next to it I am inclined to place the narrative in Thietmar of Merseburg, which he heard when it was fresh from the lips of an Englishman named Sewald. He gives a minute account of the martyrdom, which differs a good deal from the popular version, but which falls in very well with the account in the Chronicles, contradicting it in nothing, but explaining it on one or two points. But, oddly enough, Ælfheah is called Dunstan, a strange mistake to have been made by a contemporary, even though a foreigner, but one which shows how great was the fame of Dunstan, and how small the fame of Ælfheah, in Christendom generally. There is also the Life of Ælfheah by Osbern in Anglia Sacra, ii. 122. This is a mere piece of hagiology, in the common style of such lives, and it contains many statements which are untrue or impossible. It is in fact valuable only as affording practice in the art of unravelling the component elements of a romantic story. But the remarkable thing is that the fourth narrative, that of Florence, departs in several important points from the Chronicles and copies either from Osbern, or, what is more likely, from some third source from which Osbern also copied. Florence’s knowledge and good sense kept him from repeating any of Osbern’s grosser absurdities, but he has not improved his narrative by introducing several details which cannot be reconciled with the Chronicles. Simeon simply copies Florence; Henry of Huntingdon follows the Chronicles, with some slight touches from Florence.

The Chronicles (1011) describe the whole event in detail, but they give us only a picture of plunder and captivity, without any mention of slaughter. The Archbishop and the other persons spoken of and a further countless number of clerks and laymen, men and women, were made prisoners (“hi þær genamon inne ealle þa gehadodan men and weras and wif; þæt wæs unasecgendlic ænigum men hu micel þæs folces wǽs”). The word “genamon” which is applied to the mass of the people is the same word which is applied to the Archbishop, who was not put to death till long after, and to others who we know were not put to death at all. The Chronicles then go on to say how the Danes stayed in the city as long as they would, and when they had searched it thoroughly went to their ships (“ðá hí hæfdon þa buruh ealle asmeade, wendon him þá tó scypan”). Then follows a short poem lamenting the captivity of Ælfheah and the wretchedness of the city; but there is not a word to imply any general massacre. Neither is there anything to imply such a massacre in the shorter narrative of Thietmar. But in Osbern (Ang. Sacr. ii. 136, 137) and Florence we get a soul-harrowing account of every possible horror. Men are slaughtered, burned, thrown from the walls, tortured in horrible ways. Women are dragged by their hair and thrown into the fire. Children are tossed on spears or crushed under the wheels of waggons. The whole ends with a systematic decimation of the surviving adult males. By decimation is here meant the slaying, not of one out of ten, but of nine out of ten. This process leaves their lives to four monks and eight hundred laymen. If this is any clew to the population of Canterbury, the monks of the two minsters must have been fewer, and the general population much larger, than one would have expected. The metropolis of England must have gone down, relatively at least, since the eleventh century.

These stories cannot be accepted in the teeth of the speaking silence of the Chroniclers. The narrative of these last is so minute and so pathetic that they could hardly have failed to dwell on the massacre if any massacre had taken place. No doubt some lives were lost; a city was not likely to be taken, least of all by Danes in that age, without the loss of some lives. And here would be material enough for rhetorical hagiologists to work up into the picture given us by Osbern, into which they of course brought in all the horrors that they had ever heard of anywhere.

The reader will perhaps not be inclined to set much store by the authority of Osbern, if he knows the kind of story with which he (ii. 132) introduces the siege. One of the brothers of Eadric, a man “lubricus et superbus” like Brihtric, perhaps Brihtric himself, stirs up the wrath of the thegns of Kent by falsely accusing them to the King, and thereby procuring the confiscation of the estates of many of them. For these misdeeds they kill him and burn his house. Then Eadric, whom the King had made ruler over the whole realm (“totius imperii sui præfectum statuerat”), calls on the King to chastise them. The parts of Eadward and Godwine in a later story are thus transposed. Æthelred refuses to inflict any punishment on the Kentish thegns, affirming the wrong-doer to have been rightfully slain (“jure peremptum”). Eadric then takes the law into his own hands; he collects ten thousand men, who are described as being “optime armati,” and invades Kent at their head. The Kentishmen however resist valiantly, and the expedition fails. He then leagues himself with the Danes (“Danorum conciliabula expetit”) and exhorts them to attack, not Kent only, but the whole of Britain (“ad totius Britanniæ fines invadendos”). He describes the nakedness of the land, how the King—at the age of forty-two—was worn out with years, how the princes and people were all sunk in sloth and luxury. All this happens at a time when Swegen is already dead, and when Thurkill has seemingly succeeded to his power (see above, p. 654). So Eadric and Thurkill agree to divide the kingdom. Eadric is to take the East-Angles, seemingly in addition to his Mercian government, and the Danes are to take the North (“regnum post victoriam æqua sorte dividendum se Orientalibus Anglis principari, illos vero aquilone potiri”). Eadric now joins the Danes in the siege of Canterbury. Thurkill is not personally mentioned, but Eadric presently vanishes from the stage, without any explanation. It might not be hard to resolve this fable into its component parts; it is even possible that Eadric’s attack on the metropolitan city of England is really borrowed from his capture of the metropolitan city of Wales.

A point now arises as to the traitorous churchman who betrayed the city. It is not quite clear whether there were two Ælfmærs or one (see Hook, Lives of Archbishops, i. 466). The Chronicles seem to distinguish Ælfmær the traitor from Ælfmær the Abbot; and Florence distinguishes the traitor as “archidiaconus.” Yet if Ælfmær the Abbot was a different man from Ælfmær the traitor, why should the Danes let Abbot Ælfmær go free, when the Archbishop and the rest were seized? I can only suggest, as seems also to have occurred to Dr. Hook, that the story is the reverse story of that of Cinna the conspirator and Cinna the poet, that the Danes mistook one Ælfmær for the other, and let go the innocent one by mistake.

Abbot Ælfmær undoubtedly kept his abbey, and was afterwards raised to the bishopric of Dorset (W. Thorn, X Scriptt. 1782; Hist. St. Aug. 23, 24). Thorn gives two dates, 1017 and 1022, and makes him resign his see and return to his abbey. He signs various charters of Cnut as Bishop; he also appears as Abbot in a writ of Cnut (Cod. Dipl. iv. 9), addressed to him together with Archbishop Lyfing—therefore before 1020—and Bishop Godwine; also as a witness to the marriage settlement of another Godwine (Cod. Dipl. iv. 10) along with King Cnut and Archbishop Lyfing. We find him also in the doubtful charter of 1023, in Cod. Dipl. iv. 23, 25, where he signs in company with Æthelric, Bishop of Dorset, who otherwise seems to have left off signing in 1009. This Ælfmær must not be confounded with the contemporary Ælfmær, Bishop of the South-Saxons, whose signature also appears to the charter in iv. 25. The annals of his own abbey speak of Ælfmær with great reverence; and, though ordinary traitors might be advanced, a churchman who had had an indirect share in the martyrdom of a saint would hardly meet with any favour at the hands of Cnut or of any one else.

In describing the Archbishop’s martyrdom, I have given no heed to the mythical details in Osbern, but I have formed my narrative from the Chroniclers and Thietmar. There is no contradiction between the two accounts, but each fills up gaps in the other. Thus the statement that Ælfheah first promised a ransom and then refused to pay it comes from Thietmar; this explains the whole story, which otherwise is hardly intelligible. We thus see, what otherwise we do not clearly see, both why the Danes kept Ælfheah so long in bonds, and why they were so bitterly enraged against him when he finally refused to pay. And we can easily see why this part of the story should be left out, as tending somewhat to lessen the martyr’s glory, while it is not easy to see why any one should invent or imagine it. Florence makes the Danes demand a ransom of the Archbishop on one Saturday, and tell him that, if he does not pay it, he shall be killed on the next Saturday (“necem ejus usque ad aliud sabbatum protelant”). He seems to connect the demand with the late vote of the Witan rather than with any promise on the part of Ælfheah himself. The intercession of Thurkill comes from Thietmar; it falls in exactly with his conduct directly after. The words put into his mouth imply that he was already a Christian, which he certainly was, and a zealous one, before long. William of Malmesbury, the consistent persecutor of Thurkill, must be uttering mere calumnies when he says that he was “incentor ut lapidaretur archiepiscopus.” I accept from Florence the name and motive of the Dane Thrim or Thrum, who cleft the Archbishop’s head. The Chronicles simply mention the fact. “Ðrim miles,” “Ðrym dux,” “Ðrim eorl” is a signature attached to more than one charter of Cnut (Cod. Dipl. iv. 17, 23, 25). The documents are suspicious; the title of Earl is specially suspicious. But no one would have invented a signature of Thrim, unless he had seen it attached to some genuine document.

Lappenberg (ii. 177 Thorpe) has some good remarks on the impossibility of Osbern’s general story, though he accepts his account of the horrors at Canterbury. Mr. St. John (ii. 30) amusingly takes Lappenberg to task for “misinterpreting Florence and the Saxon Chronicle.” The truth is that Lappenberg did not misinterpret anything, but that Mr. St. John failed to consult Thietmar, though Lappenberg gave him the reference. Sir Francis Palgrave, when he wrote his small history (p. 297), swallowed the whole tale about Eadric and his brother. M. de Bonnechose (ii. 17) has much to tell us about “un chef farouche nommé Turchtill,” but he does not take him to Canterbury.

As Thietmar’s account of the martyrdom is well worth reading, and as his work is much less accessible than most of my authorities, I transcribe it in full;

“Percepi quoque a relatu prædicti hominis Sewaldi factum miserabile ac idcirco memorabile, quod perfida Northmannorum manus, duce ad hoc Thurkilo, Cantuariæ civitatis egregium antistitem, Dunsten nomine, cum cæteris caperent, et vinculis et inedia ac ineffabili pœna, more suo nefando, constringerent. Hic humana motus fragilitate, pecuniam eis promittit, et ad hanc impetrandam inducias posuit, ut si in his acceptabili redemptione mortem momentaneam evadere nequivisset, semet ipsum gemitibus crebris interim purgaret, hostiam Domino vivam ad immolandum. Transactis tunc omnibus designatis temporibus, vorax picarum charybdis Dei famulum evocat, et sibi promissum celeriter persolvi tributum minaciter postulat. Et ille, ut mitis agnus, ‘Præsto sum,’ inquit, ‘paratus ad omnia quæ in me nunc presumitis facere; ac Christi amore, ut suorum merear fieri exemplum servorum, non sum hodie turbatus. Quod vobis mendax videor, non mea voluntas, sed dira efficit mihi egestas. Corpus hoc meum, quod in hoc exsilio supra modum dilexi, vobis culpabile offero, et quid de eo faciatis in vestra esse potestate cognosco; animam autem meimet peccatricem Creatori omnium, vos non respicientem, supplex committo.’ Talia loquentem profanorum agmen vallavit, et diversa hunc ad interficiendum arma congerit. Quod quum eorum dux Thurcil a longe vidisset, celeriter accurrens: ‘Ne, quæso, sic faciatis!’ infit. ‘Aurum et argentum, et omne quod hic habeo vel ullo modo acquirere possum, excepta navi sola, ne in christum Domini peccetis libenti animo vobis omnibus trado.’ Tam dulci affatu infrenata sociorum ira, ferro et saxis durior, non mollitur, sed effuso innocenti sanguine placatur, quem communiter capitibus boum et imbribus lapidum atque lignorum infusione protinus effundunt. Inter tot frementium impetus potitus est cœlesti jucunditate, ut signi sequentis efficacia protinus testatur.” (Pertz, iii. 849.)

NOTE QQ. p. 360.
The Kingship and Death of Swegen.

That Swegen was acknowledged as King over England seems to be beyond doubt. The Chronicles (1013) say, “And eall þeodscipe hine hæfde þa for fulne cyning.” So Florence; “Ab omni Anglorum populo rex, si jure queat rex vocari, qui fere cuncta tyrannice faciebat, et appellabatur et habebatur.” So Henry of Huntingdon (M. H. B. 754 D); “Suain vero ab omni populo habebatur pro rege;” and again, “Suain jam rex Anglorum.” So, among later writers, Roger of Wendover (i. 447), “Regem Angliæ se jussit appellari;” and Bromton (X Scriptt. 892), “Swanus jam rex Anglorum factus.” William of Malmesbury (ii. 177) loses himself in fine writing; “tota jam Anglia in clientelam illius inclinata.”

On the other hand the English writers are specially fond of giving Swegen the name of Tyrant, a name, it must be remembered, which still keeps the meaning which became familiar in the third century (see p. 137), that of “usurper” or “pretender.” We have already seen Florence use the adverb “tyrannice,” and under the year 1014 he begins the account of Swegen’s death with the words, “Suanus tyrannus, post innumerabilia et crudelia mala, quæ vel in Anglia vel in aliis terris gesserat, ad cumulum suæ damnationis,” &c. So William of Malmesbury (ii. 179), rhetorically describing the evil case of England during Swegen’s occupation, says, “Hæsitabatur totis urbibus quid fieret; si pararetur rebellio, assertorem non haberent; si eligeretur subjectio, placido rectore carerent. Ita privatæ et publicæ opes ad naves cum obsidibus deportabantur, quod non esset ille dominus legitimus, sed tyrannus atrocissimus.” This is developed by Roger of Wendover (i. 448); “Swanus ... tyrannus nequissimus ... evidenter apparet ipsum naturalem non esse dominum [cyne-hlaford] sed tyrannum. Hæsitabat populus quid faceret, quia, si bellum quæreret, ductorem non haberet, si subjectionem eligeret, tyrannum rectorem haberet.” The technical and the rhetorical sense of the word are struggling throughout.

It will be seen at once that the former set of passages are much more distinct than the latter, which are intelligible only on the supposition that something happened, just as in the cases of Cnut and William, which at least passed for a regular election. Florence’s scruple about calling Swegen “rex” seems of itself to imply that he had some kind of formal claim to the title. But I imagine that he was never crowned. The remarkable words of the Chronicles that “all the people held him for full King” almost seem to imply that in strictness he was not full King. This would be exactly the position of a King elected but not crowned. No one hints at a coronation, except perhaps the Encomiast, who tells us (i. 5), “Ubi jam sæpedictus rex tota Anglorum patria est inthronizatus, et ubi jam pene illi nemo restitit, pauco supervixit tempore, sed tamen illud tantillum gloriose.” But if Swegen had been solemnly crowned and anointed, his panegyrist would hardly have contented himself with so vague a word as “inthronizatus.” Florence again (1013) mentions only Ealdormen and thegns as joining in the submission to Swegen, while in the election of Cnut in 1016 he distinctly speaks of Bishops and Abbots as taking a share. And their absence seems implied in a statement of William of Malmesbury (ii. 177), which, though his narrative is evidently inaccurate in many points, is worth notice. This is that Æthelred (p. 361), before he crossed into Normandy, held a meeting of Bishops and Abbots, as being the only people who still clave to him. “Abbates et episcopos, qui nec in tali necessitate dominum suum deserendum putarent, in hanc convenit sententiam.”

This at once brings us to the problem of Swegen’s religion. There seems no reason to doubt the account of his early baptism, his apostasy, his rebellion against his father. The English and German writers seem to know nothing of any reconversion. With Thietmar, for instance, a writer absolutely contemporary, who wrote while the events of 1016 were the last news of the day (see vii. 27, 28; Pertz, iii. 848), Swegen is to the end the “immitis Danorum rex” (vii. 26) and “Suennus persecutor” (28). But the Danish chroniclers assert a repentance and reconversion. So the Chronicle of Eric (Langebek, i. 158) mentions the baptism of Harold Blaatand and the parricidal war of Swegen, without however mentioning Swegen’s early baptism. Thus we read how Swegen “de regno expulsus, tandem ad Christi fidem conversus, baptizatus est et mox, Deo favente, regnum suum recepit.” So the Chronicle of Roskild (i. 376); “Christianis valde inimicus, quos etiam finibus suis expelli præcepit ... tandem Deum cognovit post flagella, quem cœpit quærere eique credere.” We then read how he founded churches and brought Bishop Bernhard from Norway into Scania. So Saxo first (186) describes his persecutions, and then (188) tells of his conversion, how he was “fortunæ sævitia ad amplectendam religionis caritatem adactus.” He too places Swegen’s baptism at this stage; “Quinetiam cunctis circa se rite peractis, lavacri usum promptissimo religionis tenore percepit.” He then, as well as the Roskild Chronicle, goes on to tell of the churches and bishoprics which he founded, and especially how he brought the English Bishop Bernhard from Norway to Lund. But Adam (ii. 53) attributes all this to Cnut. Saxo becomes (191) almost affecting on Swegen’s piety in his old age; “Sveno senilis animæ laboribus fessus, divinis rebus infatigabilem ultimi temporis curam tribuit,” &c. So the Encomiast (i. 5) tells us of the good and Christian advice, as well as the instructions in the art of government, which he gave to his son Cnut before his death; “Præsciens igitur dissolutionem sui corporis imminere, filium suum Cnutonem quem secum habuit advocat, sese viam universæ carnis ingrediendum indicat. Cui dum multa de regni gubernaculo multaque hortaretur de Christianitatis studio, Deo gratias, illi, virorum dignissimo sceptrum commisit regale.”

When we balance the two sets of authorities, I think we shall hardly be inclined to reject the implied witness of the German and English writers in favour either of a careless writer like Saxo or of an abandoned flatterer like the Encomiast. The English legend of his death implies a kind of half belief in the power of Saint Eadmund which is really not unlikely in such a case. It has a kind of parallel in a story of a Danish chief, perhaps the Guthrum-Æthelstan who was found making a vow to Saint Patrick. (See Dr. Todd’s Introduction to the Wars of the Gaedhill and the Gaill, lxiv, lxv, xciii.) We have the like contradictions as to Swegen’s death. The Encomiast goes on to tell us how he prayed his son that his body might be taken to Denmark, and makes incidentally an admission of some importance. Swegen would not be buried in England; “noverat enim quia pro invasione regni illis odiosus erat populis.” He then dies; “Nec multo post postrema naturæ persolvit debita, animam remittendo cœlestibus, terræ autem reddendo membra.” Saxo also (191) makes him die very quietly, perhaps in the odour of sanctity; “Omni humana concussione vacuus, in ipso perfectissimæ vitæ fulgore decessit.” The English story, as it is told by Florence, I have given in the text. The Chronicle records only that “he ended his days.” William of Malmesbury (ii. 179) had heard more stories than one; “pervasor ... ambiguum qua morte, vitam effudit.” He then goes on to tell the story in a form slightly different from that of Florence: Swegen seems to have reached Bury and to be actually harrying the lands of Saint Eadmund; “Dicitur quod terram Sancti Edmundi depopulanti martyr idem per visum apparuerit, leniterque de miseria conventum insolentiusque respondentem in capite perculerit, quo dolore tactum in proximo, ut prædictum est, obiisse.” The Knytlinga Saga, c. 6 (Johnstone, 89), makes Swegen’s death sudden, but says significantly that he died in his bed; “urdo þau tídindi þar, at Sveinn konungr Haralldsson vard bráddaudr um nott í ’reckio sinni.” The tale then goes on to speak of the legend as one told by Englishmen; “Oc er þat sögn Enskra manna, at Eadmundr hinn helgi hafi drepit hann, med þeima hætti sem hinn helgi Mercurius drap Julianum níding.” There is no mention of Saint Mercurius in Florence, but the comparison between Julian and Swegen, according to the English notion of Swegen, is obvious enough, and the name “níding” (= the English “niðing”) applied to Julian is worth notice. In after times Orderic (518 A) attributes the death of Swegen to Saint Eadmund, but without details; “A sancto Edmundo jussu Dei peremptus est.” In Orderic’s eyes Swegen is still “vesanus idololatra.” The same story is told of the Bulgarian King Kalojohannes, who died before Thessalonica in 1207. He was smitten by Saint Dêmêtrios, just as Swegen was by Saint Eadmund. See the Notes to Georgios Akropolites, p. 236 ed. Bonn, and Jireček, Geschichte der Bulgaren, p. 242. There is another tale of the same kind in p. 246.

As for Swegen’s body, Thietmar (vii. 28) says, in a marked but not very clear way; “hujus proles, multum in omnibus patrissantes, dilecti genitoris corpus delatum flebiliter suscipiunt et tumulant, et quidquid dedecoris patri suimet ingeri ab Anglis propositum est, paratis navibus ulcisci studebant.” This must be taken in connexion with the significant remark of the Encomiast quoted in the last paragraph. He presently goes on (ii. 3) to tell us how an English lady (“quædam matronarum Anglicarum”)—had Swegen found his Eadgyth Swanneshals in England?—dug up the body which had been buried in England (“assumpto corpore Sueini regis sua in patria sepulti”), embalmed it, and carried it in a ship to Denmark. She then summoned Cnut and Harold to come and bury their father in the place which he had himself appointed. They come accordingly and bury him honourably in the tomb which he had himself made in the minster of the Holy Trinity of his own rearing (“honorificentiusque illud in monasterio in honore sanctæ Trinitatis ab eodem rege constructo, in sepulcro quod sibi paraverat recondunt”). From the Saga of Olaf Tryggvesson (Johnstone, 101), which says nothing about the manner of Swegen’s death, we find that this minster is Roskild. “Sveirn konungr andadist í Englandi oc færdo Danir han til Danmerkur oc grofo þan í Hroiskeldo hia födr sinum.” The English lady is here left out.

NOTE RR. p. 369.
The Sermon of Wulfstan or Lupus.

There is, I suppose, no question that the person affectedly described as “Lupus” is really Archbishop Wulfstan. And I have little doubt in fixing the discourse to the year 1014. This is the date given in the heading of one of the manuscripts, while another has 1008. In an insertion in the text itself the discourse is said to have been delivered four years before the death of Æthelred. “Ðis wæs on Æþelredes cyningcs dagum gediht, feower geara fæce ær he forðferde.” This would at first sight look as if the right year were 1012. But the discourse itself contains a passage which shows that it must be later than Æthelred’s flight in 1013. The speaker says (p. 102) that the two most shameful deeds that can be done are to compass one’s lord’s death and to drive him out of the land. Each of these crimes, he says, has been done in England (“ægðer is geworden on ðysum earde”); Eadward has been murdered; we expect the speaker to add that Æthelred has been driven out; but either some words have been lost in the text or else Wulfstan left it to his hearers to fill up the gap for themselves. But in any case the passage would have no force or meaning at any time before Æthelred’s flight. And I am not sure that it is not possible, by a little chronological subtlety, to reconcile the date of 1014 with the other date of four years before the death of Æthelred. The year begins at different times in different reckonings. In a chronology which made the year begin at Lady-day, Æthelred’s death on April 23, 1016 would come in a year 1016–1017, while, if the sermon was preached before March 25, in a year 1013–1014, this might possibly be called the fourth year before the other. It may no doubt have been delivered just at the end of what we should call the year 1013, but the matter of the discourse agrees so well with the matter of the decrees of the Gemót of 1014 that one is strongly tempted to connect the two. It cannot in any case belong to 1012. See p. 361.

It is remarkable how little strictly historical information the speech gives us. Indeed the one historical fact which it mentions is wrong, as Wulfstan says that the body of Eadward the Martyr was burned (“Eadweard man forræde and syððan acwealde and æfter þam forbærnde”). But it is none the less valuable as a picture of the wretchedness of the times, a picture which goes very much into detail in its general descriptions, though without mentioning the names of persons or places. I have summed up most of the chief points in the text. Among the passages which are most worthy of notice are those which relate to the slave-trade. The orator first says (p. 100);

“Earme men syndon sare beswicene and hreowlice besyrwde and ut of þysum earde wide gesealde swyþe unforworhte fremdum to gewealde, and cradolcild geðeowode þurh wælhreowe unlaga for lytelre ðyfðe wide gynd ðas þeode. And freo riht fornumene and ðrælriht genyrwde and ælmesriht gewanode.”

The other passage (102) says;

“Eac we witan full georne hwær seo yrmð gewearð þæt fæder gesealde his bearn wið weorðe, and bearn his modor, and broðor sealde oðerne fremdum to gewealde ut of ðisse ðeode.”

Slavery also brought its own punishment in other ways. The slaves often joined the heathen invaders (“ðeh þræla hwylc hlaforde æthlæpe and of cristendome to wicinge weorðe”); sometimes a thegn’s slave led his own master into slavery (“and oft þræl ðæne ðegen ðe ær wæs his hlaford, cnyt swyðe fæste and wyrcð him to þræle, ðurh Godes yrre”). The lustful excesses of Englishmen, several of whom would hire a harlot in common (p. 102), were avenged by the outrages of the invaders on the wives and daughters of English thegns (“and oft tyne oððe twelfe, ælc after oðrum, scendað and tawiað to bismore micelum ðæs ðegenes cwenan, and hwilum his dohtor oððe nyd magan; þær he onlocað þa læte hine sylfne rancne and rincne and genoh godne ær þæt gewurðe.” p. 103. Cf. Herod, viii. 33). Two or three pirates drove all the people from sea to sea (“oft twegen sæmen oððe ðry hwilum drifað ða drafe Cristenra manna fram sæ to sæ ut ðurh ðæs ðeode gewelede togædere.” p. 103).

Lastly, there is an apparent allusion to the capture of Canterbury and captivity of Ælfheah and others, which certainly falls in better with my notion of that event than with the notion of a general massacre. “We hym gyldað singallice, and hy us hynað dæghwamlice: hy hergiað and hy bærnað, rypað and ræpiað and to scipe lædað.” (p. 103). This almost sounds like the poem in the Chronicles about Ælfheah. One might almost have thought that the speech was made during the time of Ælfheah’s imprisonment, but the manifest allusion to the flight of Æthelred forbids this.

NOTE SS. p. 372.
The Children of Æthelred.

The list of the children of Æthelred, among the genealogies given by Florence (i. 275, Thorpe), is manifestly imperfect. He is there said to have had by his first wife Ælfgifu, the daughter of Ealdorman Æthelberht, three sons, Eadmund, Eadwig, and Æthelstan, and one daughter, Eadgyth. He then mentions the two sons of Emma, Ælfred and Eadward, but does not mention Emma’s daughter Godgifu. This list is copied by R. Higden (270) and Knighton (2314), only changing Ælfgifu daughter of Æthelberht into Æthelgifu daughter of Ecgberht. The three sons of the first marriage here mentioned are those who survived to play a part in the history, but it appears from the charters that Ælfgifu, if that was her name, was the mother of several other sons. I quote the doubtful charters along with the genuine ones, as this is the kind of point in which one who either forged a charter or wrote down a lost charter from memory would be sure to reproduce what he had seen in genuine documents. Thus in a doubtful charter of 990 (Cod. Dipl. iii. 250) we have the signatures of Æthelstan, Ecgberht or Ecgbriht, Eadmund, Eadred, Eadwig, Eadgar, and Eadward. All sign with the title of “clito,” which is of course equivalent to Ætheling. In iii. 270, we have Æthelstan, Ecgbriht, Eadmund, and Eadred, all with the title of “regis filius.” At iii. 308, a seemingly genuine charter of 998, we have the “clitones” Æthelstan, Ecgbriht, Eadmund, Eadred, Eadwig. In iii. 314 (999) we have Æhelstan and Eadred. In iii. 321 (1001) Æthelstan, Ecgbriht, Eadmund, Eadred, Eadwig, and Eadgar; and the same list in iii. 325 (1002). At iii. 330, in a doubtful charter of 1004, Æthelstan, as the eldest son, signs on behalf of his brothers. In a genuine charter of the same year (iii. 334) we have the same list which I have already quoted with the omission of the name Eadred. In vi. 142 (1002) we have the same list with the name of Eadred. In another of the same year, vi. 146, the list stands, Æthelstan, Ecgbriht, Eadmund, Eadward, Eadwig, Eadgar. In vi. 153 (1005) the list is Æthelstan, Ecgbriht, Eadmund, Eadric, Eadwig, Eadgar, Eadward. In 1007 (vi. 156) it stands, Æthelstan, Eadmund, Eadred, Eadwig, Eadgar, Eadward. In another of the same year (vi. 159) Æthelstan signs on behalf of all his brothers (“Ego Æðelstanus filius regis cum fratribus meis clitonibus adplaudens consensi”). In a doubtful charter of 1013 (vi. 166) the signatures are Æthelstan, Eadmund, Eadward, Ælfred, and Eadwig, and in a genuine one of 1014 (vi. 169) we have Eadmund, Eadwig, Eadward, and Ælfred. Lastly, in 1015 (vi. 171) we have Eadmund and Eadward only.

From all this it seems certain that Æthelstan was the eldest son and Eadmund the third, the intermediate brother Ecgbriht dying, it would seem, about 1005. It now becomes an important point whether Æthelstan was alive at the time of his father’s death. This I shall discuss in another Note. His will (iii. 361), a very important document, of which I shall have to speak again, is witnessed by Eadmund, and contains bequests both to him and to Eadwig. We may perhaps also infer that Eadred was dead as well as Ecgbriht, and Eadric also, if the single signature of that name be not a mistake. But from the mention of “brothers” (“fratres”) of Eadmund as surviving him (see page 405) one might be inclined to think that one at least of Eadmund’s younger brothers, besides Eadwig, was alive at the beginning of 1017. For Cnut had much more reason to dread opposition from Eadmund’s brothers of the whole blood than from the sons of Emma. And if Æthelstan, Ecgbriht, and perhaps Eadred, were dead, Eadgar might be alive. There would also seem to have been an Eadward a son of the first marriage, as (to say nothing of the doubtful charter of 990, and of that of 984, mentioned below) Eadward the son of Emma could not have signed in 1002, though he might in 1005, if the pen was held in the child’s hand. If so, this elder Eadward doubtless died before the birth of his namesake.

Of the daughters of the first marriage Florence mentions only Eadgyth the wife of Eadric. But we seem to have evidence enough for Wulfhild the wife of Ulfeytel (see p. 654) and for Ælfgifu the wife of Uhtred (see p. 330). We also need a fourth daughter to account for the King’s son-in-law Æthelstan, who died in the battle of Ringmere (see p. 347).

The mother of these children, as I have said, is called by Florence Ælfgifu, the daughter of Ealdorman Æthelberht. I cannot however find any Ealdorman of that name. Æthelred of Rievaux (X Scriptt. 362, 372) calls her the daughter of Earl Thored (see p. 661). William of Malmesbury (ii. 179) professes ignorance of her name, and speaks of her birth as ignoble; “Erat iste Edmundus non ex Emma natus, sed ex quadam alia quam fama obscura recondit.” He then goes on to magnify Eadmund, saying that he was one “qui patris ignaviam, matris ignobilitatem, virtute sua probe premeret si Parcæ parcere nossent.” Roger of Wendover speaks nearly to the same effect in i. 451. I do not understand Lappenberg’s note (431, ii. 163 Thorpe), where he quotes the Scholiast on Adam of Bremen as calling her “Afficud,” which he takes to be Ælflæd. Mr. Thorpe (Dipl. Angl. 542) further identifies her with the Æthelflæd whose will he has there printed. But, at least in Pertz’ edition (ii. 51, Schol. 39), the name is “Afelrud,” and she is described as the step-mother of Eadward the son of Eadgar, that is, of course, Ælfthryth. I would rather identify her with the Ælfgifu whose will appears in Cod. Dipl. iii. 359. This cannot belong to Ælfgifu-Emma, as it speaks of her sister Ælfwaru and her brother’s wife Æthelflæd. (These three names again come together in the will of Wynflæd, Cod. Dipl. iii. 293.) It reads to me like the will of a King’s wife, yet it contains bequests not only to the Ætheling but to the Lady. Mr. Kemble gives it the date of 1012, and a bequest to Bishop Æthelwold (1006–1014) shows that it cannot be far from that date. Several questions arise out of this. Was Æthelred’s first wife divorced to make room for the Norman Lady? Or was she only a mistress or Danish wife? I do not think she is ever called “regina,” and Æthelred of Rievaux seems pointedly to contrast her with “regina Emma.” And again, were all these sons and daughters children of one mother? There is a very strange charter (Cod. Dipl. iii. 204) which must be spurious or at least wrongly dated, as Æthelred, born in 969, cannot have had six sons in 984; but the signatures are worth notice from their very strangeness. They run thus, “Æðelstan,” “Eadgar clito,” “Eadmund frater prædicti clitonis,” “Eadweard clito,” “Eadward filius regis,” “Eadwig frater clitonum.” This does not read like a list of sons of one mother. Lappenberg (u. s.) makes Æthelred marry in his seventeenth year, but I have not found his authority. At any rate his third son Eadmund cannot have been born, as Roger of Wendover (i. 422) tells us, in 981, when Æthelred was twelve years old.

It should again be noticed that in the will of Æthelstan (Cod. Dipl. iii. 363) there is no mention of his mother, living or dead, and that he speaks of his grandmother Ælfthryth as having reared him (“Ælfðryðe mínre ealdormódor ðe me áfédde”). Ælfthryth was living in 999, as appears by her signature in Cod. Dipl. iii. 314; perhaps later, as she (Cod. Dipl. iii. 353) addresses a writ to Archbishop Ælfric who lived to 1006. The young Æthelings and their grandmother are again spoken of in the will of Wynflæd (Cod. Dipl. iii. 292), which, as mentioning Archbishop Sigeric, comes between 990 and 994. But here again is no mention of their mother, unless she lurks among the cloud of witnesses, “Ælfwaru, Ælfgifu, and Æthelflæd,” names which we have just before seen in company.

I am afraid therefore that I must leave the first marriage of Æthelred shrouded in some obscurity. The Scandinavian writers cut the knot by giving all Æthelred’s children to Emma. Thus in the Knytlinga Saga (Johnstone, 130) Cnut is called Eadmund’s stepfather, and again (139) Emma is distinctly called the mother of Eadmund and his brothers. So Snorro (ib. 97), speaking of the Norman Dukes, says expressly that Emma, daughter of Richard and sister of Dukes William and Robert, whomever he may mean, married Æthelred, and was mother of Eadmund, Eadward the Good, Eadwig, and Eadgar (“Eadmundr oc Eadvardr hinn gódi, Eatvígr oc Eatgeir”). It is odd that the last two names should have been remembered.

So Thietmar (Pertz, vii. 28) mistakes Æthelstan and Eadmund for children of Emma. Walter Map, on the other hand (De Nugis, 203), confounds the sons of Emma with their nephews, the sons of Eadmund and Ealdgyth. At least Eadward and Ælfred reached Normandy (see p. 361) only by the help of the Hungarian King. Cnut, having married Emma, tries in vain to find her sons; “Rapuerat enim eos, ut præparavit Altissimus, a tumultu et turbine miles quidam, et clam in cymba positos in portum impulit, et regiis ornatos insigniis cum brevi cognitionis et cognationis eorum dispositioni divinæ supposuit. Illi autem in die secundo a mercatoribus Pannoniæ vagientes inventi sunt, et ab Hungarorum rege redempti, et ad avunculum suum ducem [Normannorum sc.] remissi.” This story is one of a whole class of tales of persons exposed in boats. See Historical Essays, First Series, p. 13.

NOTE TT. p. 381.
The Elections of Cnut and Eadmund.

Cnut may be said to have been three times elected to the crown. The first time is in 1014, on the death of his father Swegen (see p. 367), when the election was made wholly by the Danish fleet, and when the Witan of England passed their vote for the restoration of Æthelred. But on the death of Æthelred he seems to have been more regularly elected by a large portion at least of the English Witan. The fact is not stated in the Chronicles, but it is distinctly affirmed by Florence, and the words of the Chronicles (1016), if carefully studied, will perhaps be found to give the statement of Florence a negative confirmation. It is only the latest and least authoritative version of the Chronicles, the Canterbury manuscript, which states the election of Eadmund to have been an act of the Witan of all England; “And æfter his [Æðelredes] ende ealle Angelcynnes witan gecuron Eadmund to cinge.” The three other Chroniclers seem carefully to mark the act as more partial and local. They say only, “And þá æfter his ende ealle ða witan þá on Lundene wǽron and seo burhwaru gecuron Eadmund to cýninge.” When we remember that London was the only place which still held out, and that Wessex itself was in the power of Cnut, we shall probably have little difficulty in accepting the account in Florence. His words are as follows;

“Cujus [Ægelredi] post mortem, episcopi, abbates, duces, et quique nobiliores Angliæ, in unum congregati, pari consensu, in dominum et regem sibi Canutum elegere, et ad eum in Suthamtonia venientes, omnemque progeniem regis Ægelredi coram illo abnegando repudiantes, pacem cum eo composuere, et fidelitatem illi juravere; quibus et ille juravit quod, et secundum Deum et secundum seculum, fidelis esse vellet eis dominus. At cives Lundonienses, et pars nobilium, qui eo tempore consistebant Lundoniæ, clitonem Eadmundum unanimi consensu in regem levavere.”

I accept then the double election, and there can be no doubt that the election of Eadmund was the earlier of the two. The Witan of his party were on the spot, while those who chose Cnut had to come together from various places to Southampton. The election of Eadmund also seems to have been followed by a coronation, while the election of Cnut answered rather to the submission made to William at Berkhampstead, between which and his coronation at Westminster some little time passed. Florence seems pointedly to exclude a coronation of Cnut, while, though he does not distinctly affirm, he seems rather to imply the ceremony in the case of Eadmund. For he immediately adds, “qui solii regalis sublimatus culmine, intrepidus West-Saxoniam adiit sine cunctatione.” And Eadmund’s coronation in Saint Paul’s by Lyfing appears in three later, but two of them very respectable, authorities. Ralph de Diceto, in his series of Archbishops of Canterbury (Ang. Sacr. ii. 683), says of Lyfing, “Hic consecravit Edmundum Ferreum Latus, et postmodum Cnutonem regem Daciæ.” So Bromton (904), “Londonienses cum nonnulla parte procerum Edmundum filium regis Ethelredi in regem levaverunt, qui a Livingo Dorobernensi archiepiscopo apud Londonias consecratus est.” And in the list of coronations in the Rishanger volume (426) we read,

“Anno gratiæ millesimosexto-decimo, Londoniis, coronatio Edmundi Ferrei Lateris, filii regis Ethelredi, qui in eodem anno proditionaliter interfectus, Glastoniæ est sepultus.

“Anno gratiæ millesimo septimo-decimo, Londoniis, coronatio Cnutonis regis, filii David. Hic vicesimo regni anno mortuus, apud Wyntoniam est humatus.”

I have no notion whatever why Swegen or Otto should be called David; but these entries in Rishanger, though not contemporary, are not the obiter dicta of a man who is carelessly compiling a story, but the assertions of a man who is giving the results of his special inquiries into a special subject. As therefore there is no contemporary authority to set against them, and as they fit in with the slight indication in Florence, I accept them. Lyfing then was one of the Witan who were in London with Eadmund, and he performed the ceremony of Eadmund’s royal consecration at once on his election. But Cnut remained uncrowned till after his second or third election after the death of Eadmund. This was doubtless one reason among others why, in the agreement between Cnut and Eadmund, the Imperial dignity remained with the West-Saxon.

It is worth noticing that both candidates were most likely chosen over the heads of their own elder brothers. Cnut clearly was so chosen at his first election by the Danish fleet. In choosing a successor to Swegen in his conquered kingdom of England, Harold, who succeeded him in Denmark (see p. 366), was passed by in favour of his more promising brother. At the Southampton election Cnut was chosen on the same grounds on which William was afterwards chosen, because he was the conqueror, and a conqueror far more fully in possession of the conquered land than William was in December 1066. If Harold had any share in the war, he was altogether overshadowed by his brother. But was Eadmund the eldest surviving son of Æthelred? We have seen in the last Note that he had two elder brothers, Æthelstan and Ecgbriht. Of these there can be little doubt that Ecgbriht was dead, but the case is not so clear about Æthelstan. One story, which I shall have to examine in the next Note, seems to hint that he took a part in the war of Cnut and Eadmund and died during its course. His will, of which I have already spoken and shall have to speak again, was made during his father’s lifetime, but it does not follow that he died before his father. The point is an obscure one, but it is worth inquiring into, for to choose a younger brother over the head of an elder, though a perfectly legal measure, was a strong and unusual one. If it be the fact, it does equal honour to both brothers. The merits of Eadmund must have been great, if he was thus preferred to an elder brother, while no praise can be too great for the conduct of Æthelstan in quietly accepting and loyally serving a younger brother thus chosen over his own head.

Another question arises as to the ecclesiastical position of Cnut at the time of the Southampton election. It is not very clear when Cnut was baptized; our notices on this point have to be sought for in rather out of the way places. In the Aquitanian history of Ademar, iii. 55 (Pertz, iv. 140), we read, “Rex Canotus de Danamarcha paganus, mortuo Adalrado rege Anglorum, regnum ejus dolo cepit et reginam Anglorum in conjugium accepit, quæ erat soror comitis Rotomensis Richardi, et factus Christianus utraque regna tenuit, et quoscumque potuit ex paganis de Danamarcha ad fidem Christi pertraxit.” Another manuscript adds, “Pater ejus paganus nomine Asquec solum regnum de Danamarca tenuit.” “Asquec” as the name of Cnut’s father seems at first sight as incomprehensible as the name David, but Pertz is doubtless right in hinting that it is a corruption of his nickname Tveskiæg, “Fork-beard,” or, in plain English, Two-shag. The religion of Swegen, as we have seen, is a problem, but the chances are certainly against his son being baptized in his infancy. One Danish Chronicler, as we have already seen (see p. 375), makes Cnut be baptized by Unwan, Archbishop of Bremen, in the middle of his war with Æthelred; and this may seem to draw some confirmation from the statement of the Scholiast on Adam of Bremen, 38 (ii. 50); “Knut, filius Suein regis, abjecto nomine gentilitatis, in baptismo Lambertus nomen accepit. Unde scriptum est in libro fraternitatis nostræ Lambrecht rex Danorum, et Imma regina, et Knut filius eorum, devote se commendaverunt orationibus fratrum Bremensium.” If Cnut was baptized by the name of Lambert, he was none the less always called by his heathen name, just as his father was never known as Otto, nor Rolf as Robert. We also read in Osbern’s tract on the Translation of Saint Ælfheah (Ang. Sacr. ii. 144) that Archbishop Æthelnoth was “regi [Cnutoni] propterea quod illum sancto chrismate livisset valde acceptus.” This cannot refer to his coronation, which was not performed by Æthelnoth, and it can hardly refer to his baptism. I suspect therefore that it refers to confirmation, and that Cnut was confirmed at the time of the Southampton election. His case would thus be very like that of the elder Olaf (see above, p. 290), who was confirmed after a much earlier baptism at the time of his peace with Æthelred. The Christianity of Cnut at the time of that election is plainly implied in the words of the oath put into his mouth by Florence.

The final accession of Cnut after the death of Eadmund forms the first entry in each of the four Chronicles under the year 1017; “Hér on þissum geare feng Cnut kyning tó eallon Angelcynnes [Englalandes, Ab.] ryce.” The Winchester Chronicle alone, in one of its short and occasional entries, says, “Her Cnut wearð gecoren to kinge.” The expression in the other four is probably chosen advisedly; for, as Cnut succeeded by virtue of the terms of the Olney compact, there was no need of any formal election. Florence, whose fuller account I have followed in the text, uses the words expressive of election only in a sort of incidental way; “Ipse juraverunt illi quod eum regem sibi eligere vellent, eique humiliter obedire.” What he chiefly insists on is the examination of the witnesses—false witnesses, as he says they were—to show that Cnut really was entitled to succeed under the compact. Florence divides the details of Cnut’s accession between the two years 1016 and 1017; he might thus be thought to speak of two distinct assemblies; but as there is no trace of more than one in the Chronicles, I am disposed to think that the two accounts are merely two narratives of the proceedings of the same Gemót, perhaps rather unskilfully borrowed from two sources. Florence begins the year on the first of January, and the ordinary session of a Midwinter Gemót, taking in the twelve days of Christmas, would really extend into both years. The coronation of Cnut, like the coronation of Harold, most likely took place on the feast of the Epiphany. We have seen that there is every reason to believe that the ceremony was performed in Saint Paul’s by Archbishop Lyfing. The coronation, it must be remembered, would involve the ecclesiastical election by clergy and people. See vol. iii. p. 627.

How utterly the real story was forgotten, and above all how utterly the true position of Cnut at the time of his father’s death passed out of his mind, is nowhere better shown than in the version of Walter Map (De Nugis, 202). The English, according to him, especially the Londoners, were so tired of Æthelred that they sent for help to Cnut, who, it would seem, had already founded his Northern Empire. “Erat illa tempestate regum omnium ditissimus et strenuissimus Dacorum rex Chnutus. Hic ab optimatibus Angliæ vocatus, et frequentibus epistolis illectus, non invitis sed invitantibus Anglicis et cum gaudio suscipientibus, cum exercitu nimio in Danesiam illapsus est, quæ nunc usque dicitur a Dacis, ut aiunt, Danesia.” (Where is “Danesey”?) Presently, Cnut comes, “ab invitatoribus suis Londoniensibus susceptus.”

NOTE VV. p. 383.
The War of Cnut and Eadmund.

The English narratives of this great year of battles agree well together on the whole, and I see no difficulty in accepting the story as it is given in them. The part played by Eadric is indeed hard to understand, but so is his career throughout, and I can see no ground for casting aside the unanimous witness of our authorities and placing any arbitrary conjecture in its stead. We have first the narrative in the Chronicles. The three elder versions agree together, with only the smallest verbal differences; the later Canterbury Chronicle gives the story in an abridged shape; Florence, William of Malmesbury, and Henry of Huntingdon, tell essentially the same story. Their versions are plainly grounded on the history in the Chronicles, seemingly with some help from contemporary songs. This is especially plain in Henry of Huntingdon. His narrative of this campaign, like his narrative of the campaign of Stamfordbridge (see vol. iii. p. 733), is a mere meagre abridgement till he reaches the battle of Assandun, when he lights up and gives a spirited account, which evidently comes from a ballad. In all these accounts, whether coming from Chroniclers or from minstrels, the treason of Eadric stands out distinctly. And it stands out no less distinctly in the account given from the Danish side by the author of the Encomium Emmæ, of which I shall speak more presently.

I will now mention a few points in detail, in which the English writers differ from one another, or which call for attention on any other ground.

It is, I think, plain that Eadmund, on leaving London, was at once accepted by the West-Saxons, or such part of them as he had been able to reach before he was overtaken by Cnut at Penselwood. These would be the forces of Somerset, Dorset, Devonshire, and part of Wiltshire. This we gather from Florence’s account of the battle of Sherstone. The Chronicle says distinctly, “Eadmund cyng ... gerad þa Westsexon, and him beah eall folc tó.” So Florence more fully, “Intrepidus West-Saxoniam adiit sine cunctatione, et ab omni populo magna susceptus gratulatione, suæ ditioni subegit eam citissime; quibus auditis multi Anglorum populi magna cum festinatione illi se dederunt voluntarie.”

No doubt, as soon as Eadmund’s standard was once raised, volunteers would drop in from all parts which were not actually occupied by a Danish military force. The expressions of Florence implying something like a conquest, though of course a perfectly willing conquest, of Wessex by Eadmund will be understood if we remember that Cnut was actually the acknowledged King, by the choice of all the Witan who were not actually within the walls of London. I do not quite understand William of Malmesbury (ii. 180), who seems to think that Eadmund took a force with him from London (“oppidani Edmundum in regem conclamant. Ipse, mox congregato exercitu, apud Pennam juxta Gilingeham Danos fugavit”), and that the West-Saxons did not acknowledge him till after the battle of Sherstone—“quo facto West-Saxonum conversi animi dominum legitimum cognoverunt.”

I see no reason to doubt that the Sceorstan of the Chronicles is Sherstone in Wiltshire, and not Chimney in Oxfordshire, as suggested by Mr. Thorpe in his note on Florence. Mr. Thorpe objects that Florence places the battle “in Hwiccia,” and that Sherstone, as being in Wiltshire, does not answer that description. But Florence also places the battle of Pen “in Dorsetania,” which Pen Selwood is not, though Gillingham is. But both Sherstone and Pen Selwood are so near to the marches of their respective shires, that military operations may well have extended in both cases beyond the border.

As for the details of the battle of Sherstone, I have mainly followed Florence. The story of Eadric pretending that Eadmund was dead no doubt comes from a ballad, but I do not see that that makes it at all untrustworthy. A contemporary ballad, such as that of Maldon or the lost ballad on which Henry of Huntingdon must have founded his account of Stamfordbridge, is surely very good authority. But while Florence and William of Malmesbury place the story at Sherstone, Henry of Huntingdon transfers it to Assandun; he therefore leaves out the incident of Eadric’s striking off the man’s head or otherwise professing to have killed Eadmund, a story which was of course inconsistent with Eadric’s position at Assandun, where he held a command on Eadmund’s side. But this incident is surely an essential part of the story; it is not Florence and William who have added it, but Henry who has left it out. William of Malmesbury simply says that Eadric “gladium in manu tenens quem, in pugna quodam rustico impigre cæso, cruentarat, Fugite, inquit, miseri, fugite, ecce, Rex vester hoc ense occisus est.” Florence is fuller; “Siquidem quum pugna vehemens esset, et Anglos fortiores esse cerneret, cujusdam viri, regi Eadmundo facie capillisque simillimi, Osmeari nomine, capite amputato et in altum levato, exclamat Anglos frustra pugnare, dicens

‘Vos Dorsetenses, Domnani, Wiltonienses,

Amisso capite præcipites fugite;

En domini vestri caput Eadmundi Basilei

Hic teneo manibus, cedite quantocius.’”

(The same stratagem is said to have been employed by an English soldier at the Battle of the Standard. See Æthelred of Rievaux, X Scriptt. 345; “Cujusdam prudentis viri figmento, qui caput unius occisi in altum erigens, regem clamabat occisum, revocati, vehementius solito irruunt in obstantes.” The story is told with great spirit by Peter of Langtoft, i. 480.)

The metrical character of the speech given by Florence was first remarked by Professor Stubbs (R. Howden, i. 82); but we may be sure that both this and the other longer speech are merely expansions of the vigorous little bit of English given us in Henry of Huntingdon, “Flet Engle, flet Engle, ded is Edmund,” which are likely enough to be Eadric’s real words. Still the speech in Florence is valuable (see above, p. 558). It helps us to the party divisions of Wessex at the moment of the battle. The Wilsætas are here reckoned among the followers of Eadmund, but Florence had just before said that Eadric, Ælfmær, and Ælfgar were there “cum Suthamtoniensibus et Wiltoniensibus provincialibus, innumeraque populi multitudine in parte Danorum.” It is plain then that the northern and southern parts of Wiltshire were arrayed on opposite sides. The incident of Eadmund taking off his helmet and hurling his spear at Eadric is found only in William of Malmesbury; “Fugissent continuo Angli, nisi rex, cognita re, in editum quemdam collem procederet, ablata galea caput suum commilitonibus ostentans.” I hope that this is not copied from the like story of William at Senlac; it is an incident which might easily repeat itself; and the notion of Eadmund getting on higher ground to show himself, falls in with the difference between a general fighting on foot like Eadmund and one fighting on horseback like William.

There is nothing in the English accounts which calls for special remark till we come to the battle of Assandun. All the accounts agree as to the treason of Eadric at Aylesford. But it is to be noticed that the remark made in p. 417 as to the two classes of treasons laid to the charge of Eadric applies here. The treasons reported at Sherstone and Assandun must be facts; the treason reported at Aylesford may have been only a general surmise. As to the order of events all agree, only Florence, in his reckoning, goes by the number of armies, Henry of Huntingdon by that of battles. The third army fought two battles, one under the walls of London, the other at Brentford.

As for the battle of Assandun, I have no doubt that the modern Ashington is the true site. In June, 1866, I went over the ground with Mr. Dawkins, Florence in hand. We found that the place exactly answered his description, and I afterwards compared it with the other authorities. Another spot which has been proposed is Ashdown in another part of Essex. I suppose its claims rest on the description of the Encomiast (ii. 9), “in Æsceneduno loco, quod nos Latini montem fraxinorum possimus interpretari.” But this only shows the foreign writer’s imperfect knowledge of English. Assandun is simply, as Florence has it, mons asini. Henry of Huntingdon’s form Esesdun may come from substituting the later genitive asses for the older assan, or from a confusion with Ælfred’s Æscesdun in 871, or possibly from a shrinking from so unheroic a meaning as mons asini. The modern form Assington or Ashington is due to the same corruption which has changed Abbandun and Huntandun and Ælfred’s Ethandun into Abingdon, Huntingdon, and Edington. The form in -ing is so common that it has swallowed up others which are less familiar. As for the other hill, Canewdon, the local explanation which connects it with the name of Cnut is certainly very tempting, though it is perhaps a little hard to get it out of Cnutesdún. But the Domesday form (ii. 44) Carendun is clearly corrupt, and the pronunciation Cánewdon is a very recent corruption, savouring of the schoolmaster. On the lips of the oldest inhabitant it is distinctly Caneẃdon, which brings us near, if not to Cnuto, at least to Canutus.

The battle of Assandun was distinctly a national struggle on the English side. In the words of the Chronicles, “Þær ahte Cnut sige, and gefeht him ealle Engla þeode.” So just before, Eadmund’s army is called “ealle Engla þeode,” and Florence says that he came “cum exercitu quem de tota Anglia contraxerat.” The presence of Ulfcytel and Godwine witnesses to the presence of the forces of such strongly Danish districts as East-Anglia and even distant Lindesey, while Eadric is distinctly marked in Florence as commanding, among other forces, the equally distant Magesætas; “cum Magesetensibus et exercitus parte cui præerat.”

My account of the battle comes from three sources. The strictly military part of it, the arrangements and intentions of the two generals, comes from Florence. The poetical part, the picture of the King by his Standard and his charge upon the enemy, comes from Henry of Huntingdon; I have even ventured to bring in a few touches from the Encomiast, whose account of this one battle seems to be historical. But it must be remembered that the stratagem of Eadric, which Florence and William of Malmesbury place at Sherstone, is by Henry of Huntingdon moved to Assandun. Eadmund, in his great charge, has nearly reached Cnut’s post in the Danish army, when Eadric cries out “Flet Engle,” &c., takes to flight himself, and the rest of the English army follow him. I hope that I have already shown that the story of Eadmund’s pretended death is in its place at Sherstone, and that its details have been changed to make it suit the circumstances of Assandun. It is also plain from the other accounts that, though the flight of Eadric greatly weakened the English forces, yet the battle went on long after.

I will now turn to the foreign accounts, beginning with the absolutely contemporary Thietmar. We have seen something of him when dealing with the accounts of the martyrdom of Ælfheah. Thietmar clearly took a deep interest in English affairs without fully understanding them. He wrote down the accounts which he heard at the time as well as he could make them out, but in so doing he often made havoc of his story. Still an author to whom the struggle of Cnut and Eadmund was the latest piece of foreign news must have his use; and we shall find that Thietmar here, as before, gives us some hints which, if used cautiously, may be of great value. His account is full of blunders, but there is nothing of perversion, romance, or colouring. His story (vii. 28, ap. Pertz, iii. 849) runs thus. After the death of Æthelred, Harold and Cnut the sons of Swegen, with their Earl Thurgut (“cum duce suimet Thurguto”), besiege London with 340 ships, each manned by eighty men. The city was defended by the Lady Emma—who is described as “tristis nece viri suimet et defensoris”—with her two sons Æthelstan and Eadmund—Æthelred’s first family being as usual mistaken for children of Emma—together with two Bishops and other chief men (“duobus episcopis ceterisque primatibus”). The siege lasted six months; at last the Lady, tired out (“bello defatigata assiduo”), asked for peace. The Danes demanded the surrender of the two Æthelings to be put to death, the payment of 15,000 pounds of silver as the Lady’s ransom, of 12,000 pounds as the ransom of the Bishops, the surrender of all the coats of mail in the city, 24,000 in number (“numerus incredibilis”), and of 300 hostages. If these terms are not agreed to, all would be put to death (“sin autem, omnes ter clamabant eos una gladio perituros”). The Lady (“venerabilis regina”—I need not say that this is a mere title of honour and has no reference to the age of the future bride of Cnut), after some hesitation, consents to these terms. The Æthelings escaped by night in a little boat, and forthwith begin to gather a force for the relief of their mother and of the city. Eadmund one day falls in with Thurgut, who was engaged in plundering. A drawn battle follows, in which both Thurgut and Eadmund are killed. The Danes go back to their ships, and hearing that Æthelstan is coming with a British force to the relief of the city (“intelligentes urbi solatium ab Æthelsteno superstite et Britannis venientibus afferri”), they raised the siege after killing or mutilating their hostages (“truncatis obsidibus”). The strictly contemporary character of the account is shown by the prayer with which the Bishop of Merseburg winds up his story; “Et destruat eos [Danos] atque disperdat protector in se sperantium Deus, ne umquam solito his vel aliis noceant fidelibus. In ereptione civitatis illius gaudeamus et in cetero lugeamus.”

This account sounds very wild, and it is easy to show that there are plenty of mistakes in it. But written as it was at the very time, while the final upshot of the war was still uncertain, it suggests some very important points. To mistake Æthelstan and Eadmund for sons of Emma was a common and easy blunder. But to suppose that Emma had come back to England with Æthelred, that she was now in London, that, with or without the consent of Eadmund, she entered into negotiations with Cnut, are statements which are not found in our Chronicles, but which do not contradict what is found there. They are statements which are perfectly possible; they may even throw light on the marriage of Cnut and Emma in the next year. The mention of the two Bishops again falls in with the fact, which we have got at in another way, that Archbishop Lyfing was in the city. Then, though it is quite certain that London did not stand a continuous siege of six months, beginning with July 1016, yet London must have been besieged off and on for about that time in the course of the year 1016. Then the death of Eadmund is of course wrongly given, and the death of Thurkill also, if by Thurgut we are to understand Thurkill. But this last point is by no means clear, as Thietmar goes on immediately to tell the story of Ælfheah, in which Thurkill, though not Ælfheah (see above, p. 677), appears with his right name. But the thing which is most remarkable in this account is the mention of Harold the brother of Cnut and of Æthelstan the brother of Eadmund. Harold and Æthelstan are men whose existence we know, but not much more about them. There was no temptation to bring them in, unless they had really played a part in the war. I think we may infer that Harold did accompany Cnut, and that Æthelstan had a share in the campaign—that is, that he did not die before his father (see above, p. 691). Moreover Thietmar, who called Ælfheah Dunstan, was quite capable of confounding the two brothers and transposing their names. Let us only read Eadmund for Æthelstan and Æthelstan for Eadmund, and we get a consistent and probable narrative. The tale was probably told Thietmar by some one who came from London and who did not enlarge on the western fights of Pen Selwood and Sherstone. He dwelt mainly on what happened in and near his own city. Æthelstan, it would seem, was killed, as is perfectly probable, in one of the battles near London or in some unrecorded skirmish. The Danes raise the siege, as we know that they twice did, before the armies of Eadmund. Those armies, levied mainly in the western shires, are by Thietmar called Britanni. This expression is one of the most remarkable in the whole story. It must have some special force; it is not Thietmar’s usual way of speaking of Englishmen. We can hardly doubt that Thietmar’s English informant, speaking of troops levied mainly within the shires of the old Wealhcyn, spoke of them as Brettas or Wealas. Altogether I look on this account as worthy of all heed. I have not ventured to insert the death of Æthelstan or the negotiation between Emma and Cnut in the text as thoroughly ascertained facts, but I certainly look upon both as highly probable.

I must now turn to a foreign writer of quite another character, the Encomiast of Emma. I have already mentioned (see above, p. 670) how he makes Thurkill bring Cnut into England. This is before the death of Æthelred. He now (ii. 6) goes on to tell us how, before Cnut himself landed, Thurkill determined to win Cnut’s favour by some great exploit. He therefore lands, in what part of England it is not said, with the crews of forty ships, and fights the battle of Sherstone (“ascendit cum suis e navibus dirigens aciem contra Anglorum impetum qui tunc in loco Scorastan dicto fuerat congregatus”) all by himself against an English force of more than double his numbers (“Danorum exercitus ... medietati hostium minime par fuerat”), over whom he of course gains a complete victory. Eric then (see p. 379), fired by the example of Thurkill, is allowed to go on another expedition, in which he fights several battles and wins much plunder. Cnut then, seemingly looking on the country as his own, forbids further ravages (“rex parcens patriæ, prohibuit ultra eam prædari”), but orders a strict siege to be laid to London, which is oddly called “metropolis terræ,” and which the writer seems half to fancy was on the sea (“undique enim mari quodammodo non pari vallatur flumine”). Just at this time Æthelred died, being removed, according to the Encomiast, by God’s special providence, in order that Cnut might enter the city and that both Danes and Englishmen might have a breathing-space; “Deus itaque qui omnes homines vult magis salvare quam perdere, intuens has gentes tanto periculo laborare, eum principem qui interius civitati præsidebat educens e corpore, junxit quieti sempiternæ, ut eo defuncto liber Cnutoni ingressus pateret, et utrique populo confecta pace paulisper respirare copia esset.” The citizens accordingly bury Æthelred and make a capitulation with Cnut, by which the city is surrendered to him. Cnut accordingly enters the city, and if not crowned, is at least enthroned; “Cnuto civitatem intravit, et in solio regni resedit.” But a part of the troops within the city disapprove of the agreement with Cnut, so on the night after his entrance they leave the city with a young man called Eadmund, a son of the late King; “cum filio defuncti principis egressi sunt civitatem;” so directly after “Ædmund, sic enim juvenis qui exercitum collegerat dictus est.” Eadmund easily gathers an army, because the English were more inclined to him than they were to Cnut; “nec quieverunt quousque omnes pene Anglos sibi magis adhuc adclines quam Cnutoni conglobarent.” Cnut is meanwhile in London, but finding that he cannot trust the Londoners, he first repairs his ships, and then leaves the city and winters in Sheppey, having declined an offer of single combat made to him by Eadmund. Eadmund enters London, where he is joyfully received, and spends the winter, having Eadric with him as his chief counsellor (“erat quoque ejus partis comes primus Edricus, consiliis pollens, sed tamen dolositate versipellis, quem sibi ad aurem posuerat Ædmund in omnibus negotiis”). The next Lent is spent by Eadmund in gathering a vast force with the intention of driving Cnut out of the country. The story now becomes more trustworthy, and we get a spirited account of the battle of Assandun, from which I have not scrupled to draw largely in the text. I need only mention here that the treacherous flight of Eadric is as distinctly asserted as in any English account. The only difference is that it is placed before the battle has actually begun. The words are,

“Ibique, nondum congressione facta, Edric, quem primum comitem Ædmundi diximus, hæc suis intulit affamina, ‘Fugiamus, O socii, vitamque subtrahamus morte imminenti, alioquin occumbemus illico, Danorum enim duritiam nosco.’ Et velato vexillo quod dextra gestabat, dans tergum hostibus, magnam partem militum bello fraudabat. Et, ut quidam aiunt, hoc non caussa egit timoris sed dolositatis, ut postea claruit; quia hoc eum clam Danis promisisse, nescio quo pro beneficio, assertio multorum dicit.”

The Scandinavian writers are, if possible, yet more wonderful. In the Saga of Olaf Haraldsson (Laing, i. 8; Johnstone, 89) we read how, when Æthelred came back from Normandy, or, according to this account, from Flanders, Olaf took service under him and joined in an attack on London, which was then held by the Danes. Olaf with his ships breaks down London bridge and takes Southwark, on which the Londoners surrender and receive Æthelred. Olaf passes the winter in England, and, strange to say, fights the battle of Ringmere in Ulfcytel’s land (p. 93); “Þá atto þeir orrosto micla á Hríngmaraheidi á Ulfkelslandi, þát ríki átti þá Ulfkell Snillingr.” (See above, p. 654.) By a yet more amazing confusion Olaf is next made to take Canterbury; he then has the general command of all England, where he stays three years. In the third year Æthelred dies, and is succeeded by his sons Eadmund and Eadward. Olaf now leaves England, and performs divers exploits in Valland or Gaul. Meanwhile Cnut and Eric come into England, where Eric fights a battle near London, in which Ulfcytel is killed. Cnut fights several battles with the sons of Æthelred with various success. He then marries Emma, by whom he has three children, Harold, Harthacnut, and Gunhild. He then divides the kingdom with Eadmund, who is presently killed by Eadric Streona. Cnut now drives all the sons of Æthelred out of England; they take refuge at Rouen in Valland, where Olaf joins them. They lay plans for recovering England from Cnut, Northumberland being promised to Olaf. Olaf sends over his foster-father Rana (see p. 404) into England, who spends a winter there, collecting forces. In the spring Olaf and the sons of Æthelred go over into England themselves, but after some fighting, the power of Cnut is found to be too strong for them, so Olaf goes into Norway and the sons of Æthelred return to Valland.

Not less amazing is the version in the Knytlinga Saga (c. 7–16; Johnstone, 103 et seqq.). Here again Æthelred is made to return after the death of Swegen with the help of Olaf. Cnut is only ten years old at his father’s death; still, as his brother Harold is dead, he succeeds in Denmark. After three years, it is thought good that he should assert his claims to England. So he sets sail with the Earls Eric and Ulf, and with Heming and Thurkill the Tall, the sons of Strut-Harold (see above, p. 670). They land in England at a place called Fliot; their first battle is fought in Lindesey. They then take the town of Hemingburgh (“Hemingaborg à Englandi”) and go on conquering towards the south. In the autumn Æthelred dies, Emma is just about to leave England, when Cnut stops her and persuades her to marry him (see Appendix ZZ). The English now (p. 129) choose four Kings, sons of Æthelred and Emma (“Eptir andlat Adalrads konungs voru til konunga teknir synir hans oc Emmu drotningar”). The eldest is Eadmund the Strong (“Jatmundr enn sterki”), the others Eadgar, Eadwig, and Eadward the Good (“Jatvardr enn godi,” see above, p. 688). The battle of Sherstone is now fought, but one is rather surprised to find it fought in Northumberland by the banks of the Tees. Eadmund and Cnut both fight on horseback, and meet face to face in the battle. On a report that Eadmund is killed the English take to flight. After this is placed the story of Godwine’s introduction to Ulf (see Note ZZ). Cnut next defeats the sons of Æthelred in a battle at Brentford, then comes (p. 134) the battle of Assundun, which is described as “Assatun to the north of the Daneswood” (“Knutr konungr atti ena þridu orrostu vid Adalradsyni, þar sem heita Assatun: vard þar en mikil orrosta: þat er nordr fra Danaskogum”). A fourth battle and a fourth defeat of the English follows at Norwich. Eadmund and his brothers then take shelter in London. Cnut sails up the river and besieges the city. The English come out to fight, and, while Cnut continues the siege, Eric, with some of the Thingmen, fights a battle against Ulfcytel (“Ulfkell Snillingr”) and puts him to flight. He then wins another battle at Ringmere. Cnut is still besieging Eadmund in London, when it is agreed that the kingdom shall be divided. Then follows the murder of Eadmund. (See Appendix WW.)

All this is wonderful enough, but it is hardly so wonderful as what we read, not in any saga, but in the sober Annals of Roskild (Langebek, i. 376); “Sven Angliam invasit, regem Adelradum expulit et Britanniæ fines potitus, vix tres menses supervixit. Post cujus mortem Edmundus filius Adelradi, quem Sveno expulit, Kanutum filium Suenonis et Olavum filium Olavi regis Norwegiæ, qui ibi obsides fuerant, in vincula conjecit (see p. 375).... Mortuo Edmundo rege Anglorum filius Adelradus in regnum successit. Quod audiens Kanutus, veteris injuriæ non immemor quam pater ejus sibi et Olavo intulerat, cum mille armatis navibus transfretavit, et immensis viribus Angliam invasit, triennium cum Adelrado certavit. Adelradus, fessus et bello et senio, quum obsideretur in Londonia civitate, obiit, relinquens filium Edwardum, quem suscepit ab Ymma regina, quæ fuit filia Rothberti comitis. Kanutus victor exsistens, ipsam Ymmam duxit uxorem, genuitque ex ea filium Hartheknud.”

It is hardly worth while examining these stories in detail, though it would not be hard to point out some of their confusions and transpositions. They should make us thankful for the priceless heritage of our own Chronicles.

NOTE WW. p. 395.
The Conference of Cnut and Eadmund.

The conference between Cnut and Eadmund has grown in the hands of many historians, from Henry of Huntingdon onwards, into a single combat between the two Kings, which, as Mr. Earle says (Saxon Chronicles Parallel, 340), “became in the course of time one of the established sensation scenes of history.” The Chronicles and Florence know nothing of the story. The Chronicles simply say, “And coman begen þa cyningas togædre æt Olanige,” and go on to mention the terms of the agreement. So Florence, who is a little fuller; “Dein uterque rex in insulam quæ Olanege appellatur, et est in ipsius fluminis medio sita, trabariis advehitur, ubi pace, amicitia, fraternitate, et pacto et sacramentis confirmata, regnum dividitur.” The Knytlinga Saga knows nothing of the story, and the Encomiast (ii. 12, 13) describes at great length the negotiation which led to the division of the kingdom, without any reference to a combat. Mr. Earle ingeniously suggests that the notion of the combat arose from a misunderstanding of the words of the Chronicles, as the words “coman togædre” might mean either a hostile meeting or a friendly conference,—the latter of course being their meaning here.

It is hardly worth while to go at length through all the later versions, but the utterly different accounts in William of Malmesbury and Henry of Huntingdon, and the strange tale of Walter Map, may well be compared together. According to William (ii. 180), Eadmund had already collected a new army in Gloucestershire, and the two armies are standing ready for battle, “quum infestis signis constitissent.” Then Eadmund, to spare further bloodshed (“ne duo homunculi propter ambitionem regnandi tot subjectorum sanguine culparentur”), proposes a single combat. This challenge Cnut refuses, on the ground that he would have no chance against a man so much bigger and stronger than himself as Eadmund was; “Abnuit prorsus, pronuncians animo se quidem excellere sed contra tam ingentis molis hominem corpusculo diffidere.” He proposes instead that, as each of them had a fair claim to a kingdom which had been held by his father (“quia ambo non indebite regnum efflagitent, quod patres amborum tenuerint”), instead of fighting for the kingdom, they should divide it between them. The armies on both sides agree, and the division is quietly carried out, though seemingly against the wishes of Eadmund, who is spoken of as “unanimi clamore omnium superatus.” In Henry of Huntingdon (M. H. B. 756 C, D), when the armies are gathered together in Gloucestershire for the seventh time, the chief men (“proceres”), seemingly on both sides, agree that, instead of another battle, the two Kings shall decide the matter by single combat (“pugnent singulariter qui regnare student singulariter”). The Kings approve, and Henry adds, “nec enim mediocris erat rex Cnut probitatis.” They fight therefore in Olney (“positi igitur reges in Olanie duellum inceperunt”). Henry of Huntingdon seems to have been not quite clear whether he ought to describe a French tournament or a Scandinavian holmgang. There is no mention of horses, but we read of the lances being broken, and it is not till then that the champions draw their swords. Then the fight really begins. The people on each side behold and listen to the “horribiles tinnitus et igneas collisiones,” which most likely come from a ballad. The strength of Eadmund however has the better of it (“tandem vigor incomparabilis Edmundi fulminare cœpit.” See above, p. 392). Cnut resists manfully, but begins to fear for his life; he therefore proposes that they shall fight no longer, but divide the kingdom and become sworn brothers (“fratres adoptivi”). Eadmund agrees (“his verbis juvenis mens generosa delinita est”), and they exchange the kiss of peace. Walter Map (De Nugis, 204) has yet another version. The armies meet one another “apud Durherst in valle Gloucestriæ super Sabrinam.” The Danes have the larger host (“Chnutus dimidium Angliæ cum Dacis adduxerat”). Still the Danes are afraid, because of the valour of the English and their own unjust cause. They therefore demand that the matter shall be settled by a single combat of champions (“Fiat pro bello duellum, et victor pugil domino suo regnum obtineat cæteris in pace dimisis”). Eadmund determines to fight himself and not by a champion; so Cnut determines to do the same (“quatinus informis absit imparitas, par enim congressio regum et bene consona”). They meet in the island on horseback, their horses are killed, and they fight on foot. The personal description of the Kings is quite unlike any other (“Chnutus procerus et major et altus, Edmundum grandem et planum, i.e. mediocriter pinguem, tam probo tam improbo fatigavit assultu”). They exchange sarcasms and go on fighting, till the Danes, seeing Cnut in danger, demand that the Kings should make a treaty. They accordingly agree to divide the kingdom and to become sworn brothers (“Daci ... in fœdus eos hujusmodi multis coëgerunt precibus et lacrymis, quatinus æqualiter inter eos divisum possiderent tota vita sua regnum, et post mortem alterius succederet superstes in solidum, factique sunt ibi fratres et amici, fideque firmissima conglutinati”). Roger of Wendover (i. 457–459) tells the same story, but at much greater length and with a much greater display of eloquence. He attributes the first proposal of the single combat to Eadric (“iniquus dux Eadricus”). The fight and the proposal on the part of Cnut are essentially the same as in Henry of Huntingdon. Cnut makes a long speech, in which he sets forth the greatness of his own dominion in words which would have been somewhat beyond the truth some years later (“mihi Dacia servit, mihi Norwegia succumbit, mihi rex Suanorum manus dedit”). Besides the kiss of peace, the exchange of arms and clothes is described (“in signum pacis vestes mutantes et arma, fit Eadmundus Cnuto et Cnuto Eadmundus”). The exchange of garments is also mentioned by Florence in his account of the peaceful conference (“armis et vestibus mutatis ... ab invicem discesserunt”); but if the tradition followed by William of Malmesbury as to the personal stature of the two Kings be at all trustworthy, a judgement of Cyrus would presently have been needed to restore the clothes to their former owners.

The place of meeting, the island in the Severn called Olney, is placed near Deerhurst by the Worcester Chronicler, by Florence, and by Walter Map, all of whom had local knowledge; the other Chronicles do not mention its position. Mr. Earle (Parallel Chronicles, 341) places it close to Gloucester. I have not examined either place for the purpose, but I should be inclined to look on the witness of the Hwiccian writers as decisive.

As for the terms of the treaty, three of the Chronicles simply assign Wessex to Eadmund and Mercia to Cnut. It was perhaps held that Cnut was already King of the Northumbrians, and that his possession of that kingdom could not be called in question. The Worcester Chronicle says more exactly, “and feng þa Eadmund cyng to Westsexan and Cnut to þam norð dǽle.” Florence makes the important addition of East-Anglia, Essex, and London to the share of Eadmund. Henry of Huntingdon gives London to Cnut; “Edmundus regnum suscepit Westsexe, Cnut vero regnum Merce suscipiens reversus est Londoniam.” William of Malmesbury follows the three Chronicles. The Encomiast (ii. 13) talks simply of North and South. The English deputies say to Cnut, “Dominare in australi”—for which we must of course read “boreali”—“parte cum quiete, e regione autem sit noster Ædmundus in finibus meridianæ plagæ.” Walter Map (De Nugis, 206) gives quite another division; “Chnutus Lundoniam et illas trans Hichenild partes habebat, Edmundus alias.” This reads like an utter turning about of the whole geography; the Icknild way is an approach to the frontier as traced by Florence; only Cnut is placed in Wessex and East-Anglia, and Eadmund in the rest of the kingdom. I have no doubt as to accepting the line drawn by Florence. Ever since the extinction of the short-lived dynasty of Guthrum, we always find East-Anglia heartily throwing in its lot with Wessex, never with Mercia and Northumberland.

The distinct statement that the Imperial supremacy was reserved to Eadmund is found, oddly enough, only in Roger of Wendover. His text runs thus;

“Dividitur itaque regnum, Eadmundo dictante, inter duos, ita ut corona totius regni regi remaneat Eadmundo; cedunt ergo in usus ejus totam Angliam ad australem plagam Thamesis fluminis, cum Est-Sexia et Est Anglia et civitate Londoniarum, quæ caput est regni; Cnutone etiam aquilonales partes Angliæ obtinente.”

Roger would of course be by himself no authority on such a point; but it is plain that he is copying Florence. In the text of Florence there is a gap, which can be filled up only, as Mr. Thorpe has filled it, with the words of Roger;

“West-Saxoniam, East-Angliam, East-Saxoniam cum Lundonia [civitate, et totam terram ad australem plagam Tamesis fluminis obtinuit Eadmundus, Canuto aquilonares partes Angliæ obtinente; corona tamen] regni Eadmundo mansit.”

A certain superiority on the part of Eadmund appears also in the words of William of Malmesbury; “Edmundus ... concordiæ indulsit, fœdusque cum Cnutone percussit, sibi West-Saxoniam, illi concedens Merciam.” Henry of Huntingdon (756 C), on the other hand, falls into the mistake of supposing that Cnut occupied London after the battle of Assandun, perhaps that he was crowned then; “Rex Cnut, tanta fretus victoria, Londoniam et sceptra cepit regalia.” In the Encomiast Cnut naturally takes a lofty tone; the other King is to be his tributary. Such at least seems to be the meaning of the words, “Sed tamen vectigal etiam suæ partis vester rex, quicumque ille fuerit, exercitui dabit meo. Hoc enim illi debeo, ideoque aliter pactum non laudo.” It is hard to weigh the exact meaning of these rhetorical writers, but this sounds like something more lasting than the single Danegeld which was undoubtedly to be paid. This last is witnessed by the Chronicles. The Kings, among their other agreements, “þæt gyld setton wið þone here.” So Florence, “Tributo quod classicæ manui penderetur statuto.”

One point still remains. After the death of Eadmund, Cnut, according to the account in Florence, claimed his dominions by virtue of the Olney compact. He asks the witnesses whether any provision had been made for the succession of the brothers or sons of Eadmund, in case Eadmund died before Cnut; “Interrogavit ... qualiter ipse et Eadmundus de fratribus et filiis ejusdem inter se loquuti fuissent. Utrum fratribus et filiis ejus liceret in regno Occidentalium Saxonum post patrem eorum regnare, si Eadmundus moreretur vivente illo.” They made the answer which I have given in the text at p. 405; “Se proculdubio scire quod rex Eadmundus fratribus suis nullam portionem regni sui, nec se spirante neque moriente, commendasset; dixeruntque hoc se nosse, Eadmundum regem velle Canutum adjutorem et protectorem esse filiorum ejus, donec regnandi ætatem habuissent.” Florence goes on to say that their witness was false, and that the false witnesses were, when a convenient season came, characteristically put to death by Cnut. But an agreement that each King should succeed to the dominions of the other, that is, that the adoptive brother should be preferred to the brother by blood, is in every way likely. Such an agreement is directly asserted in the Knytlinga Saga, c. 16 (Johnstone, 139). Cnut and Eadmund divide the land and swear that, if either of them dies childless, he shall succeed to the dominions of the other (“sva, at skipta skylldi i helminga lanndi med þeim, oc hafa halft riki hvarr, medan þeir lifdi; enn ef annarrhvarr anndadiz barnlauss, þa skylldi sa taka allt rikit med frialsu, er eptir lifdi; oc var su sætt eidum bunndin”). In Saxo (192) the agreement between Cnut and Eadmund (whom he calls Eadward) is all on one side; Cnut is to have half the kingdom while Eadmund lives, and the whole at his death (“Edvardus ... pactum cum hoste conseruit, ut quoad ipse viveret, Canutum dimidii regni consortem haberet, extinctus omnium honorum hæredem relinqueret”). This would seem to shut out Eadmund’s children, which seems inconsistent with the account in Florence. But some agreement to exclude the brothers on each side was almost necessary. A claim on the part of one of the Æthelings to succeed Eadmund, a claim on the part of Harold of Denmark to succeed Cnut, would be almost sure to be put forward. And it might be thought to be on the whole for the common interest of both Kings to shut out such claims. The brothers on both sides were much more dangerous than the sons. Cnut most likely had no children as yet. And even if either of the doubtful brood of Ælfgifu of Northampton was already born, he must have still been in his cradle. So were the two little Æthelings, the “clitunculi” of Florence, the sons of Eadmund and Ealdgyth. The words of the witnesses clearly imply that these children were put in a different position from their uncles. The possibility of their coming to the crown is recognized; Cnut is to be their guardian till they are of age to reign. Of course this does not mean that he was to resign in their favour when they came of age; it means only that they were to be in the same position as other minor Æthelings, as the sons of Æthelred the First (see p. 109) or the sons of Eadmund the Magnificent (see p. 63). They were to be passed over for the present; at any future vacancy they might be elected or they might not. An arrangement of this kind seems to agree both with the words of the witnesses and with the circumstances of the case. I assume of course that, if Cnut was to succeed Eadmund, Eadmund was equally to succeed Cnut, just as in the agreement between Harthacnut and Magnus (see p. 508). No other terms would be possible in an agreement between two sworn brothers, in which whatever superiority there was to be on either side was reserved to Eadmund.

NOTE XX. p. 398.
The Death of Eadmund.

The Chronicles are silent as to the manner and place of Eadmund’s death. All that they say is, “Þá to Sc̃e Andreas mæssan forðferde se kyning Eadmund.” Florence adds, “decessit Lundoniæ.” He mentions neither Cnut nor Eadric, and in a later passage he seems to exclude Eadric. At least when Cnut puts Eadric to death, the reason is said to be, “quia timebat insidiis ab eo aliquando circumveniri, sicut domini sui priores Ægelredus et Eadmundus frequenter sunt circumventi.” If Florence had thought that Eadmund was killed by Eadric, he would surely have said so more plainly. The treasons of Eadric towards Æthelred and towards Eadmund are put on a level, and no one ever charged Eadric with the death of Æthelred. Florence, as his whole narrative shows, was not slack at attributing crimes to Eadric, but that he had anything to do with the death of Eadmund he nowhere hints.

The language of the Encomiast (ii. 14) is obscure and mysterious, and his way of speaking of the Deity may be thought slightly anthropomorphic. God, in his wisdom, took away Eadmund, lest the contention for the crown should be renewed, and in order that Cnut might possess the whole kingdom peaceably. The whole passage is remarkable;

“Verumtamen Deus, memor suæ antiquæ doctrinæ, scilicet omne regnum in seipsum divisum diu permanere non posse, non longo post tempore Ædmundum eduxit e corpore, Anglorum misertus Imperii, ne forte, si uterque superviveret, neuter regnaret secure, et regnum diatim adnihilaretur renovata contentione.... Cujus rei gratia eum Deus jusserit obire, mox deinde patuit; quia universa regio illico Cnutonem sibi regem elegit, et cui ante omni conamine restitit, tunc sponte sua se illi et omnia sua subdidit.”

Adam of Bremen, who is not very well versed in English genealogy, says (ii. 51), “Frater Adelradi Emund, vir bellicosus, in gratiam victoris veneno sublatus est.” The murderer, whether Eadric or any one else, is not mentioned, and the words, though they might be taken as accusing Cnut, perhaps rather point to a version more like some of those which I shall presently mention.

We now come to the long string of English writers who accuse Eadric. William of Malmesbury (ii. 180) says that Eadmund died “ambiguum quo casu extinctus;” he then goes on to mention the charge against Eadric as a rumour;

“Fama Edricum infamat, quod favore alterius mortem ei per ministros porrexerit. Cubicularios regis fuisse duos, quibus omnem vitam suam commiserat, quos pollicitationibus illectos, et primo immanitatem flagitii exhorrentes, brevi complices suos effecisse. Ejus consilio ferreum uncum, ad naturæ requisita sedenti, in locis posterioribus adegisse.”

Here the deed is done by two chamberlains of Eadmund. In another version the actual murderer is a son of Eadric. The intention of this change is obvious. The son of Eadric is of course meant to be a son of Eadmund’s sister Eadgyth, so that we get the additional horror of a sisters son killing his uncle. It was either forgotten that a son of Eadric and Eadgyth would be a mere child, or else to kill Eadmund by the hand of a child was thought to be a further improvement. The scene is also placed at Oxford. In this shape we get the tale in Henry of Huntingdon (M. H. B. 756 D);

“Edmundus rex post paucos exhinc dies proditione occisus est apud Oxineford. Sic autem occisus est. Quum rex hostibus suis terribilis et timendissimus in regno floreret, ivit nocte quadam in domum evacuationis ad requisita naturæ, ubi filius Edrici ducis in fovea secretaria delitescens consilio patris, regem inter celanda cultello his acuto percussit, et inter viscera ferrum figens, fugiens reliquit.”

Walter Map (De Nugis, 205–207) has a very strange story, in which, among other things, he takes care to keep the whole tale in his own part of England. He nowhere names Eadric, but, just as before in the case of Æthelred (see above, p. 658), he speaks of a “servus” whose relations to Eadmund would seem to have been somewhat the same as those of Chiffinch to Charles the Second. This man asks the King for the lands of Minsterworth in Gloucestershire, a parish of which Walter himself was parson, and which, according to his account of the division (see above, p. 708), would come within the share of Eadmund. The King does not refuse the gift, but delays it. The servant plans his death, and carries out his purpose at Minsterworth by much the same means as those described by William of Malmesbury and Henry of Huntingdon. The King, mortally wounded at Minsterworth, is carried to die at Ross.

Roger of Wendover (i. 459) tells the story in nearly the same words as Henry of Huntingdon, beginning with a panegyric on Eadmund which is essentially the same as the panegyrics on Godwine, Harold, and others (see vol. ii. c. vii. and above, p. 400); “Rex Anglorum Eadmundus, dum justis in regno appareret mansuetus et pius ac injustis terribilis et crudelis, invidit ejus bonitati dux et proditor Eadricus, Merciorum dominus, et qualiter eum perderet infatigabiliter cogitavit.” The opportunity comes when Eadmund is at Oxford, which is evidently looked on as a town within Eadric’s government. The title “Merciorum dominus” is odd. We have heard of nothing like it since Æthelred and Æthelflæd. See above, p. 574.

Bromton (X Scriptt. 906) gives three versions, that of Florence, that of Henry of Huntingdon, and a third. He decides in favour of that of Henry; “Verior aliis et authenticior habetur.” His other version contains quite a new story, but one which shows that the story of the murder of Ælfhelm was running in the heads of those who devised it. Nothing else could have suggested the description of Eadric as “Edricus perfidus comes Salopiæ semper proditor.” Eadmund and Eadric are now on good terms; the Earl asks the King to visit him at his house, seemingly either at Shrewsbury or at Oxford. After the evening meal, the King is led to his bedroom. He there finds a figure of an archer of wonderful workmanship, with his bow bent and an arrow ready to shoot. He examines and touches it; the arrow goes off, and pierces and kills Eadmund, that being the end for which the ingenious piece of mechanism was made. This introduction of a mechanical contrivance instead of the simpler forms of murder which we find in the earlier forms of the story may be paralleled with the other mechanical contrivance which appears in the later forms of the story of Eadric’s own death. See Note BBB.

Knighton (X Scriptt. 2316) brings in the death of Eadmund with a most amazing preface. Eadmund has reigned five years, and he is then put to death at Gloucester, seemingly by a vote of the Witan, on a charge of favouring the Danes, a precedent which seems not to have been remembered in 1649. It seems to be only the manner of his death which is left to the ingenuity of Eadric. The words run thus;

“Edmundus quinto anno regni sui apud Gloverniam, pro eo quod barones sui suspicabantur eum proditorem et subversorem communis profectus regni sui [“a tyrant, traitor, murderer, and public enemy”], eo quod nimis inclinatus fuit antedictis Danis et prætulit eorum consilium, consilio regiorum suorum juratorum fidelium, incurrit mortem infra scriptam. De morte ejus multæ sunt opiniones, sed sufficiat una pro omnibus, quum sit per proditionem occisum Edrici.”

He then tells the story of the archer, which he calls “unum tristegum cum imagine ad similitudinem unius sagittarii.” Ducange (in voce) is puzzled at the “tristegum,” which generally means a structure of three stages, whether a house or a moveable tower. Knighton then tells, as an alternative version, the story of Henry of Huntingdon, only making Eadric himself the actual murderer, but with a further alternative of the two chamberlains. He adds that Eadric at once went to the widowed Ealdgyth, took her two children from her, and carried them away to Cnut.

With regard to the place where all this happened, we have seen that the Chroniclers are silent, that Florence names London, that Henry of Huntingdon names Oxford, while other writers name various other places. Amidst all this contradiction it is safest to cleave to Florence. But Mr. James Parker (History of Oxford, p. 26 and Postscriptum 3) argues strongly on behalf of Oxford. His best argument is that Oxford lies on the road between Gloucester and London, and that it is the last place within the Mercian jurisdiction of Eadric. But this assumes that Eadric was at this moment Earl of the Mercians. He was so at an earlier and at a later time, and it is assumed in the version of Roger of Wendover that Oxford was at this time under his government. But the position of Eadric at this moment is quite uncertain, and a story of a murder done by Eadric in his own earldom, especially a murder done at Oxford, seems to connect this story with the stories of Ælfhelm, Morkere, and Sigeferth, the former husband of Eadmund’s wife Ealdgyth. The mention of Shrewsbury in the so-called Bromton clearly comes from the same mint, and it seems to me that the mention of either Oxford or Shrewsbury is a part of the mythopœic process. Those who put together this version most likely forgot that Oxford lay within Cnut’s share of the kingdom.

In none of these English versions is it hinted that Cnut had any share in the deed. Eadric, in a later stage of the story, pleads the murder of Eadmund as a merit towards Cnut, and that is all. It is only by Cnut’s own countrymen that he is directly charged with the crime. The Knytlinga Saga (c. 16; Johnstone, 139) calmly tells us that Eadric, the confident and foster-brother of Eadmund, killed him—we are not told how—on the receipt of a bribe from Cnut. “Heidrekr Striona het ein rikr madr, er fe tok til þess af Knuti konungi, et hann sviki Jatmund konung, oc dræpi hann med mordvigi, oc þetta var hans bani: Heidrekr var þo fostri Jatmundar konungs, oc trudi hann honom sem sialfun ser.” Saxo (192, 193) has a story how, seven years after the agreement with Eadmund, Cnut is saluted at supper by some nameless person as King of all England. The bearers of the news then say that they have killed Eadmund to win Cnut’s favour, on which Cnut puts them to death. This is of course one version of the death of Eadric. See Note BBB. Saxo then adds, “Memorant alii Edvardum [Edmundum, see above, p. 710] clandestino Canuti imperio occisum, ejusdemque jussu pœnam a maleficis gratia demendæ suspicionis exactam. Ut enim innocentiæ suæ fidem adstrueret, seque ei culpæ affinem fuisse negaret, gravius in sceleratos consulendum putavit. Ea tamen res primum regis apud domesticos favorem quassavit.” These last words are very remarkable. They seem to fall in with several hints from other sources, which seem to show that Cnut, at least in his later days, was much less popular in Denmark than in England.

Snorro, in the Saga of Saint Olaf (Laing, ii. 21; Johnstone, 98), simply says that Eadric killed Eadmund; “Á sama mánadi drap Heinrekr Striona Eadmund konung.” But he adds that Cnut at once drove all the sons of Æthelred out of England, and quotes the poet Sigvat, who is also quoted in the Knytlinga Saga, who says that Cnut either killed or banished all the sons of Æthelred.

“Oc senn sono

Sló hvern oc þó

Adalráds eda

Utflæmdi Knutr.”

The allusion here must be either to Eadmund or to Eadwig (see the next Note), most likely to Eadmund.

Of the manner of Eadmund’s death there is no mention in any of these writers. But the singularly base form of murder which so many English writers attribute to Eadric or his emissaries was not without other examples in that age. The younger Dedi of Saxony was said to have been killed in this way in 1068, and Gozelo, Duke of Lotharingia, in 1078 (see Lambert in annis, pp. 74 and 221 of the lesser Pertz). And the great Countess herself is charged with doing the like to her husband “Gigo, Duke of Normandy,” (Vit. Mat. c. viii; Muratori, v. 393). It is also essentially the same as the way in which the defender of Stamfordbridge was killed (see Hen. Hunt. M. H. B. 762 B), and a large part of a German army is said to have been destroyed in nearly the same way when the Emperor Henry the Fifth invaded Poland in 1109. Dlugoss, Hist. Pol. lib. iv. vol. i. col. 378 (ed. Lips. 1711).

And now as to the truth of the story. I think we can hardly do more than say, with William of Malmesbury, “ambiguum quo casu extinctus.” Eadmund died at a moment most convenient for Cnut. Cnut therefore, whether he really had a hand in his death or not, was sure to be suspected of it. Eadric was held to be capable of every crime, and was popularly believed to be the actual doer of every crime that was done. Eadric therefore was sure to be suspected as well as Cnut. Eadric was doubtless capable of the crime; so, I fear, was Cnut also at this time of his life. But the direct evidence against either does not seem strong enough for a conviction. The silence of Florence, compared with his language elsewhere, tells in favour of Eadric. The silence of all the English writers tells in favour of Cnut. This silence could hardly be owing to his later popularity in England, which has thrown no veil over the other crimes of his early reign. Florence can hardly fail to have heard the charge both against Eadric and against Cnut, but, while speaking of their other crimes, he leaves this out. On the other hand, there is something which tells against Cnut in the studied obscurity and overdone piety of the special panegyrist of himself and his wife.

NOTE YY. p. 406.
The two Eadwigs.

Nothing can be plainer than that Eadwig King of the Churls is quite a different person from Eadwig the Ætheling. The two are confounded by Bromton (907), who says, “Consilio Edrici exlegavit Edwinum, Edmundi regis fratrem, qui ceorlesking, id est rex rusticorum, appellabatur; postmodum tamen dolose reconciliatus, factione secretariorum suorum fraudulenter occisus est.”

I can offer no guess as to the reason of the singular surname of “ceorla cyning,” which is found in the three Chronicles, Abingdon, Worcester, and Peterborough. Nor can I say anything as to Eadwig’s earlier history. An “Eadwig minister” signs a charter of Æthelred in 1005 (Cod. Dipl. iii. 345), and before that, in 996, land at Bensington had been granted by Æthelred (vi. 136) to three brothers, Eadric, Eadwig, and Ealdred. As to the fate of the King of the Churls, the Worcester and Peterborough Chronicles, followed by Florence, place his banishment in 1017, Florence adding, “vero sequenti tempore cum rege pacificatus est Eadwius.” The Abingdon Chronicle puts off his banishment to the Gemót at Cirencester in 1020. Possibly he was outlawed, reconciled, and outlawed again. We hear nothing of his death.

Of the Ætheling Eadwig, the Worcester and Peterborough Chronicles (1017) simply say, “Cnut cyning aflymde ut Eadwig æðeling.” Abingdon adds, “and eft hine hét ofslean.” Florence, under the years 1016 and 1017, has two stories which it is not very easy to reconcile with one another. I suspect however that they arose, like the other statements of Florence under the years 1016 and 1017, out of two different accounts of the acts of Cnut’s first Midwinter Gemót. The first version, under 1016, immediately follows the vote by which the sons and brothers of Eadmund were set aside. It was followed by a vote of banishment against the Ætheling Eadwig—“Eadwius egregius et reverendissimus regis Eadmundi germanus.” Then Cnut holds a conference with Eadric, and asks him if he can by any means beguile Eadwig to death (“quomodo decipere posset Eadwium, ut mortis subiret periculum”). Eadric answers that there is a man fitter for the purpose than himself, namely a nobleman named Æthelweard—which of all the Æthelweards it is hard to say, but he is described as being “ex nobilissimo genere Anglorum ortus.” Æthelweard, it seems, had better opportunities of familiar intercourse with the Ætheling than Eadric had. Cnut sends for Æthelweard and makes him the largest promises, if he will undertake the murder of Eadwig. “Bring me his head,” says Cnut, “and you shall be dearer to me than a brother.” Æthelweard undertakes the task, but, like Uhtred in the case of Thurbrand, without any intention of performing it. So Eadwig escapes, at least for one while.

Directly after, under 1017, as soon as Florence has recorded the fourfold division of England and the mutual oaths of Cnut and the English, he goes on to say that, by the advice of Eadric (“consilio perfidi ducis Eadrici”), Cnut banished both Eadwigs (“rex Canutus clitonem Eadwium, regis Eadmund igermanum, et Eadwium, qui rex appellabatur rusticorum, exlegavit”). He goes on to say that the King of the Churls was reconciled to Cnut, as I have already said, but that the Ætheling was treacherously murdered within the year by Cnut’s order (“Eadwius vero clito, deceptus illorum insidiis quos eotenus amicissimos habuit, jussu et petitione regis Canuti, eodem anno innocenter occiditur”). This account, which is perhaps really the same as the other, is of course founded on the Abingdon Chronicle.

William of Malmesbury (ii. 180) has quite another story, which recognizes the outlawry, but makes the Ætheling die a natural death. “Frater ejus [Edmundi] ex matre Edwius, non adspernandæ probitatis adolescens, per proditorem Edricum Anglia, jubente Cnutone, cessit; diu terris jactatus et alto, angore animi ut fit corpus infectus, dum furtivo reditu inter Anglos delitescit, defungitur, et apud Tavistokium tumulatur.”

Now we must choose between these stories. The authority of Florence, backed as to the main outline of the tale by the Abingdon Chronicle, is in itself much higher than that of William of Malmesbury. But Florence’s authority is in this case somewhat lessened by the confused way in which he tells the story twice over. Also tales of secret conferences and assassinations are always suspicious, and they are specially suspicious when they bring in the name of Eadric. If Eadwig died anyhow soon after his outlawry, people would be sure to say that he was made away with by Cnut and Eadric. But if he really was so made away with, it is hard to see how the story in William of Malmesbury could arise. Also, if Eadwig was outlawed, and therefore banished, it is hard to see how even Eadric would have the chance of murdering him, unless it is meant that he was treacherously pursued during his days of grace, as Godwine is said to have been (see vol. ii. c. vii). It can hardly mean that the hand of Eadric could reach banished men in foreign lands.

The character of Cnut, at this stage of his career, throws no light on the matter either way. But it is amusing to see Thierry turning the particular promise of Cnut to Æthelweard into a general advertisement for the heads of his enemies; “‘Qui m’apportera la tête d’un de mes ennemis,’ disait le roi danois avec la ferocité d’un pirate, ‘me sera plus cher que s’il était mon frère.’”

NOTE ZZ. p. 409.
The Origin of Earl Godwine.

The prominent position of Godwine at the time of Cnut’s death is one of the most conspicuous facts of our history, and the combined evidence of the charters and of the Biographer of Eadward has enabled me to trace up his greatness to the earliest days of Cnut’s reign. But, when we ask for the birth and parentage of the man who became the greatest of English subjects, who so nearly became the father of a new line of English kings, we find ourselves involved in utter obscurity and contradiction. Was he the son of Child Wulfnoth the South-Saxon (see above, p. 663)? Was he the great-nephew of the arch-traitor Eadric? Or was he the son of a churl somewhere near Sherstone, introduced by the Dane Ulf to the favour of Cnut? Or is it possible that none of these accounts rests on any sure foundation, and that we must remain altogether in the dark as to the birth of Godwine and the events of his early life?

I will begin with the one fact which appears to be certain, that is the name of Godwine’s father. While the accounts of him agree in nothing else, all who mention his father at all agree in giving him the name of Wulfnoth. (It is hardly worth while to mention that Fordun, v. 11, makes Godwine a son of Eadric.) I have therefore not scrupled to speak in the text of Godwine the son of Wulfnoth. Still, as Godwine was one of the commonest names at the time, it is not safe to assume every Godwine, or even every Wulfnoth, whom we come across to be the Godwine and the Wulfnoth with whom we are concerned. But any case in which the two names come together is at least worthy of notice. There is absolutely no evidence whether any of the many signatures of various Godwines in the later days of Æthelred belong to the great Earl or not. But when the Ætheling Æthelstan, in his will (Cod. Dipl. iii. 363), makes bequests to two Godwines, and distinguishes one of them as the son of Wulfnoth, this raises a strong presumption, though it does not reach positive proof, that our Godwine is the Godwine intended. And, if the expressions of the bequest fall in with any circumstances in any of the accounts of Godwine, we reach, though still not quite positive proof, yet certainly the highest degree of probability.

What then is our available evidence on the subject? Our own historians, as far as direct statement goes, are silent. Godwine appears in the Chronicles as Earl of the West-Saxons and as chief supporter of Harthacnut, without any hint as to who he was. The writers who speak of his exploits in the time of Cnut are equally silent. Even his own panegyrist, the Biographer of Eadward, has nothing whatever to tell us as to his origin. The silence of the Chronicles is not wonderful; they commonly take people’s position for granted, and introduce them without any particular description. But the absence of any direct statement in all our authorities, good and bad, is certainly remarkable, and the silence of Godwine’s own special admirer, the Biographer of Eadward, is very remarkable indeed.

But, though none of our own historians introduces Godwine as the son or nephew of Wulfnoth, or of Eadric, or of any one else, yet we have, on authority which seems at first sight to be irresistible, two statements that a Wulfnoth was the father of Godwine, one statement that Eadric was the great-uncle of Godwine. Florence (anno 1007), in a passage which I have discussed in other Notes (see pp. 655, 663), says that one of Eadric’s brothers was named Æthelmær, and that Æthelmær was the father of Wulfnoth, the father of Earl Godwine. The Canterbury Chronicle (anno 1008) describes Child Wulfnoth the South-Saxon as “Godwines fæder eorles.” Most writers put these two statements together, and assume Godwine to be the son of Child Wulfnoth and Child Wulfnoth to be the nephew of Eadric. To me it seems that the two accounts are quite distinct, and that their statements are almost irreconcileable. Florence, who speaks of Godwine the son of Wulfnoth as the nephew of Eadric, does not say that Godwine was the son of Child Wulfnoth, nor does he in any way identify Child Wulfnoth with Wulfnoth the nephew of Eadric. The Canterbury Chronicler, who makes Godwine the son of Child Wulfnoth, is equally silent as to any kindred between Child Wulfnoth and Eadric. In fact, the way in which they write seems to shut out—perhaps is designedly meant to shut out—any such kindred either way. Florence speaks of “Wlnothus, pater West-Saxonum ducis Godwini;” directly afterwards he speaks of “Suth-Saxonicus minister Wlnothus.” This is the way in which a man would speak of two distinct Wulfnoths, not of the same. He says that “Brihtric, brother of Eadric, unjustly accused Child Wulfnoth.” This is not the way in which he would speak of a charge brought by one member of the family of which he had just given the pedigree against another member of the same family. Prima facie then, the Wulfnoth spoken of under 1007 and the Wulfnoth spoken of under 1008 are two different persons. Nor is it enough to say that, in the entry under 1008, Florence is translating the Worcester Chronicle, and that he keeps its language without trying to harmonize it with what he had himself just before said. Florence is here not merely translating, for he stops to put in a character of Brihtric of his own composition. It is certain that Florence cannot be quoted on behalf of the view that Godwine was the son of Child Wulfnoth; he seems indeed designedly to exclude any such parentage by distinguishing one Wulfnoth from the other.

The three elder Chronicles, Abingdon, Worcester, Peterborough, give us no information either way. Godwine’s name does not occur in any of them till after the death of Cnut. The Abingdon Chronicle, in describing Wulfnoth, calls him simply “Wulfnoð cild.” To this description the Worcester and Peterborough Chronicles add “þone Suðseaxscian;” the Canterbury Chronicler adds again, “Godwines fæder eorles.” All the Chroniclers knew, and they all thought it right to state, that Brihtric was the brother of Eadric; that he was the uncle of the man whom he was accusing, a fact surely quite as important, is not implied in any way. The combined evidence of all the Chronicles seems to me to go to distinguish Child Wulfnoth the South-Saxon from any Wulfnoth who was nephew to Eadric. The evidence of Florence goes the same way. As to the parentage of Godwine the three elder Chroniclers are silent. Florence affirms him to have been the son of Wulfnoth the nephew of Eadric; the Canterbury Chronicler affirms him to have been the son of Child Wulfnoth the South-Saxon. I do not say that these two statements are logically contradictory; but it certainly seems to me that, as a matter of historical evidence, they are very hard to reconcile.

Now which of these two accounts is the more probable? As far as authority goes, they are much on a level. Neither statement is strictly contemporary; indeed both of them are statements which in their own nature could not be contemporary; Wulfnoth, whoever he was, is described by a form which could not have been used till long after, when his son had become far more famous than himself. Each description is a mere insertion into an earlier text; each may be a mere hasty inference from likeness of name. The authority of Florence on such a matter is quite equal to that of the Canterbury Chronicle, the latest and least authoritative of the four. His statement too, as part of an insertion of some length, describing the character and family of Eadric, has more the air of a deliberately advised statement than the three words of the Canterbury Chronicler, which might have been inserted currente calamo. On the other hand, the statement of Florence is most unlikely in itself, while that of the Canterbury Chronicler has some external support of a very remarkable kind.

If we admit that Godwine was the great-nephew of Eadric, we are at once plunged into all kinds of chronological difficulties and into the strangest of family relations. Eadric was put to death in 1017; there is nothing to show that he was at all an aged man, rather the contrary. Godwine must have been at least a grown man in 1018, when he was already an Earl. Is it possible that Godwine was two generations younger than Eadric? Again, Eadric married Eadgyth the daughter of Æthelred; Eadward the son of Æthelred married Eadgyth the daughter of Godwine. Eadric may well have been a good deal older than his wife, who, as the daughter of a man who was born in 969, must have been young, and may have been almost a child, in 1007, the probable year of her marriage (see above, p. 658). Eadgyth again must have been some years older than her half-brother Eadward, who was born between 1002 and 1005 (see p. 686). Eadward again must have been much older than his wife Eadgyth, whose parents were married in 1019 (see p. 423). Still, allowing for all this, can we conceive a man marrying the great-great-niece of his own brother-in-law? The pedigree would stand thus;

Æthelric Æthelred

| |

+------+-----+ +------+-----+

| | | |

Æthelmær Eadric = Eadgyth Eadward.

|

Wulfnoth

|

Godwine

|

Eadgyth.

Eadward may easily have been twenty years older than his wife, but can we believe that he belonged to the same generation as his wife’s great-grandfather?

This seems to me to be a strong objection to the statement of Florence. On the other hand, the statement of the Canterbury Chronicle curiously falls in with the bequest in the will of the Ætheling Æthelstan; “Ic gean Godwine Wulfnóðes suna ðes landes æt Cumtúne, ðe his feder ǽr áhte.” Why should Æthelstan leave Godwine the land which his father had? The bequest follows immediately on one in which the Ætheling leaves to one Ælfmær the land which had formerly been his own (“Ic gean Ælmére ðes landes æt Hamelande ðæ he ǽr áhte”). And this is followed by a very earnest prayer to his father to confirm the grant to Ælfmær (“Ic bidde minne feder for Godes ælmihtiges lufan and for minon, ðæt he ðes geunne ðe ic him geunnen hebbe”), which is not attached to any of his other bequests. Some special cause evidently lurks under such bequests as these. They naturally suggest the idea that the lands bequeathed were confiscated lands which Æthelstan thought it right to restore, in the one case to the former owner himself, in the other case to the former owner’s son. Now the lands of Child Wulfnoth would doubtless be confiscated after his doings in 1009, and a part of them might easily come into the possession of the Ætheling. For a possession of Child Wulfnoth the South-Saxon we naturally look in his own shire. And Domesday shows us two South-Saxon Comptons, one of them held by Harold (21), the other held by a tenant of Earl Godwine (24). Here is indeed no actual proof, but there is a remarkable series of undesigned coincidences in favour of the belief that Godwine was the son of Child Wulfnoth the South-Saxon, and therefore, as I think, against the belief that he was the great-nephew of Eadric.

This evidence, if it stood alone, would probably be thought quite conclusive; but there is another account of Godwine’s birth, which we could hardly, in any case, accept in its literal shape, but the existence of which is, in any case, a phænomenon to be accounted for, and which, when stripped of its romantic details, is in itself by no means devoid of likelihood. This is that Godwine was the son of a churl near the field of Sherstone or elsewhere.

This version appears in several places and in several forms, and it seems to come from more than one independent source of tradition. We hear of it alike in English, in Danish, and in Norman writers. Thus, while some Norman writers, as William of Jumièges (viii. 9), speak of Godwine’s nobility, Wace (Roman de Rou, 9809) expressly calls him

“Quens Gwine,

Ki mult esteit de pute orine.”

Among English writers it is first found in a writer of Henry the First’s time, whose accounts of things, though often very strange, are always independent. This is the chronicler whose work is printed in Mr. Edwards’ Liber de Hyda. In his account of Godwine, against whom he is bitterly prejudiced, he says (p. 288), “Fuit nempe ex infimo Anglorum genere ... et licet per omnes fere Angliæ partes potestas ejus extenderetur, principalis tamen comitatus ejus Australis erat, regio quæ lingua eorum dicitur Sudsexia.” So Ralph the Black, a chronicler of no great value who wrote early in the thirteenth century, distinctly asserts the peasant origin of Godwine. His whole story is full of mythical elements, still it is of some importance, because some of the statements in it clearly do not come from the common sources. His story runs thus (p. 160); “Godwinus Comes filius bubulci fuit; in mensa regis Edwardi offa suffocatus est, et ab Haraldo filio sub mensa extractus. Hic Godwinus, a rege Cnutone nutritus, processu temporis in Daciam cum breve regis transmissus, callide duxit sororem Cnutonis.” (See Note EEE.)

One of the fullest accounts among those which assert Godwine’s lowly origin, and that which has met with most attention from modern writers, is the picturesque tale in the Knytlinga Saga (c. 11; Johnstone, p. 131). Earl Ulf, pursuing the flying English at Sherstone, loses his way. He meets a youth driving cattle, who tells him that his name is Godwine (Gudini), and whom he asks to show him his way to the Danish ships. Godwine speaks of the difficulty of so doing, when the whole country is so enraged against the Danes; he refuses the Earl’s offered gift of a gold ring, but says that he will do what he can for him, and that, if he succeeds, Ulf may reward him at his pleasure. He then takes the Earl to the house of his father Wulfnoth (Ulfnad), who is described as a rich yeoman (bondi), living in very comfortable style. The Earl is well entertained, especially with good drink; he is greatly pleased with the house and its inhabitants, old and young, and stays the whole of the next day there in great comfort. At night Ulf and Godwine are mounted on two good horses, well caparisoned. Wulfnoth and his wife remind Ulf of the dangerous errand on which they are sending their only son, and they trust to his gratitude for a recompense. The Earl is charmed with the handsome countenance and ready speech of the youth; they ride all night, and reach Cnut’s ships the next morning. Ulf treats Godwine as his son, places him by his side, gives him his sister Gytha in marriage, presents him to Cnut, and procures for him the dignity of Earl.

Here we have a story which, whatever else we say of it, at least fits in with the chronology of the time. It must be a confused or perverted shape of the same tradition when Walter Map (199) tells a story in which the part of Ulf is assigned to King Æthelred. The King loses his way in hunting, and comes alone at night to ask shelter in the house of his neat-herd (“ad domus cujusdam custodis vaccarum suarum”). The neat-herd’s son Godwine (“impiger filius custodis, puer nomine Godwinus, pulchrior et melior quam ipsi daret linea priorum”) does all kinds of services for the royal guest, and specially provides him with a supper which would seem to imply a boundless appetite on the part of the unready King. He thus wins the King’s heart, who presently promotes him in every way, makes him a knight, and gives him the earldom of Gloucester (“tulit ergo ipsum rex in thalamum suum, et processu temporis sublimavit super omnes principes regni, et cum cingulo militiæ comitatum ei Gloucestriæ contulit”). The “bubulci filius” shows all manner of natural gifts in his new elevation, and makes himself famous among both Christians and Saracens. He is above all things protector of the English coast, freeing it from pirates, and making England the terror of all nations, instead of being, as she had been before him, the common prey of all of them (“pererrabat omnes Angliæ portus, tum terra tum mari, piratas omnes destruens; et facta est Anglia per ejus operam timor omnium circum jacentium terrarum quæ fuerat earum direptio et præda”). Presently Cnut comes, invited, according to this writer’s story, by the English themselves (see above, p. 693). The story of the war is told with great confusion, but Godwine appears (204) as the chief supporter of Eadmund (“At in hac quid fecit Godwinus tempestate? Multa et valida manu militum collecta, Edmundum Edelredi filium advocavit, et properanti contra eos occurrunt Chnuto apud Durherst in valle Gloucestriæ super Sabrinam”). Then comes the story of the single combat of Cnut and Eadmund (see above, p. 706).

Now, what are we to make of these stories? The one which is most likely to be true in its main features is that in the Knytlinga Saga; but the saga is a saga, and I have given some specimens of its inaccuracies and confusions. In this very story it would be hard to reconcile the author’s conception of the battle of Sherstone with the truth of history; Godwine also was not the only son of his parents, as we shall in course of time hear of his brother (see Edwards, Introduction to Liber de Hyda, xxxvii.; Mon. Angl. ii. 428, 430); and it is more amazing still when the saga goes on to tell us that Godwine and Gytha were the parents, not only of Swegen, Harold, and Tostig, but also of Morkere and Waltheof. Such a tale is not history; the utmost amount of credit which I should ever think of giving it would be to admit it as evidence of a tradition that Godwine was not of illustrious birth, that he was by origin ceorl and not eorl, and that he was in some way connected with Earl Ulf. The details might be devised to account for an Englishman of lowly birth marrying the sister of the great Danish Earl. We may, I think, be sure that the real legend is that which attributes Godwine’s rise to a service done to Ulf, and that the story of Walter Map which puts Æthelred instead of Ulf is a later version. Nothing can be wilder than Walter’s general story, but we may be inclined to believe that he preserves a piece of genuine history when he speaks of Godwine’s services towards Æthelred and Eadmund. This agrees in a remarkable way with the bequest and the will of Æthelstan, if we take that as referring to Godwine the Earl. The account in Ralph the Black is most likely an abridgement of that in Walter Map, as both use the same words (“bubulci filius”), and both tell the same story of Godwine’s marriage (see below, p. 746), which is quite different from that in the Knytlinga Saga. Yet we may take Ralph’s words (“a rege Cnutone nutritus”) as a correction of Walter’s story about Æthelred. The account in the Hyde writer is remarkable on two grounds. It asserts Godwine to have been of low birth; it also, like the Canterbury Chronicle, specially connects him with Sussex, while most of the later writers specially connect him with Kent. On the other hand, if any one ventures to put any faith in the geography of the Knytlinga Saga, Godwine must have come from some place near the borders of Gloucestershire and Wiltshire. Walter Map does not mention any particular place, but, according to his usual practice of drawing everything to his own side of England, makes Godwine Earl, not of Kent or Sussex, but of Gloucester.

We have then a distinct tradition, turning up in several quarters, some of which at least seem to be independent of one another, which tradition asserts Godwine to have been a man of churlish birth. Taking the story in the Knytlinga Saga as the genuine form of the legend, the English writers and Wace exaggerate, as in such a case they were sure to do, the lowliness of Godwine’s origin. So do the only modern writers who adopt the story. These are Sharon Turner (Hist. Angl. Sax. ii. 494), who talks about “poverty,” “humble mansion,” &c., and Thierry (i. 160), who talks about a “cabane.” But the Wulfnoth of the saga is not a poor man; he is a ceorl and not a thegn; but he has everything good about him, good house, good drink, good horses. His treatment of Ulf seems to be his usual way of entertaining strangers, while the astonishing supper given to Æthelred in Walter Map’s version is a special effort for the purpose. In the Danish writer’s picture, Wulfnoth is, in modern phrase, not a labourer, not even a tenant farmer, but clearly a rich yeoman. Such a man might, in the England of those days, easily rise to thegn’s rank (see p. 90). Eadric had risen from such a rank, or very possibly from a lowlier one (see above, p. 655), to be Ealdorman of the Mercians and son-in-law of the King. Still the rise from the yeoman’s comfortable house to the earldom of the West-Saxons in one generation and to the throne of England in the next is not an every day event. How far is such an exaltation probable in the present case?

I assume that the story of the Knytlinga Saga is altogether irreconcileable with either of the others. Sharon Turner indeed, like Florence in some of his weaker moments, adopts all three stories at once. He accepts the pedigree given by Florence without hesitation, and seemingly without thinking it at all contradictory to the tale of Godwine’s lowly origin. That tale he adopts in its fulness, and he does his best to weave the two together. He even conceives Wulfnoth in his humble estate as probably remembering the high fortunes of his uncle Eadric, and hoping that a similar good luck may attend his own child. Somewhat earlier, in recording the story of Brihtric and Wulfnoth, Mr. Turner calls the latter “the father of Earl Godwine,” and, though he remarks in a note that the words are absent from some MSS. of the Chronicles, he does not appear to doubt Child Wulfnoth’s paternity. Now it would be remarkable if a nephew of the powerful Eadric remained in the condition of a herdsman or even in that of a yeoman, while Eadric himself had risen to such greatness, and had raised at least one of his brothers with him. Yet this, however unlikely, is at least possible. But possibility itself can hardly be stretched so far as to make Wulfnoth the naval commander of 1009 the same as Wulfnoth the yeoman of 1016. Doubtless princes and lords, under the frown of fortune, have before now lurked in much lowlier disguises; but one who, outlaw as he was, still had twenty ships at his bidding, was far more likely to take service under King Swegen or to go on with his doings as wiking on his own account, than to betake himself to the tilth of the ground in a western shire. I think we may safely assert that, if Godwine was the son of a West of England yeoman, he was certainly not the son of the South-Saxon naval captain, and was not likely to be the grand-nephew of Ealdorman Eadric.

And now, what is the measure of likelihood in the story itself? First of all, what is always of no small consequence in these questions, if we grant the truth of the tale in its main outlines, we can understand how the other tale arose, while the reverse process is by no means so easy. For, if the tale of the Knytlinga Saga be a fiction, it must be pure invention without motive. One does not see how any confusion or misconception can have led to it. The story of Godwine’s lowly birth is not introduced in the saga, whatever we say of Wace and the Hyde writer, with the least notion of depreciating him. One therefore hardly sees why any one should go out of his way to invent the tale. But if there were several contemporary Wulfnoths, especially if the real one was an obscure person, mere misconception might lead Florence or his informants to fasten the paternity upon the wrong Wulfnoth. Or, if falsification is supposed, its motives are much more obvious than in the other case. To connect Godwine either with Eadric or with Child Wulfnoth would suit foes who wish to brand one whom they called a traitor as the kinsman of earlier traitors. It might suit Danish friends to represent him as connected with one who had so great a share in setting up the Danish throne in England. And, as Eadric, with all his crimes, was clearly the leader of a powerful party, the invention might even suit some among Godwine’s English friends, who might still regard a connexion with Eadric as conferring more of honour than of shame.

Again, if we accept the legend in the saga, we can understand the rather mysterious way in which Godwine himself comes on the stage under the patronage of Cnut and Ulf, better than if we suppose him to have been a member of a powerful English family. We can especially understand the astonishing silence of his own panegyrist. If Godwine had been a scion of any eminent family, or had been of kin to any famous, or even infamous, men, we should surely, somewhere or other, find him described accordingly. But the mass of writers, as we have seen, are utterly silent; no one introduces him with any description at all; those who connect him with Eadric or with Child Wulfnoth do it backwards; they describe Wulfnoth as the father of Godwine, not Godwine as the son of Wulfnoth.

I think then that, if this story stood by itself, there would be little difficulty in accepting it. I mean of course in accepting the general outline of the tale, namely that Godwine was a yeoman’s son who had somehow attracted the favour of Ulf, and who was by him introduced to Cnut. Details are quite another matter. The whole narrative of the war of Cnut and Eadmund in the Knytlinga Saga is so utterly confused and unhistorical that nothing can be safely said as to time, place, or circumstance. And the story in Walter Map, as far as concerns the first rise of Godwine, is even wilder than the saga itself. But the tradition of Godwine’s churlish origin, taken by itself, would have much to be said for it. I am inclined to think that it might hold its ground against the version in Florence. But the statement of the Canterbury Chronicler, backed up by the will of Æthelstan, is a more formidable opponent. The two descriptions fit singularly well into one another, and the coincidence is, on the face of it, undesigned. It is of course possible that Godwine the son of Wulfnoth and legatee of Æthelstan may not have been the great Earl; it is possible that, being the great Earl, he may have been the son of some other Wulfnoth, and not of the South-Saxon Child. But when we put together the Canterbury Chronicle, the will of Æthelstan, and the entries in Domesday, their cumulative force is so great as to make such explanations mere possibilities and no more. If we accept the will as referring to the great Godwine, and if we further accept my conjecture as to the death of Æthelstan (see above, p. 700), we may look on Godwine as a brave young warrior, whose services had, even before the death of Æthelred, entitled him in the Ætheling’s opinion to a restitution of the lands forfeited by his father. This same conception of him, which might well be genuine tradition, appears in an exaggerated form in the version of Walter Map. This view of him is in no way inconsistent with the fact of the favour which he afterwards found with Ulf and Cnut. Neither is his favour with Ulf and Cnut inconsistent with the story of his yeoman origin, but quite the reverse. The main difficulty, one which I do not see the way to get over, is that Wulfnoth the churl and Child Wulfnoth the South-Saxon cannot be the same man.

The two stories thus become alternatives between which we must choose. Godwine was either the son of Child Wulfnoth, or the son of Wulfnoth the churl; in neither case do I believe him to have been the great-nephew of Eadric. I once inclined, of course with the necessary allowances, to the story in the Knytlinga Saga; I had not then weighed the arguments suggested by the will of Æthelstan and the entries in Domesday. On the strength of these last I now incline to the statement of the Canterbury Chronicler. But I leave the critical reader to decide.

NOTE AAA. pp. 409, 425.
The West-Saxon Earldom.

There is, I think, quite evidence to show that Godwine was raised to Earl’s rank very early in the reign of Cnut, but that he was not invested with the vast government of which we afterwards find him in possession till some years later.

I do not try to identify any of the signatures of “Godwine minister” in the later days of Æthelred. There are a good many of them, and some of them may be signatures of the great Earl; but the name Godwine is so common that it is utterly impossible to say anything either way. But Godwine undoubtedly signs as Earl from the very beginning of Cnut’s reign. The earliest charters of Cnut are of the year 1018, and Godwine signs one of these (Cod. Dipl. iv. 3) as “dux,” though seemingly, as one would expect, as the junior Earl. But, as Cnut kept Wessex in his own hands, while he appointed Earls over Northumberland and Mercia, Godwine could not have been Earl over all Wessex so early as this. He must have been simply the local Earl of some one shire. That shire may have been Kent. He is called Earl of Kent by Eadmer (“Cantiæ comes magnanimus,” p. 4), and it is his usual description in later accounts. But writers who did not take in the position of an Earl of the West-Saxons, and who did not understand that his jurisdiction took in Kent, may have called Godwine Earl of Kent simply because they found him acting as Earl at Dover in 1051. And, on the other hand, we have just seen (see above, p. 727) that there were other versions which call his first earldom Sussex, and even Gloucester. I do not pretend to settle the question, and it is of no great moment. The one important point is that Godwine was raised to high rank in the very beginning of Cnut’s reign, and was raised to higher rank still somewhat later.

That Godwine at a later time, under Harthacnut and Eadward, held an earldom which took in all Wessex—that is the old kingdoms of Wessex, Kent, and Sussex—there is no doubt. He appears as the immediate ruler of Wessex from the death of Cnut onward, and he is distinctly called “West-Saxonum dux” (Fl. Wig. 1041; cf. 1009). It might indeed be thought that his promotion to this greater government did not take place till after the death of Cnut, when Godwine acted as the minister of the absent Harthacnut. But it is clear from the Biographer of Eadward (392) that he was raised to some special rank by Cnut at the time which I have stated in the text. He attracted Cnut’s notice from the very beginning. “Ubi ... regnum cessit Cnuto regi vario eventu bellorum, inter novos adepti regni principes regio adscitos lateri, hic Godwinus ... probatus est.” This quite falls in with his signature as Earl in 1018. But after Cnut’s visit to Denmark in 1019, after Godwine’s exploits and his marriage (see pp. 422–424, and Note DDD), we read, “Quum repatriaret [Cnutus] in Angliam, feliciter actis omnibus, totius pene regni ab ipso constituitur dux et bajulus.” So in the next page we read, “Regnante supradicto Cnuto rege, floruit hic in ejus aula primus inter summos regni proceres; et agente æquitatis ratione, quod scribebat scriptum, quod delebat omnes censebant delendum. Et in hujus potentatus solio potenter viguit, donec et hunc regem et ejus totam stirpem Ille qui regna pro libitu suo transfert succidit.” That is, in plain words, Cnut on his return to England in 1020 invested Godwine with an office which made him the first man in the kingdom, and which he kept through the reigns of Cnut’s sons. It was therefore from Cnut and in 1020 that Godwine received the office which we find him holding under Harthacnut, that of “West-Saxonum dux.” The charters tell the same tale. From 1019 onwards (see Cod. Dipl. iv. 9 et seqq.; vi. 179 et seqq.) Godwine always signs before every other Englishman, while in 1018 (iv. 3) Æthelweard signed before him. For a while (iv. 9, 14, 17, 29) we find some of Cnut’s Danish Earls and kinsmen, Thurkill or Eric, signing before him, but Godwine always signs among them, and gradually, as Cnut’s government became more and more English, it became the established rule for Godwine to sign at the head of the laymen. That Godwine then was Earl of the West-Saxons uninterruptedly from 1020 to 1051 there can I think be no doubt. Of the nature of the office and the policy of the appointment I have spoken in the text. It is plain that it was something quite new, something quite different from the ordinary ealdormanship of a shire in Kent or elsewhere.

“Bajulus,” the word used by the Biographer here and afterwards in p. 401 to express Godwine’s position, exactly answers to the Eastern Vizier, and the title is specially common in Sicily and the Levant. But the word is the parent of all the various forms of bailiff, bail, and such like. See Ducange in Bajulus, and Roquefort, Glossaire de la Langue Romane, in Bailleul.

Thierry has an amusing glimmering of truth when he says (i. 168), “Après une grande victoire remportée sur les Norwégiens, Godwin obtint la dignité d’earl, ou chef politique de l’ancien royaume de West-Sex, reduit alors à l’état de province.” He saw by some happy instinct, for the Life of Eadward was not then published, that Godwine’s great promotion followed on his exploits in the North; but he turned Godwine’s enemies, who are in every account called either Swedes or Wends, into Norwegians, and he placed the appointment between 1030 and 1035, after Cnut’s conquest of Norway. Moreover, of all Cnut’s dominions Wessex was just the part which was the furthest from being reduced to the form of a province.

NOTE BBB. p. 410.
The Marriage of Cnut and Emma.

Cnut’s first wife or concubine is incidentally mentioned in the three principal Chronicles under 1035, in describing the accession of her supposed son Harold. According to Abingdon and Worcester, “Harold sæde þæt he Cnutes sunu wære and þære oðre Ælfgyfe [Ælfgyfe þære Hamtunisca. Wig.], þeh hit na soð nære.” Peterborough has, “Sume men sædon be Harolde þæt he wære Cnutes sunu cynges and Ælfgive Ælfelmes dohtor ealdormannes; ac hit þuhte swiðe ungeleaflic manegum mannum.” We thus learn that “the other Ælfgifu” was daughter of the murdered Ealdorman Ælfhelm and that she was known as Ælfgifu of Northampton. We also learn that the alleged parentage of her son Harold was generally doubted.

Florence (1035) in describing the succession of Swegen in Norway and of Harold in England, calls their supposed mother “Northamtunensis Alfgiva, filia videlicet Alfhelmi ducis et nobilis matronæ Wlfrunæ.” He goes on to mention the popular belief which I have mentioned in the text at p. 411. William of Malmesbury (ii. 188) says, “Haroldus, quem fama filium Cnutonis ex filia Elfelmi comitis loquebatur.”

There is in all this no hint that Ælfgifu of Northampton was in any sense Cnut’s wife; but Roger of Wendover, who elsewhere (i. 473) calls her “Algiva concubina,” says (i. 462), “Anno Domini MXVIII. obiit Algiva, Elfelmi Comitis filia et uxor regis Cnutonis, ex qua duos habuit filios, Suanum videlicet et Haroldum, licet alii dicant eos ex fornicatione generatos.” He then adds, “Misit ergo Cnuto in Normanniam ad ducem Ricardum propter Emmam sororem suam,” &c. The Chronica Regis Cnutonis in the Liber de Hyda (267), which is followed by Roger of Wendover with a good many changes, calls her “Elgiva uxor sua regina,” and directly after says, “defuncta uxore Cnutonis regis, Elfgiva nomine, idem rex misit in Normanniam,” as in Roger. Bromton too (906) first calls her “concubina,” and perverts her name into Ailena; but afterwards (934) she, for it must be the same, is Cnut’s “prima uxor sive amasia.”

In the Knytlinga Saga (c. 16) Swegen appears as the son of Cnut and “Alfifa,” as he also does in Snorro (Laing, ii. 344 et seqq.), according to whom Ælfgifu survived Cnut and governed Norway in the name of her son. So Saxo (196) calls Swegen “quem ex Alvina sustulerat.” He had before (192) spoken of her as the mistress, first of Saint Olaf, then of Cnut. “Eodem tempore Alvvinam ab Olavo adamatam, Canutus eximia matronæ specie delectatus, stupro petiit.” Olaf is thereby “concubinæ facibus spoliatus.” As far as one can make anything out of Saxo’s chronology, this is just after the battle of Assandun.

The Encomiast, in recording Emma’s care, before she marries Cnut, to secure the succession for her own children, says incidentally (ii. 16), “dicebatur enim ab alia quadam rex filios habuisse.” Again, in iii. 1, when recording the accession of Harold, he describes him as “quemdam Haroldum, quem esse filium æstimatione asseritur cujusdam ejusdem regis Cnutonis concubinæ; plurimorum vero assertio eumdem Haroldum perhibet furtim fuisse subreptum parturienti ancillæ, impositum autem cameræ languentis concubinæ. Quod veracius credi potest.”

Notwithstanding the pious care of Roger of Wendover and the Hyde writer to marry this Ælfgifu to Cnut, and to kill her off before his marriage with Emma, there can be no doubt that she was at most a Danish wife after the manner of Popa and Sprota (see pp. 206, 253), that she was alive at the time of Emma’s marriage, and that she survived Cnut. Moreover, if Cnut’s connexion with Ælfgifu began when Saxo says it did, one at least of her sons must have been born after Emma’s marriage. Cnut, it is to be supposed, reformed in these matters, as in others. The Ramsey historian (c. 80; Gale, p. 437) calls him “usus venerei parcus,” and in his Laws (51–57, Thorpe, i. 404–6) he is strict against all breaches of chastity.

And now for the marriage with Emma. There is indeed something very strange about the whole thing. William of Malmesbury (ii. 180) is uncertain whether Emma or her brother Richard was most disgraced by the marriage. “Ignores majore illius dedecore qui dederit, an feminæ quæ consenserit ut thalamo illius caleret qui virum infestaverit, filios effugaverit.” Not to enter into this delicate question, it is worth noticing that Cnut was now about twenty-two, while Emma, married in 1002, could not have been under thirty, and considering the ages of her parents, the daughter of Richard and Gunnor may have been much older. The Scandinavian writers are not startled at a much greater disparity of years, as they boldly make Emma the mother of all the children of Æthelred. (See above, p. 688.) According to the Knytlinga Saga (Johnstone, 129), Emma was in England at the moment of Æthelred’s death, upon which she prepared to leave the country, but Cnut persuaded her to stay and marry him. The war of Cnut and Eadmund is therefore, according to this view, war between a stepfather and a stepson. I need not go about to show that Eadmund was not the son of Emma, and it is equally certain that Cnut did not marry Emma till July 1017, eight months after the death of Eadmund, and that she was in Normandy at the time of Cnut’s proposal. But that she was in England at the time of Æthelred’s death (as is distinctly affirmed by R. Howden, ii. 240), and that Cnut saw her during the course of the war, is quite possible. See above, p. 700. As to her coming to England, there is something amusing in the form of words employed, with some slight variations, by all the English Chroniclers; “And þa toforan Kal. Augusti het se cyng feccean him þæs oðres kynges lafe Æðelredes him to wife, Ricardes dohtor.” She signs Cnut’s charters from this time, beginning in 1018, sometimes as Emma, but more commonly as Ælfgifu. In Cod. Dipl. iv. 9 she is “Ælfgive thoro consecrata regio.”

According to William of Malmesbury (ii. 196), Emma not only hated the memory of Æthelred, which is not very wonderful, but extended her dislike to her children by him; “hæreditario scilicet odio parentis in prolem, nam magis Cnutonem et amaverat vivum et laudabat defunctum.” This account receives a most singular confirmation from the language of her Encomiast, from which it is plain that she wished her first marriage to be utterly forgotten. Not a hint is allowed to escape the courtly panegyrist which might imply that Emma had any earlier connexion with England, or that she had ever been married to Æthelred or to any other man. Cnut, after he had established himself in England and had got rid of Eadric (“omnibus rite dispositis,” ii. 16, cf. c. 15), wanted a wife worthy to be the partner of his Empire (“ut inventam hanc legaliter adquireret et adeptam Imperii sui consortem faceret”). He sends and seeks through many kingdoms and cities, but no help-meet for him is found (“longe lateque quæsita, vix tandem digna reperitur”). At last the Imperial bride is found (“inventa est hæc Imperialis sponsa”) in Normandy; Cnut, we are told, specially preferred the Norman connexion, because the Normans were a victorious people who had established themselves in Gaul by force of arms (“pro hoc præcipue quod erat oriunda ex victrici gente, quæ sibi partem Galliæ vendicaverat invitis Francigenis et eorum principe”). An opportunity is of course seized on for a special “encomium” on the lady herself. Deputy-wooers (“proci”) are sent with gifts and promises; but the prudent Emma, hearing that Cnut had children by another woman, will have nothing to say to him till he swears that none but her own children shall succeed him in the kingdom; “Abnegat illa se umquam Chnutonis sponsam fieri, nisi illi jusjurando affirmaret, quod numquam alterius conjugis filium post se regnare faceret nisi ejus, si forte illi Deus ex eo filium dedisset. Dicebatur enim ab alia quadam rex filios habuisse, unde illa suis prudenter providens, scivit ipsis sagaci animo profutura præordinare.” Cnut agrees, and on these terms they marry. But, by a nearly unparalleled flight of daring (but compare the way in which Matilda is spoken of. See vol. iii. p. 655), the widow of Æthelred, the mother of Eadward, Ælfred, and Godgifu, is twice spoken of as a virgin; “Placuit ergo regi verbum virginis, et jusjurando facto virgini placuit voluntas regis.” Presently (c. 18) we hear of the birth of Harthacnut; and we are told that Cnut kept Harthacnut with him as the heir of his throne, while his other lawful sons were sent into Normandy for education (“alios liberales filios educandos direxerunt Normanniæ, istum hunc retinentes sibi utpote futurum hæredem regni”). Now we know that Cnut and Emma had no son except Harthacnut, and by comparing this passage with a later one (iii. 2) it is plain that the sons spoken of are Eadward and Ælfred, and that the intention of the writer is to pass them off as younger sons of Cnut and Emma. A more impudent case of courtly falsehood can hardly be found; but these daring statements of her contemporary flatterer show how little Emma loved either her elder sons or the memory of their father.

NOTE CCC. p. 414.
The Family of Leofwine of Mercia.

Of Leofwine himself, as far as I know, no single political action is recorded. But the important part played by his son Leofric and his children naturally awakens a certain interest in the whole family. Our curiosity as to their earlier history would be amply gratified if we could put any trust in a document which is printed in the Monasticon, iii. 192, and which is drawn out in a tabular shape by Sir Francis Palgrave, English Commonwealth, ii. ccxci. This is a complete pedigree of the family, which is attached to one of the manuscripts of Florence, but which its contents show to be not earlier than the reign of John. According to this document, Leofwine was the son of Leofric, the son of Ælfgar, the son of Ælfgar, the son of Leofric, who is placed in the days of Æthelbald of Mercia (716–757; see p. 38). Our Leofwine is made contemporary with Æthelstan, Eadmund, Eadwig, and Eadgar. Now Agêsilaos was the son of Archidamos, and Lewis the Twelfth was the son of the Duke of Orleans who was taken at Azincourt; still it would be amazing if a man who was not only born, but seemingly an Ealdorman, between 926 and 940 was succeeded by a son who himself lived till 1057, and whose widow, seemingly much of his own age, survived the Norman Conquest. Leofric also himself, the famous Earl of the days of Eadward, is made to flourish and to found monasteries for a space of about eighty-two years. He is described as “nobilis fundator multorum cœnobiorum, tempore Edwardi secundi, Ethelredi, Cnutonis, Haroldi, Hardicanuti, et Edwardi tertii regum Angliæ.” Such a document is self-convicted. It is simply of a piece with the wonderful stories of Harold and Gyrth surviving to a præternatural age.

We shall, as usual, come nearer to the truth by turning to the charters. We find a signature of “Leofwine dux” in 994 (Cod. Dipl. iii. 280), from which time his signatures, if they are all those of the same person, go on through the reign of Æthelred and into the reign of Cnut. From one signature in 997 (Cod. Dipl, iii. 304) he appears to have been Ealdorman of the Hwiccas (“Wicciarum provinciarum dux”), but as this charter is signed by two other Leofwines with the rank of thegn, it is of course possible that one of these may have been the Ealdorman of the days of Cnut. Considering the rarity of the name Northman, borne by one of Leofwine’s sons, I should be inclined to look for the father of our Leofwine in a “Norðman dux” who signs in 994 (Cod. Dipl. iii. 280); only, if so, the father signs after the son.

Leofwine, as I hold, succeeded Eadric in the head earldom of Mercia in 1017, and he was most likely succeeded by his son Leofric at some time between 1024 and 1032. The last signature of Leofwine comes between 1021 and 1024 (Cod. Dipl. iv. 29), and he was living and acting in 1023 (see Cod. Dipl. iv. 26). The first undoubted signature of Leofric as “dux” is in 1032 (Cod. Dipl. iv. 39). He therefore succeeded his father in some earldom at some time between those dates, and he was clearly head Earl of the Mercians in 1035 (see p. 482). The natural inference is that it was in the head earldom of the Mercians that he succeeded his father, and therefore that Leofwine, hitherto subordinate Ealdorman of the Hwiccas, was raised to the chief government of all Mercia when that post became vacant by the death of Eadric.

Florence, under 1017, in recording the execution of Northman, gives him the title of “dux” and calls him “filius Leofwini ducis, frater scilicet Leofrici comitis.” This distinction between “dux” and “comes” is unusual. I can only guess that it means that Leofwine and Northman had borne the title of Ealdorman under the old state of things, while Leofric was only Eorl under the new. And that this is the ground of the distinction seems the more likely, because, in a case where the distinction was purely local, where the Chronicles in 991 call Thored Eorl and Ælfric Ealdorman (see p. 279), Florence puts them together as duces. The Chronicles however do not mention Northman as an Ealdorman, but rather imply the contrary; “On þisum geare wæs Eadric ealdorman ofslagen, and Norðman Leofwines sunu ealdormannes.” Florence goes on to say that Leofric succeeded Northman in his government; “Leofricum, pro Nortmanno suo germano, rex constituit ducem, et eum postmodum valde carum habuit.” But I find no certain signature of Leofric as “dux” till 1032. His signature with that title is indeed put to the document in Cod. Dipl. iv. 32 which professes to belong to 1026, but of the doubtful nature of that document I have already spoken (see above, p. 667). But in 1023 (Cod. Dipl. iv. 27) he signs as “minister” a grant of Cnut to another man of his own name, Leofric son of Bonda; and in the last charter signed by Earl Leofwine his son seems to be pointedly distinguished from him, “Ego Leofwine dux. Ego Leofric.” I therefore cannot help suspecting that he did not become an Earl till his father’s death, and that Florence forestalled his appointment by confounding it with the elevation of his father. If he was appointed to a subordinate earldom in 1017, it was most likely that of Chester; at least he figures in later and spurious documents as “Leycestriæ comes.”

Besides Northman and Leofric, Leofwine had a son named Eadwine who died in the battle of Rhyd-y-Groes (see p. 506), and another son Godwine. Godwine had a son Æthelwine, who was given, probably as a child, as a hostage to Cnut, and had his hands cut off (“a Danis obses manibus truncatus est”) in the mutilation of the hostages in 1014 (see p. 371). This curious fact we learn from Heming’s Worcester Cartulary, 259, 260.

The relations of Cnut towards this family are singular. The father and one of his sons are high in his favour. A second son is put to death, and the son of a third son is cruelly mutilated. The difference is, I suspect, to be found in the gradual change of Cnut’s own character.

NOTE DDD. p. 415.
The Death of Eadric.

The accounts of the death of Eadric form an excellent example of the growth of a legend. Each writer knows more about it than the one immediately before him.

The three elder Chronicles, under the year 1017, simply record the execution of Eadric; “On þisum geare wæs Eadric ealdorman ofslagen.”

The Canterbury Chronicler adds the place, London, and volunteers his own conviction that the execution was righteous; “Eadric ealdorman wearð ofslagan on Lundene swyðe rihtlice.”

Florence adds that the execution happened at Christmas, in the palace, and that the body of Eadric was thrown over the wall of the city, and left unburied. He also tells us Cnut’s motive, namely fear lest Eadric should some day betray him, as he had betrayed his former lords Æthelred and Eadmund.

William of Malmesbury (ii. 181) knows Eadric’s fate after death; “Putidum spiritum dimisit ad inferos.” He has also more to tell us than his predecessors about his last sayings and doings in this world. Cnut and Eadric quarrelled, he does not know about what; but Eadric began to go through all his services, and to tell, amongst other things, how he first forsook Eadmund and then slew him for Cnut’s sake. Cnut waxes wroth, and says that Eadric must die, because he has slain his own lord and Cnut’s sworn brother. His blood shall be on his own head, because he has borne witness against himself that he has slain the Lord’s anointed. For fear of a tumult the King has Eadric at once stifled to death (“fauces elisus”) in the room where they were, namely Cnut’s own bed-chamber, and has the body thrown through the window into the Thames.

Henry of Huntingdon (M. H. B. 756 E) makes Eadric come to Cnut directly after the murder of Eadmund and salute him as sole King. Cnut asks the meaning of the title, which Eadric explains, saying how he has brought about Eadmund’s death. Cnut answers that for so great a service he will set him higher than all the Witan of England. So he cuts off his head, and sets it on a pole on the highest tower in London.

Æthelred of Rievaux (X Scriptt. 365) has the same story with a few verbal changes. He sets the head on the highest gate of London. The gate and the tower may or may not be the same thing, but we have now clearly come to the beginning of the practice of exposing heads on Temple-Bar.

Walter Map (De Nugis, 207), who never names Eadric, tells nearly the same story of the anonymous servant of Eadmund of whom he has so much to tell us. After Eadmund’s death at Ross, the servant hastens to Cnut and tells him that he is now full King instead of half-King (“rex integer qui semirex heri fuisti”), and begs him to reward the man who had removed his enemy. Cnut (“licet tristissimus, placido vultu retulit”) asks who his friend is, as he will set him high above all his comrades (“faciam eum præcelsum præ consortibus suis”). The servant says it is himself, on which the King has him hanged on a lofty oak, a kind of death which looks as if Walter Map did not place the story in London.

Roger of Wendover (i. 460) tells William of Malmesbury’s story, only adding the subject of dispute between Cnut and Eadric, which William of Malmesbury could not tell us. Eadric complained of being deprived of his earldom of Mercia, a singular complaint, as Cnut had only that year confirmed him in it. He also tells Henry of Huntingdon’s story as an alternative.

Bromton (X Scriptt. 908) gives both versions with slight improvements on each. William’s version is enriched by the detail that Eadric’s hands and feet were tied when he was thrown out of the window. This was the mode of his death, for in this version we do not hear of his being stifled. To the other story the only addition is that, when his head was set on the gate, his body was thrown over the wall.

Lastly, Knighton (X Scriptt. 2318) follows William, but gives us Eadric’s speech at greater length and tells us that it was made before dinner. Also we now hear that he was thrown into the Thames from the window of a high tower; his hands and feet were tied, and he was thrown out by a machine—a sling or catapult.

These English versions seem to form a series of themselves, and to grow without foreign help. But in the Encomium Emmæ (ii. 15) we have a version older than any of these except perhaps that of the Chronicles, which shows how the intentional or careless perversion of a contemporary writer may depart as widely from the truth as any feat of the imagination of legend-makers. The Encomiast, as we have seen (see above, p. 711), leaves the death of Eadmund shrouded in mystery, and does not say a word implicating Eadric; he also leaves out Eadric’s appointment to the earldom of Mercia, because his object is to represent Cnut as immediately punishing all who had dealt in any way treacherously towards Eadmund. Eadric is therefore made to demand a reward for his treachery at Assandun (“Edricus qui a bello fugerat, quum prœmia pro hoc ipso a rege postularet, acsi hoc pro ejus victoria fecisset”). Cnut says that he who had been faithless to one lord will not be faithful to another, and he accordingly bids Earl Eric to cut off his head with his axe. “Ille vero nil moratus bipennem extulit, eique ictu valido caput amputavit, ut hoc exemplo discant milites regibus suis esse fideles, non infideles.”

In the English series the turning-point is when, in the version of William of Malmesbury, there comes in the first allusion to the Amalekite who slew Saul. When this parallel was once thought of, the true date of Eadric’s execution, namely the thirteenth month after Eadmund’s death, no longer suited the tale; the date of the story was therefore moved back, and Eadric was made to announce the murder of Eadmund and to be put to death at once. For the details, the writers at each stage of course drew on their imaginations.

NOTE EEE. p. 422.
The Exploits and Marriage of Godwine.

I copy this tale from Henry of Huntingdon (M. H. B. 757 B) in the belief that, though its details are most likely mythical, Godwine really rose higher in Cnut’s favour through some conspicuous warlike exploit during Cnut’s visit to Denmark in 1019. The Biographer of Eadward (392) distinctly asserts as much, and he makes both Godwine’s marriage with Gytha and his promotion to the West-Saxon earldom to be the rewards of the qualities which he showed on this journey. Cnut goes to Denmark to subdue certain rebels; “absenti enim rebellare paraverant collo effreni ejus abjicientes potentiam.” This may refer either to disturbances in Denmark itself, of which we get some slight hints elsewhere (see Note GGG, and above, p. 669), or to revolts on the parts of subject nations. Godwine goes with him—“adhæsit comes individuus per omnem viam.” Cnut remarks Godwine’s great qualities, not only his eloquence (“quam profundus eloquio”) but his military capacity; “Hic ejus prudentiam, hic laborum constantiam, hic virtutis militiam, hic attentius expertus est idem rex tanti principis valentiam.” He feels that such a man will be most useful to him in the government of his newly won kingdom of England. He therefore admits him to his most secret counsels and gives him his sister in marriage (“ponit eum sibi a secretis, dans illi in conjugem sororem suam”), and on his return to England he gives him the great promotion of which I have spoken in an earlier Note (see above, p. 731). If then Henry of Huntingdon’s tale of Godwine’s Northern exploit be historical, it must belong to this year, and it seems quite to fall in with the brief hints of the Biographer. He places it in the year 1019; “Tertio anno regni sui ivit in Daciam, ducens exercitum Anglorum et Dacorum in Wandalos.” He then tells the story, and adds, “Quamobrem summo honore deinceps Anglos habuit nec minori quam Dacos.” William of Malmesbury, however (ii. 181), transfers the story to the Swedish war of 1025, waged against Ulf and Eglaf. Cnut wins a victory mainly through the valour of Godwine and the English; “Promptissimis in ea pugna Anglis, hortante Godwino comite ut, pristinæ gloriæ memores, robur suum oculis novi domini assererent.” No details are given; but the English by their valour win fame for themselves and an earldom for their captain; “Angli ... victoriam consummantes comitatum duci, sibi laudem pararunt.” Roger of Wendover (i. 466) also transfers the story to the Swedish war. He tells the tale much as it is told in Henry of Huntingdon, adding, that Godwine took Ulf and Eglaf prisoners. He says nothing about any special reward to Godwine, but of the English in general he says, “ob hanc caussam Cnuto deinceps Anglos summo honore venerans, cum læta victoria ad Angliam navigavit.” But this version is clearly wrong, for in the Swedish war of 1025 Cnut was defeated (see p. 454, and Note MMM); but William of Malmesbury’s statement, that Godwine, already an Earl, received an earldom as the reward of his conduct in this war, is evidently the true version of Godwine’s appointment to the West-Saxon earldom moved to a wrong year.

The Biographer, as we have seen, distinctly makes Godwine’s marriage as well as his promotion to be part of his reward for his exploits in 1019. He marries him to a sister of Cnut himself, but most of the other authorities make Godwine’s wife Gytha to be the sister of Ulf and daughter of Thorgils Sprakaleg—the same epithet as the Homeric πόδας ὠκύς. So Florence (1049), Adam of Bremen (ii. 52—“dedit ejus Wolf sororem copulatam altero duci Guduino”), and Snorro (Laing, ii. 252). The Knytlinga Saga also (c. 11; Johnstone, 133), as we have seen (see above, p. 725), marries Godwine to Ulf’s sister, but seemingly at an earlier time. The words of Saxo (196) are not very clear; “Benevolentiam enim quam Canutus perfidis Ulvonis meritis denegavit, consanguineæ sibi prolis respectui tribuendam putavit. Quinetiam sororem Anglorum satrapæ Godewino nuptiis junxit, gentem genti animis atque affinitate conserere cupiens.” I used to think that this meant that Cnut gave Godwine Ulf’s sister, but it now strikes me that it rather means Cnut’s own sister. The marriage or alleged marriage of Godwine with the sister of Cnut forms the subject of a legend which is found in more than one English writer. Its fullest form is to be found in Walter Map (207). In this version, as soon as Eadmund’s servant (see above, pp. 713, 741) had announced the murder of his master to Cnut and had received his fitting reward, Cnut and his Danes are guilty of all kinds of oppressions and outrages in England. Godwine, having failed to persuade Cnut to act otherwise, revolts against him (“quod Godwinus Chnuto cum multis afferens lacrimis, ad nullam exauditus est populi sui liberationem, et factus est pietate suorum impius et immitis regis Dacorum hostis, restititque regiæ potestati viriliter, et in plurimis eum ipsi dicunt prævaluisse congressibus, pacem semper Anglicis et libertatem exorans”). Cnut, unable to overcome Godwine, makes a feigned reconciliation with him (“facti sunt amici superficie tenus, et libertas Angliæ restituta”). Cnut still goes on laying various plots against Godwine, and at last tells him that he wishes to send him into Denmark to settle things there. As his credentials, the King will give him a letter to his sister, who will presently call together the chief men of Denmark to receive Godwine’s commands. When he is going to sail, his chaplain Brand (“consilio Brandi capellani sui, quem optimum sciebat in subtilibus artificem”)—can this be meant for the Brand who was chosen Abbot of Peterborough late in 1066? (see vol. iii. p. 529; v. p. 224)—counsels him to open the letter; he does so, and finds that it contains an order for the Danes to put him to death (“non enim sum ipso superstite rex unicus Anglorum et Daciæ”). One expression in the alleged letter is singular (“quod comes Godwinus ... extorsit a me tam dolose quam violenter Daciæ regimen per triennium”). Godwine of course substitutes a forged letter, in which he is invested with the regency of Denmark and is promised the King’s sister in marriage. The description which Godwine is made to give of himself is strange enough. He is “Eboracensium comes, dominusque Lincolniæ, Notingam, Leicestriæ, Cestriæ, Huntendunæ, Northamtunæ, Gloucestriæ, quique nobis diu restitit Herefordiæ.” That is to say, Godwine is described as Earl of exactly those parts of England of which he never was Earl; things are turned about in much the same way as they are turned about by the same writer in his account of the division of the kingdom between Cnut and Eadmund (see above, p. 706). Yet the imaginary warfare of Godwine after the death of Eadmund may well be a confused remembrance of real warfare before the death of Eadmund, and one would like to know something about the alleged resistance of Hereford to Cnut, a point on which Walter Map might certainly preserve a genuine tradition. The story here breaks off; but in the romantic Life of Harold (Chroniques Anglo-Normandes, 153, 154) the tale goes on to its natural end. The letter is opened, and another is put in its place, by which the Danes are ordered to receive Godwine as regent, and to give him the King’s sister in marriage. All this is accordingly done, and Cnut then puts the best face upon the matter; he receives Godwine as a brother and gives him the rank of “consul” or Earl. The same story is alluded to in the Chronicle of Ralph the Black (160), who in his account of Godwine (see above, p. 725) tells us how “in Daciam cum breve regis transmissus callide duxit sororem Cnutonis.” The same story is told by Saxo (194) of the way in which Ulf obtained his own wife Estrith. We can further compare the stories of Bellerophontês, Uriah—an analogy which does not fail to present itself to the mind of Harold’s biographer—the messenger of Pausanias in Thucydides (i. 132), and the letter given by King Philip of Swabia to Otto of Wittelsbach, Chronicon Slavorum, vii. 14.

In weighing these counter-statements, there is no doubt that, for anything personal to Godwine, the Biographer’s authority is the highest of any. But his authority will hardly bear up against so many opposite witnesses, especially against the distinct, though implied, statement of Florence (1049). Earl Swegen is there described as “Godwini comitis et Gythæ filius,” and directly afterwards we read of “Beorn comes, filius avunculi sui Danici comitis Ulfi ... ac frater Suani Danorum regis.” Florence himself indeed goes wrong when in a later passage (1067, and again in the Genealogia, vol. i. p. 275) he calls Gytha “soror Suani regis Danorum;” but this is a slip between Swegen Estrithson’s aunt and his sister, and in no way brings Gytha nearer to Cnut. If Gytha had really been Cnut’s sister, it is inconceivable that any one would have turned her, especially in the elaborate and formal way in which it is done by Florence and Adam, into a sister of Ulf. But a sister of the King’s brother-in-law might be much more easily mistaken for the King’s own sister; perhaps she might be laxly called so. But in any case I accept the statements as to the parentage of Godwine’s wife as alternative statements, and I do not admit that Godwine married twice. It seems to me that, when Ulf’s sister had been mistaken for Cnut’s sister, and when two statements had thus arisen about her, the next stage was to cut her into two separate women. Thus William of Malmesbury (ii. 200) marries Godwine, first to a sister of Cnut, who bears one nameless son, and then to a nameless woman, who was the mother of his historical children. This is clearly an attempt to reconcile the statement that Godwine married Cnut’s sister with the fact that Godwine’s children are never spoken of as in any way of kin to Cnut. William’s account of Godwine’s first wife is an excellent specimen of Norman calumny. She gets great wealth by selling English slaves, especially beautiful girls, into Denmark. Her son, while still a boy, is drowned in the Thames, being carried into the stream by a horse given him by his grandfather—Swegen, Wulfnoth, or whom?—and she herself is killed by lightning for her misdeeds. Mr. Thorpe (Diplomatarium, 312) seemingly accepts this tale, as he takes the marriage settlement of a certain Godwine (Cod. Dipl. iv. 10), containing the names of three other Godwines, all alike unknown, to be a record of the imaginary second marriage of the great Earl. Bromton (934) and Knighton (2333) tell William’s story with improvements, making, with a fine perception of dates and ages, Godwine’s first wife to be a daughter of Cnut by Ælfgifu of Northampton. See above, p. 734.

I have no doubt that Godwine had but one wife, Gytha, daughter of Thorgils, sister of Ulf, and aunt of Swegen Estrithson, and that all his sons and daughters were her children.

NOTE FFF. p. 430.
Wyrtgeorn King of the Wends.

I cannot pretend to any special knowledge of Slavonic history, and I must confess that I am quite unable to identify this King Wyrtgeorn. There was however a very eminent Slavonic prince at this time, who was closely connected with Cnut, and who spent some time with him in England. I do not know whether the two can anyhow be the same, or whether there has been any confusion between them.

The person I mean is Godescalc the son of Uto or Pribignew the Obotrite, a Wendish prince whose exploits will be found recorded in the Chronica Sclavica, ap. Lindenbrog, capp. 13, 14 (Hamburg, 1706), in Helmold’s Chronicon Slavorum, i. 19–25 (Frankfurt, 1581), in three notices of Saxo, pp. 196, 204, 208, and in a variety of passages of Adam of Bremen, ii. 64, 75; iii. 18, 21, 45, 50, 70. In his youth he was sent as a student to Lüneburg, but, hearing of his father’s death at the hands of the neighbouring Saxons, he gave over his studies, renounced his faith, put himself at the head of his heathen countrymen, and carried on a fierce war with the Saxons of Holstein and Stormaria. The freemen of Thetmarsen alone withstood him. He was then brought to a better mind by a rebuke received from a Christian, which has a somewhat legendary sound. He was soon afterwards taken prisoner by Bernhard the Second, Duke of the Saxons (1010–1062), who after a while released him, seemingly on condition that he should leave the country. He then joined himself to Cnut, entered his service, seemingly as an officer of the Housecarls, served in his wars, and, according to the national Chronicle, was rewarded with the hand of his daughter—no doubt a mistake for sister—whose name is given as Demmyn. He was in England at the time of Cnut’s death. According to the Chronicle he then returned to his own country (“revertens ad patriam post mortem Kanuti,” c. 13), but according to Adam of Bremen (ii. 75) it was not till early in the reign of Eadward (“post mortem Chnut regis et filiorum ejus rediens ab Anglia”). In this case it is not unlikely (see vol. ii. p. 65) that he was banished from England. According to Saxo (20) he served some time under Swegen Estrithson in his war with Magnus, and married his natural daughter Siritha (Sigrid?). The two Swegens are clearly confounded, and Godescalc is much more likely to have married a daughter of the elder Swegen. But his main object was to win back his own inheritance, which after some fighting he regained, and devoted himself to the spread of Christianity among his countrymen. He not only built and endowed churches, but became personally a missionary, translating into the vulgar tongue what the clergy preached in Latin or German. He waged some wars in concert with Duke Bernhard, and his power seems to have been sensibly lessened after that prince’s death. At last, in 1066, he suffered martyrdom at the hands of his heathen subjects, at the instigation of his brother-in-law Blusso. With him suffered John, Bishop of Mecklenburg, who was sacrificed to the Slavonic god Radegast, and others of his companions, both clergy and laity. Godescalc’s wife, the Danish princess, was sent away naked; several of his sons were killed, but one, Henry, took refuge with his cousin Swegen in Denmark, and afterwards avenged his father’s death. On the death of Godescalc, the whole Wendish country fell back into heathenism.

The account of these things in the honest Nether-Dutch of Botho’s Picture Chronicle of Brunswick (Leibnitz, iii. 327) is worth reading. “In dussem sulven jare [1065, but the year of William’s coming to England] vorhoff sick ein grot mort van den Wenden, Gotschalckus wart dot geslagen binnen Lentzin, Answerus wart mit sinen moneken geschent binnen Rosseborge, bischopp Johannes to Mekelenborch de wart mit speten to hauwen in alle stucke, unde worpen sinen licham upp de strate in de goten, unde offerden sin hovet örem affgode Ridegaste. Des konighes dochter to Dennemarcke Gotschalckes wiff, de jageden se ut Mekelenborch naket mit anderen Cristen fruwen, se fenghen unde slogen de Cristen alle, unde to bespottinge se de crütze to hauweden, unde vorstorden gruntliken Hamborch, Sleswick, Mekelenborch unde Oldenborch dat se ane Bischopp stonden LXXX.”

Godescalc is so interesting a character that we should certainly be well pleased to connect him with England as closely as we can. But I do not know how far we are justified in making him the same as the Wyrtgeorn of Florence. There is also a single charter of 1026 (Cod. Dipl. iv. 33) which is signed (along with the Earls Godwine, Hakon, Hrani, and Sihtric) by an Earl Wrytesleof, whose name certainly has a very Slavonic sound.

NOTE GGG. p. 431.
The Death of Ulf.

Ulf, as we have seen, plays hardly any part in English history; there seems no doubt that he was put to death by order of Cnut, but the Danish and Norwegian accounts of his death differ very widely. According to Snorro’s Saga of Saint Olaf (Laing, ii. 244), Ulf had joined with Emma in a conspiracy to set Harthacnut on the throne of Denmark, of which kingdom Ulf had been left in command, as well as in charge of the kingly bairn. Cnut comes over into Denmark, and Ulf, finding himself forsaken of all men, asks for grace. This is just at the time of the joint Swedish and Norwegian invasion which led to the battle of the Helga. Cnut bids Ulf come with his men and ships, and they will talk of grace afterwards. Ulf joins the King’s muster and takes a part in the battle. Soon after, on Saint Michael’s Eve (252), Ulf entertains Cnut at Roskild. The Earl was in a good humour, and the King in a bad one. They quarrel over a game of chess, on which Ulf rises to leave the room. Cnut says, “Run away, Ulf the Fearful.” Ulf turns round and reminds him that he did not call him Ulf the Fearful when he himself ran away at the Helga and Ulf saved him. The next morning, as he is dressing, Cnut bids his page go and kill Ulf. The lad comes back, saying that he has not killed him because he has gone to the church of Saint Lucius. Cnut then bids his chamberlain Ivar the White go and kill him in the church, which was accordingly done, after which Cnut gives great wealth to the church of Roskild.

Saxo has quite another story. Ulf first (194) obtains Estrith in marriage by the stratagem which I have already mentioned. He then makes divers plots, takes refuge in Sweden, exhorts Olaf and Omund to an invasion of Denmark, and fights on their side at the Helga (195). Presently, on the birth of her son Swegen, Estrith obtains her husband’s pardon from her brother (196). Then in a feast at Roskild, seemingly at Christmas (“annuo feriarum circuitu repetito”), Ulf, being half drunk, something like Kleitos in the history of Alexander, enlarges on his own exploits, especially his exploits at the Helga against Cnut. He is therefore at once put to death, quite justly, according to Saxo’s declared opinion, though his language is so laboured that one might fancy that he had some doubts about it. He comments thus (197);

“Igitur Ulvo inter ipsa mensæ sacra ab adstantibus interfici jussus, præcipitis linguæ justa supplicia pependit. Ita dum aliena facta parum sobrie meminit, sua cecinit, siccatosque cupide calices proprii sanguinis liquore complevit. Merito enim ex tam petulanti ingenio amaritudinem potius quam voluptatem percipere debuit, quod gloriæ sibi loco arrogasset, ductu suo præcipuis regis viribus ultimam incessisse jacturam.”

Cnut then gives his sister two provinces as a sort of wérgild for her husband. She presently gives them, or a tithe of them, to the church of Roskild; “Quas eadem postmodum sacrosanctæ Trinitatis ædi, præcipua apud Roskildiam veneratione cultæ, decimarum nomine partiendas curavit.” See p. 472.

These stories, different as they are, have manifestly some elements in common. I do not pretend to decide between them. On Ulf’s presence at the Helga, see Note MMM.

NOTE HHH. p. 434.
The Pilgrimage of Cnut.

The disputed date of Cnut’s journey to Rome is discussed by Lappenberg (476, ii. 211 Thorpe). The Chronicles place it in 1031. So does Florence, who adds that he went from Denmark, and describes his alms and his redemption of the tolls by which pilgrims were troubled at various points of the road. He also mentions his vow of amendment before the tomb of the Apostles, and gives a copy of the letter, which he says was sent to England by Lyfing, then Abbot of Tavistock, afterwards the famous Bishop, who had gone with him on his journey. Cnut himself went from Rome to Denmark, and thence to England. In the heading of the letter, Cnut describes himself as “Rex totius Angliæ, et Denemarciæ, et Norreganorum, et partis Suanorum.” The account given by William of Malmesbury is essentially the same, with some abridgements and verbal differences. The description of Cnut as King of the Norwegians seems to point to a time later than his conquest of Norway in 1027. The Encomiast (ii. 20) enlarges with much rhetoric on Cnut’s piety, and says that he himself saw him on his journey in the church of Saint Bertin at Saint Omer’s, where he was much edified by the King’s prayers and almsdeeds. He gives no date, but he seems to imply (19) that it was after Cnut had gained a right to be called Emperor of five kingdoms (see Note NNN). But with so rhetorical a writer, this can hardly be taken as a distinct chronological statement, and it is certain that the complete submission of Scotland, which, as well as Norway, is reckoned among the five, did not happen till after Cnut’s return from Rome (see p. 450). Adam of Bremen (ii. 60–65) seems to put the pilgrimage in the time of Archbishop Libentius, that is, between 1029 and 1032; but I am not clear that its mention at this point is more than incidental, and, at all events, the chronology is confused, as Adam places the pilgrimage after the marriage of Henry and Gunhild, which did not take place till after Cnut’s death (see p. 455, and Note NNN). His description is very odd; “Tempore illo Conradus Imperator filiam Chnut regis Heinrico filio accepit in matrimonium. Cum quibus statim regio fastu Italiam ingressus est ad faciendam regno justitiam, comitem habens itineris Chnut regem, potentia trium regnorum barbaris gentibus valde terribilem.” Cnut himself, in the letter, mentions his dealings with the Pope, the Emperor, and King Rudolf of Burgundy, by which English and Danish travellers, whether pilgrims or merchants, were released from various tolls and exactions, and English Archbishops from the great sums that they had to pay for the pallium. This was at a great meeting at Easter (“quia magna congregatio nobilium in ipsa paschali solemnitate ibi cum domino papa Johanne et Imperatore Cuonrado erat”), at which the concessions made to Cnut were witnessed by four Archbishops, twenty Bishops, and a countless multitude of Dukes and nobles. This leads us to the account of Wipo (Vita Chuonradi, 16), from which it appears that this great gathering was for no less a purpose than the Emperor’s coronation, at which he distinctly says that Cnut and Rudolf were present. He describes the Emperor’s election and coronation, and adds, “His ita peractis in duorum regum præsentia, Ruodolfi regis Burgundiæ et Chnutonis regis Anglorum, divino officio finito, Imperator duorum regum medius ad cubiculum suum honorifice ductus est.” But there is no doubt that the coronation of Conrad happened at the Easter not of 1031, but of 1027.

The Tours Chronicle, in Bouquet, x. 284, places the journey “anno Conradi II. et Roberti Regis XXX.” The thirtieth year of Robert, counting from his father’s death in 996, would be 1026 or 1027. The second year of Conrad means, oddly enough, neither the second year of his German reign, which would be 1025 (see Wipo, c. 2), nor that of his Imperial reign, which would be 1028, but the second year of his Italian reign, which would be 1027, as he was crowned at Milan in 1026. See Arnulf, Hist. Med. ii. 2, ap. Muratori, iv. 14; Sigonius de Regno Italiæ, 354; and cf. Wipo, capp. 11, 12. But the Aquitanian William Godell, who gives the account in nearly the same words as the Tours Chronicle, places it “anno Domini MXXX. et regni sui [Cnutonis] anno XV.” They go on to say, “Fortissimus rex Cnuto Romam perrexit, in eoque itinere tanta munificentia usus est, quanta nullus unquam regum usus fuisse reminiscitur. Ecclesiis enim, pauperibus et infirmantibus et carceratis multa largitus est. Vectigalia insuper sive pedagia itinerum, in ipso itinere aurum et argentum largiendo, vel ex parte minuit, vel ex toto redemit; ut merito transeuntes deinceps per viam illam in æternum dicant: Benedictio Domini super regem Anglorum Cnutonem, benediximus tibi in nomine Domini.”

It seems impossible to withstand this evidence for the year 1027, a year which the Chronicles leave quite blank, and in which Florence mentions only Cnut’s intrigues in Norway, which is quite consistent with a journey from Denmark to Rome. We must therefore accept the date of 1027, and suppose with Lappenberg that the Chroniclers were misled by mistaking a date of MXXVI. for MXXXI., and that the titles in Florence and William of Malmesbury are simply a careless insertion of Florence himself or of some one from whom he copied the letter.

It is worth noticing that though the kingdom of Burgundy was now in its last days, Cnut speaks of Rudolf as a prince of importance through his command of the passes of the Alps; “Rodulphus rex, qui maxime ipsarum clausurarum dominatur.”

NOTE III. p. 434.
The Laws of Cnut.

Cnut’s code will be found in Thorpe’s Laws and Institutes (i. 358) and in Schmid’s Gesetze der Angelsachsen (250). The exact date is uncertain. The heading itself tells us only that the laws were enacted by the authority of the Witan (“mid his witena geþeahte,” “venerando ejus sapientum consilio”) in a midwinter Gemót at Winchester. Kemble (ii. 259) refers them to some Gemót between 1016 and 1020. Lappenberg (467, ii. 202 Thorpe) argues, from the fact that Cnut in the heading calls himself King of the Norwegians, and also from the mention of Peter’s pence (c. 9. about “Romfeoh.” Cf. in the letter “denarii quos Romæ ad sanctum Petrum debemus”), that they must be later than the pilgrimage to Rome and the conquest of Norway, that is later than 1028. Schmid in his Preface (lv.), on the ground that Cnut never uses his Danish or Norwegian titles in his English charters, looks on them as an interpolation here. The Norwegian title is absent in one manuscript, and Schmid also quotes a text which contains the words, “And þæt was gewordon sóna swá Cnut cyngc, mid his witena geþeaht, frið and freóndscipe betweox Denum and Englum fullice gefæstnode and heora ǽrran saca getwǽmde.” He therefore holds that the midwinter Gemót spoken of in the heading was one which immediately followed the Oxford Gemót of 1018 (see p. 419). I follow Lappenberg in placing the laws late in Cnut’s reign, because they seem to me to breathe the spirit of that part of his life, the same spirit which we find expressed in the Roman letter. It strikes me that the scribe quoted by Schmid confounded these laws with the renewal of Eadgar’s Law, from which they are evidently distinct.

The hunting code to which I have referred in p. 436 seems to me to carry its own confutation with it. What can be made of such a division of society as we find there? (Thorpe, i. 426; Schmid, 318). First we hear (c. 2) of “mediocres homines, quos Angli ‘les þegenes’ (or ‘læs-þegnas,’ see Schmid’s note) nuncupant, Dani vero ‘yoongmen vocant;’” then (c. 3) of “liberales quos Dani (sic) ‘ealdermen’ appellant;” then (c. 4) of “minuti homines quos ‘tineman’ Angli dicunt;” lastly (c. 12) of “liberalis homo, i. e. þegen.” Schmid (lvi.) seems by no means clear of its genuineness. Kemble however (ii. 80) seems to have no doubt, and he conjectures that the clause (c. 30) in which the right of every freeman to hunt on his own ground is asserted as strongly as it is in the undoubted laws was forced upon Cnut by the Witan. This is going rather far in the way of conjecture.

After reading Cnut’s laws, and comparing them with the testimonies already quoted from Florence and William of Malmesbury (see p. 437, cf. 441), the following declamation of John of Wallingford (Gale, 549) seems strange indeed; “Successitque ei [Eadmundo] ex prædictæ concordiæ conditione Cnuto Danus et hostis potius Anglorum quam regnator, immutavitque statim statuta et leges scriptas patriæ, et consuetudines, et populum, qui sub omni honore et libertate tempore suorum regum exstiterat, sub gravi jugo coëgit, nihilque de Ælfredi boni regis et justi, qui ab undique bonas consuetudines collegerat et scripserat, audire noluit statutis. Sed et omnia quæ vel ipse vel successores legitime sanxerant, ad suam studuit reducere voluntatem. Sicque factum, ut prædia et possessiones et antiqua præclarorum virorum tenementa suæ adscriberet ditioni. Porro quot et quanta sub pallio ejus protectionis facta fuerint injusta, non est scriptura quæ possit explicare.”

NOTE KKK. p. 444.
The Housecarls.

There is no distinct mention in the Chronicles of the institution of the Thingmen or Housecarls, nor does their name occur in any of the English Laws, but the incidental mention of them by the name of Housecarls, or by the equivalent name of Hiredmen (familiares, members of the hired, court or family), is common in the Chronicles, while grants to housecarls and signatures of housecarls are common in the Charters, and they are mentioned several times in Domesday. The subject is discussed by Lappenberg (467, i. 202 Thorpe), and by Kemble (ii. 118, 124), to whom I owe the remark that the institution was only a revival of the comitatus. The “Leges Castrenses” or “Witherlags Ret” are described at length by Saxo (p. 197), and they are drawn out in a tabular form in a separate work by Swegen Aggesson (ap. Langebek, iii. 141). A Danish text follows at p. 159. This however dates only from the reign of Cnut the Sixth, who reigned from 1185 to 1202. In the Chronicle of King Eric (Langebek, i. 159) they are, by a somewhat grotesque mistake, attributed, with several other actions of the great Cnut, to his son Harthacnut. It is not easy to make out from the confused narrative of Saxo when he conceived the force to have been established. According to Swegen (146), the laws were enacted in England after the settlement of the country (“quum in Anglia, omni exercitu suo collecto, Kanutus rex defessa bellicis operibus membra quietis tranquillitate recrearet”) by the advice of Opo, a Dane from Zealand, who is also mentioned by Saxo (197), and his son Eskill. I think that there is little doubt that the date which I have suggested in the text must be the right one. Lappenberg also places the enactment of the “Witherlags Ret” early in Cnut’s reign.

The force was made up of men of all nations. So says Swegen (145); “Tanti regis exercitus, utpote ex variis collectus nationibus, universis videlicet regnis ditioni suæ subjugatis.” It is clear then that, among Cnut’s other subjects, Englishmen might find their way into the force. So Saxo, 197; “Quos quum rex natione, linguis, ingeniis, quam maxime dissidentes animadverteret.” Saxo (196) fixes the number at six thousand; he calls them “clientelam suam sex millium numerum explentem.” (“Clientela,” as used by Saxo, is a technical word, and quite recalls the old comitatus.) But Swegen (144) reckons them only at three thousand; “Cujus summa, tria millia militum selectorum explevit. Quam catervam suo idiomate thinglith nuncupari placuit.” I know of no statement as to their numbers in later times, but the force was one which was likely to grow. The “stippendiarii et mercenarii” formed the core of the English army at Senlac, and we find Earls keeping housecarls as well as Kings.

That Cnut did lay down strict laws for the government of the force there is no reason to doubt; but I confess that in the Leges Castrenses, as we have them, there is much that has a mythical sound. Traitors for instance (Saxo, 199; Swegen, iii. 162) were expelled and declared to be “Nithing.” They had the choice of departing by land or by sea. He who chose the sea was put alone into a boat, with oars, food, &c.; but if any chance brought him to shore, he was put to death. This sounds to me very much of a piece with various mythical and romantic tales about people being exposed in boats, of which that of the Ætheling Eadwine in the reign of Æthelstan is the most famous (see above, p. 689). Then again, though no doubt, in Cnut’s army as in other armies, purely military offences would be judged by purely military tribunals, I confess to stumbling at one passage in the Witherlags Ret (Swegen, iii. 149), which sets before us the military assembly as judging among its own members even in causes of real property; “Constitutione etiam generali cautum est, ut omnis inter commilitones orta controversia de fundis prædiis, et agris, vel etiam de mansionis deprædatione ... in jam dicto colloquio agitaretur. Tum vero is, cui commilitonum judicium jus venditionis adjudicabit, cum sex sortitis in suo cœtu, ... territorii sui continuatam possessionem sibi vendicare debet, præscriptionemque lege assignata tuebitur.” If Cnut’s courts martial really exercised this kind of jurisdiction, it was a clear violation of the constitutional rights of Ealdormen, Bishops, earls, churls, everybody; still it need not have interfered with the personal rights of any but members of the guild. I confess however that I should like some better evidence of the fact. It is also rather too great a demand on our faith when we are told that these laws never were broken (save in one famous case) till the reign of Nicolas of Denmark (1101–1130), and when the authority cited for the statement is Bo or Boethius the Wend, an old soldier of Cnut who shared the longevity of the legendary Harold and Gyrth, and was alive in the time of Nicolas (Swegen, iii. 154, 163). The one offender in earlier times was Cnut himself, who in a fit of passion killed one of his comrades. The assembly was perplexed as to the way of dealing with such a culprit, and the King settled the matter by adjudging himself to a ninefold wérgild. Saxo, pp. 199, 200. So Swegen, somewhat differently, iii. 151.

There are strict regulations (see Swegen, iii. 147) about the horses of the Thingmen; but these were of course only horses on which they rode to battle (see p. 271), not horses to be used in actual fight.

As for the behaviour of the housecarls to the mass of the people and the feeling with which they were looked at by the mass of the people, we can say very little in the absence of any direct evidence. They were a standing army in days when a standing army was a new thing, and a standing army, as long as it is a new thing, is never a popular institution. And the housecarls at first were not only a standing army, but a standing army largely made up of foreigners and conquerors. Still everything both in the reign of Cnut and in the reign of Eadward would tend to make the force grow more and more national and popular. The time when it was likely to be abused, as we know that it was abused, was in the days of Cnut’s sons. Still, even under Harold the son of Godwine, we can perhaps discern a certain tinge of ill-will in the words “stippendiarii” and “mercenarii,” which seem to breathe the same spirit as the manifest dislike to Danegelds and heregelds, perhaps one might say to taxes of every kind. But I see no sign of any strong ill-will between the housecarls and the people at any time. I can find no evidence for the highly-coloured picture given by Mr. St. John (ii. 99) of their insolence in Cnut’s days, though it is likely enough that such things sometimes happened. But the reference which he gives to the Ramsey History (c. lxxxv. p. 441) is only a legend about Bishop Æthelric making a Danish thegn—married, by the way, to an Englishwoman—drunk, and so getting a grant of lands out of him. As for Bromton’s tales about Englishmen having to stand on bridges while the Danes passed, having to bow to the Danes, and the like (X Scriptt. 934), they prove very little indeed. They are parts of an historical confusion which I shall presently have to mention, and they seem to be placed in the time of Cnut’s sons rather than in that of Cnut himself.

One point more remains with regard to the relations of the housecarls to the people at large. Though there is no mention of the force in the genuine English laws, yet in the so-called Laws of Eadward the Confessor (Thorpe, i. 449) and in Bracton (iii. 15. 2, 3) the legal process of “Murdrum,” and in Bracton the Presentment of Englishry also, is traced up to the institutions of Cnut. When Cnut, we are told, sent away the mass of his Danish troops, at the request of the Witan (“rogatu baronum Anglorum,” “precatu baronum de terra”), the Witan pledged themselves that the rest should be safe in life and limb (“firmam pacem haberent”), and that any Englishman who killed any of them should suffer punishment. If the murderer could not be discovered, the township or hundred was fined. Out of this, we are told by Bracton, grew the doctrine, continued under the Norman Kings, that an unknown corpse was presumed to be that of a Frenchman—in Cnut’s time, doubtless, that of a Dane—and that the “Englishry” of a slain person had to be proved. The “Laws of Eadward” of course contain no notice of “Englishry” as opposed to Frenchry—if I may coin such a word; but neither do they mention it as opposed to Danishry. They simply record the promise of the Witan—not an unreasonable one—that Cnut’s soldiers should be under the protection of the law. This is likely enough; anything more is the mere carrying back of Norman institutions into earlier times. In the Dialogus de Scaccario (i. 10) there is no hint of the “Murdrum” and “Englishry” being older than the Norman Conquest. See vol. v. pp. 443, 444.

We shall as we go on come across many passages in which the housecarls both of the King and of the great Earls are spoken of. Among the charters of Eadward are several (Cod. Dipl. iv. 201, 204, 221, cf. 200) containing grants to the King’s housecarls. The three grantees spoken of are called Thurstan, Urk, and Wulfnoth—the last at all events being an Englishman, perhaps a kinsman of Godwine. The two latter writs are addressed to Earl Harold. In the oldest (201), a Middlesex writ, addressed to Bishop Robert, Osgod Clapa, and Ulf the Sheriff, Thurstan is described in the English copy as “Ðurstan min huskarll,” in the Latin as “præfectus meus palatinus Ðurstanus.” As Mr. Kemble says (ii. 123), such a description could not apply to every man in so large a body; so we may infer that Thurstan stood high in the service. There is also the will of Wulfwig, Bishop of Dorchester (Cod. Dipl. iv. 290), which is witnessed by a crowd of people, great and small, from the King and the Lady downwards, including some signatures of large bodies of men; “On eallra ðæs kynges húscarlan and on his mæsse-préostan ... and on eallra ðára burhwara gewitnesse on Lincolne and on eallra ðæra manna ðe seceað gearmorkett tó Stowe.” This immediately follows on the signatures of the Stallers Ansgar, Ralph, and Lyfing, from which Mr. Kemble (ii. 122) infers that the Stallers were the special commanders of the force. Housecarls are also mentioned several times in Domesday (see Ellis, i. 91; ii. 151; Kelham, 238), and in Simeon of Durham (Gest. Regg. 1071; see vol. iv. pp. 304, 513) we find a housecarl not only reckoned among the “principales viri” of Northumberland, but high in personal favour with William; “Eilaf huscarl apud regem præpollens honore.”

NOTE LLL. p. 448.
Cnut’s Relations with Scotland.

I. The authorities for the Battle of Carham are the Melrose Chronicle (in anno), and two entries of Simeon of Durham, one in his general History (Gest. Regg. in anno), the other in his History of the Church of Durham (iii. 5; ap. X Scriptt. 30). The Melrose writer (p. 155) simply says, “Ingens bellum inter Anglos et Scottos apud Carham geritur.” This entry seems an abridgement of that in Simeon’s Annals; “Ingens bellum apud Carrum gestum est inter Scottos et Anglos, inter Huctredum filium Waldef comitem Northymbrorum, et Malcolmum filium Cyneth regem Scottorum, cum quo fuit in bello Eugenius Calvus rex Lutinensium.” From neither of these accounts should we learn which side was victorious. But in the Durham History Simeon becomes explicit, if not exaggerated; “Universus a flumine Tesa usque Twedam populus, dum contra infinitam Scottorum multitudinem apud Carrum dimicaret, pene totus cum natu majoribus suis interiit.” In the Durham Annals (Pertz, xviii. 507) there is a further notice; “Fuit apud Carrum illud famosum bellum inter Northanhymbros et Scottos, ubi pene totus sancti Cuthberti populos interiit, inter quos etiam xviii sacerdotes, qui inconsulte se intermiscuerant bello; quo audito præscriptus episcopus dolorem et vitam morte finivit.” It is not clear whether this is the event referred to by Fordun (iv. 40), where he tells us that Duncan was sent by Malcolm to meet the Danes and Northumbrians (“qui tunc velut una gens coierant”), who were on their march to ravage Cumberland. He met them and defeated them with great slaughter. Fordun seems to place this before the death of Æthelred; in so confused a writer the chronological difficulty is of no great consequence; it is of more importance that a Northumbrian army, marching to invade any part of Cumberland, would hardly pass by Carham.

There are several points to be noticed here. First, the event of 1018, like the event of 1066, was ushered in by a comet which, though it is not mentioned by our national Chroniclers, seems to have deeply affected local imaginations. “Northanimbrorum populis,” says Simeon in his local work, “per xxx. noctes cometa apparuit, quæ terribili præsagio futuram provinciæ cladem præmonstravit. Siquidem paullo post, id est post triginta dies,” &c. Then follows the account of the battle.

Secondly, Simeon, accurate as he commonly is, has gone wrong—who could feel certain of not going wrong?—among the Earls of his own land. His Uhtred ought (see above, p. 587) to be Eadwulf. It was he, “ignavus valde et timidus,” who now, according to one view (see above, p. 585), ceded Lothian to the victorious Malcolm.

Thirdly, for “Lutinensium” in Simeon we should, according to Mr. Robertson (i. 99), read “Clutinensium.”

Fourthly, the extent of the district from which the English army came should be noticed. It came from the land between Tees and Tweed, that is from old Bernicia, without Lothian. This suggests the question why Lothian, if it was not ceded for the first time till after the battle, did not take a part in the war as well as the rest of the earldom.

Fifthly, the “natu majores” of Simeon are doubtless the “yldestan” of our English Chronicles. See p. 591, and below, p. 777. On this slaughter of the nobility, compare the same result at Assandun, p. 392.

II. With regard to Cnut’s later relations with Scotland, our own Chronicles contain no entries on Scottish affairs earlier than the great submission of 1031. So far as the sagas can be relied upon, they certainly represent Cnut as exercising lordship in Scotland at an earlier time. In Snorro’s Saga of Olaf Haraldsson (Laing, ii. 195) we read how Cnut “reigned over Denmark and England and had conquered for himself a great part of Scotland.” And again we read (Laing, ii. 196; Johnstone, 148), both in prose and verse, how two Kings came to Cnut from Scotland out of Fife, and how he received them to favour, restored their lands, and gave them fresh gifts (“til hans komo tveir konungar nordan af Skotlandi, af Fifi, oc gaf hann þeim upp reídi sína, oc lönd þau öll, er þeir höfdo ádr átt, oc þar med stórar vingiafir”). This is placed while Cnut is still only intriguing, and not yet fighting, against Olaf, that is, at some time before the battle of the Helga in 1025. This story may be merely a transfer to a wrong date of the submission of 1031, or it may be a record of some earlier submission. If the sagas are extremely confused in their chronology, our Chronicles are during this reign extremely meagre in their entries. The Knytlinga Saga also (c. 17; Johnstone, 144) not only makes Cnut subdue a large part of Scotland, but sets his son Harold over it as Under-king, as Swegen was in Norway and Harthacnut in Denmark (see below, p. 775). This seems to be put before the Roman pilgrimage, but the chronology is very confused. The Roman pilgrimage seems to be put after the conquest of Norway. And of a reign of Harold in Scotland nothing, as far as I know, is mentioned elsewhere.

There is also the account in Fordun (iv. 41) of Cnut’s relations with Cumberland, to which I have referred in the text (see p. 449). This story may be true in itself; but the prominence which is given to it certainly looks like an attempt to evade the fact of the submission of Scotland itself. Fordun places the Cumbrian expedition after the Roman pilgrimage, and that he places (iv. 40) in the eighth year of Conrad, meaning seemingly 1032. The refusal of Duncan to do homage is thus described; “Non enim hactenus Anglorum regi Cnutoni, quia regnum invaserat, pro Cumbria Duncanus, quamquam iterum et iterum ab eo submonitus, homagium fecerat, quia non inde sibi de jure, sed regibus Angligenis fidem deberi rex rescripsit.” Cnut then marches against him; that it was with the intention of incorporating Cumberland with the English kingdom, of dealing with the dominions of the recusant as being, in feudal language, a forfeited fief, I infer from the words “Cumbriam suo subdendam dominio pedetentim advenit.” The terms on which peace was finally made are thus described; “Ut regis [Scottorum sc.] nepos Duncanus Cumbriæ dominio libere, sicut predecessorum aliquis liberius tenuit, de cetero gaudeat in futurum, dum tamen ipse futurorumque regum hæredes qui pro tempore fuerint regi Cnutoni ceterisque suis successoribus Anglorum regibus fidem consuetam faciant.” There is nothing unlikely in all this, except perhaps in the extreme loyalty towards the house of Cerdic which is attributed to the Cumbrian Under-king; but we must always remember the strong tendency of Scottish writers to make too much rather than too little of the vassalage of Cumberland to England.

III. We now come to the undoubted submission of Scotland to Cnut in 1031, as recorded in our own Chronicles. I do not understand Mr. Burton (i. 368), when, after quoting Mr. Thorpe’s translation (ii. 128), which is certainly made up confusedly from the Worcester and Peterborough Chronicles, he says that “in only one of the four accepted versions of the original is there anything resembling this.” The Abingdon Chronicle is certainly silent, but Worcester and Peterborough both record the submission, though in different words, and Canterbury follows Peterborough. The Worcester entry runs thus; “Þa fór he [Cnut] to Scotlande, and Scotta cyng eode him on hand and wearð his mann; ac he þæt lytle hwile heold.” Peterborough says, “he [Cnut] for to Scotlande, and Scotta cyng him to beah Mælcolm, and twegen oðre cyningas, Mælbæþe and Iehmarc.” Mr. Robertson (i. 97, ii. 400) seems unable to identify Jehmarc. Mr. Skene (Celtic Scotland, i. 397) makes him the same as Imergi, from whom Somerled, who was killed in 1166, was fourth in descent, and places him in Airergaidhel or Argyll, the old Scottish land of Dalriada. His companion, “Mælbæþa,” “Mealbæaðe,” must be the same as the “Macbeoðe” of the Worcester Chronicle in 1054, that is the Machabæus of Fordun, the Macbeth of Shakespere. The words of the Worcester Chronicler, “ac he þæt lytle hwile heold,” may refer to Malcolm’s death soon after in 1033. Scotland soon fell into confusion, and before long England also.

The submission recorded by our two Chroniclers is not to be doubted; but I confess that I am not quite clear about the date. Both Chroniclers pointedly connect the Scottish expedition with Cnut’s return from Rome (“sona swa he ham com þa fór he to Scotlande,” Wig. “Þy ilcan geare he for to Scotlande,” Petrib.); so it is possible that the true date may be 1027 or 1028 instead of 1031.

Lastly, there is the curious account of Rudulf Glaber (ii. 2) which I have referred to in the text (see p. 450), and which comes in a passage which I shall have to refer to again. In the year 996 a whale as big as an island came out of the North towards Gaul and portended the troubles which were to come upon Gaul and Britain. In Britain especially there was frightful confusion; various Kings were striving and wasting the land, till in the end one got the better of them all; “Viso ... Oceani portento exorsus est bellicus tumultus in universali occidentali orbis plaga, videlicet tam in regionibus Galliarum quam in transmarinis Oceani insulis, Anglorum videlicet atque Brittonum necnon et Scotorum. Siquidem, ut plerumque solet contingere, propter delicta infimi populi, versi in dissensionem illorum reges ac cæteri principes, statimque exardescentes in subjectæ plebis depopulationem scilicet usque dum perducuntur ad suimet sanguinis effusionem. Quod videlicet tamdiu patratum est in prædictis insulis, quousque unus regum earumdem vi solus potiretur regiminis ceterarum.” This lucky King of course is Cnut, who is conceived to be King of the West-Saxons. He seizes the kingdom of Æthelred, who is conceived, it would seem, to be King of one of the British islands called Denmark. “Denique mortuo rege Adalrado, in regno scilicet illorum qui Danimarches cognominantur, qui etiam duxerat uxorem sororem Ricardi Rotomagorum ducis, invasit regnum illius rex videlicet Canuc Occidentalium Anglorum, qui etiam post crebra bellorum molimina ac patriæ depopulationes, pactum cum Ricardo stabiliens ejusque germanam, Adalradi videlicet uxorem, in matrimonium ducens, utriusque regni tenuit monarchiam.” It might be refining too much to hint that this wonderful turning about of the dominions of Cnut and Æthelred had anything to do with the strangely reversed state of geographical parties in 1015–1016 (see p. 377). Then follows the account of the Scottish expedition, as follows;

“Post hæc quoque idem Canuc cum plurimo exercitu egressus, ut subjugaret sibi gentem Scotorum, quorum videlicet rex Melculo vocabatur, viribus et armis validus et, quod potissimum erat, fide atque opere Christianissimus. Ut autem cognovit quoniam Canuc audacter illius quæreret invadere regnum, congregans omnem sui gentis exercitum, potenter ei ne valeret restitit. Ac diu multumque talibus procaciter Canuc inserviens jurgiis, ad postremum tantum prædicti Ricardi Rotomagorum ducis ejusque sororis persuasionibus, pro Dei amore, omni prorsus deposita feritate, mitis effectus, in pace deguit. Insuper etiam et Scotorum regem amicitiæ gratia diligens, illiusque filium de sacro baptismatis fonte excepit.” One does not quite see why either Emma or Duke Richard or Rudolf Glaber should be seized with such a sudden fit of interest in the affairs of Scotland. Still Rudolf’s account is less wonderful than that of a contemporary German writer, Ekkehard the historian of Saint Gallen, who boldly carries Cnut back into the tenth century, and sends Otto the Great over into England to fight against him (Pertz, ii. 119); “Ottone apud Anglos cum Adaltage, rege ipsorum, socero suo, aliquamdiu agente, ut junctis viribus Chnutonem Danorum debellaret regem.” Yet Ekkehard was born in 980 and died in 1036.

NOTE MMM. p. 454.
The Battle at the Helga.

This battle is not mentioned in the Abingdon and Worcester Chronicles. Peterborough, followed by Canterbury, places it in 1025. No enemies but Swedes are spoken of, and their commanders are called Ulf and Eglaf. “Þær comon ongean Ulf and Eglaf and swiðe mycel here, ægðer ge landhere ge sciphere of Swaðeode.” Many of Cnut’s men, both Danish and English, are killed, “and þa Sweon hæfdon weallstowe geweald.” As for the place of the battle, Cnut is said to go “to Denmearcon mid scipon to þam Holme æt ea þære halgan.” See Earle, Parallel Chronicles, p. 342; only I do not understand how the “Helge-Aa” could be “then the boundary between Sweden and the Danish possessions,” as the old frontier of Sweden and Scania lies some way to the north of that river.

Ulf and Eglaf are doubtless the sons of Rognvald and Ingebiorg, of whom Snorro speaks in the Saga of Saint Olaf, c. 95 (Laing, ii. 119). At any rate the Ulf spoken of cannot be Ulf the son of Thorgils and brother of Gytha (see above, Note FFF), nor can Eglaf be the Eglaf whom we have already heard of (see p. 447). But both Snorro in c. 159 (Laing, ii. 246) and Saxo (194, 195) agree in making no mention of the sons of Rognvald, and in making Cnut fight the battle against the two Kings Olaf of Norway and Omund of Sweden. They also agree in bringing in Ulf the son of Thorgils; only they bring him in in quite different characters. Saxo makes him a traitor who has invited the combined Swedish and Norwegian invasion, while Snorro makes him redeem former misdeeds by saving Cnut when in great danger. In the Annales Islandorum (Langebek, iii. 40) the date is given as 1027 and the death of Ulf Thorgilsson is placed in the same year.

We can hardly be wrong in accepting the presence of Omund and Olaf on the combined witness of all the Scandinavian writers. But the two Ulfs and Eglaf are puzzling. It has sometimes struck me that “Ulf and Eglaf” in our Chroniclers may be a mistake for “Ulf and Olaf,” taking of course Saxo’s view of the conduct of Ulf Thorgilsson. The Peterborough writer might very easily get wrong in his Ulfs, but he was hardly likely to mistake Saint Olaf, whose history he knew very well, for a man of such small renown as Eglaf Rognvaldsson.

It must not be forgotten that it is to this battle that William of Malmesbury and other writers have, with an utter misconception of the result of the battle, transferred Godwine’s exploit of 1019. See above, p. 743. Henry of Huntingdon translates the Peterborough Chronicle. Florence, following Abingdon and Worcester, is silent.

NOTE NNN. p. 455.
Cnut’s Relations with the Empire.

Cnut, according to Saxo (196), was lord of six kingdoms; “sex præpollentium regnorum possessor effectus.” But he does not give their names. His commentator Stephanius (p. 212) says, “nempe Daniæ, Sveciæ, Norvegiæ, Angliæ, Sclaviæ, Sembiæ” [Semba or Samland in Eastern Prussia?]. The Encomiast (ii. 19) says, “Quum rex Cnuto solum imprimis Danorum obtineret regimen, quinque regnorum, scilicet Danomarchiæ, Angliæ, Britanniæ, Scotiæ, Nordwegæ, vendicato dominio, Imperator exstitit.” Swegen Aggesson (c. 5; Lang. i. 54) outdoes them all. Cnut’s empire extends over the adjoining realms (“circumjacentia regna suo aggregavit Imperio”) from Thule to the Byzantine frontier (“ab ultima Thyle usque ad Græcorum ferme Imperium”), taking in, seemingly, not five or six, but ten kingdoms; “quippe Hyberniam, Angliam, Galliam, Italiam, Longobardiam, Teotoniam, Norwagiam, Sclaviam, cum Sambia sibi subjugavit.” Swegen clearly believes in three Empires, Greek, German, and Scandinavian. His exaggerations may be compared with the exaggerations of Dudo and Rudolf Glaber with regard to the Norman Dukes. On the other hand, Prior Godfrey (Satirical Poets, ii. 148) allows Cnut only three kingdoms, the three most obvious,

“Sic insigne caput trino diademate cingit,

Dum Danos, Anglos, Northigenasque regit.”

The Danish writers thus paint Cnut as at least the equal of Conrad; but I am not quite sure that Wipo, in a passage already quoted (see p. 752), where he describes Conrad at his Imperial coronation as walking between the two Kings Cnut and Rudolf, has not a lurking wish to imply that Cnut stood in much the same relation to Conrad that Rudolf did. And the circumstances of the visit, the sight of Pope and Cæsar in all their glory in the old home of both, would be very likely to impress the mind of the still newly-converted lord of Northern Europe, and to make him feel somewhat less Imperial than he felt either at Winchester or at Roskild. But even in Wipo’s account there is nothing to make us think that Cnut did more than yield to Conrad the formal precedence to which he was certainly entitled, and above all at such a moment.

As to the marriage of Gunhild to King Henry there is no kind of doubt; but the plain fact has been clouded over with many fables. That the betrothal took place during the reign of Cnut I infer from the account of Adam of Bremen (ii. 54), who after talking largely of Cnut, Archbishop Unwan of Hamburg, and the Emperor Conrad, goes on to say; “Cum rege Danorum sive Anglorum, mediante archiepiscopo [Unwan], fecit pacem. Cujus etiam filiam Imperator filio suo deposcens uxorem, dedit ei civitatem Sliaswig cum marcha quæ trans Egdoram est, in fœdus amicitiæ; et ex eo tempore fuit regum Daniæ.” But there is no doubt that the marriage was not celebrated till 1036, when Cnut was dead. See Wipo, c. 35, who calls the bride Cunehildis, and the Hildesheim Annals in anno (Pertz, iii. 100), where we read that “regina Cunihild nomine ... in natali Apostolorum regalem coronam accepit et mutato nomine in benedictione Cunigund dicta est.” See also Hepidanni Annales in anno (ap. Duchesne, Rer. Franc. Scriptt. iii. 479). William of Malmesbury (ii. 188) is so far accurate as to place the marriage after Cnut’s death, but he tells the story with great confusion. He grows specially eloquent on the splendour of the bride’s progress, just as Roger of Wendover (iv. 332 et seqq.) does over the marriage of Isabella, daughter of John, with Frederick the Second; but William makes Harthacnut send his sister from England, though Harthacnut certainly was not there in 1036, and he seems to place the marriage after the trial and acquittal of Godwine in 1041. It was probably this confusion which led him to speak of Henry as “Imperator Alemannorum,” for though Henry did not become Emperor till 1046, yet his father died in 1039, leaving to Henry, as Wipo (c. 39) says, “regni rem, Imperii autem spem, bene locatam.” Wace also (Roman de Rou, 6552) tells us;

“Gunnil fu à Rome menée,

Et à Rome fu mariée;

Fame fu à l’Emperéor;

Ne pout aveir plus halt seignor.”

Besides that Henry was not yet Emperor, the marriage was (see the Hildesheim Annals, u. s.) not celebrated at Rome but at Nimwegen. Gunhild died July 18th, 1038, “quasi in limine vitæ,” as Wipo (c. 37) says, before the death of Conrad. There is another inaccurate account of the marriage in Heming’s Worcester Cartulary, 267 (Monasticon, i. 596), where the bridegroom is described as “Imperator Cono” and Brihtheah, Bishop of Worcester, appears as one of the bride’s suite; “Idem vero episcopus Brihtegus quodam in tempore ad Saxoniam Gunnildæ, Cnuti regis filiæ, ductor exstitit, quum eam Imperator Cono uxorem duceret, et quemdam ministrum sibi valde carum, Hearlewinum nomine, socium itineris secus habuit.” But the mistakes of all these writers seem pardonable when we turn to the wonderful romance which some of the Scandinavian writers have devised by rolling together the Roman pilgrimage of Cnut, the marriage of Gunhild, and seemingly also the Italian expedition of Conrad and Henry, which happened (see Wipo, c. 35) soon after Henry’s marriage. Saxo (196) is comparatively brief. After the description of Cnut as lord of six kingdoms, he tells us how he married Gunhild to Henry and then went and restored the authority of his son-in-law over certain rebels in Italy. “Canutus ... eximio sui fulgore etiam Romanum illustravit Imperium. Enimvero ejus principi Henrico filiam Gunnildam nuptum tradidit, eumdemque paullo post Italica consternatione perculsum auxilio prosequutus, pristinæ fortunæ, pressa rebellium conspiratione, restituit.” Swegen Aggesson (c. 5; Langebek, i. 54) is much fuller. Henry, already Emperor, marries Gunhild; he is driven from Rome by a sedition, and comes to crave help of his father-in-law (“quem quum Romani tumultuaria seditione a regio pepulissent solio, socerum adiens ejus auxilium imploravit”). Cnut, seemingly glad of the chance (“nactus occasionem illustris ille præcluisque Kanutus”), sets out to avenge his wrongs. On the road, seemingly by way of pastime, he ravages Gaul (“assumpto exercitu suo, primo Galliam depopulando invasit”); he then harries Lombardy and Italy, which, it will be remembered, Swegen had already reckoned as separate kingdoms, and compels the Romans to receive their Emperor back again (“multimoda virtute compulit Romanos civitatem sibi resignare, tandemque Imperatorem et generum throno suo restituit”). He then goes to France, which is seemingly looked on as something different from Gaul; yet most certainly Latin and not Teutonic Francia is intended, for Cnut goes to Tours (“cum ingenti tripudio ad Franciam usque commeavit, Turonisque profectus,” &c.) and carries off thence (“potenter secum asportavit”) the relics of Saint Martin, which he translates to Rouen, on account of his great love for that city; “eo quod illam [Rothomagum] præ ceteris specialem diligeret.” This wild talk about Rouen must be compared with another equally wild tale which I shall have to mention presently about Cnut dying before Rouen.

It is no wonder that Swegen’s editor says, “Mirum est Suenonem et in hoc et in plurimis historiæ Canuti M. momentis adeo hallucinatum esse.” Swegen wrote about 1186, in the days of Frederick Barbarossa and Henry the Sixth, and it is worth noting how thoroughly both he and his elder contemporary Wace look on the Roman Emperor as the local sovereign of Rome, in opposition to William of Malmesbury’s slipshod talk about “Imperator Alemannorum.”

About Gunhild, William of Malmesbury has a legend which is the same as that of Sir Aldingar and Queen Eleanor in Percy’s Reliques. The King’s name in both tales is Henry. Gunhild left a daughter, Beatrice, Abbess of Quedlingburg (see Struvius, i. 355). The only English princess, Matilda daughter of Henry the Second, who was the mother of an Emperor, was not the wife of an Emperor or even of a King.

On the cession of Sleswick, Adam, as quoted in the text, seems quite explicit. On the Eider as the boundary of the Carolingian Empire, see the Annals of Einhard, 808, 811, 815, 828, and the Annals of Fulda (Pertz, i. 355 et seqq.), 811, 857, 873. Nothing can be plainer than the last passage, “fluvium nomine Egidoram, qui illos [Danos] et Saxones dirimit.” In saying that it remained the boundary till 1866, I should perhaps except the time of confusion, 1806–1814, when the Roman Empire had been dissolved and when the German Confederation had not yet been founded. During these years Holstein, the “Transalbiana Saxonia” of Einhard, was united to the kingdom of Denmark by an act as regular as any act of that irregular time.

NOTE OOO. p. 469.
Ælfred the Giant.

Ælfred is a name so purely English that the presumption in favour of the English birth of any one bearing it in this generation is extremely strong. There is no doubt that Ælfred is the name intended. The giant is “Alvredus cognomento gigas” in William of Jumièges, and “Alvredus” is the name by which he calls the English Ætheling Ælfred. In the Roman de Rou he is “Auvere,” “Alverei,” “Alvere;” the Ætheling is “Auvered” and “Alvred.” So in Mary of France (see Roquefort, ii. 34 and vol. iii. p. 572, iv. p. 796, v. p. 594) Ælfred appears as “Auvert,” “Auvres,” “Alurez,” “Affrus.” The only chance against Ælfred being an Englishman is the chance—a somewhat faint one, I think—that the name may also have been in use among the Saxons of Bayeux. M. Pluquet (Roman de Rou, ii. 17) says that the name is still common in the district, seemingly under the form of “Auvray.” But “Auvray” may be “Alberic;” and we shall find that Ælfred and Eadward were just the two English names which we shall find that a later generation of Normans did adopt.

I have a note, but I cannot lay my hand on the reference, of a charter of Hugh Capet in 967 signed by “Alfredus monachus;” and “Alfridus abbas Sancti Vulmari” signs in 1026 (Chron. Sithiense, p. 175) a charter of Baldwin, Bishop of Terouanne. These two can hardly be the same man, but both may be Englishmen. It is more singular to find the name in Italy. Yet we read in Donizo’s Life of the Countess Matilda (Murat. v. 372),

“Ac Mons Alfredi capitur certamine freni.”

Was the mount called from any English pilgrim, the great King himself perhaps, or did any cognate name exist among Goths or Lombards? The elfish names are mainly English; yet Elberich is said to be the same as Ælfric, and Alboin as Ælfwine. See Miss Yonge’s Christian Names, ii. 346, 347.

Our Ælfred signs two charters with the title of “vicecomes,” one in 1025 and one in 1027. He afterwards became a monk at Cerisy. Roman de Rou, 8717 et seqq. He seems (see Neustria Pia, 660) to have left a son William and a daughter who bears the odd-sounding name of Athselinoc. Can this be a corruption of any English name beginning with æðel?

NOTE PPP. p. 473.
Cnut’s Relations with Normandy.

The Norman and English writers do not mention the marriage of Robert and Estrith. It is asserted by Saxo, Adam of Bremen, and Rudolf Glaber. But the two former tell the story with much confusion, making Estrith marry, not Robert, but Richard. They both connect this marriage with Cnut’s own marriage with Emma. Saxo’s words (p. 193) are; “Quum Anglorum rebus obtentis nectendam cum finitimis amicitiam decrevisset, Normanniæ præfecti [an odd title] Roberti filiam Immam matrimonio duxit, ejusque fratri Rikardo sororem Estritham conjugio potiendam permisit.” The utter confusion of Saxo’s ideas about the Norman Dukes is manifest. Adam (ii. 52) says; “Chnud regnum Adalradi accepit uxoremque ejus Immam nomine, quæ fuit soror comitis Nortmannorum Rikardi. Cui rex Danorum suam dedit germanam Margaretam pro fœdere. Quam deinde Chnut, repudiatam a comite, Wolf duci Angliæ dedit.... Et Rikardus quidem comes, declinans iram Chnut, Jherosolimam profectus, ibidem obiit, relinquens filium in Nortmannia nomine Rodbertum, cujus filius est iste Willelmus quem Franci Bastardum vocant.” Here we get a little light. The marriages of Richard the Good with Judith and Papia are well ascertained, and there is no room left for a marriage with Estrith. But, as Lappenberg remarks (479. Eng. Tr. ii. 217), Adam’s mention of the pilgrimage to Jerusalem shows that Robert is the person really meant among all this confusion. Lastly, Rudolf Glaber, a better authority on such a point than Saxo or even than Adam, steps in to settle the matter. He describes (iv. 6. p. 47) Robert’s pilgrimage to Jerusalem and his death without lawful issue, “quamlibet sororem Anglorum regis Canuc manifestum est duxisse uxorem, quam odiendo divortium fecerat.” This seems to put the fact of a marriage between Robert and Estrith on firm ground. Among the Danish annalists, the Esrom Annals (Lang. i. 236) simply copy Adam of Bremen; those of Roskild (Lang. i. 377) tell the same tale in different words; “Kanutus victor exsistens, ipsam Ymmam duxit uxorem, genuitque ex ea filium Hartheknud. Kanutus Ricardo suam dedit sororem nomine Estrid. Quæ ab illo repudiata duci Ulf sine fratris consensu [cf. Saxo’s tale quoted in p. 746] est conjuncta.” The name Margaret given by Adam to the Danish princess is remarkable. Estrith might possibly, like Emma and Eadgyth the daughter of Malcolm, have been required to take a Norman name on her marriage. But the name of Margaret, which became popular only through Eadgyth’s mother, is rare throughout the century, and this would perhaps be the first instance of it in the West.

As for the date of the marriage, see Lappenberg, ii. 217, and Pertz’s note to Adam, ii. 52. A dispute between Robert and Cnut which could be connected, even mythically, with Cnut’s death and Robert’s pilgrimage must be placed quite late in their reigns. And as the offender is always looked on as the reigning Duke, 1028, or (if we take the reckoning of Florence under 1026 and the Peterborough Chronicle under 1024) 1026, is the earliest year to which the transaction can be referred. Ulf was killed in 1025. William the Bastard was born in 1027 or 1028. As for Estrith’s dowry, Saxo tells us that Cnut, before her marriage with Ulf, “sororem Sialandiæ redditam regiarum partium functione donavit” (p. 194). After Ulf’s death, execution, or murder, “Canutus violatæ necessitudinis injuriam, ac sororis viduitatem, duarum provinciarum attributione pensavit” (p. 197). He adds that she gave them to the Church of Roskild. The Roskild Annals (Lang. i. 377) makes her rebuild the church with stone, it having before been of wood; “Honorifice sepelivit, ecclesiamque lapideam in loco ligneæ construxit, quam multis modis ditavit.”

I need hardly say that Cnut’s expedition to Normandy is quite mythical. We have already seen (see above, p. 768) a legendary account of a campaign of Cnut in Gaul, including a visit to Rouen, which seems to have grown out of his Roman pilgrimage. The present legend seems further to mingle up with this the pilgrimage of Robert to Jerusalem and the beginning of the Norman exploits in Sicily and Apulia. Saxo, so far as anything can be made out of his chronology, seems to make two Norman expeditions on the part of Cnut. The first (p. 194) seems to be early in his reign; “Rikardum, acerrimum uxoris osorem effectum, patria exegit.” Afterwards (pp. 200, 201) we have the story of his great expedition and death before Rouen. Richard is still Duke, but, for fear of Cnut, he flees to Sicily; “Cujus [Canuti] impetum Richardus Siciliam petens, fuga præcurrere maturavit.” The mention of Sicily is of course suggested by the exploits of the Normans in those regions. Adam, as we have seen, makes Richard flee to Jerusalem. His scholiast adds that the conquest of Apulia was begun by forty of his comrades on their return. The source of confusion is obvious.

This wild story of Cnut’s death before Rouen seems peculiar to Saxo. Several of the other Danish writers distinctly assert his death in England. Chron. Esrom. ap. Langebek, i. 236 (which makes him die in 1037); Chron. Rosk. i. 377. The attempt of Robert against England is described by William of Jumièges (vi. 10, 11) and Wace (Roman de Rou, 7897 et seqq.). I have followed their account in the text. Only two English writers mention it, William of Malmesbury (ii. 180) and John of Wallingford (Gale, 549–550). William mentions only the intended invasion, and says nothing of the embassies before and after it. John of Wallingford tells the story much as William of Jumièges does, only, with the usual confusion, he talks of Richard instead of Robert. But it is plain from the two Williams that Robert was the Duke concerned, so that John of Wallingford is clearly wrong when he places the story in the first years of Cnut—“in primordiis regni sui.”

William of Jumièges (vi. 10) thus describes the message sent by Robert to Cnut; “Mandavit Chunuto regi ut jamjamque satiatus eorum [the Æthelings] exterminio illis parceret, et sua eis vel sero pro sui amoris obtentu redderet.” So John of Wallingford; “Venerunt legati a Normannia ... qui cum Cnutone de regni jure disceptantes juvenibus prædictis regnum postulabant.”

William of Jumièges, it should be mentioned, distinctly implies the personal presence of Robert on board the fleet, but says nothing of that of the Ætheling. Wace (7941) speaks of both Robert and Eadward.

NOTE QQQ. p. 480.
The Division of Cnut’s Dominions.

That Cnut, like Charles, established a system of under-kingdoms, to be held by his sons in subordination to his own Imperial authority, is distinctly asserted by Saxo (196). “Inde [from Rome, see p. 768] reversus, Haraldum natu majorem Angliæ, Daniæ Canutum, Norvagiæ Suenonem, quem ex Alvina sustulerat, absque ulla majestatis suæ diminutione præfecit. Nam etsi tres provincias totidem filiorum regimini tradidit, nihilominus commune sibi trium imperium reservavit, neque summam penes alium consistere voluit. Præterea teneris adhuc ducibus in officiorum tutelam fortissimorum præsidia sociavit.” The Knytlinga Saga (c. 17; Johnstone, 144) gives a similar account, only instead of England, it makes Harold Under-king over part of Scotland (see above, p. 761); “Knutr konungr hafdi oc til forrada mikinn hlut af Skotlandi, oc setti hann þar Haralld son sinn konung ysir: enn þo var Knutr konungr ysir-konungr [overkonge] allra þeirra.” Now this statement that Cnut established his sons as Under-kings under the guardianship of some of his chief men falls in exactly with the statement in our own Chronicles that Thurkill was established in Denmark as guardian to one of Cnut’s sons (see p. 429). The words of the passage (1023) are, “And he betæhte Þurcille Denemearcan and his sunu to healdenne;” but the details of this arrangement, as described both in Saxo and in the saga, seem open to much doubt. There is not a shadow of evidence that Harold ever reigned as Under-king in England, and the statement that he reigned in Scotland, though very remarkable, is hardly to be accepted without better authority than that of the Knytlinga Saga. The further question arises, who was the son whom Cnut left in Denmark? Not Harthacnut, who succeeded him there, for that kingly bairn was with his mother in England (see Chron. Wig. in anno). It must have been one of the two doubtful sons, Swegen and Harold, whom it may have been convenient to remove from England, together with their mother, “the other Ælfgifu.” She and Swegen, it is well known, were afterwards quartered in Norway, and this looks as if Harold were now, in the like sort, quartered in Denmark. This would prove a change of purpose on Cnut’s part as to the succession of his children, as it was Harthacnut who actually succeeded him in Denmark.

On Swegen’s reign in Norway under the guardianship of his mother, see Saxo, 196; Snorro, c. 252; Laing, ii. 344. I suspect that Saxo conceived the three sons as having been Under-kings in the several kingdoms to which they actually succeeded; but if it be true, as seems likely, that Harold was first quartered as Under-king in Denmark and afterwards displaced to make way for Harthacnut, the fact becomes of importance with reference to the disputed election which followed his death.

As to the division on Cnut’s death there seems no doubt at all. The account given by Adam (ii. 72) runs thus; “Post cujus mortem, ut ipse disposuit, succedunt in regnum filii ejus, Haroldus in Angliam, Svein in Nortmanniam, Hardechnut autem in Daniam.... Suein et Harold a concubina geniti erant; qui, ut mos est barbaris, æquam tunc inter liberos Chnut sortiti sunt partem hæreditatis.” This is copied by the Esrom Chronicle, Lang. i. 237; cf. Chron. Rosk. p. 377; Chron. Erici, p. 159. As Harold actually succeeded in England, foreign writers seem to have taken for granted that his succession was in accordance with Cnut’s will; but it is evident that Cnut latterly intended England for Harthacnut.

On the expulsion of Swegen and Ælfgifu from Norway, see Snorro, Saga of Magnus, c. 4; Laing, ii. 363.

NOTE RRR. p. 482.
The Candidature of Harold and Harthacnut.

I have gathered my account of this disputed election wholly from our own Chronicles, which are the only trustworthy guides. The cause of all the difficulties and contradictions with which the subject is involved, is the fact that the division of the kingdom between Harold and Harthacnut proved a mere ephemeral arrangement, and was set aside within two years. It seems therefore to have quite passed out of mind, except with the very few writers with whom minute accuracy was really an object. No one would find out the fact from Adam of Bremen, from the Encomiast, or even from William of Malmesbury. Of the Danish writers it is needless to speak. The Encomiast (iii. 1 et seqq.) sees, so does William of Malmesbury (ii. 188) still more plainly, that a strong opposition was made to the election of Harold; they do not see that that opposition was so far successful that a temporary sovereignty over a part of the kingdom was secured to Harthacnut. Even Florence, seemingly hesitating, as he sometimes does, between two versions of a story, tells the tale with some confusion. But on comparing the Abingdon, Worcester, and Peterborough Chronicles, the matter becomes much clearer. The Peterborough Chronicle is the primary authority for the division of parties in the Witenagemót, for the division of the kingdom between the two competitors, for the regency of Emma and Godwine on behalf of Harthacnut. Its statements are copied, with more or less of confusion and misconception, by the Canterbury Chronicle, Florence, and William of Malmesbury. The Abingdon and Worcester Chronicles do not distinctly mention the division of the kingdom under the year 1035; but they imply it under 1037, in the words, “Hér man geceas Harald ofer eall to cinge, and forsoc Harðacnut,” which, unless Harthacnut had before possessed part of the kingdom, would be meaningless. Oddly enough, the Peterborough Chronicler does not distinctly mention this second election of Harold, though he perhaps alludes to it in the words, “And he [Harold] wæs þæh full cyng ofer eall Englaland.” Thus the two accounts in the Chronicles fill up gaps in each other, and between the two we get a full and consistent narrative.

I believe the controversy to have lain wholly between the two sons of Cnut, Harold and Harthacnut. That there was a party in favour of one of the sons of Æthelred (see p. 476) is asserted by William of Malmesbury (ii. 188); “Angli diu obstiterunt, magis unum ex filiis Ethelredi, qui in Normannia morabantur, vel Hardecnutum filium Cnutonis ex Emma, qui tunc in Danemarchia erat, regem habere volentes.” But in the Chronicles, where the proceedings in the Witenagemót are described, we hear nothing of any voices being raised on the side of the Æthelings, and William himself says (u. s.) of a time a little later; “Filii Ethelredi jam fere omnibus despectui erant, magis propter paternæ socordiæ memoriam, quam propter Danorum potentiam.” These last words are at least a witness to the freedom of election on this occasion.

The geographical division of parties is clearly marked in the Peterborough Chronicle, which is also the only one which notices the share taken by London in the election. We now hear only of the “liðsmen,” not, as in the election of 1016, of the “burhwaru.” The proposal for a division I understand to come from Harold’s supporters, most likely from Leofric, the natural mediator between the two extreme parties. I do not see what else can be the meaning of the expression in the Peterborough Chronicle that Leofric and others chose Harold and Harthacnut (“Leofric eorl and mæst ealle þa þegenas be norðan Temese and þa liðsmen on Lunden gecuron Harold to healdes Englelandes; him and his broðer Hardacnute, þe wæs on Denemearcon”). This proposal—namely the division—Godwine and the West-Saxons resist (“and Godwine eorl and ealle þa yldestan menn on West-Seaxon lagon ongean, swa hi lengost mihton; ac hi ne mihton nan þing ongean wealcan”); that is, they claim the whole kingdom for Harthacnut. At last they are obliged to consent to the division and the regency (“and man gerædde þa þæt Ælfgifu Hardacnutes modor sæte on Winceastre mid þæs cynges huscarlum hyra suna, and heoldan ealle West-Seaxan him to handa; and Godwine eorl was heora healdest man”). Henry of Huntingdon (M. H. B. 758 B) translates this account, but he was evidently puzzled by the words about electing Harold and Harthacnut, as he says, “elegerunt Haraldum, ut conservaret regnum fratri suo Hardecnut”—a most unlikely story. The last clause he translates; “Consilium ergo inierunt quod Emma regina cum regis defuncti familia [huscarlum?] conservaret Westsexe apud Wincestre in opus filii sui, Godwinus vero consul dux eis esset in re militari.” Henry says nothing of the second election of Harold in 1037. William of Malmesbury (ii. 188), though telling the story in a most confused way, seems quite to take in the position of Godwine; “Maximus tum justitiæ propugnator fuit Godwinus comes, qui etiam pupillorum [his notion about the sons of Æthelred, as well as Harthacnut, here comes in] se tutorem professus, reginam Emmam et regias gazas custodiens, resistentes umbone nominis sui aliquamdiu dispulit; sed tandem, vi et numero impar, cessit violentiæ.” Mr. St. John (Four Conquests, ii. 106, 107) makes Godwine first assert the rights of the Æthelings, which I suppose is his interpretation of the words of William, and then himself propose the compromise in favour of Harthacnut. For this he refers us to Simeon; but Simeon (X Scriptt. 179) only copies the narrative of Florence, and that narrative, as well as that of the “Saxon Chronicle” [Abingdon as opposed to Peterborough?], Mr. St. John had just before cast aside as “confusing the whole subject.”

I see that the idea of the Imperial supremacy being reserved to Harold has also occurred to Mr. St. John (ii. 110). It was suggested to me by the words of the Peterborough Chronicle (evidently misunderstood by the Canterbury Chronicler), “And he [Harold] wæs þæh full cyng ofer eall Englaland.” This however, as I remarked just above, may perhaps refer to Harold’s second election in 1037. The same idea might also lurk in the other words of the Peterborough Chronicler, quoted in the last page, “gecuron Harold to healdes ealles Englelandes; him and his broðer Hardacnute,” &c. But an Imperial supremacy on the part of Harold seems quite consistent with the general tenor of events, and such a supposition may perhaps render the account of the fate of the Ætheling Ælfred one degree less obscure.

The story of Æthelnoth’s refusal to crown Harold comes wholly from the Encomium Emmæ, iii. 1. But it is possible that the tale, if true, may belong to the second election of Harold in 1037, and may have been thrust back in the confused chronology of the Encomiast. A coronation, sooner or later, seems quite certain. It is asserted by Ralph de Diceto, ii. 238, ed. Stubbs; “Haroldus filius Cnutonis regnavit annis iii. consecratus ab Ethelnodo Dorobernensi archiepiscopo apud Lundonias.” So Roger of Wendover (i. 473); “Prævaluit pars Haroldi, et regni Angliæ illum diademate insignivit.” According to Bromton (X Scriptt. 932), Harold was “ab Ethelnodo Dorobernensi archiepiscopo apud Lundonias consecratus.” But the higher authority of the list of coronations in Rishanger (427) places it at Oxford, which seems to have been Harold’s capital. Believers in the false Ingulf may also entertain themselves with a story about Harold’s coronation robe, and a great deal more about which authentic history is silent. See St. John, ii. 107–110.

NOTE SSS. p. 489.
The Death of the Ætheling Ælfred.

I have stated in the text the chief versions as to the death of Ælfred. The different statements may be grouped under two main heads, those which put the event at its right date under the reign of Harold, and those which move it to some other time. It is the former class whose statements we must weigh against other; the latter are useful mainly as illustrating particular points, and as examples of the way in which legends grow.

The earliest English account is that which is found, in different shapes, in the Abingdon and Worcester Chronicles. Peterborough is silent about the whole matter. The story, except a few lines at the beginning, takes the form of a ballad, as it appears in Mr. Earle’s Parallel Chronicles. It is astonishing that Mr. Thorpe should have printed it as plain prose, when it plainly is, not only, like the songs of Brunanburh and Maldon, in rhythm, but actually in rime. This was seen long ago by Dr. Ingram, who not only printed it as verse, but attempted a riming version of his own in modern English. I have in the text analysed the account thus given. The remarkable point is that the Abingdon Chronicle distinctly accuses Godwine, while the Worcester version leaves out his name. In the prose introduction, Ælfred the innocent (“unsceððiga”) Ætheling lands and wishes to go to his mother, who sat at Winchester. Then says Abingdon, “Ac hit him ne geþafode Godwine eorl ne éc oþre men þe mycel mihton wealdan: forþan hit hleoðrode þa, swiðe toward Haraldes, þeh hit unriht wære.” But in Worcester it stands, “Ac þæt ne geþafodon þa þe micel weoldon on þisan lande; forþan hit hleoþrade þa swiðe to Harolde, þeah hit unriht wære.” So the beginning of the ballad stands in Abingdon,

“Ac Godwine hine þa gelette,

And hine on hæft sette;”

while in the Worcester version it runs,

“Ða let he [Harold] hine on hæft settan.”

There can be no doubt that here the Abingdon version is the original, and that the Worcester text, which destroys rhythm and rime, was altered by an admirer of Godwine. But as to the prose introduction the case is far less clear; the words “Godwine eorl ne éc oþre men” might just as well be an interpolation. So in Florence the mention of Godwine comes in very awkwardly; “Quod indigne graviterque ferebant potentes nonnulli, quia, licet injustum esset, Haroldo multo devotiores exstitere quam illis, maxime, ut fertur, comes Godwinus.”

Florence’s version is made up by modifying the account in the Chronicles, with some touches from other quarters. He makes both brothers come, changing the words “Ælfred se unsceððiga æþeling” into “innocentes clitones Ælfredus et Eadwardus.” While in the Chronicles Ælfred simply wishes to go to his mother (“wolde to his moder þe on Wincestre sæt”), and is hindered by certain men, Godwine or others, in this account both the Æthelings actually visit their mother (“ad suæ matris colloquium, quæ morabatur Wintoniæ, venere”), and Godwine and the other powerful men are simply displeased at their coming (“indigne graviterque ferebant,” as above). Then comes the strangest part of his statement; that Godwine seized and imprisoned Ælfred is simply translated from the ballad, but Florence now introduces the almost incomprehensible assertion that Ælfred, when he was seized, was going to London for a conference with Harold; “Hic quidem [Godwinus] Ælfredum, quum versus Lundoniam, ad regis Haroldi colloquium, ut mandarat, properaret, retinuit, et arcta in custodia posuit [‘hine þa gelette and hine on hæft sette’].” The companions of Ælfred, to the number of six hundred, are sold, killed, or tortured at Guildford; the place is not mentioned in the Chronicles. Emma then sends back her son Eadward, who had stayed with her (“qui secum remansit”) and had not set out with his brother, with all haste to Normandy. Then, at the bidding of Godwine and certain others (“Godwini et quorumdam aliorum jussione”), Ælfred is taken to Ely, and the rest of the story follows as in the ballad.

It is plain that Florence in writing this had one or both of the Chronicles before him, and tried to work in details from other sources which were really inconsistent with the account which the Chronicles gave. One change is of special importance. The ballad simply mentions the companions (“geferan”) of Ælfred without any account of their number or who they were. Florence makes them six hundred, and adds the very important statement that they were Norman knights or soldiers. The Æthelings come, “multis Normannicis militibus secum assumptis, in Angliam paucis transvecti navibus.” This touch clearly comes from the Norman version, which represents the first attempt of the Æthelings as an actual invasion, an idea which the Chronicles do not suggest. It is also plainly from the same source that he got the idea that Eadward had any share in the business.

The ballad in the two Chronicles has about it something of that vagueness which is natural in a poem which is rather a pious lamentation than a narrative. The Norman account, true or false, is at least fuller and clearer. It first appears in William of Poitiers, the Conqueror’s chaplain, the extant part of whose narrative begins at this point. He is followed by William of Jumièges (vii. 8, 9), who is followed by Wace (Roman de Rou, 9759 et seqq.). I have given the substance of their story in the text, and I do not know that there is anything to remark, except that at the end of his tale William of Poitiers turns round and reviles Godwine in an address in the second person, much as at a later stage of his narrative he reviles Harold.

We now come to the version of the Encomiast. He is a perplexing writer to deal with; one knows not what to make of an historian who was either so easily imposed upon or else so utterly reckless as to truth. A contemporary writer who wipes out Emma’s marriage with Æthelred, who looks on the Æthelings as sons of Cnut, who is ignorant that his heroine was actually Queen-regent over Wessex, is really somewhat of a curiosity. His astounding statement (ii. 18) that Eadward and Ælfred were the sons of Cnut I have already spoken of in Note BBB. In his present account (iii. 1) Emma remained in England after the death of Cnut, grieving for the death of her husband and the absence of her sons (“sollicita pro filiorum absentia”). He then goes on; “Namque unus eorum, Hardecnuto scilicet, quem pater regem Danorum constituit, suo morabatur in regno; duo vero alii in Normanniæ finibus ad nutriendum traditi, cum propinquo suo degebant Rotberto.” These last are the sons of whom one, Ælfred, the younger of the two (“Alfridus minor natu,” iii. 4), is the victim of the present story. It is plain therefore that the “liberales filii” of Cnut, spoken of in the former passage, are meant to be the same as the Æthelings. All three brothers being absent, “factum est,” he goes on to say, “ut quidam Anglorum, pietatem regis sui jam defuncti obliti, mallent regnum suum dedecorare quam ornare, relinquentes nobiles filios insignis reginæ Emmæ, et eligentes sibi in regem quemdam Haroldum,” &c., &c. (see above, p. 775). He then goes on with Æthelnoth’s refusal to crown Harold (see above, p. 487), and with Harold’s ungodly manner of life (see p. 504). Then comes the forged letter and the rest of the story, as I have told it in the text. The piece of detail most worthy of notice is the writer’s remarks (iii. 5) on the decimation of Ælfred’s companions (on the alleged decimation at Canterbury in 1012, see above, p. 674);

“Traditi sunt carnificibus, quibus etiam jussum ut nemini parcerent nisi quem sors decima offerret. Tunc tortores vinctos ordinatim sedere fecerunt, satis supraque eis insultantes, illius interfectoris Thebææ legionis exemplo usi sunt, qui decimavit primum innocentes multo his mitius. Ille enim rex paganissimus Christianorum novem pepercit, occiso decimo: at hi profanissimi falsissimique Christiani bonorum Christianorum novem perimerunt, decimo dimisso.”

Now when a writer, whether through ignorance or through design, goes so utterly wrong about the birth of his hero, about the position of his heroine and the general condition of the kingdom, one hardly knows how to accept anything that he tells us. Yet his account, if used with caution, seems to supply some useful hints. His account is the only one which, while consistent with Godwine’s innocence, explains the origin of the belief as to his guilt. If we accept his account of what happened between Godwine and Ælfred, the various statements become intelligible; we see how the opposite stories could arise, which in any other way it is hard to see. The tale of the forged letter has a very odd sound, and the details may easily be mythical. Yet something of the kind would fill up the gap in the Chronicles, in which Ælfred comes over to England without any particular reason for his coming, better than William of Poitiers’ wild tale of a Norman invasion, which is most likely a mere repetition of the attempt of Robert.

The Encomiast seems to have had no notion that Emma was at Winchester, but rather to have fancied that she was in London. Ælfred, before he has landed, is recognized by his enemies, who wish to seize him (“volebant eum adgredi,” iii. 4), but he escapes, lands elsewhere, and sets out to go to his mother (“matrem parabat adire”). When he has got near to her (“ubi jam erat proximus”), he is met by Godwine, who persuades him not to go to London, and takes him to Guildford (“devians eum a Londonia, induxit eum in villa Gildefordia nuncupata”). The mistake is remarkable, for to quarter Emma in London instead of at Winchester implies utter ignorance as to her real position. But it seems quite plain that the Encomiast did not mean to identify Godwine either with the “adversarii” of Ælfred whom he had mentioned just before, nor yet with the “complices Haroldi infandissimi tyranni” (iii. 5), who are spoken of afterwards. And he expressly shuts out the story of invasion and battle which appears in William of Poitiers. The companions of Ælfred are indeed called “commilitones” (iii. 4), but, when Baldwin offers him the help of an armed force, he declines it (“cum marchione Balduino moratus, et ab eo rogatus ut aliquam partem suæ militiæ secum duceret propter insidias hostium”). This seems to forbid the notion of a force such as the Norman writers speak of, a force which could dream of the conquest of England or even of Wessex.

The only other independent witness is the strong partizan of Godwine, the Biographer of Eadward (Vita Eadw. 401). He perhaps shows some wish to slur the story over; but his account of the time between the death of Cnut and the election of Eadward is throughout confused and meagre. He brings in the story of Ælfred only incidentally, not in its chronological place, but much later, when describing the attempts of the Norman Archbishop Robert to sow dissensions between King Eadward and the Earl. He merely says that Ælfred, incautiously entering the country with some French companions, was seized and put to death by torture by order of Harold, his comrades being killed, sold, and so forth. As Godwine was still, under Harold as under Cnut, the chief counsellor of the King (“eo quoque tempore, ut superius, regalium consiliorum erat bajalus.” See above, p. 733), the slanderer Robert took occasion to affirm that the deed was done by Godwine’s advice; but the Biographer strongly asserts the Earl’s innocence.

These are the earliest accounts of the business, all of them written by men who were alive at the time, and of whom the Encomiast of Emma personally knew Cnut, while the Biographer of Eadward personally knew Godwine. Their differences and contradictions are therefore the more amazing; and their one point of agreement is more amazing still, namely, that they all forget, as I said in the text, that Emma and Godwine were ruling in Wessex in the name, not of Harold, but of Harthacnut. The division of the kingdom, the regency of Emma and Godwine, are facts which cannot be doubted; they are affirmed by two of the Chronicles and they are implied by the other two (see above, p. 776). But in telling the tale of Ælfred all this is forgotten. Even the Biographer of Eadward, the formal apologist of Godwine, seems, in the very act of defending him, to forget his real position. The Encomiast, whose version is the most favourable to Godwine’s innocence, seems to know nothing of any King but Harold; Godwine, if not Harold’s minister, is at least Harold’s subject. On comparing all these writers, the question at once arises, How far, when their main story involves so great a misconception, can we trust any of their details? The inconsistency is manifest; it seems to have been felt at the time. The ballad which laments the fate of the Ætheling is found only in those Chronicles which do not directly mention the division of the kingdom. And, even of these, one inserts the ballad in a form which does not accuse Godwine. The Peterborough Chronicler, who is so clear as to the division of the kingdom, says nothing about the fate of the Ætheling. The Norman writers, so eloquent about the fate of the Ætheling, know nothing of the kingship of Harthacnut. Florence, who attempts to combine the two stories, falls into all kinds of confusions and inconsistencies. It was no doubt the feeling of this inconsistency, the feeling that the story, as told, could not have happened at the time to which it is fixed, which made later writers, from William of Malmesbury onwards, move it to various other dates. William’s own account (ii. 188) is very remarkable. He hardly believes the story, because it is not in the Chronicles, but he tells it, because it was a common report; “Quia fama serit, non omisi; sed quia chronica tacet, pro solido non asserui.” He therefore had the Peterborough Chronicle before him. So just before; “Sane ne silentio premam quod de primogenito [Ælfred was certainly the younger] Ethelredi Elfredo rumigeruli spargunt.” The tale is placed by him in 1040, after the death of Harold and before the arrival of Harthacnut. Sir Thomas Hardy, in his note, proposes to read “mortem Cnutonis” for “mortem Haroldi,” but this is rather destroying evidence than explaining it. Ælfred enters the kingdom; by the treachery of his countrymen, chiefly of Godwine (“compatriotarum perfidia et maxime Godwini”), he is blinded at Gillingham (probably a mistake for Guildford); thence he is taken to Ely, where he soon dies. His companions are beheaded, save one out of each ten, who are allowed to escape.

This date, if it rested on any authority, would be far more probable than the other. Henry of Huntingdon (M. H. B. 758 D) pushes on the story yet a reign further. It is now placed after the death of Harthacnut in 1042. On that King’s death the English send for Ælfred, the elder of the Æthelings, to succeed to the Crown. He comes, and brings with him a great number of his mother’s kinsfolk and of other Normans. Now Godwine (“quum esset consul fortissimus et proditor sævissimus”) has determined that the new King shall marry his daughter. But he sees that Ælfred’s high spirit (“quia primogenitus erat et magnæ probitatis”) will not consent to this scheme, while he thinks that the milder spirit of Eadward (“frater minor et simplicior”) will submit to the yoke. Godwine then harangues the Witan (“intimavit igitur proceribus Angliæ”); Ælfred has brought with him too many Normans; he has promised them lands in England; it will not be safe to allow so valiant and so crafty a people to take root in the land; the strangers must be punished lest other strangers should venture to presume on their kindred with Kings to meddle with Englishmen and English affairs (“ne alii post hæc audeant pro regis cognatione se Anglis ingerere”). Ælfred’s Norman companions are then decimated at Guildford, in the fashion above mentioned; but even the tenth part seem to the English too many to be allowed to live (“nimium visum est Anglis tot superesse”); so they are decimated again; the Ætheling is blinded and sent to Ely, as before. Ralph the Black (157) brings in his version incidentally. Under the reign of Harthacnut, he says, “Edwardum fratrem suum a Normannis revocans, secum pacifice aliquamdiu habuit. Nam alter frater, Alureclus scilicet, ad stipitem ligatus a Godwino in Hely peremptus est, ter decimatis commilitonibus apud Guldedune, port mortem Haroldi, antequam regnaret Hardecnutus, consilio Stigandi archiepiscopi.” This last strange statement may be taken in connexion with a scandal which charged Emma herself with a partnership in the deed. (See p. 498 and Note SSS.) There is no need to point out that Stigand was not Archbishop until long afterwards.

Bromton (X Scriptt. 934 et seqq.) gives several versions, but decides in favour of one grounded on that of Henry of Huntingdon. He adds several particulars, especially that the English nobles were so enraged against Godwine that they vowed that he should die a worse death than Eadric the betrayer of his cyne-hlaford (“dominum suum naturalem regem”) Eadmund. (It is a little remarkable that these words are used without any hint as to the supposed kindred between Godwine and Eadric.) On this Godwine flees to Denmark and remains there four years, his lands and goods being meanwhile confiscated. But Bromton’s most remarkable version is one in which the death of Ælfred, combined with an attempt to poison Eadward, is attributed to the joint action of Godwine, Harthacnut, and Emma herself. The same scandal turns up again in the Winchester Annals (Luard, Ann. Mon. ii. 22) as part of the legend of Emma and the ploughshares. So also in Bromton himself, X Scriptt. 942. But the Winchester Annalist had just before (Ann. Mon. ii. 17) given his own version. The tale is placed in the reign of Harthacnut. Godwine wishes to open the succession to his own son Harold. He entices Ælfred over—Duke Robert, notwithstanding his death and burial in the East, keeps Eadward back in Normandy—and causes one tenth of his companions to be beheaded, the rest to be tortured and crucified, and the Ætheling himself to be embowelled. Godwine’s instructions to his agents are given in two very graphic speeches. I trust that so pleasant a writer as Richard of the Devizes is not answerable for this stuff. See Mr. Luard’s Preface, p. xi.

Lastly, two charters ascribed to Eadward the Confessor, but of very doubtful genuineness, speak of the murder of Ælfred in a way which ought to be noticed. In the first (Cod. Dipl. iv. 173) Eadward is made to attribute the death of his brother to Harold and Harthacnut conjointly, and to speak of himself as being with difficulty rescued from them; “Invadentibus regnum Swegeno et Cnuto filio regis [ejus?], regibus Danorum, ac filiis ipsius Chnuti Haroldo et Hardechnuto, a quibus etiam alter meus frater Ælfredus crudeliter occisus est, solusque, sicut Joas occisionem Oðoliæ, sic ego illorum crudelitatem evasi.” In the other (Cod. Dipl. iv. 181) the crime is attributed to the Danes generally; “Dani qui ... fratrem meum alium Ælfredum miserabiliter interemptum enecaverant.” Now, even if these charters be spurious, they still have a certain value as witnessing to popular belief on the subject. Neither of them mentions Godwine; had they done so, Godwine’s sons could hardly have been represented as signing them. But the mention of the fact in charters signed by them might imply that the subject was not one which they at all sought to avoid. The second charter is perfectly vague; but the language of the former, attributing the deed to Harold and Harthacnut, is remarkable. That Harthacnut personally had no hand in it needs no proof; neither was Eadward at any time in the least danger at the hands of Harthacnut, who always acted towards him as an attached brother. Is the charge against Harthacnut meant to convey an indirect charge against the representative of Harthacnut, that is, against Emma herself?

I have thus fairly put together, as far as I can, the evidence on this most perplexing question. That Ælfred landed and was put to death by order of Harold there can be no reasonable doubt. But one can hardly say more, except that, of all the accounts of his coming, the least likely is that which connects it with a Norman invasion under the command of Eadward. The charge against Godwine implies a state of things which we know not to have existed; on the other hand it is strange that his one direct apologist should not have used so obvious an argument on his behalf. In my whole history I know no more remarkable instance of mistakes and contradictions on the part of writers who had every means of being well informed.

NOTE TTT. p. 512.
The Burial of Harold the First.

The Peterborough Chronicle (1040) distinctly says that Harold died at Oxford; “Her forðferde Harold cyng on Oxnaforda on XI. Kal. Apr. and he wæs bebyrged æt Westmynstre.” Worcester and Abingdon say merely “Her swealt Harold cyng,” without any mention of the place either of death or of burial. Canterbury has, “Her forðferde Harold cing, and he wearð bebyrged at Westmynstre.” Florence however says “obiit Lundoniæ.” That the place of his death was Oxford can hardly be doubted, when we remember the charter which I have quoted at pp. 505, 509. And the point is of some importance in relation to the burial of Westminster, which becomes still more remarkable in the case of a King who died so far off as Oxford.

As for the disinterment of Harold’s body by order of Harthacnut, two stories seem to have been afloat which Florence tried to put into one. His words are;

“Mox ut regnare cœpit injuriarum, quas vel sibi vel suæ genitrici suus antecessor fecerat rex Haroldus, qui frater suus putabatur, non immemor, Ælfricum Eboracensem archiepiscopum, Godwinum comitem, Stir majorem domus, Edricum dispensatorem, Thrond suum carnificem, et alios magnæ dignitatis viros, Lundoniam misit, et ipsius Haroldi corpus effodere, et in gronnam projicere jussit: quod quum projectum fuisset, id extrahere, et in flumen Thamense mandavit projicere. Brevi autem post tempore a quodam piscatore captum est, et ad Danos allatum sub festinatione, in cœmeterio quod habuerunt Lundoniæ sepultum est ab ipsis cum honore.”

Here we find a mention both of a fen and of the river Thames as places into which the body was successively thrown. If we look into other accounts, we shall find one story speaking of the fen, and another of the river. The Peterborough Chronicle is silent; the Abingdon and Worcester speak of the fen; “He let dragan up þone deadan Harold; and hine on fenn onsceotan.” William of Malmesbury (ii. 188) tells the story like the second part of the story in Florence, except that he adds that the body was beheaded, which Florence does not mention; also he does not choose to mention any of the performers in the disinterment except Ælfric. His account runs thus;

“Per Alfricum Eboracensem episcopum, et alios quos nominare piget, Haroldi cadavere defosso, caput truncari, et miserando mortalibus exemplo, in Tamesim projici jussit. Id a quodam piscatore exceptum sagena, in cœmeterio Danorum Londoniæ tumulatur.”

The special mention of Ælfric is remarkable. It may be that the presence of a prelate was needed to sanctify the insult to consecrated ground; still Ælfweard would have been the more natural performer in his own diocese. And William of Malmesbury elsewhere (De Gest. Pont. 250) distinctly asserts that the deed was done by the special advice of Ælfric; “Habetur [Ælfricus] in hoc detestabilis, quod Hardacnutus ejus consilio fratris sui Haroldi cadavere defosso caput truncari, et infami mortalibus exemplo in Tamensem projici jussit.”

The burying-place of the Danes seems to be first mentioned by William of Malmesbury. Ralph de Diceto (i. 186 ed. Stubbs) marks it as the same as the church of Saint Clement Danes; “Brevi autem post a quodam piscatore ad Danos allatum est, et in cœmeterio quod habuerunt Lundoniæ sepultum est apud sanctum Clementem.” He is followed by Bromton (933), who however only speaks of the church of Saint Clement without any special mention of Danes.

Florence’s list of the dignitaries employed in this matter is followed by most of the later writers. Roger of Wendover calls them “milites et carnifices.” On the relation of the great Earls to the officers of the King’s household, see above, p. 89. The mention of the “major domus” and the seemingly dignified position of “Thrond carnifex” (cf. Jeremiah lii. 12) should be specially noticed.

It is really worth while to transcribe the narrative of M. de Bonnechose (ii. 61); it is so amusingly coloured; “Le corps d’Harold, son frère, fut déterré par ses ordres, décapité, jeté dans un marais, puis dans la Tamise, et il exigea que le comte Godwin, principal ministre des volontés d’Harold, fût un des instruments de la vengeance exercée sur son cadavre et sur une population rebelle, Godwin cependant ne trouva pas, dans son empressement à obéir, une sûreté suffisante; la clameur publique s’élevait contre lui, et le désignait comme l’assassin d’Alfred, frère utérin du nouveau roi; l’archevêque d’Yorck se porta son accusateur devant Hardi-Canut.”

NOTE VVV. p. 516.
The Trial and Acquittal of Godwine.

A point to be specially noticed in this trial is the form of words which Florence, the only primary authority who records any form, puts into the mouth of Godwine and his compurgators. They swear that it was not by Godwine’s will or counsel that the Ætheling Ælfred was blinded, and that, whatever Godwine did in the matter, he did at the bidding of his lord King Harold (“Non sui consilii nec suæ voluntatis fuisse quod frater ejus cæcatus fuisset, sed dominum suum regem Haroldum illum facere quod fecit jussisse”). This is clearly an abridged, and it is most likely an inaccurate, report of the oath really taken. It is clearly abridged, because, when Godwine by implication confessed to have done something, he could not fail to explain more at large what it was that he confessed himself to have done. But such a form of words is consistent with the view that Godwine met Ælfred, or even that he arrested Ælfred, within his own earldom, but that he had no hand in the barbarous cruelties which followed in a place out of his jurisdiction. But the mention of Harold as Godwine’s lord again steps in to throw doubt on the whole formula. The only character in which Harold could be called Godwine’s lord was that of superior lord of all Britain, in which character he was the lord rather of Harthacnut than of Godwine. Still, whatever doubts the formula may be open to, it has its worth. It points to the general likelihood that Godwine may have had a share in the events which led to the death of Ælfred, and yet not a guilty share.

William of Malmesbury (ii. 188), though he mentions the oath, does not give any form of words. Roger of Wendover (i. 478), seemingly following Florence, leaves out the clause in which Godwine says that he had acted by order of Harold; “Juravit quod neque ingenio suo nec voluntate frater ejus fuerat interemptus et oculis privatus.” This is remarkable, as Roger (i. 474) asserts the complicity of Godwine with Harold’s doings perhaps more strongly than any other writer. The clause appears again in the writer called Matthew of Westminster, p. 400.

I cannot resist giving some account of the grotesque legend into which the compurgation of Godwine has grown under the hands of the so-called Bromton (X Script. 937, 8). It is transferred to the reign of Eadward. Godwine, it will be remembered (see above, p. 786), is, at his accession, in Denmark. Meanwhile Eadward comes over to England, he is crowned, and reigns justly and mercifully. Godwine, hearing of his justice and mercy, ventures to hope that the latter princely virtue may be extended to himself, and supplicates that he may be allowed to come over and plead his cause. This he does in a “Parliament,” where the King with his Earls and Barons talk a large amount of Norman law. Earl Leofric at last cuts the knot; It is clear that Godwine is guilty; but then he is the best born man in the land after the King himself—therefore it may be presumed, neither the son of Wulfnoth the herdsman nor yet the kinsman of the upstart Ealdorman Eadric—so he and his sons, and I and eleven other nobles his kinsmen, will bring the King as much gold and silver as we each can carry, and the King shall forgive Earl Godwine and give him his lands back again. To this singular way of observing his coronation oath to do justice the saintly monarch makes no objection; Earl Godwine takes his lands, and King Eadward takes the broad pieces. Perhaps they were the very pieces over which he afterwards saw the devil dancing.

NOTE WWW. p. 520.
The Origin of Earl Siward.

All that I can say of Siward (Sigeweard) is that he was most likely a Danish follower of Cnut. A Siward, seemingly the same, signs as “minister” in 1019 (Cod. Dipl. iv. 9) and 1032 (iv. 39). His name is also attached to a doubtful charter of Archbishop Æthelnoth (iv. 53) as “miles.”

The mythical history of Siward will be found in Langebek, iii. 288, also in the Chroniques Anglo-Normandes, ii. 104. The pedigree there given runs thus; “Tradunt relationes antiquorum quod vir quidam nobilis, quem Dominus permisit, contra solitum ordinem humanæ propaginis, ex quodam albo urso patre, muliere generosa matre, procreari, Ursus genuit Spratlingum, Spratlingus Ulsium, Ulsius Beorn, cognomento Beresune, hoc est filius ursi.” Beorn is Siward’s father. Ulsius should of course be Ulfius, and the pedigree of course comes from Florence (see p. 423) or from the source from which Florence drew his pedigree of Ulf. But there is something especially grotesque in making Siward a son of Biorn Ulfsson, who was killed by Swegen the son of Godwine in 1049. The bear who was the ancestor of Siward and Ulf had also, it would seem, known ursine descendants; at least so I understand the legend of Hereward, Chroniques Angl.-Norm. ii. 7. Hereward there kills a bear, “quem incliti ursi Norweye fuisse filium ... affirmabant ... cujus igitur pater in silvis fertur puellam rapuisse, et ex ea Biernum regem Norweye genuisse.” Siward, in the story, after slaying dragons and other such exploits in Orkney and Northumberland, comes to London in the reign of Eadward; he then, under very odd circumstances, kills one Tostig, Earl of Huntingdon, and gets his earldom. The church of Saint Clement Danes (see above, p. 789) was built, we are told, to commemorate the slain followers of Tostig. This Tostig, it seems, was a Dane, who was in disfavour with King Eadward for a curious reason; “Rex eumdem habuit odio, quia duxerat in uxorem filiam comitis Godwini, sororem reginæ.” Afterwards, when an invasion from Norway was threatening (1045?), Siward was made Earl over Northumberland, Cumberland, and Westmoreland. The same story is found in Bromton, 945, only there “Bernus,” father of Siward, is himself son of the bear. Such stuff would be hardly worth mentioning, had not Sir Francis Palgrave (Engl. Comm. ii. ccxcvii.) inferred from it the existence of an historical Tostig, Earl of Huntingdon. See above, p. 667. It is, I think, plain that the Tostig of this story (who is, not indeed brother, but brother-in-law of Eadward’s wife Eadgyth) is meant for the son of Godwine, and that the slaying of Eadwulf by Siward has got confounded with the career of Tostig in Northumberland and his expulsion from the earldom. The one bit of history which lurks in all this seems to be the fact of the union of the earldoms of Northumberland and Huntingdon in the person of Siward. See vol. ii. Note G.

NOTE XXX. p. 528.
Tofig the Proud.

A certain amount of interest cannot fail to attach to Tofig as Harold’s forerunner in the foundation of Waltham. Of the Waltham history, “De Inventione Sanctæ Crucis,” I shall speak more at large when I come to Harold’s time (see vol. ii. Appendix RR). All that is known of Tofig is collected by Professor Stubbs in his edition of that tract. Nothing but local partiality could describe him as “Tovi le Prude, qui totius Angliæ post regem primus, stallere, vexillifer regis, monarchiam gubernabat.” (c. 7; cf. c. 14.) Professor Stubbs does not seem quite clear as to his being Staller, but he certainly was an important person. He appears in Florence as “Danicus et præpotens vir Tovius, Pruda cognomento.” He signs many charters of Cnut, one of them in 1033 (Cod. Dipl. iv. 44) distinctly as “Tovi Pruda.” He appears also with the same surname in Cod. Dipl. iv. 54, where he is sent by Cnut on a special mission into Herefordshire to attend a Scirgemót held by Bishop Æthelstan and Earl Ranig (see p. 520), the account of which, though not illustrating the life or character of Tofig, gives us one of the most living pictures of Old-English jurisprudence. Tofig’s surname was needed to distinguish him from two namesakes, “Tovi hwita” and “Tovi reada,” who sign in 1024. Cod. Dipl. iv. 31. “Tofig minister,” who signs under Eadward in 1054 (Cod. Dipl. iv. 135), and who was Sheriff of Somerset between 1061 and 1066 (see Cod. Dipl. iv. 171, 197, 199), must, if the Waltham narrative be at all accurate, be a different man.

In the name of Tofig’s son Æthelstan, as in that of Ranig’s son Eadwine (see p. 520), we see an instance of the tendency among the Danish settlers under Cnut to identify themselves with England and to give their children English names.

Tofig must have died soon after his marriage with Gytha (see De Inv. 14; “Tandem consummatus in brevi expleverat tempora multa, cui successit filius ejus Adelstanus”). There is, as Professor Stubbs (pp. 1, 13) remarks, some difficulty in reconciling the chronology of the Waltham writer with regard to the Invention of the Cross with the undoubted date of Tofig’s marriage. The Waltham writer places the Invention in the time of Cnut (“regnante Cnuto et Anglis imperante”), that is to say seven years at the least before the time of the marriage, whereas Gytha is represented in c. 13 as already Tofig’s wife and as a benefactress to the church. As Harthacnut died at the wedding, we cannot even suppose, what would otherwise be just possible, that by “Cnutus” we are to understand Harthacnut. The easiest explanation seems to be that gifts made by Gytha in her widowhood have been wrongly transferred to an earlier date. I have elsewhere (see vol. ii. Appendix MM) thrown out a hint that this Gytha may possibly be the same as Gytha the wife of Earl Ralph of Hereford.

NOTE YYY. p. 530.
Events after the Death of Harthacnut.

The legend to which I have referred in the text has found a place in the text of Thierry (i. 179) and also in that of Mr. St. John (Four Conquests, ii. 127). According to Bromton (934) and Knighton (2326), the English, wearied with the oppressions of the Danes under Harthacnut (see above, p. 758), rose against them after his death, and drove them out by force. Knighton calls the leader of the revolt Howne, and his forces Howneher [Hunanhere]. Thierry makes Godwine the leader instead of Howne. M. de Bonnechose (Quatre Conquêtes, ii. 70–2), though seeing the general absurdity of the story, admits it so far as to accept an expulsion of the housecarls. Saxo (202, 203) has a more wonderful tale than all. He has nothing to say about Howne or about Godwine. Harold, the son of Godwine, is the deliverer (“Danicæ oppressionis simulque domesticæ libertatis auctor”). He causes the Danish forces throughout England to be invited to banquets in different places, so that they are all slain in one night. Of all this there is not a word in any trustworthy writer; the only passage which looks at all like it is a rhetorical expression in the Life of Eadward (“reducto diu afflictis Anglis barbarica servitute redemptionis suæ jubilæo”, p. 394), which however most likely refers only to the extinction of the foreign dynasty and the accession of a native King. Any one who has had any experience of the growth of mythical and romantic tales will soon see what is the origin of this legend. It is plainly nothing in the world but the massacre of Saint Brice moved still further out of its place than it had already been moved by Roger of Wendover (see above, p. 652), and further mixed up with the legend of the death of Ælfred, with which it is connected by both Bromton and Knighton. Knighton’s “Howne” is clearly Roger’s “Huna” over again. Everything in our authentic narrative makes us believe that the election of Eadward was perfectly peaceful. A general driving out or massacre of Danes is simply ridiculous; even an expulsion of the housecarls is supported by no kind of evidence. The housecarls of Harthacnut no doubt became the housecarls of Eadward, and the saintly King, if Godwine had not been at hand to restrain him, was as ready to send them against Dover as his half-brother had been to send them against Worcester.

A more marvellous version than all is to be found in the French Life of Eadward, 532–581 (Luard, pp. 40, 41). Here the Danes, after committing the usual atrocities, rebel against Harthacnut, who raises an English army against them, and, after much fighting, overcomes them. Such wild shapes did our history take when it fell into the hands of strangers.

END OF VOLUME THE FIRST.

1. On this subject I must refer, once for all, to the papers of Dr. Guest in the Archæological Journal and in the volumes of Transactions of the Archæological Institute, especially to the paper on the Early English Settlements in South Britain in the Salisbury Volume. On these questions I have little to do except to profess myself, in all essential points, an unreserved follower of that illustrious scholar. On the difference between historical, traditional, mythical, and romantic narratives see Historical Essays, 1st Series, p. 3.

2. It is really hardly worth while to dispute about the names of Hengest and Horsa. The evidence for their historical character seems to me at least as strong as the suspicion of their mythical character. But whether the chiefs who led the first Jutish settlers in Kent bore these names or any others does not affect the reality of the Jutish settlement. I must confess however that there are names in the Chronicles which strike me as far more suspicious than those of Hengest and Horsa. I mean names like Port and Wihtgar, who figure in the entries for 501 and 544. See Earle’s Parallel Chronicles, p. ix.

3. For all that is to be said on this side of the question, see the eleventh Chapter of Palgrave’s English Commonwealth and the first chapter of Kemble’s Saxons in England. On the other side see Dr. Guest’s paper in the Salisbury Volume.

4. See Guest, Salisbury Volume, p. 35.

5. The account in Ammianus (xxxvii. 8) of the exploits of the elder Theodosius does not speak of the Saxons or of any other Teutons as invaders of Britain, but only as invaders of Gaul. But there seems quite evidence enough to show that, at the end of the fourth and beginning of the fifth centuries, Britain was constantly ravaged by Saxon pirates. This is shown by the well-known phrases of Limes Saxonicus and Littus Saxonicum, for the true explanation of which I must again refer to Dr. Guest. The Saxon shore or march, like the Welsh march in England, like the Spanish, Slavonic, and other marches of the later Empire, was, not a district occupied by Saxons, but the march—in this case a shore—lying near to the Saxons and exposed to their ravages. Ammianus himself, in the passage just referred to, speaks of “Nectaridus comes maritimi tractus” as killed by the Picts at this time. The phrase is analogous to that of “Scythici limitis dux,” etc. in Vopiscus, Aurelian, 13. Claudian also constantly couples the Saxons with the Picts and Scots as among the invaders of Roman Britain who were repulsed by Theodosius and Stilicho;

... “Maduerunt Saxone fuso

Orcades: incaluit Pictorum sanguine Thule:

Scotorum cumulos flevit glacialis Ierne.”

Carm. viii. 31. Cf. xviii. 392; xxii. 255.

So Sidonius Apollinaris, Carm. vii. 370 (cf. Epp. viii. 6);

“Quin et Aremoricus piratam Saxona tractus

Sperabat, cui pelle salum sulcare Britannum

Ludus, et asserto glaucum mare findere lembo.”

Were our keels coracles, or was the British fashion transferred to the Saxon?

6. Yet even this view seems to be pretty well disposed of by Dr. Guest in his Salisbury paper.

7. I use the word “Saxon” throughout only in its correct sense, to express one only among several Teutonic tribes which settled in Britain. The name “Saxon” was never used by the people themselves to express the whole nation, which was called, sometimes “Anglo-Saxon,” but, far more commonly, simply “Angle” or “English.” I shall discuss this point more at length in the Appendix, Note A.

8. I use, as a technical term, this correct and old-fashioned description of the class of languages to which our own belongs. The English language is simply Low-Dutch, with a very small Welsh, and a very large Romance, infusion into its vocabulary. The Low-Dutch of the continent, so closely cognate with our own tongue, is the natural speech of the whole region from Flanders to Holstein, and it has been carried by conquest over a large region, originally Slavonic, to the further east. But, hemmed in by Romance, High-Dutch, and Danish, it is giving way at all points, and it is only in Holland that it survives as a literary language. It should always be borne in mind that our affinity in blood and language is in the first degree with the Low-Dutch, in the second degree with the Danish. With the High-Dutch, the German of modern literature, we have no direct connexion at all.

9. The proper Scots, as no one denies, were a Gaelic colony from Ireland, the original Scotia. The only question is as to the Picts or Caledonians. Were they another Gaelic tribe, the vestige of a Gaelic occupation of the island earlier than the British occupation, or were they simply Britons who had never been brought under the Roman dominion? The geographical aspect of the case favours the former belief, but the weight of philological evidence seems to be on the side of the latter. But the question is one which, as far as purely English history is concerned, may safely be left undetermined.

10. It seems certain that the English seldom occupied a Roman or British town at once. The towns were commonly forsaken for a while, though they were in many cases resettled by an English population. The only question is whether any of the towns preserved a sort of half independence after the conquest of the surrounding country. See Comparative Politics, 130, 422.

11. In Northern Gaul the name of the tribe is commonly preserved in the modern name of its chief town, the original name of the town itself being dropped. Thus Lutetia Parisiorum has become Paris. But in Aquitaine and Provence the cities commonly retain their original names, as Burdigala and Tolosa, now Bourdeaux and Toulouse.

12. Words like street and chester; this class is excessively small. See Max Müller, Science of Language, Second Series, p. 269.

13. Words like Mass, Priest, Bishop, Angel, Candle.

14. See Comparative Politics, 420.

15. I mean the extirpation of anything worthy to be called a nation, of any people who had reached the position which all the inhabitants of the Roman Empire had reached. The dying out of savage tribes before the arts and arms of highly civilized Europeans is another matter.

16. Yet the legend of Hengest’s daughter, as told by Nennius—her name Rowena is a later absurdity—absolutely worthless as a piece of personal history, seems to point to the fact that the invaders not uncommonly brought their women with them.

17. Prokopios, Bell. Goth. iv. 20. Βριττίαν δὲ τὴν νῆσον ἔθνη τρία πολυανθρωπότατα ἔχουσι, βασιλεύς τε εἷς αὐτῶν ἑκάστῳ ἐφέστηκεν· ὀνόματα δὲ κεῖται τοῖς ἔθνεσι τούτοις Ἄγγιλοί τε καὶ Φρίσσονες καὶ τῇ νήσῳ ὁμώνυμοι Βρίττωνες. Prokopios’ account of Britain is mixed up with a great deal of fable, but here at least is something clear and explicit.

18. See the Chronicles under the years 443 and 449, and compare 473, where Hengest and his Jutes are again called “Engle.”

19. It is necessary to make this limitation, because the Danish Kings, as well as Harold the son of Godwine and William the Conqueror, were none of them of the West-Saxon house. But all our earlier Kings were descended from Cerdic in the male line and all our later Kings in the female line.

20. I have given the boundaries somewhat roughly, as they do not always exactly answer to those of the present counties. For details I must refer to Dr. Guest’s paper already quoted, and to his two later papers in the Archæological Journal, vol. xvi. p. 105, and vol. xix. p. 193.

21. Yet some of the passages collected by Sir Francis Palgrave (English Commonwealth, i. 462) would seem to show that parties of independent Welshmen held out in the fen country till a very late date.

22. On the quasi-insular character of East-Anglia, see Dr. Stanley’s paper in the Norwich volume of the Proceedings of the Archæological Institute, p. 58.

23. The Chronicles, under the year 547, record the accession of Ida, and speak of him as the ancestor of the following line of Northumbrian Kings. But we are not told, as in the cases of Hengest, Ælle, and Cerdic, anything about his landing, and the phrase “Ida feng to rice” (cf. 519) implies that this was not the beginning of the settlement. I therefore cannot help suspecting that there is some truth in the legend preserved by Nennius (38), according to which settlers of the kindred of Hengest occupied Northumberland in the preceding century. William of Malmesbury (i. 7) follows the same account, with additional details, but he distinctly adds that no English chief in those parts took the title of King before Ida. See Comparative Politics, 419.

24. The date of Offa is given by Henry of Huntingdon (Mon. Hist. Brit. 714 A). But he had before (M. H. B. 712 A) said, speaking of the days of Cerdic, “Eâ tempestate venerunt multi et sæpe de Germaniâ, et occupaverunt East-Angle et Merce: sed necdum sub uno rege redacta erant. Plures autem proceres certatim regiones occupabant.” This marks the transition from Ealdormanship to Kingship, of which I shall speak in my next Chapter.

25. Crida or Creoda is mentioned in the Chronicles (593), but he is not said to have been the first King of the Mercians. That he was so is a conjecture of Henry of Huntingdon, M. H. B. 714 C.

26. Chronicles, 626. Cf. 654.

27. On the list of Bretwaldas and its historic value, see Appendix B.

28. Bæda, Hist. Eccl. i. 25, 26.

29. See Appendix C.

30. Prokop. Bell. Goth. iv. 20. οὐ πολλῷ πρότερον ὁ Φράγγων βασιλεὺς ἐπὶ πρεσβείᾳ τῶν οἱ ἐπιτηδείων τινὰς παρὰ βασιλέα Ἰουστινιανὸν ἐς Βυζάντιον στείλας ἄνδρας αὐτοῖς ἐκ τῶν Ἀγγίλων ξυνέπεμψε, φιλοτιμούμενος ὡς καὶ ἡ νῆσος ἥδε πρὸς αὐτοῦ ἄρχεται.

31. The Goths in the fourth century were the first Teutonic nation to embrace Christianity, but they were still a wandering tribe, while the conversion of England was a distinct territorial conquest. Armenia again, at the other end of the Roman world, was a territorial conquest more ancient than that of England; but Armenia lay far more open to Imperial influences than England did.

32. See above, p. 25.

33. See the Laws of Ine, 23, 24, 32, 33, 46, 54, 74. (Thorpe, Laws and Institutes, i. 119–149; Schmid, pp. 30–55.) In the time of Ælfred the distinction, at least within the strictly English territory, seems to have died out.

34. Bæda, i. 34; Chron. 603, 605. The latter year is the date of his victory over the Welsh near Chester and the famous massacre of the monks of Bangor.

35. Bæda, ii. 5. See Appendix B.

36. See above, p. 27.

37. Chron. 628. “Her Cynegils and Cwichelm gefuhtan wið Pendan æt Cirenceastre and geþingodon þa.” This I take to mean a cession of territory, most probably of the north-western conquests of Ceawlin. Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire must have been kept longer, as appears from the position of Dorchester as originally a West-Saxon bishopric.

38. See Appendix B.

39. See Appendix D.

40. See Appendix D.

41. For the chronology between the years 752–849 I follow the Northumbrian reckoning preserved by Simon of Durham. See Stubbs, Roger of Hoveden, i. pp. xci, et seqq.

42. Ecgberht’s titles commonly run, “Rex,” “Regali fretus dignitate,” “Occidentalium Saxonum rex,” once, in 820, “Rex Occidentalium Saxonum necnon et Cantuariorum” (Kemble, Cod. Dipl. i. 289), but in one charter of 828 (Cod. Dipl. i. 287) he appears as “Ecgberhtus gratiâ Dei Rex Anglorum.” In that year he had granted out Mercia to an Under-king and had reduced all the Welsh to submission.

43. One can hardly describe these relations between the different states without using such words as “homage,” “apanage,” and the like, though of course the words were unknown in England at the time.

44. A local invasion of the Hwiccas was repelled at Kempsford by the Wilsætas. The Hwiccas are the people of the old diocese of Worcester. They were therefore doubtless mainly of Saxon blood, yet they now act as Mercian subjects. The war however seems to have been quite local, carried on by the Ealdormen of the two shires.

45. I infer this from the description of the battle of Gafulford in 825, which is said to have been fought between the Welsh and the men of Devonshire, who must therefore have been English, or at least acting in the English interest. Yet Devonshire, and even the city of Exeter, remained partly Welsh as late as the time of Æthelstan.

46. Norð-Wealas in the Chronicles means the inhabitants of Wales in the modern sense, both North and South; they are opposed to the West-Wealas, the Welsh of Cornwall.

47. See above, p. 12.

48. On the conquest of Northumberland, see Appendix KK.

49. It is hardly worth while to reckon the puppet Ceolwulf, not of the royal house, set up for a moment by the Danes after the expulsion of Burhred.

50. The exact boundary started from the Thames, along the Lea to its source, then right to Bedford and along the Ouse till it meets Watling-Street, then along Watling-Street to the Welsh border. See Ælfred and Guthrum’s Peace, Thorpe’s Laws and Institutes, i. 152. This frontier gives London to the English; but it seems that Ælfred did not obtain full possession of London till 886. See Earle’s Parallel Chronicles, p. 310.

51. See Appendix E.

52. The story which represents Ælfred as forsaken by his subjects on account of cruelties in the early part of his reign, and as being thus led to reformation, is part of the legend of Saint Neot, not of the history of Ælfred.

53. No one can blame Ælfred for hanging (see Chron. 897) the crews of some piratical Danish ships, who had broken their oaths to him over and over again. His general conduct towards his enemies displays a singular mildness.

54. “I then, Ælfred King, these [laws] together gathered, and had many of them written which our foregangers held, those that me-liked. And many of them that me not liked I threw aside, with my Wise Men’s thought, and on otherwise bade to hold them. Forwhy I durst not risk of my own much in writ to set, forwhy it to me unknown was what of them would like those that after us were. But that which I met, either in Ine’s days my kinsman, or in Offa’s the King of the Mercians, or in Æthelberht’s that erst of English kin baptism underwent, those that to me rightest seemed, those have I herein gathered and the others passed by. I then Ælfred, King of the West-Saxons, to all my Wise Men these showed, and they then quoth that to them it seemed good all to hold.” Ælfred’s Dooms, Thorpe’s Laws and Institutes, i. 58–59; Schmid, p. 69

55. Guthrum of East-Anglia was a nominal vassal all along. But the Northumbrians, whether Danes or English, seem not to have made submission till 893, in the prospect of the last Danish invasion of this reign. Their King Guthred had just died. See the two statements in Simeon of Durham, X Scriptt. pp. 133 (M. H. B. 685), 151, and Palgrave, ii. cccxv. Cf. Chron. and Fl. Wig. 894.

56. Ælfred was thus King of nearly all the Saxon part of England, of very little of the Anglian part. Hence doubtless the title of “Rex Saxonum” which he often uses. He was more than King of the West-Saxons; he was less than King of the English.

57. See Appendix F.

58. Between Eadwig and Eadgar in 957, between Eadmund and Cnut in 1016, between Harold and Harthacnut in 1035. All these arrangements were short-lived, and they were probably not meant to be more than temporary compromises.

59. Florence of Worcester (901) after a splendid panegyric on Ælfred, continues, “Huic filius successit Eadwardus, cognomento Senior, litterarum cultu patre inferior, sed dignitate, potentia, pariter et gloria superior; nam, ut in sequentibus clarebit, multo latius quam pater fines regni sui dilatavit,” &c. &c.

60. Ælfred was, according to custom, chosen in preference to the sons of his elder brother Æthelred, who were minors at the time of their father’s death. On Ælfred’s death one of these sons, Æthelwald, tried to obtain the crown, but the Witenagemót elected Eadward the son of Ælfred.

61. See Chron. 924, and Appendix G.

62. Ealdred the son of Ealdwulf, Lord of Bamburgh. His father had been among the chiefs who did homage to Eadward in 924. On this family, see Appendix KK.

63. See Earle, p. xix. It is much to be lamented that the prose entries in the Chronicles for this important reign are so meagre. On the other hand, William of Malmesbury evidently worked out the life of Æthelstan with unusual care, seemingly from lost sources, and, amidst a great deal of fable, we recover some truth.

64. I shall have to speak again of the foreign policy of Æthelstan in my Chapter on the Early History of Normandy.

65. Florence has some special epithet for each of the conquering Kings of this period—Eadward is “invictissimus,” Æthelstan “strenuus et gloriosus,” Eadmund “magnificus,” Eadred “egregius,” Eadgar “pacificus.”

66. The Imperial character of the English royalty at this time will be spoken of more largely in the next Chapter. See also Appendix B.

67. Leicester (Chron. 918), Stamford (922), and Nottingham (924) were all in possession of Eadward, who built fortresses at the latter two. Perhaps they had joined in the revolt of the Northumbrians in 941; but the words of the Chronicles may lead us to think that Eadward accepted the submission of the Confederation and built forts to keep the towns from rebellion, without interfering with their internal administration. A Danish civic aristocracy may therefore have gone on down to the deliverance by Eadmund, holding the former English inhabitants in more or less of subjection.

68. See Appendix H.

69. On the whole reign of Eadwig, see Mr. Allen’s Essay attached to his work on the Royal Prerogative.

70. The entries in the Chronicles just at this time are singularly meagre.

71. See Brut y Tywysogion, a. 965. With this seems to be connected the famous story of the tribute of wolves in William of Malmesbury, ii. 155.

An Irish campaign and victory of Eadgar (see the spurious charter of 964, Cod. Dipl. ii. 404) seem very doubtful.

72. Chron. 966.

73. With regard to Thanet, the Chronicles witness to the fact; Henry of Huntingdon (M. H. B. 748 A) guarantees its justice; it was done “quia jura regalia spreverant.” Roger of Wendover (i. 414) knows all about it, and says it was because the men of Thanet plundered certain merchants of York.

74. See the Pictish Chronicle, ap. Johnstone, Ant. Celt. Norm. 143.

75. The alleged cession of Lothian is surrounded with so many difficulties that I reserve the question for fuller discussion. See Appendix I.

76. This is Dr. Lingard’s probable conjecture. Hist. of England, i. 262.

77. Laws of Eadgar, in Thorpe’s Laws and Institutes, i. 272, Schmid, p. 195.

78. The best of all authorities, the Chronicles (973), bear witness to the meeting of Eadgar with six kings at Chester, where they renewed their homage to him. Florence, the authority next in value, raises the number to eight; he also gives their names (Kenneth of Scotland, Malcolm of Cumberland, Maccus of the Isles, and five Welsh princes) and describes the ceremony on the Dee.

79. In the ballad in the Chronicles (958) the only fault found with Eadgar is his fondness for foreigners, who are said to have corrupted the morals of the English in divers ways.

80. The scandalous stories told of Eadgar’s private life are, with one exception, that of the abduction of the nun Wulfthryth, mere romances, without a shadow of authority.

81. As long as Man retained its separate Kings or even its separate Lords, it was strictly in the same position in which it was in the days of Eadgar. Even now, as retaining its own Legislature and not being represented in the Imperial Parliament, it is a dependency of the British Crown, like the Channel Islands, not an integral part of the United Kingdom, like England, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland.

82. I cannot, in this Chapter, lay claim to the same originality which I hope I may fairly claim in the narrative parts of this history. The early political and legal antiquities of England have been treated of by so many eminent writers that there is really little more to be done than to test their different views by the standards of inherent probability and of documentary evidence, and to decide which has the best claim to adoption. Among many other works two stand out conspicuously, Sir Francis Palgrave’s History of the English Commonwealth and Mr. Kemble’s Saxons in England. My readers will easily see that I have learned much from both, but that I cannot call myself an unreserved follower of either. Another most important work is Dr. Reinhold Schmid’s Die Gesetze der Angelsachsen (2nd ed. Leipzig, 1858). The most valuable part is the Antiquarian Glossary, the principal articles of which swell into essays on the most important subjects suggested by the Old-English Laws, supported by the most lavish array of references for every detail. On the whole I think I shall be commonly found maintaining the same constitutional views as Mr. Kemble, except on the point of the Imperial character of the Old-English monarchy, an aspect of it which Mr. Kemble has rather unaccountably slurred over. This point, one which closely connects itself with other studies of mine, is perhaps the one which I have thought out more thoroughly for myself than any other. Sir Francis Palgrave, with his characteristic union of research, daring, and ingenuity, was the first to call attention to the subject; but I must confess that many of his views on the matter seem to me not a little exaggerated.

[I let this note stand as it was first written about eleven years ago; since then the great Constitutional History of Professor Stubbs has gathered together all knowledge on these subjects in a wonderfully short compass. My special obligations to him are recorded in my Fifth Volume. I have also, since this Chapter was written, studied the great work of Waitz, Deutsche Verfassungs Geschichte, and other German constitutional writers, some for the first time, others more carefully than I had read them before. I am glad that I do not find more to change than I do. I have not thought it needful to recast the Chapter; but I have changed whatever seemed either inaccurate or misleading, and I have added some fresh illustrations and references, chiefly to Waitz and Sir Henry Maine.]

83. [This was first written in the year 1866.]

84. On the change from Ealdormen or Heretogan to Kings, see Appendix K.

85. See above, p. 54.

86. On all these points see Appendix K.

87. See above, p. 26.

88. See above, p. 54, and Appendix F. Gneist, Englische Verwaltungsrecht, i. 47; “Nach dem Aussterben oder der Verdrängung der mediatisirten Häuptlinge aber treten nahe Verwandte des regierenden Hauses (Athelingi) oder verschwägerte oder sonst nahestehende Grossthane in die Stelling solcher Unterkönige ein, bis die fortschreitende Reichseinheit diese Statthalter allmälig auf dem Fuss blosser Reichsbeamten bringt.” Cf. K. von Maurer, Kritische Überschau, i. 86.

89. See above, p. 62.

90. The modern German princes represent nothing but modern dynastic and diplomatic arrangements; otherwise one might compare this process with the return to ealdormanship in Wessex and Lombardy. [This was written early in 1866, before the reverse process had begun.]

91. On the word “King” see Appendix L.

92. See Appendix M.

93. Englaland, in its different forms, does not appear in the Chronicles till the year 1014. Angel-cyn, which in 597 clearly means the people, must, in 975 and 986, be taken for the country. So still more plainly in 1002. In many places it may be taken either way. Cf. Appendix A, T.

94. Il. ix. 160. καὶ μοὶ ὑποστήτω ὅσσον βασιλεύτερός εἰμι.

95. In tracing the origin and progress of the Comitatus or Thegnhood I find no essential difference between the views of Sir Francis Palgrave and Mr. Kemble. It is only when we draw near to more purely political questions that their theories diverge in any marked way.

96. Tac. Germ. 11. “De minoribus rebus principes consultant; de majoribus omnes; ita tamen ut ea quoque, quorum penes plebem arbitrium est, apud principes pertractentur.” This is exactly the Greek βουλή and δῆμος.

97. For the Assembly of the Achaians, see Il. ii. 51; for that of the Gods, see Il. xx. 4. Compare on the Homeric Assemblies, Grote, Hist. of Greece, ii. 91, and Gladstone, Homer and the Homeric Age, iii. 114. It certainly strikes me that Mr. Gladstone has understood far more thoroughly than Mr. Grote the position of the simple freeman of the Homeric age, which Mr. Grote is inclined to undervalue. So most people are inclined to undervalue the position of our Ceorlas. See Hallam, Supplementary Notes, p. 206 et seqq.

98. On the amount of freedom among the Macedonians, see Historical Essays, Second Series, p. 188, and the passages there quoted.

99. See History of Federal Government, i. 37–38.

100. The story is in the Rig’s-mal, and will be found in the English translation of Mallet’s Northern Antiquities, p. 365. Jarl, Karl, and Thræll, all born on one day through the power of the God Helmdall, are the respective ancestors of the three classes of men, eorls, ceorls, and thralls or slaves. Karl, among other sons, has Husbandman, Holder, and Smith.

101. Of the history and constitution of these commonwealths I trust to treat more at large in the second volume of my History of Federal Government. I will now only say that, though the amount of independence enjoyed by the ancient Cantons has often been greatly exaggerated, there is evidence enough to show that, in some districts at least, the old Teutonic system can be traced back uninterruptedly as far as we have any records at all, so that we may fairly presume an unbroken succession from the Germans of Tacitus. [See Growth of the English Constitution, p. 161, ed. 3.]

102. This comparison may surprise some who have been accustomed to look on the ceorlas as a very degraded class. There can be no doubt that among the ceorlas there were men of very different positions, that the general tendency of their position was to sink, and that, by the time of the Norman Conquest, some classes of them had advanced a good way on the road to serfdom. But this was not the condition of the whole order even then; still less was it the original conception of ceorldom. The original ceorl is a citizen and a soldier; he is, or may be, a landowner; on the one hand he is free, on the other he is not noble. See the remarks in Hallam’s Supplementary Notes already referred to.

103. See Mr. Kemble’s Chapter on “The Mark” in the first volume of The Saxons in England.

104. To Mr. Allen (Royal Prerogative, p. 129) belongs the honour of having first explained what folkland and bookland really were.

105. In Latin possessores, the word so fertile in confusions as to the Agrarian Laws. So Aristotle (Pol. vii. 10) lays down the rule, ἀναγκαῖον εἰς δύο μέρη διῃρῆσθαι τὴν χώραν, καὶ τὴν μὲν εἶναι κοινὴν, τὴν δὲ τῶν ἰδιωτῶν. [On this whole subject of communities and common lands much has been said since this Chapter was written. The English reader will find the cream in Sir Henry Maine’s Village Communities.]

106. Cæsar, Bell. Gall. vi. 22. Cf. Tac. Germ. 26; but from c. 16 it would seem that in his time the institution of the eðel had already begun.

107. In Glarus and Appenzell altogether so, and even in Uri to some extent.

108. On the Comitatus see the classical passage of Tacitus, Germ. 13, 14 (cf. 25), and for the working out of the whole in detail, see Mr. Kemble’s two Chapters, “The Noble by Service” in the first volume, and “The King’s Court and Household” in the second.

109. Looked at philologically, this word Hlaford is most puzzling, and the feminine Hlæfdige (Lady) is more puzzling still. But it is enough for my purpose, if a connexion with Hláf in any shape be admitted, whatever may be thought of the last syllable.

110. Maine, Ancient Law, 303. “The person who ministered to the sovereign in his court had given up something of that absolute personal freedom which was the proudest privilege of the allodial proprietor.”

111. Hom. Od. iv. 22;

ὁ δὲ προμολὼν ἴδετο κρείων Ἐτεωνεὺς,

ὀτρηρὸς θεράπων Μενελάου κυδαλίμοιο,

βῆ δ’ ἴμεν ἀγγελέων διὰ δώματα ποιμένι λαῶν.

So Il. xxiv. 473;

ἕταροι δ’ ἀπάνευθε καθείατο· τῷ δὲ δύ’ οἴω

ἥρως Αὐτομέδων τε, καὶ Ἄλκιμος ὄζος Ἄρηος,

ποίπνυον παρέοντε.

Eteôneus is κρείων, Automedôn is ἥρως, yet they are the Þegnas of Menelaos and Achilleus respectively.

112. Bæda, ii. 9. “Lilla minister (þegn) Regis amicissimus.” He saves his hlaford’s life at the cost of his own.

113. See this most remarkable story in the Chronicles, 755; Florence, 784.

114. Herod. vii. 104. ἔπεστι γάρ σφι δεσπότης νόμος, τὸν ὑποδειμαίνουσι πολλῷ ἔτι μᾶλλον ἢ οἱ σοὶ σε.

115. Of this feeling, and the gradual change as the Empire advanced, I have spoken in Historical Essays, Second Series, p. 317. See the passages quoted in the note, Tac. Hist. i. 58, and Spartianus (in Hist. Aug. Scriptt.) Hadrian, 22.

116. Mr. Kemble however (ii. 112) remarks that the greatest men of the kingdom, men like Godwine, Leofric, and Siward, seem never to have held such offices. So in our own day a man who had any chance of becoming First Lord of the Treasury would not stoop to become Lord Chamberlain or Master of the Horse.

117. See Appendix O.

118. On the promotion of Ceorls to higher rank, the following passages are explicit. “We witan þæt þurh Godes gyfe þrǽl wærð tô þegene and ceorl wearð tô eorle, sangere tô sacerde and bôcere tô biscope,” (Be griðe and be munde. Wilkins, 112; Thorpe, i. 334; Schmid, 386). “And gif ceorl geþeàh þæt he hæfðe fullice fîf hîda agenes landes, cirican and kycenan, bell-hûs and burh-geat-setl and sunder-note on cynges healle, þonne wæs he þononforð þegen rihtes weorðe.” (Thorpe, i. 190; Schmid, 388. “Be leôd-geþincð and lage.”) The whole of this last document bears on the subject. Compare also the table of Wergilds (Schmid, 396), ii. § 9. On the first extract I may remark that the jingle of beginnings and endings has carried the lawgiver a little too far. In strictness the Ceorl could not become an Eorl (in the older sense of the word); but a Ceorl, or even a Thrall when once manumitted, might become a Thegn, and, once a Thegn, he might conceivably become an Eorl in the later sense.

119. On Commendation, see Appendix N.

120. See Appendix O.

121. “Homo”—whence “homagium,” “hommage”—is the constant technical name for the vassal. See Domesday in almost every page.

122. Palgrave, English Commonwealth, i. 354. Maine, Ancient Law, 302, who however seems to forget the Comitatus, and brings in the relation of patron and client, which however is itself a form of the Comitatus.

123. This was found in a somewhat different form on the continent. See the documents in Waitz, Deutsche Verfassungsgeschichte, iv. 266, one of Charles the Great, which speaks “de tribus causis, de hoste publico, hoc est de banno nostro, quando publicitus promovetur, et wacta, vel pontes componendum.” Waitz remarks, “Statt der Wachtdienste wird bei den Angelsachsen und später auch auf deutschem Boden das sogenannte Burgwerk, die Hülfe beim Burgenbau, genannt.” And to the repair of bridges, some of his documents add that of churches and roads.

124. For continental exemptions under the Karlings, see Waitz, iv. 268.

125. See Appendix P.

126. See Allen, pp. 143, 153, et seqq.; also on the whole subject of the change of Folkland into Terra Regis.

127. I have said more on this subject in Growth of the English Constitution, pp. 139, 140.

128. See Eichhorn, Deutsche Staats- und Rechtsgeschichte, iii. 158.

129. This was written before the wonderful changes in Germany (August, 1866), which will supply me with abundant matter for another work.

130. On this whole subject I must again refer to Mr. Kemble, especially to his chapters on the Mark and the Shire.

131. Many of our present shires are historically divisions of kingdoms (see above, p. 48), and the word Scír, connected with scérn or shear, of course actually means division. But the word is most likely a comparatively modern one; the Shire or Pagus answers to the German Gau, on which see Kemble’s chapter on the Gá, and the chapter in the first volume of Waitz, Deutsche Verfassungsgeschichte, “Das Dorf, die Gemeinde, der Gau.”

132. See above, pp. 25, 26. Comparative Politics, 408, 412, 417.

133. See again Mr. Kemble’s chapter on the Gerefa. The Gerefa or Reeve is an officer, especially a fiscal officer, of any kind, from a Shirereeve down to a Dykereeve—Mr. Kemble adds, to a Hogreeve. In Northern English the word, under the form of Grieve, has changed from a public to a private exactor. The word is the same as the High-Dutch Graf; only the one title has risen and the other has fallen. A Burggraf is a greater man than a Boroughreeve.

134. See above, p. 48.

135. Tac. Germ. 11. “Si displicuit sententia, fremitu adspernantur; sin placuit, frameas concutiunt. Honoratissimum adsensus genus est, armis laudare.” Comparative Politics, 466.

136. I must again refer to Mr. Gladstone’s remarks on this subject. Cf. Historical Essays, Second Series, p. 84.

137. [Changes made since this was written have pretty well got rid of the ancient scirgemót. See vol. v. p. 465.]

138. See Appendix Q.

139. Hist. of Federal Government, i. 266. We may be sure however, both from the smaller extent of the country and from the political instincts of the Greek mind, that popular attendance never died out so completely in Achaia as it did in England. And in both cases those who lived in the neighbourhood of the place of meeting would doubtless often attend when people from a distance did not. The frequent attendance of the citizens of London in the Witenagemót may be compared with the appearance of a vast crowd of Corinthian citizens of inferior rank in an assembly held at Corinth, which is spoken of as unusual. Polybios, xxxviii. 4. Hist. Fed. Gov. i. 263.

140. Cf. Arist. Pol. iv. 5. 3. οὐ δεῖ δὲ λανθάνειν ὅτι πολλαχοῦ συμβέβηκεν ὥστε τὴν μὲν πολιτείαν τὴν κατὰ τοὺς νόμους μὴ δημοτικὴν εἶναι, διὰ δὲ τὸ ἦθος καὶ τὴν ἀγωγὴν πολιτεύεσθαι δημοτικῶς, ὁμοίως δὲ πάλιν παρ’ ἄλλοις τὴν μὲν κατὰ τοὺς νόμους εἶναι πολιτείαν δημοτικωτέραν, τῇ δ’ ἀγωγῇ καὶ τοῖς ἔθεσιν ὀλιγαρχεῖσθαι μᾶλλον. I suspect that both these descriptions are in a manner applicable to the Old-English constitution. The latter is true on the face of it; the democratic theory veiled an oligarchic reality. But it seems not unlikely that the former may be true also, and that the narrow body into which the ancient free assembly had shrunk up still in practice fairly expressed the sense of the nation.

141. Witena-Gemót = Sapientum concilium. Sir Francis Palgrave suggests (i. 143) that Witan is used in the sense of witnesses; but sapientes is the common Latin translation. The Senate of Bremen used to be called “Die Wittheit,” and the Senators of all the three Hanseatic Towns were till lately called “hoch- und wohl-Weisheit.”

142. One might say, in all seriousness, ψυχῶν σόφων τοῦτ’ ἐστὶ φροντιστήριον.

143. In 1004 Ulfkytel, acting as Ealdorman of the East-Angles (see Appendix HH), assembles the local Gemót; “Þa gerædde Ulfkytel wið þa witan on East-Englum.” The letter from the Kentish men to Æthelstan, quoted in a former note, reads like an act of acceptance, on the part of a local Gemót, of resolutions passed by the general body.

144. See Appendix Q.

145. See above, p. 102.

146. [On the seeming difference on this point between myself and Professor Stubbs, see vol. v. p. 406.]

147. The powers of the Witan are drawn out in form by Kemble, ii. 204.

148. See Appendix R.

149. See Appendix S.

150. I shall speak of this point when I come to the disputed election after the death of Eadgar.

151. See Ælfred’s will in Cod. Dipl. ii. 112, v. 127; and the account of Æthelwulf’s will in Florence, 855. See Pauli’s Life of Ælfred, pp. 103, 104 (Eng. Trans.).

152. Taxation, in our modern sense, is seldom a matter of great importance in an early state of society. Public or demesne lands, various imposts on lands, feudal dues and compositions of various kinds, largely supply its place. Taxation in the modern sense is scarcely heard of in our earliest history, except for one shameful and unhappy purpose, that of buying off the Danish invaders. For this purpose a real tax, the famous Danegeld, was levied, and levied, as appears by several passages of the Chronicles, by the joint authority of the King and his Witan. So, during the same unhappy reign of Æthelred, we shall find the King and his Witan laying on an impost, of which I shall speak more when I come to it in the course of my narrative, one of a kind intermediate between ship-money and an Athenian λειτουργία.

153. There was a direct collision in the case of that “Good Parliament” of the eleventh century, the famous Mycel Gemót which restored Godwine and his family and drove out the foreign favourites of Eadward. But whether anybody voted against the enactment of the Laws of Æthelstan or Eadgar we have no means of knowing. We have several clear cases of parties among the Witan during a vacancy of the crown, and of differences on questions of foreign policy; but these cases do not touch the present question.

154. Laws of Æthelberht, Thorpe, i. 2. “Gif cyning his leode to him gehated, and heom mon þær yfel gedo, II bote and cyninge L scillinga.”

155. See Historical Essays, Second Series, p. 32.

156. On Ælfred’s deference to the authority of his Witan, see the quotation from his Laws, above, p. 52.

157. The reign of Æthelred in England reminds one of the generalship of Epêratos in Achaia (Polyb. v. 30; Hist. of Fed. Gov. i. 550), but happily for Achaia her General could not remain in office for thirty-eight years.

158. See Appendix D.

159. See Appendix G.

160. A ceorl might have his own loaf-eaters (Hláf-ætas. Laws of Æthelberht, 25), and this looks very like a form of the Comitatus.

161. Waitz (iii. 87), recording the homage done by Tassilo to Pippin, “ut vasses,” says, “So viel wir wissen ist es das erste Mal, dass Gebräuche und Grundsätze, welche ursprünglich offenbar auf ganz andere Verhältnisse berechnet waren, für die politisch so bedeutenden Beziehungen eines Herzogs zu dem Oberhaupt des Staates zur Anwendung kamen.”

162. Among a crowd of smaller princes the Kings of Denmark, Poland, Hungary, and Bohemia stand out conspicuous. All these were at one time or another vassals of the Empire, though all except Bohemia recovered their independence. The Kings of Poland and Bohemia received the royal title from an Imperial grant.

163. Widukind, i. 29, who however calls him Imperator prospectively. The date is fixed by the Annales Vedastini (Pertz, i. 525, ii. 205), though they give a different colouring to the transaction.

164. See Edward’s own statement, tracing his right up to the Commendation, in Trivet (p. 382, Hog) and Hemingford (ii. 196). It is a pity that any nonsense about Brutus has found its way into some copies of these documents.

165. A Highlander, with his notions (though grounded on a different principle) of personal fidelity to a chief, might perhaps have understood it; but the true Scots had very little to do with the affairs of the kingdom of Scotland.

166. See Robertson, Scotland under her Early Kings, i. 55.

167. See Appendix H.

168. Ibid.

169. See Appendix I.

170. See History of Federal Government, i. 120.

171. Again I keep clear of all mazes about Picts and Scots. My division is true upon any theory, except the wild one of Pinkerton. The Picts were either Irish or Welsh—in the wide sense of those two words.

172. See Appendix G.

173. I refer to the transactions between Æthelred and Malcolm of Cumberland, which I shall speak of in my fifth Chapter.

174. See Appendix Q.

175. See Appendix B.

176. That is of course not Constantine the Great, but Constantine the “Tyrant” of the fifth century.

177. See Appendix B.

178. For a specimen of this style see Macaulay, Hist. of Eng. i. 358.

179. See Appendix B.

180. See Appendix B.

181. The word Tyrant in those times bore a sense which may be called a monarchical antitype of its old Greek sense. The Greek tyrant was a man who obtained kingly power in a commonwealth; the tyrants of the third and fourth centuries were men who revolted against a lawful Emperor. “Licet apud nos incubator imperii tyrannus dicatur,” says Servius (ad Virg. Æn. vii. 266). In both cases, the word in strictness expresses only the origin of power, and not the mode of its exercise. Many of the so-called tyrants were excellent rulers. But the Imperial tyrant had this great advantage over the Greek tyrant, that success might turn him into a lawful Emperor, while the Greek tyrant remained a tyrant always. In mediæval writers the word is constantly used in this later Imperial sense, as equivalent to “usurper” or “pretender.”

182. After all the case of an Emperor or tyrant reigning in Britain and Britain only was excessively rare. It could have happened only in the case of those fleeting tyrants of whom the land was said to be fertile, and who rose and fell without being recorded. All the more famous men of the class, Carausius, Maximus, Constantine, possessed some part of the continental dominions of the Empire, and sought to possess the whole.

183. See above, pp. 38, 39.

184. See p. 39.

185. Grimm’s Gedichte auf König Friedrich (Berlin 1844), p. 65.

186. See Appendix B.

187. I would not be understood as asserting the justice or honesty of any such claim. The Commendation of 924 was wiped out by the renunciation of 1328. From that time Scotland must be looked on as an independent kingdom, and, as such, she rightly entered into the Union with England on equal terms.

188. For the Norman and French history of the tenth century there are three principal authorities. The only writer on the Norman side is Dudo, Dean of Saint Quintin, whose work will be found in Duchesne’s Rerum Normannicarum Scriptores. His history is nearly coincident with the century, going down to the death of Richard the Fearless. He is a most turgid and wearisome writer, without chronology or arrangement of any kind. He is in fact one of the earliest of a very bad class of writers, those who were employed, on account of their supposed eloquence, to write histories which were intended only as panegyrics of their patrons. It is only just before the end of his narrative that Dudo begins to be a contemporary witness; up to that time he simply repeats such traditions as were acceptable at the Norman court. Of the two French writers, Flodoard or Frodoard, Canon of Rheims (whose Annals will be found in the third volume of Pertz), is a far more valuable writer in himself, but his notices of Norman affairs are few and meagre. He perhaps avoids speaking of the terrible strangers any more than he can help. Flodoard is a mere annalist, and aspires to no higher rank, but in his own class he ranks very high. He is somewhat dull and dry, as becomes an annalist, but he is thoroughly honest, sensible, and straightforward. His Annals reach from 919 to 966, the year of his death, so that he is strictly contemporary throughout. The other French writer is Richer, a monk of Rheims, whose work was discovered by Pertz, and is printed in his third volume (also separately in his smaller collection, and in a French edition by M. Gaudet, with a French translation, 2 vols. Paris, 1845). He was the son of Rudolf, a knight and counsellor of King Lewis the Fourth, and derived much of his information from his father. He also makes use of the work of Flodoard. He goes down to 998, which was seemingly the year of his death. Richer is not content with being an annalist; he aspires to be an historian. He is much fuller and more vivid than Flodoard, but I cannot look on him as equally trustworthy. On this writer see Palgrave, History of Normandy and England, i. 748. The second volume of Sir Francis’ own work contains a most vivid, though very discursive and garrulous, history of the time before us, full of all the merits and defects of its author. I would refer to an article of mine on it in the Edinburgh Review for April 1859; also to another, “The Franks and Gauls,” in the National Review for October 1860, since reprinted in my first series of Historical Essays.

189. See Appendix A.

190. See Appendix T.

191. Will. Pict. 145. “Hujus milites Normanni possident Apuliam, devicere Siciliam, propugnant Constantinopolim, ingerunt metum Babyloni.”

192. Guil. App. apud Murat, vol. v. p. 274;

... “Sic uno tempore victi

Sunt terræ domini duo; rex Alemannicus iste,

Imperii rector Romani maximus ille:

Alter ad arma ruens armis superatur, et alter

Nominis auditi sola formidine cessit.”

Cf. Roger of Howden (404) with his wild account of Robert Wiscard, copied from Benedict, ii. 200.

193. Matt. Paris, p. 804, Wats. “Principum mundi maximus Fredericus, stupor quoque mundi et immutator mirabilis.” P. 806. “Stupor mundi Fredericus.”

194. This time of struggle is the subject of the second volume of Sir Francis Palgrave’s History of Normandy and England. The character of the period cannot be better summed up than it is by Widukind, lib. i. c. 29; “Unde usque hodie certamen est de regno Karolorum stirpi et posteris Odonis, concertatio quoque regibus Karolorum et orientalium Francorum super regno Lotharii.” On the force of these names see Appendix T.

195. I understand by “modern France” the extent of territory which, before the annexations at the expense of the Empire began, was held either by the King of the French in domain or by princes who held of him in fief. From the France of 1870 we must take away the French part of Hennegau, Lothringen and the three Bishopricks, Elsass, the county of Burgundy, Savoy, Lyons, Bresse, the Dauphiny, Provence, Nizza, and Corsica. We must add the still independent part of Flanders, the county of Barcelona, and the Channel Islands.

196. That is, Aquitaine was, up to the Peace of Bretigny, always held in nominal vassalage to France, but, except during the momentary occupation when Philip the Fair had outwitted Edmund of Lancaster, no Parisian King was immediate sovereign of Bourdeaux till Aquitaine finally lost its independence in the fifteenth century.

197. Charles the Third is commonly said to have reunited the whole Empire of Charles the Great, and he certainly reigned over Germany, Italy, Lotharingia, and the Western Kingdom; but he never obtained the immediate sovereignty of the Kingdom of Burgundy, founded by Boso in 879. Boso was succeeded by Rudolf.

198. “The City of Revolutions begins her real history by the first French Revolution.” Palgrave, i. 282. (References to “Palgrave” will, for the future, mean the “History of Normandy and England,” not the “English Commonwealth.”)

199. On the sieges of Paris and the origin of the Parisian dynasty, see more in Historical Essays, first series, “The Early Sieges of Paris.”

200. Richer, i. 5. “Hic [Odo] patrem habuit ex equestri ordine Rotbertum; avum vero paternum, Witichinum advenam Germanum.”

201. See Appendix V.

202. I use this familiar name prospectively, as I know not what other to put in its place. I may add that Capet was at no time really a family name, as people fancied during the French Revolution, and ludicrously described Lewis the Sixteenth as “Louis Capet.”

203. Sir Francis Palgrave has altogether upset the vulgar error which looks on the later Karlings as a line of utterly incapable Kings, like the later Merwings. No two sets of men could be more completely different both in position and in character.

204. See the story of the taking of Luna by mistake for Rome, Dudo, 65.

205. Regino in Anno (Pertz, i. 602), and our own Chronicles.

206. On the battle of Saulcourt, see the Chronicle in Duchesne, p. 4.

207. The Ludwigslied will be found in Max Müller’s German Classics, p. 37.

208. See Benoît de Ste. More, p. 76, and M. Michel’s note. Cf. Dudo, p. 66.

209. See Flod. A. 923, 930 (Pertz, iii. 379), et pass. On the Loire, as at Bayeux, the Normans had Saxon forerunners. Greg. Tur. ii. 18, 19; Zeuss, 386.

210. “Richardus pyratarum dux apoplexia minore periit” is one of the last entries in the history of Richer (t. ii. p. 308, Guadet).

211. The genuine name is Hrolfr, Rolf, in various spellings. The true French form is Rou. The love of the Old-French tongue for making all nouns end in s, that is, for making them all of the second declension, made this into Rous, and hence came a strange Latin form Rosus. The true Latin form is Rollo, like Cnuto, Sveno, &c. From this Latin form modern French writers have, oddly enough, made a form Rollon. The strangest form is Rodla, which occurs in a late manuscript of the English Chronicles (A. 876. Thorpe’s ed.). This was clearly meant to be an English form of Rollo. The English masculine ending a was substituted for the Latin o, just as Giso and Odo are in English Gisa and Oda. The writer also clearly thought that Rollo was a name of the same type as Robert and others, and he fancied that by putting in a d he was restoring it to its genuine Teutonic shape.

212. Flodoard was perhaps contemporary with the settlement, but we have no narrative of those years from his hand. Richer, if he was very old when he died, may have been an infant at the time of the settlement, but that is all.

213. Dudo, 75 C.

214. Lappenberg (Thorpe), ii. 60.

215. In some accounts he seems to appear even earlier than 876. Duchesne, 25 D.

216. Dudo, 75 D.

217. Ib. 77 C.

218. Ib. C, D.

219. Dudo, 80 B. Cf. Duchesne, 25 A, 34 B.

220. See above, p. 53.

221. Dudo, 84 A.

222. See Appendix W.

223. See Appendix W.

224. See Appendix T.

225. I cannot but think that Sir Francis Palgrave has made too much of this last title, which is surely only a piece of Dudonian rhetoric, like the “satrapæ” and “archontes” of our own charters.

226. See above, p. 164.

227. See the stories in Dudo, p. 85; Benoît de Ste. More, 7146 et seqq.

228. On the division of the land, just like the division of Northumberland and Danish Mercia, see Depping, i. 125.

229. See further on in this Chapter.

230. See Palgrave, i. 700; Lappenberg’s Anglo-Norman Kings, 97; and, more at large, Depping, ii. 339. Such names as Dieppedal (Deep dale) and Caudebec (Cold beck) are good examples. In forming local names from the proper names of men, the familiar Danish by often appears under the form of bœuf; but it is more usual to couple the Danish name with a French ending. Haqueville, for instance, answers to the English Haconby.

231. Palgrave, ii. 68, 259.

232. Dudo, 76 D. “Quo nomine vester senior fungitur? Responderunt, Nullo, quia æqualis potestatis sumus.”

233. Several examples are collected by Lappenberg, p. 19. The dealings of the Assembly touching the abdication of Rolf are given at large by Dudo, 90 D, et seqq. So in 85 B we read, “Jura et leges sempiternas voluntate principum sancitas et decretas plebi indixit.”

234. See Depping, ii. 128, 129.

235. Flod. A. 923. “Ragenoldus princeps Nortmannorum qui in fluvio Ligeri versabantur, Karoli frequentibus missis jampridem excitus, Franciam trans Isaram conjunctis sibi plurimis ex Rodomo prædatur.”

236. The well-known duchy of after times, with Dijon for its capital. This part of the earliest Burgundy always retained its connexion with the kingdom of the West-Franks, while the rest formed the Burgundian kingdom of Boso.

237. Here Lewis the Eleventh was kept in durance by Charles the Bold, on which Philip of Comines remarks (ii. 7), “Le roy qui se vid enfermé en ce chasteau (qui est petit) et force archers à la porte, n’estoit point sans doute: et se voyoit logé rasibus d’une grosse tour, où un comte de Vermandois fit mourir un sien predecesseur roy de France.” There is a curious notice of Charles’s imprisonment in Thietmar of Merseburg (i. 13. Pertz, iii. 741); “Fuit in occiduis partibus quidam rex, ab incolis Karl Sot, id est stolidus, ironice dictus, qui ab uno suimet ducum captus, tenebris includitur carceralibus.” Both Thietmar and Widukind (i. 33) attribute to the Eastern King a powerful intervention in favour of Charles, which is perfectly possible, but which it is hard to find in the French writers.

238. On the siege of Eu (Auga), see Flodoard, A. 925; Richer, i. 49. On Eu, see vol. iii. ch. xii. § 2. The way in which Flodoard (A. 923) mentions the first invasion of Normandy is remarkable; “Itta fluvio transito ingressus est [Rodulfus] terram, quæ dudum Nortmannis ad fidem Christi venientibus, ut hanc fidem colerent, et pacem haberent, fuerat data.”

239. See Appendix T.

240. Flod. A. 924. On Maine, see vol. iii. ch. xii. § 3.

241. Dudo gives the account in full, p. 90 et seqq. He makes Rolf survive his abdication five years. Florence of Worcester makes him die in 917, probably by omission or misreading of a letter. Richer seems (but compare his two versions) to kill him at Eu in 925. The one certain thing is that William did homage to Charles in 927. “Karolus igitur cum Heriberto colloquium petit Nortmannorum ad castellum quod Auga vocatur, ibique se filius Rollonis Karolo committit, et amicitiam firmat cum Heriberto.” Flod. in anno. So Richer, i. 53.

242. On the history of the Saxons of Bayeux, see Lappenberg, Anglo-Norman Kings, p. 2. There were also Saxon settlements in Anjou and at Sens.

243. In the Capitulary of Charles the Bald in 843 (Pertz, Legg. i. 426), which Lappenberg refers to, the “Ot lingua Saxonia” is distinguished from the “Bagisinum.” It might seem that the Saxon speech survived in some parts of the country, but not in the city. The document is a list of royal missi and of the districts to which they were sent.

244. There would be whatever difference there may have been—one probably not very perceptible—between the Saxons of Bayeux and the Angles of Eastern and Northern England; there also is greater chance of a certain Celtic intermixture at Bayeux than there is at Derby or Stamford.

245. No country is historically more interesting to Englishmen than Aquitaine, on account of its long political connexion with England; but the connexion was purely political; there are no such abiding traces of real kindred as we see in Normandy, and especially in the Bessin.

246. Benoît, v. 8342;

“Ici trespasse Rous li proz et li vaillanz

Od fin duce e saintisme, e pleins de jorz e d’anz.”

247. The tale is told by the Aquitanian chronicler Ademar (iii, 20, Pertz, iv. 123), and M. Francisque Michel (note on Benoît, v. 8349) is inclined to believe it. It runs thus; “Postea vero [Rosus, see above, p. 165] factus Christianus a sacerdotibus Francorum, imminente obitu, in amentiam versus, Christianos captivos centum ante se decollari fecit in honore, quæ coluerat, idolorum, et demum centum auri libras per ecclesias distribuit Christianorum in honore veri Dei in cujus nomine baptismum susceperat.” But the manuscript which Pertz follows in his text does not make the sacrifice take place immediately before his death, and it is as well to see how Ademar’s whole story hangs together. He makes his “Rosus” be defeated by King Rudolf in the battle of Limoges in 930; he then retreats, and finding Rouen unoccupied, takes possession.

248. Dudo, 77 D; Benoît, v. 4122.

249. Will. Gem. iii. 2. See Appendix X.

250. Will. Gem. ii. 22. “Repudiatam Popam ... iterum repetens sibi copulavit.” See more in detail, Benoît, v. 7954. So Roman de Rou, 2037.

251. Dudo, 97 C; Will. Gem. iii. 3.

252. Ademar, iii. 27. “Roso defuncto, filius ejus Willelmus loco ejus præfuit, a pueritia baptizatus, omnisque eorum Normannorum, qui juxta Frantiam inhabitaverant, multitudo fidem Christi suscepit, et gentilem linguam obmittens, Latino sermone assuefacta est.” So, in the same words, in the Chronicle of Saint Maxentius, Labbé, iii. 202. On the use of Latinus for French, instead of Romanus, see Appendix V.

253. Flodoard, A. 928.

254. Ib. A. 929; Richer, i. 56.

255. Ib. A. 930. “Aquitanos sibi subditos fecit.” Of course this implies nothing more than homage. Cf. above, p. 156.

256. Flodoard, A. 931. “Brittones qui remanserant Nortmannis in Cornu Galliæ subditi consurgentes adversus eos qui se obtinuerant, in ipsis solemniis sancti Michaelis omnes interemisse dicuntur qui inter eos morabantur Nortmannos.”

257. Dudo, 93 B.

258. The Chronicle of Saint Maxentius, under 937 (Labbé, iii. 202), speaks of Saint Michael’s Mount as founded “in ea Normannia quæ antea vocabatur marchia Franciæ et Britanniæ.”

259. On these marriages see William of Malmesbury, ii. 126, 135. He describes at length the splendid embassy sent by Hugh (see Flod. A. 926) to demand Eadhild. Oddly enough, in c. 135 he calls Hugh “Rex Francorum,” while in c. 128 he utterly confounds the whole genealogy and history of the Parisian Dukes.

260. Her name is by French writers tortured into Ethgiva, Ogive, and what not. She is “Headtgiva” in Aimon of Fleury, Pertz, ix. 375. He says that Lewis [see Appendix A.], “calamitatis paternæ procella semet involvi metuens, ad Anglos-Saxones, maternæ affinitatis invitatus gratia, se contulit, in transmarinis arbitratus se tutiorem manere regionibus, quam inter suos dominus si foret in cubiculo, rex in convivio.”

261. Richer, ii. 1, 73. He was carried out in a bundle of hay or some such stuff (“in fasciculo farraginis”); but whither was he carried? “In partes transmarinas et prope in Rifeos.” As Lewis certainly went as far north as York, does this flourish mean the Cheviots, the Grampians, or what?

262. Dudo, 93 C. “Ipse vero in Britannia, nec in tota Francia usquam morari ob metum Willelmi ducis nequivit, sed profugus expetivit auxilium Alstemi Anglorum regis.” Benoît, 8834;

“En Engleterre au rei engleis

Alestan, au proz, au corteis,

Là se remist, là s’en foï

Deserité e mauballi.”

263. Dudo, 97 B. “Franciscæ gentis principes Burgundionumque comites famulabantur ei; Dacigenæ et Flandrenses, Anglique et Hibernenses parebant ei.” Ib. D. “Non solum monarchiam, quam tenebat, regebat; verum etiam affinia regna strenuo consilio moderabat. Angli parebant ejus mandatis, Franci et Burgundiones ejus dictis.”

264. It is curious to compare the different ways in which the return of the Bretons is told by Flodoard and by Dudo. Flodoard (A. 936) is willing to magnify even an Englishman in comparison with a Norman. William is not named. “Brittones a transmarinis regionibus Alstani Regis præsidio revertentes terram suam repetunt.” Dudo mixes up their return with the return of King Lewis, which in Flodoard follows it, and he makes Æthelstan something like a suppliant to William (95 D.) He calls Æthelstan “Anglorum Rex pacificus.” Was he thinking of Eadgar, who may have come within his own memory?

265. Dudo, 98 A. “Ipseque Alanus postea Willelmi mandatis indesinenter inhæsit.” Cf. 102 B, C; 113 D; 117 D.

266. Flodoard seems to imply that some of these independent Normans entered Britanny, about the same time as this suppression of the Breton revolt, perhaps even in concert with Duke William (A. 931); “Incon Nortmannus, qui morabatur in Ligeri, cum suis Britanniam pervadit victisque et cæsis vel ejectis Brittonibus regione potitur.” Of the return of the Bretons he has two notices. The first is under the year 937; “Brittones ad sua loca post diutinam regressi peregrinationem, cum Nortmannis, qui terram ipsorum contiguam sibi pervaserant, frequentibus dimicant prœliis, superiores pluribus existentes et loca pervasa recipientes.” The second is in the next year, 939; “Brittones cum Nortmannis confligentes victoria potiuntur, et quoddam Nortmannorum castellum cepisse feruntur.” See Palgrave, ii. 178–182.

267. The general line of thought in this paragraph is suggested by Palgrave, i. 106.

268. See above, p. 155.

269. Dudo, 94 et seqq.

270. From this scheme he was dissuaded by the good sense of the Abbot Martin. Those who care to read the Abbot’s sermon on the practical and the contemplative life will find it in Latin (diversified with a little Greek) in Dudo, p. 101 et seqq., and in Old-French in Benoît, v. 11057 et seqq.

271. William of Jumièges (iii. 9) makes Harold Blue-tooth, driven from his kingdom by his son Swegen, take refuge with William Longsword, who allows him to settle in the Côtentin till he can recover his kingdom. Now Harold’s expulsion by Swegen did not happen till long afterwards, and Swegen could hardly have been born when William died. The story no doubt arises from some confusion with Harold’s dealings with Normandy in the next reign, but it may very well preserve a memory of some real Danish colonization of the peninsula with or without William’s permission.

272. Dudo, ii. 112 D. See Appendix V.

273. Richer (i. 47) distinctly calls the immediate subjects of Charles the Simple “Germani.”

274. I of course assume that Hugh had no share in the murder of William, a point which I shall discuss elsewhere.

275. Flod. A. 933. “Willelmus, princeps Nortmannorum eidem regi [Rodulfo] se committit; cui etiam rex dat terram Brittonum in ora maritima sitam.”

276. Flod in A. “Heribertus comes ad Heinricum proficiscitur, eique sese committit.” The matter was serious enough for Rudolf and Hugh to make special peace with Henry, and to give hostages.

277. Richer, ii. 1–4. See Appendix Y.

278. Richer, ii. 2. “Adelstanus rex in urbem quæ dicitur Eurvich, regnorum negotia cum nepote Ludovico apud suos disponebat.” Mark the accuracy of the plural form regnorum (we shall come to it again), as applied to the dominions of the Emperor of Britain.

279. Ib. 3. “Acsi barbaris non satis credens.” The Persians in Æschylus call themselves βάρβαροι, and Plautus says, “Menander scripsit, Marcus vortit barbarè;” but why should Richer call his own people barbari as contrasted with the English? Is the word put dramatically into the mouth of Æthelstan, and does barbari literally translate Wealas?

280. Richer, ii. 3. “Secus ipsas litoreas arenas collecti, tuguriorum incendio præsentiam suam iis qui in altero litore erant ostendebant.... Cujus [Adelstani] jussu domus aliquot succensæ, sese advenisse trans positis demonstrabat.” The passion for setting fire to everything sometimes seems to be specially Norman; here it is also English and French.

281. Richer mentions Oda only, Flodoard mentions several Bishops and Thegns (fideles).

282. Richer, ii. 4. “Quod si nolint, sese ei daturum suorum aliquod regnorum, quo contentus et suis gaudeat et alienis non sollicitetur.”

283. Ib. “Dux cum reliquis Galliarum magnatibus id sese facturum asserit, si rex creatus a suis consiliis non absistat.” The relation thus mildly described is in cap. 6 called “procuratio.” So Flodoard, A. 937.

284. Richer is an excellent authority for all matters personally concerning Lewis. He got his information from his father Rudolf, a brave and trusty servant of the King. The description here (ii. 4) is highly graphic.

285. Richer, ii. 5; Flod. in anno.

286. Flod. A. 937. “Ludowicus rex ab Hugonis principis se procuratione separans, matrem suam Lauduni recipit.” Richer, ii. 6. “Rex felicium rerum successu elatus, præter ducis procurationem absque eo jam disponebat. Laudunum itaque tendit, ibique matrem suam Ethgivam reginam ad urbis custodiam deputat. Ac exinde quæcumque præter ducem adoriebatur.”

287. See above, p. 161.

288. On this siege, which is of some interest in a military point of view, see Flodoard, A. 938; Richer, ii. 9, 10.

289. Flod. A. 939.

290. Dudo, 103 A.

291. Flod. A. 939; Richer, ii. 11–15. These writers know something of William’s personal share in the campaign, which is asserted by Dudo, 103 B; Will. Gem. iii, 10. According to Benoît (11873 et seqq.), the men of the Côtentin specially distinguished themselves.

292. Flod. A. 939. “Uxorem ipsius Herluini trans mare cum filiis ad Alstanum regem mittit.” Richer, ii. 12. “Erluini uxorem cum natis Ædelstano regi Anglorum servandos trans mare deportat.”

293. Flod. A. 939. William is excommunicated “ab episcopis qui erant cum rege.”

294. Richer, ii. 18. “Cum ejus [Ottonis] pater Saxoniæ solum propter Sclavorum improbitatem rex creatus sit, eo quod Karolus, cui rerum summa debebatur, adhuc in cunis vagiebat.” But Henry was elected in 918, just before Charles’s troubles began, but when he had been a good many years out of his cradle.

295. Flod. A. 959.

296. Ib. “Anglorum classis ab Alstano, rege suo, in auxilium Ludowici regis transmissa mari transito loca quæquæ Morinorum mari deprædatur contigua; nulloque negotio propter quod venerant peracto, remenso mari, propria repetunt loca.” Richer, ii. 16. “Nec multo post et ab Ædelstano Anglorum rege classis regi cum copiis missa est. Audierat enim illum ab iis qui maritima incolebant loca exagitari, contra quos classis dimicaret regique nepoti auxilium ferret. Comperto vero contra regem illorum neminem stare, ipsumque regem in partes Germaniæ prosperum secessisse, mari remenso ad propria remeat.”

There is a marked difference of tone in these two accounts. Flodoard clearly wishes to make as little as he can of the English intervention, while Richer is anxious to make the most. Nor are their statements easy to reconcile. If Æthelstan’s fleet ravaged the Flemish coast, while Arnulf was still not an avowed enemy, that would at once explain Arnulf’s sudden defection. But, according to Richer, it would seem that Æthelstan heard some rumour of Arnulf’s intended treachery, but that, as it was not yet carried out, he had no excuse for action. That we do not hear of English interference during the next stage of the history is probably accounted for by Æthelstan’s death in 940.

297. Flod. A. 939. “Otho rex colloquium habuit cum Hugone et Heriberto, Arnulfo et Willelmo Nortmannorum principe; et acceptis ab eis pacti sacramentis, trans Rhenum regreditur.”

298. Ib. “Proficiscitur Elisatium, locutusque cum Hugone Cisalpino.” Richer, ii. 17. “Rex in pago Elisatio eum Hugone Cisalpino principe locutus.” On this use of the word “Cisalpinus,” see Appendix T.

299. Flod. A. 939.

300. Ib. A. 940. “Rex Ludowicus abiit obviam Willelmo principi Nortmannorum, qui venit ad eum in pago Ambianensi et se illi commisit. At ille dedit ei terram quam pater ejus Karolus Nortmannis concesserat.”

301. Richer, ii. 20. “Wilelmus piratarum dux ... regis factus, tanto ei consensu alligatus est ut jam jamque aut sese moriturum, aut regi imperii summam restituturum proponeret.”

302. Flod. A. 940. Richer (ii. 22) does not mention the presence of William at the siege.

303. Flod. A. 940. “Dedit autem rex Artoldo archiepiscopo, ac per eum ecclesiæ Remensi, per præceptionis regiæ paginam Remensis urbis monetam jure perpetuo possidendam; sed et omnem comitatum Remensem eidem contulit ecclesiæ.”

304. Flod. A. 940; Palgrave, ii. 244.

305. Flod. A. 942. More fully, Richer, ii. 28.

306. See Appendix Z.

307. See above, p. 180, and Appendix X.

308. See above, p. 192.

309. Dudo, 112 D.

310. Flod. A. 943. “Rex Ludowicus filio ipsius Willelmi, nato de concubina Brittanna, terram Nortmannorum dedit.” So more fully in Richer, ii. 34.

311. The original authority, such as it is, for these stories is of course Dudo, with the metrical chroniclers, who mainly follow him, Benoît sometimes adding details of his own. The English reader will find all he can want in Sir Francis Palgrave. I cannot help also mentioning Miss Yonge’s tale of the “Little Duke,” where the whole legend is very pleasantly told, though with too great a leaning to the Norman side.

312. Richer, ii. 37; R. Glaber, i. 3.

313. See above, p. 206.

314. On the influence of Conrad, see Flodoard, A. 948, 949, 952; Richer, ii, 82, 97. Conrad afterwards lost his duchy. Bruno, Archbishop and Duke, brother of Otto, brother-in-law of Lewis and Hugh the Great, uncle of Lothar and Hugh Capet, plays a most important part somewhat later.

315. See above, p. 186.

316. Flod. A. 943; Richer, ii. 35. The Norman writers pass over their Duke’s apostasy, which of course proves very little as to the personal disposition of a mere child, though it proves a great deal as to the general state of things in the country. But Flodoard and Richer are both explicit. “Turmodum Nortmannum, qui ad idolatriam gentilemque ritum reversus, ad hæc etiam filium Willelmi aliosque cogebat.” (Flod.) “Ut ... defuncti ducis filium ad idolatriam suadeant, ritumque gentilem inducant.” (Richer.)

317. Flod. A. 943. “Quidam principes ipsius se regi committunt, quidam vero Hugoni duci.” Richer, ii. 34. “Potiores quoque qui cum adolescentulo accesserant, per manus et sacramentum regis fiunt.... Alii vero Nortmannorum, Richardum ad regem transisse indignantes, ad Hugonem ducem concedunt.”

318. Flod. A. 943. “Rex ei ducatum Franciæ delegavit, omnemque Burgundiam ipsius ditioni subjecit.” Richer (ii. 39) says, “Eum rex omnium Galliarum ducem constituit.” This last cannot have been a formal title; it is merely Richer’s characteristic way of affecting classical language in his geography.

319. Flod. A. 943. “Hugo dux Francorum crebras agit cum Nortmannis, qui pagani advenerant, vel ad paganismum revertebantur, congressiones; a quibus peditum ipsius Christianorum multitudo interimitur at ipse nonnullis quoque Nortmannorum interfectis ceterisque actis in fugam, castrum Ebroas faventibus sibi qui tenebant illud Nortmannorum Christianis, obtinet.” Richer does not mention this.

320. Flod. A. 943; Richer, ii. 35. The account of the battle is much fuller in Richer.

321. Flod. A. 943.

322. Richer, ii. 38.

323. Flod. A. 943. “Hugo Arnulfum cum rege pacificavit, cui rex infensus erat ob necem Willelmi.” Richer, ii. 40.

324. Dudo, 114 et seqq.; Benoît, 12809 et seqq.; Roman de Rou, 2799 et seqq.

325. Dudo, 114 C. “Rotomagum properavit cum suis comitibus super his quæ nefario Arnulfi comitis astu acciderant consulturus. Rotomagenses vero adventu regis Ludovici hilares susceperunt eum volenter, putantes ut equitaret super Flandrenses,” &c.

326. Ib. 115 C. “Richardo prædignæ innocentiæ puero largitus est terram hæreditario avi patrisque jure possidendam.” Is not this a repetition of the real grant and homage mentioned above, which did not take place at Rouen?

327. “Poplites coquere.” Dudo, 117 B. “Poplites adurere.” Will. Gem. iv. 3. See M. Francisque Michel’s note on Benoît, 13706.

328. That is, he was carried out in a truss of hay. One can hardly avoid the suspicion that this is the story of Lewis’s own deliverance (see above, p. 184), perhaps itself legendary, turning up in another shape.

329. Flod. A. 944. He seems to distinguish “Nortmanni cum quibus pactum inierant” from “Nortmanni qui nuper a transmarinis venerant regionibus.” Cf. Richer, ii. 41.

330. Flod. A. 944. “Hugo dux Francorum pactum firmat cum Nortmannis, datis utrimque et acceptis obsidibus.”

331. Dudo, 120 B, D.

332. Flod. A. 944. “Baiocas ... civitatem ... quam rex ei dederat, si eum ad subjiciendam sibi hanc Nortmannorum gentem adjuvaret.”

333. Ib. A. 944. “Rex Rodomum perveniens a Nortmannis in urbe suscipitur, quibusdam mare petentibus qui eum nolebant recipere, cæteris omnibus sibi subjugatis.” Richer, ii. 42. “Rex Rhodomum veniens, ab iis qui fidei servatores fuere exceptus est. Desertores vero mare petentes, amoliti sunt, municipia vero copiis munita reliquere.”

334. Flod. A. 944. “Unde et discordiæ fomes inter regem concitatur et ducem.” From Flodoard it would seem that Hugh had fought with some Normans, and from Richer that he received the homage of others, earlier in the year. Hugh’s policy was always double, and Normandy was now very much divided against itself.

335. Flod. A. 945. “Rex Ludowicus collecto secum Nortmannorum exercitu, Veromandensen pagum depredatus.” So Richer, ii. 44.

336. Richer, ii. 47. “Rhodomum rediit, nil veritus cum paucis illic immorari, cum idem consueverit.”

337. Dudo, 122 C.

338. The chronology of Gorm’s reign is of course mythical; some give him quite a short reign; others make two or three Gorms. In short, we have hardly any standing-ground in Danish history before the time of Swegen.

339. See above, p. 191, for the rebellion of his son Swegen, which the later Norman writers misplace. Of Swegen I shall have much to say in my next Chapter.

340. I may for once quote an “Apostropha” of Dudo, 125 D;

“O pius, prudens, bonus, et modestus;

Fortis et constans, sapiensque, justus,

Dives, insignis, locuplesque, sollers

Rex Haygrolde.

Quamvis haut sis chrismate delibutus,

Et sacro baptismate non renatus:

En vale, salveque, et aucto semper

In deitate.”

341. See above, p. 210.

342. “Cæsaris burgus” is the approved etymology of our author’s, but I suspect that the place is akin to our Scarborough in name as well as in natural position.

343. Flod. A. 945. “Haigroldus Nortmannus qui Baiocis præerat.” So Richer, ii. 47.

344. Flod. u. s.; Richer, u. s. This last writer brings in Hugh the Great as an accomplice; “Dolus apud ducem a transfugis paratus, qui ante latuerat, orta opportunitate ex raritate militum, in apertum erupit. Nam dum tempestivus adveniret, ab Hagroldo qui Baiocensibus præerat, per legationem suasoriam accersitus, Bajocas cum paucis ad accersientem, utpote ad fidelem quem in nullo suspectum habuerat, securis accessit. Barbarus vero militum inopiam intuitus cum multitudine armatorum Regi incautus aggreditur.”

345. Dudo, 123 C, D.

346. See vol. iii. ch. xii. § 2.

347. Flod. A. 945. “Rex solus fugam iniit, prosequente se Nortmanno quodam sibi fideli. Cum quo Rodomum veniens, comprehensus est ab aliis Nortmannis quos sibi fideles esse putabat, et sub custodia detentus.”

348. Dudo, 125 D. “Jura legesque et statuta Rollonis ducis tenere per omnia cogebat.”

349. In Cnut’s time (Chron. A. 1018) the Witan at Oxford renewed “Eadgar’s law;” so Harold, in answer to the demands of the Northumbrians in revolt against Tostig (Chron. A. 1065), “renewed Cnut’s law.” So on the conquest of Cyprus by Richard the First in 1191 the laws of the Emperor Manuel were restored—on the payment by the islanders of half their possessions. Ben. Petrib. ii. 168.

350. I confess that, once or twice, in writing this paragraph, a doubt has crossed my mind whether “Haigrold who commanded at Bayeux” (see p. 217) was not, after all, some much smaller person than Harold King of the Danes. The Northern writers, as far as I know, do not mention the expedition, the motive of which is not very obvious. But very little can be made out of the Northern stories in any case; the French writers always slur over everything Norman; and the fiction would seem almost too bold even for Norman invention. The details of course cannot be accepted in any case.

351. Flod. A. 945; Richer, ii. 48; Widukind, ii. 39. “Hluthowicus rex a ducibus suis [Hugh?] circumventus, et a Northmannis captus, consilio Hugonis Lugdunum [confusedly for Laudunum, which is itself an error] missus custodiæ publicæ traditur. Filium autem ejus natu majorem Karlomannum Northmanni secum duxerunt Rothun; ibi et mortuus est.” On the hostages, see Flodoard and Richer.]

352. Richer, ii. 49, 50. “Ob minas Anglorum nil se facturum; ipsos, si veniant, quid in armis Galli valeant promptissime experturos; quod si formidine tacti non veniant, pro arrogantiæ tamen illatione, Gallorum vires quandoque cognituros et insuper pœnam luituros. Iratus itaque legatos expulit.” Flodoard, contrary to the remark made in p. 203, is less excited against insular intervention.

353. Widukind, ii. 39. “Audiens autem rex super fortuna amici satis doluit, imperavitque expeditionem in Gallia contra Hugonem in annum secundum.”

354. Flod. A. 945. “Qui rex nolens loqui cum eo mittit ad eum Conradum ducem Lothariensium. Cum quo locutus Hugo, infensus Othoni regi revertitur.”

355. Flod. A. 946; Richer, ii. 51. Richer clearly connects the liberation of Lewis with the negotiations with Otto. Widukind (iii. 2) is still more explicit; “Certus autem factus de adventu regis Huga, timore quoque perterritus, dimisit Hluthowicum.”

356. Flod. A. 946. “Qui dux Hugo renovans regi Ludowico regium honorem vel nomen, ei sese cum cæteris regni committit primoribus.” Richer cuts the matter shorter (ii. 51); “Unde et dimissus, data Lauduno, Compendii sese recepit.”

357. Dudo, 126 C. See Appendix W.

358. Dudo, 128 D et seqq. See Appendix W.

359. Dudo, 138 A. “Burgundionibus imperat, Aquitanos arguit, et increpat Britones, et Northmannos regnat et gubernat, Flandrenses minatur, et devastat Dacos et Lotharienses, quinetiam Saxones sibi connectit et conciliat. Angli quoque ei obedienter subduntur, Scoti et Hibernenses ejus patrocinio reguntur.” Cf. p. 185.

360. See Appendix W.

361. Flod. 948. “Hugo, nullam moram faciens, collecta suorum multa Nortmannorumque manu.” 949. “Hugo comes collecta suorum multa Nortmannorumque manu.” “Hugo igitur non modico tam suorum quam Nortmannorum collecto exercitu.”

362. Widukind (ii. 2) has a good deal to tell us about the threats exchanged between Hugh and Otto, and about the straw hats worn by Otto’s soldiers, but he cuts the details of the campaign very short. See Palgrave, ii. 544.

363. Dudo, 129 D.

364. This Lotharingian dispute is not mentioned by Richer, but it appears in Flodoard, A. 944. Lewis and Hugh both sent embassies to Otto, and that of Hugh met with the more favourable reception. Things changed greatly in the course of a year.

365. Dudo, 129 B, makes Henry still King, and presently—finding out his mistake, but not correcting it—he goes on to talk of Otto. This year, 946, Otto lost his beloved English wife Eadgyth. Flod. A. 946; Widukind, ii. 41, iii. 1.

366. See Appendix T.

367. Wid. iii. 3. “Lugdunum [Laudunum] adiit, eamque armis temptavit.” Flodoard (946) says, “Considerata castri firmitate devertunt ab eo.” So Richer, ii. 54.

368. Flod. A. 946; Wid. iii. 3; Richer, ii. 54–6. Widukind places the taking of Rheims before the invasion of France.

369. The accounts here vary a good deal. Widukind says, “Inde Parisius [this name is used, I know not why, by many mediæval writers as an inclinable noun] perrexit, Hugonemque ibi obsedit, memoriam quoque Dionysii martyris [Hugh was lay Abbot of his monastery] digne honorans veneratus est.” Flodoard says, “Reges cum exercitibus suis terram Hugonis aggrediuntur, et urbem Silvanectensem obsidentes, ut viderunt munitissimam, nec eam valentes expugnare, cæsis quibusdam suorum, dimiserunt. Sicque trans Sequanam contendentes, loca quæque præter civitates gravibus atterunt deprædationibus, terramque Nortmannorum peragrantes, loca plura devastant; indeque venientes regrediuntur in sua.” Could Widukind have confounded Paris and Senlis? Richer, who has some curious details (ii. 57), mentions the siege of Senlis (56) but says nothing of Paris, and he quarters Hugh at Orleans (58). Dudo (130 B) makes the Kings meet at Paris, so far confirming Widukind. Dudo doubtless did not care about the fate of Laon or Rheims.

370. Neither Flodoard nor Richer mentions Rouen. All that Richer (ii. 58) has to say of the Norman campaign is, “Post hæc feruntur in terram piratarum ac solo terras devastant. Sicque regis injuriam atrociter ulti, iter ad sua retorquent.” But Widukind (iii. 4) has, “Exinde, collecta ex omni exercitu electorum militum manu, Rothun Danorum urbem adiit, sed difficultate locorum, asperiorique hieme ingruente, plaga eos quidem magna percussit; incolumi exercitu, infecto negotio, post tres menses Saxoniam regressus est, urbibus Remense atque Lugduno [a clear error] cum cæteris armis captis Hluthowico regi concessis.”

371. Dudo, 131–5; Roman de Rou, 3914–4291; Palgrave, ii. 556–586. See also Historical Essays, First Series, pp. 240–243.

372. Against Flanders (Flod. A. 947; Richer, ii. 60); against Rheims (Flod. u. s.; Richer, ii. 62); against Soissons (Flod. 848; Richer, ii. 85).

373. Lewis in 947 (Flod. in anno; Richer, ii. 61); Gerberga in 949 (Flod. in anno; Richer, ii. 86). This was a great meeting of German and Lotharingian princes, and of ambassadors from Italy, England, and Constantinople.

374. Flod. 947; Richer, ii. 63–5. It would seem that some bishops were there in their princely character, to whom Duke Hugh referred the question about the archbishopric of Rheims, which the bishops referred to a more regular synod to be held at Verdun. Widukind says (iii. 5), “Huga autem expertus potentiam regis virtutemque Saxonum, non passus est ultra terminos suos hostiliter intrare, sed pergenti in eamdem expeditionem anno sequenti [the French writers do not imply this] occurrit juxta fluvium qui dicitur Char, manus dedit, juxtaque imperium regis pactum iniit, utilisque proinde permansit.” This is greatly exaggerated.

375. Flod. 947; Richer, ii. 66.

376. Flod. 948; Richer, ii. 67, 8.

377. Flod. 948; Richer, ii. 69–81.

378. I quote some passages from Flodoard illustrating the position of the Kings. “Ingressis gloriosis regibus Othone et Ludowico et simul residentibus ... exsurgens Ludowicus rex e latere et concessu domini regis Othonis.” Lewis offers “inde se juxta synodale judicium et regis Othonis præceptionem purgaret, vel certamine singulari defenderet.” “Interea rex Ludowicus deprecatur regem Othonem ut subsidium sibi ferat contra Hugonem, et ceteros inimicos suos. Qui petitioni concedens,” &c.

379. Flod. 948. The Synod adjourned from Engelheim to Laon and from Laon to Trier, where the anathema against Hugh was pronounced. Flodoard was himself present, being chaplain to Archbishop Artald. Richer, (ii. 82) confounds the two adjournments, and makes the anathema be pronounced at Laon.

380. See above, p. 222.

381. See above, p. 209.

382. Flod. A. 949; Richer, at great length, ii. 87–91.

383. Flod. A. 949; Richer, ii. 95.

384. Flod. A. 950. “Hugo ad regem venit et suus efficitur.” Richer, ii. 97. “Dux ... regi humiliter reconciliari deposcit, eique satisfacturum sese pollicetur.... Hugo itaque dux per manus et sacramentum regi efficitur.”

385. Flod. A. 953.

386. Richer’s narrative (ii. 98) differs from that of Flodoard in introducing Hugh as gathering the army for the Aquitanian expedition, of which the King afterwards takes the command. But Richer’s French translator seems to misconceive his meaning when he renders “in Aquitaniam exercitum regi parat” by “le duc leva une armée en Aquitaine.”

387. Flod. A. 951; Richer, u. s., who says that Charles “ex regio quidem genere natus erat, sed concubinali stemmate usque ad tritavum sordebat.” Neither of them gives him the royal title which he certainly bore. Is “Charles-Constantine” perhaps the earliest case of a double Christian name, or is “Constantinus” a mere surname, derived from one of the cities called Constantia?

388. Flod. A. 954; Richer, ii. 103.

389. Flod. A. 965; Richer, iii. 21.

390. Flod. A. 954. “Lotharius puer, filius Ludowici, apud Sanctum Remigium rex consecratur ab Artoldo archiepiscopo, favente Hugone principe et Brunone archiepiscopo, cæterisque præsulibus ac proceribus Franciæ, Burgundiæ, atque Aquitaniæ.” Richer (iii. 1, 2) is fuller, but to the same effect.

391. He married Gerloc or Adela, daughter of Rolf and Popo. Dudo (97 B, C) has a curious story about his courtship.

392. See Flod. A. 942, 951; Richer, ii. 28, 98.

393. Flod. A. 954. “Burgundia quoque et Aquitania Hugoni dantur ab ipso [Lothario].”

394. Flod. A. 955; Richer, iii. 3–5, who puts as good a face as he can on Hugh’s discomfiture, and makes more of a subsequent victory over William, and of a second more successful siege, of which Flodoard says nothing.

395. Flod. A. 956. “Hugo princeps obiit.” Richer, iii. 5.

396. Dudo, 136 D.

397. Flod. A. 960. “Richardus, filius Willelmi Nortmannorum principis, filiam Hugonis trans Sequanam [or ‘Transsequani’] quondam principis duxit uxorem.” Dudo (136, 7) and Sir Francis Palgrave (ii. 690–4) have much to say about this marriage.

398. See Appendix W.

399. Flod. A. 960. “Otto et Hugo filii Hugonis, mediante avunculo ipsorum Brunone, ad regem veniunt ac sui efficiuntur. Quorum Hugonem rex ducem constituit, addito illi pago Pictavensi ad terram quam pater ipsius tenuerat; concessa Ottoni Burgundia.” So Richer, iii. 13.

400. Flod. A. 965. “Otto filius Hugonis, qui Burgundiæ præerat, obiit, et rectores ejusdem terræ ad Hugonem et Oddonem clericum, fratres ipsius, sese convertunt.” According to L’Art de Vérifier les Dates (ii. 495, ed. 1784), “Oddo clericus” is the same as Henry the Great, founder of the first line of Capetian Dukes of Burgundy.

401. See Appendix W.

402. In 958 Arnulf either associated his son Baldwin with him in his government, or else resigned in his favour. On his death in 962 he again took possession. See L’Art de Vérifier les Dates, iii. 3.

403. See L’Art de Vérifier les Dates, ii. 611.

404. Flod. A. 962. “Seniorem suum [Tetbaldi] Hugonem.”

405. Ib. 945. “Committens [Hugo] eum [Ludowicum] Tetbaldo cuidam suorum.” He had just before called him “Tetbaldus Turonensis.”

406. Dudo, 137 D et seqq.

407. Flod. A. 962. “Tetbaldus quidam.” 964. “Tetbaldum quemdam procerem.”

408. Dudo, 142 C.

409. Ib. 139 C et seqq.

410. Flod. A. 961. “Placitum regale diversorumque conventus principum Suessionis habetur, ad quod impediendum, si fieri posset, Richardus filius Willelmi Nortmanni accedens, a fidelibus regis quibusdam pervasus, et, interemptis suorum nonnullis, in fugam versus est.”

411. Ib. 962. “Tetbaldus quidam cum Nortmannis confligens victus est ab eis, et fuga dilapsus evasit. Qui seniorem suum Hugonem proinde infensum habens ad regem venit, a quo, sed et a regina Gerberga benigne susceptus, et miti consolatione refocillatus abscessit.” Richer only mentions Theobald in connexion with his spoliation of the Church of Rheims and his consequent excommunication, iii. 20. So Flod. A. 964.

412. Dudo, 140 C et seqq.

413. The “Norman Kingdom” was, according to Dudo (147 C, D; 151 C), confirmed by the King and his princes (“Optimates totius Franciæ”—a new use of words seems creeping in) to Richard and his heirs for ever; the question of homage is avoided.

414. Twenty-four years later, in 986, Dudo, then canon of Saint Quintin, was of an age to take a prominent share in public business. Dudo, 155 D.

415. See the detailed narrative in Richer, iii. 67–81.

416. Did the very name of the country, “regnum Lotharii,” suggest to the present Lothar the thought of recovering it? Such a motive would not be out of character with a prince whose indignation was stirred up simply because the Emperor was staying—with his pregnant wife—so near the border as Aachen. So at least Richer tells us, iii. 68.

417. Richer, iii. 69. “Mox dux et aliis primates, sine deliberandi consultatione sententiam regiam attollunt. Sese sponte ituros cum rege et Ottonem aut comprehensuros aut interfecturos aut fugaturos pollicentur.”

418. Ib. iii. 71. “Æream aquilam quæ in vertice palatii a Karolo magno acsi volans fixa erat, in Vulturnum converterunt. Nam Germani eam in Favonium converterant, subtiliter significantes Gallos suo equitatu quandoque posse devinci.”

It is amusing to find the characteristic vanity of the great nation showing itself thus early. Most likely neither Charles nor any later German had ever thought of anything of the kind.

419. Richer, iii. 74–76. See Historical Essays, p. 243.

420. According to Thietmar of Merseburg (iii. 7) Lothar came in person, accompanied by his son. Richer (iii. 79) makes him send ambassadors. The speech put into their mouths seems quite to look on Otto and Lothar as royal colleagues. Otto’s Imperial dignity is not hinted at; I doubt whether Richer ever uses the word Emperor at all.

421. Richer, iii. 81. “Belgicæ pars quæ in lite fuerat in jus Ottonis transiit.”

422. See the narrative, a most full, curious, and interesting one, of Hugh’s journey to the Emperor at Rome, and the snares laid for him on his return by Lothar. Richer, iii. 81–88.

423. Richer, iii. 89, 90.

424. Ib. iii. 91. “A duce reliquisque principibus Ludovicus rex acclamatus.” Others place this event in 978 or 979.

425. Ib. iii. 92–95. Adelaide, widow of Raymond of Septimania or Gothia. Lewis divorced her. Cf. Rud. Glaber, i. 3.

426. Richer, iii. 97–110.

427. Dudo, 155 C. Cf. Flod. A. 965.

428. Richer, iv. 1.

429. Richer, iv. 2, 3.

430. Ib. iv. 5.

431. This is alluded to in the words, “Qui tanta capitis imminutione hebuit [any notion of the legal phrase of ‘deminutio capitis’?] ut externo regi servire non horruerit.” Richer, iv. 11.

432. See Appendix S.

433. Richer, iv. 12, 13.

434. See the history of the war in Richer, iv. 14–49.

435. Ælius Spartianus, Pescennius, 1. “Quos tyrannos aliorum victoria fecerit;” a good illustration of the use of the word. The same may be said of Antipopes.

436. See pp. 206, 209, 223.

437. Neither Richer—he was not likely—nor Rudolf Glaber speaks of Richard at all. Dudo, oddly enough, passes by the whole business very briefly; “Nec illud prætereundum quod, Lothario rege defuncto [he forgets Lewis], Hugo dux inthronizatus voluit super Albertum comitem equitare.” (155 D.) William of Jumièges is fuller; “Mortuo Francorum rege Lothario, in illius loco ab omnibus subrogatur Hugonis Magni ducis filius Hugo Capeth, adminiculante ei duce Richardo.” (iv. 19.) The Roman de Rou (5823) is fuller still;

“Par defaute de son lignage,

O le cunseil del grant barnage,

E por la force de Richart,

Par son conseil e par son art,

Fu Hugon Chapes recéu,

Et en France pour rei tenu ...

Par Richart è par sa valor,

Ki éu aveit sa seror,

Par sun cunseil è par s’amur

Fu de France Huon seignur.”

438. See above, p. 223.

439. See above, p. 154.

440. See Flodoard’s description of Lewis’s invasion of Normandy, A. 944; “Ludowicus rex in terram Nortmannorum proficiscitur cum Arnulfo et Herluino et quibusdam episcopis Franciæ ac Burgundiæ.”

441. The different circumstances which led to such different results in France and in Germany I trust to point out in the second volume of my History of Federal Government.

442. With the exception of the three portions of the kingdom which have become wholly detached. See above, pp. 156, 187.

443. Dante, Purg. xx.

444. For this legend in full, see the early chapters of Oudegherst, Annales de Flandres. Lyderic, the foundling, is of course of princely birth. It is the same story as those of Cyrus and Romulus.

445. See L’Art de Vérifier les Dates, ii. 828.

446. Will. Gem. vii. 38. “Mater ejus Sprota, necessitate urgente, contubernio [was there even a Danish marriage?] cujusdam prædivitis nomine Asperlengi adhæsit. Hic, licet in rebus locuples, tamen molendina vallis Ruelii ad firmam solitus erat tenere.” So M. Jourdain measured cloth only for amusement; so, in some pious legends, Zebedee was a mighty baron of Galilee, whose sons fished for pleasure and not for profit.

447. There is something ludicrous in the way in which Dudo (137 B, C), after spending all his powers of prose to set forth the marriage of Emma, goes on to explain in verse that she was not fated to be the mother of a Duke of the Normans.

448. Dudo, 152 C. “Subscalpenti voluptuosæ humanitatis fragilitati subactus, genuit duos filios, totidem et filias, ex concubinis.”

449. Dudo (u. s.) makes her to be “ex famosissima nobilium Dacorum prosapia exorta,” but he allows that the Duke “eam prohibitæ copulationis fœdere sortitus est sibi amicabiliter.” He marries her (“inextricabili maritalis fœderis privilegio sibi connectit”) at the advice of the great men of the land. So William of Jumièges (iv. 18) vouches for the nobility of her birth and for her marriage being celebrated “Christiano more.” But his continuator (viii. 36) has a curious legend—the same as one of the legends of our Eadgar—to tell about her first introduction to Richard. See also Roman de Rou, 5390–5429, &c., 5767–5812.

450. See Chron. S. Max. ap. Labbé, ii. 202. We there read, “Ricardus Christianissimus factus,” probably not without an allusion to his apostasy in his childhood.

451. So Wace, 5873;

“Clers establi ki servireient,

E provendes dunt il vivreient.”

452. See Neustria Pia, 210; Lincy, “Essai Historique et Littéraire sur l’Abbayes de Fécamp” (Rouen, 1840), p. 6. The expressions of Dudo, 153 B et seqq., and of William of Malmesbury, ii. 178, might easily mislead.

453. See p. 164.

454. See Hist. of Fed. Government, i. 574.

455. Roman de Rou, 5955–5974.

456. Will. Gem. v. 2; Roman de Rou, 5975–6118. See above, p. 172.

457. I do not mean merely because the word “parlement” occurs several times in the Roman de Rou. It is there used in its primitive sense, as translating “colloquium.” With this Norman revolt we may compare the revolt in Britanny in 1675, described in the Count of Carné’s “Etats de Bretagne.” See especially the “Code Paysan” at i. 377. The part of Rudolf of Ivry is played by the Duke of Chaulnes.

458. Will. Gem. v. 2. “Nam rustici unanimes per diversos totius Normannicæ patriæ comitatus plurima agentes conventicula, juxta suos libitus vivere decernebant. Quatenus, tam in silvarum compendiis quam in aquarum commerciis, nullo obsistente ante statuti juris obice, legibus uterentur suis. Quæ ut rata manerent, ab unoquoque cœtu furentis vulgi duo eliguntur legati, qui decreta ad mediterraneum roboranda ferrent conventum.”

459. Roman de Rou, 6070;

“Asez tost oï Richard dire

Ke vilains cumune faseient.”

It does not necessarily follow that the word “commune” was used at the time, though I know no reason why such may not have been the case. It would be quite enough if Wace applied to the union of the peasants a name which in his time had become perfectly familiar, in the instinctive feeling that the earlier movement was essentially a forerunner of the later. Compare the “conjurationes” so strictly forbidden in the Carolingian Capitularies. See Brentano on Gilds, p. lxxvi; and for a full account of these “conjurationes,” Waitz, iv. 362–364.

460. Roman de Rou, 6001–6015.

461. Mark the brutal levity with which Rudolf’s cruelties are dismissed by William of Jumièges (v. 2); “Qui [Rodulphus] non morans jussa, cunctos confestim legatos cum nonnullis aliis cepit, truncatisque manibus et pedibus, inutiles suis remisit, qui eos talibus compescerent, et ne deteriora paterentur suis eventibus cautos redderent. His rustici expertis, festinato concionibus omissis, ad sua aratra sunt reversi.” So Roman de Rou, where various other tortures are spoken of, vv. 6093–6118. The same sentiment comes out in the speech which Orderic (713 A) puts into the mouth of the monks of Molesme; “Exinde principum institutione, et diutina consuetudine usitatum est in Gallia, ut rustici ruralia, sicut decet, peragant opera, et servi servilia passim exerceant ministeria.... Absit ut rustici torpescant otio, saturique lascivientes cachinnis et inani vacent ludicro, quorum genuina sors labori dedita est assiduo.”

462. Albereda, the wife of Rudolf, built the famous tower of Ivry. See Will. Gem. viii. 15.

463. See Palgrave, iii. 44.

464. Our main authorities for this period are essentially the same as those to which we have to go for our knowledge of earlier times. The English Chronicles are still our principal guide. For the present they may be quoted as one work, as the differences between the different manuscripts, pointed out by Mr. Earle in the Preface to his Parallel Saxon Chronicles, are not as yet of much strictly historical importance. Florence of Worcester gives what is essentially a Latin version of the Chronicles, with frequent explanatory additions, which his carefulness and sound sense render of great value. The Charters and Laws of the reign of Æthelred are abundant, and, besides their primary value as illustrating laws and customs, the signatures constantly help us to the succession of offices and to a sort of skeleton biographies of the leading men of the time. These, the Chronicles, Laws, and Charters, form our primary authorities. The later Latin Chroniclers, from William of Malmesbury and Henry of Huntingdon onwards, supply many additional facts; but their accounts are often mixed up with romantic details, and it is dangerous to trust them, except when they show signs of following authorities which are now lost. This is not uncommonly the case with both Henry of Huntingdon and William of Malmesbury. Local histories, like those of Ely, Ramsey, and Abingdon, supply occasional facts, but the same sort of cautions which apply to the secondary writers of general history apply to them in a still greater degree. We now also begin to draw some little help from foreign sources. The Danish History of Saxo Grammaticus, the Chronicles of Swegen Aggesson, the various Sagas, especially the famous Saga of Olaf Tryggvesson, are very hard to reconcile with the more authentic notices in our own Chronicles; but among much that is doubtful and much that is clearly fabulous, they often help us to facts, and to the causes and connexions of facts, which our own writers leave obscure. The Norman writers also begin to be of some importance for the events which connect England and Normandy. For the early part of the reign of Æthelred we have no contemporary Norman writer, but the accounts in the Roman de Rou and in William of Jumièges at least show us what was the Norman tradition. Later in the period, we have, in the Encomium Emmæ (reprinted in the nineteenth volume of Pertz by the name of “Gesta Cnutonis”), the work of a contemporary Norman or Flemish writer, which, though throughout unfair and inaccurate, is worth comparing with our English writers. Occasional notices of Danish and English affairs are sometimes to be gleaned from the German writers, like Adam of Bremen and the contemporary Thietmar of Merseberg.

On the whole the materials for this period are ample, and, as regards England, they are fully trustworthy. The difficulty lies in reconciling the English and continental narratives.

465. “Unready” must mean “lacking rede” or counsel. Walter Map (De Nugis, 199) calls him “Edelredus, quem Anglici consilium [insilium? see below, p. 317] vocaverunt, quia nullius erat negotii.” “Magnificus,” the epithet of Eadmund the First, means rather “worker of great deeds”—the Greek μεγαλοπράγμων,—than “magnificent” in the vulgar sense.

466. See Appendix AA.

467. Fl. Wig. A. 975. “Congregato exercitu, monasteria Orientalium Anglorum maxima strenuitate defenderunt.”

468. “Amicus Dei.” Fl. Wig. 975, 991, 992, 1016. See Appendix AA.

469. See Appendix AA.

470. For a full examination of her story, I would refer to the first Essay in my Historical Essays, first series.

471. “Fabius Quæstor Patricius Æthelwerdus,” as he thinks good to call himself, the author of the earliest and most meagre of our Latin Chronicles, was descended (see his own Prologue) from one of the sons of Æthelred the First who were excluded to make way for Ælfred (see above, p. 108).

472. Fl. Wig. 975. See Appendix BB.

473. The correct description is “the Old Lady.” See Chron. (Abingdon), 1051. Lady (Hlæfdige), it will be remembered, not Queen, is the usual title of the wife of a West-Saxon King.

474. See Eadmer, Anglia Sacra, ii. 220, Osbern, 112, and Lingard’s note, Hist. of England, i. 274.

475. Fl. Wig. A. 976. The poems in the Chronicles certainly seem to me to connect the banishment of Oslac with the predominance of Ælfhere and the anti-monastic party.

476. See Appendix KK.

477. The Chronicles bitterly lament the crime, without mentioning the criminal. Florence distinctly charges Ælfthryth with it. In the hands of William of Malmesbury (ii. 162) the story becomes a romance, which gets fresh details in those of Bromton (X Scriptt. 873 et seqq.). The obiter dictum of William of Malmesbury (ii. 165), that Ælfhere had a hand in Eadward’s death, is contrary to the whole tenor of the history. See Chron. 980; Fl. Wig. 979.

478. I know not what to make of the incredible story in Goscelin’s Life of Saint Eadgyth (Mabillon, Ann. Ord. Ben. vii. 622), that the Witan or some of them (“regni proceres”) wished to choose his heroine, a natural daughter of Eadgar and already a professed nun, as Lady in her own right. A female reign had not been heard of since the days of Sexburh.

479. Chron. and Fl. Wig. in anno. See also the charter of 998 in Cod. Dipl. iii. 305, and Appendix AA. The beginnings of a legendary version may be seen in William of Malmesbury (ii. 165) and Roger of Wendover (i. 423).

480. Fl. Wig. 987. The English and Welsh Chronicles both put the cattle-plague a year earlier, and do not mention the disease among men.

481. On the contradictory statements as to Æthelred’s first wife and her children, see Appendix RR.

482. The full form of this name, Swegen, is always used by the English Chroniclers; but in Danish pronunciation it seems to have been already cut down into Svein or Sven. The Latin forms are Suanus and Sueno.

483. This is in marked contrast to the affairs of the Empire, on which our Chroniclers evidently kept a careful eye, and of which they contain many notices.

484. See the Saga of Olaf Tryggvesson, c. 29; Laing, i. 395. Swegen is called Suein Otto by Adam of Bremen, ii. 25.

485. Adam Brem. u. s.; Sax. Gram. lib. x. p. 185, ed. Hafn. 1644.

486. See the “Saga om Oloff Tryggwasson,” “Historia Olai Tryggwæ Filii,” Upsala, 1691, or Laing’s Sea-Kings of Norway, i. 367.

487. Adam Brem. ii. 32; Saxo, lib. x. p. 188. Swegen, already King, is driven out by Eric of Sweden. To reconcile the chronology is hopeless. Saxo calls the English King Eadward.

488. Chron. A. 980. “And þý ilcan geare wæs Legeceasterscír gehergod fram norð scipherige.” Florence has, more distinctly, “Civitatis Legionum provincia a Norwegensibus piratis devastatur.” Northmen of all kinds are often confounded under the name of Danes, but none but genuine Norwegians are likely to be spoken of in this way. Leicester here, as often, is not the midland Leicester, but Chester.

489. Chron. and Fl. Wig. in anno. “Goda se Defenisca þegen” was killed, according to the Chronicles. Florence calls him “satrapa Domnaniæ.” Satrapa seems to be sometimes used as a formal title inferior to Ealdorman. See Cod. Dipl. iii. 356, where Leofsige is raised from the rank of satrapa to that of dux.

490. The Chronicles give no names; Florence mentions Justin and Guthmund; but the treaty presently to be mentioned, gives the name of Olaf as well.

491. The original Old-English text is printed in Thorpe’s Analecta Anglo-Saxonica, p. 131; there is a modern English translation in Conybeare’s Illustrations of Anglo-Saxon poetry, xc. The poem, of which unfortunately the beginning and ending are lost, is evidently local and contemporary. I therefore do not hesitate to accept the main facts of the battle and the names of the actors as trustworthy, much more trustworthy than if they were found in a Latin prose chronicle a century or two later. The speeches, no doubt, are, like most speeches in history, the invention of the poet.

492. The church, a massive Romanesque building, may not unlikely have been raised, like so many other churches on battle-fields, to commemorate the event.

493. .sp 1

“Þa he hæfde þæt folc

fægre getrymmed,

he lihte þa mid leodon,

þær him leofost wæs,

þær he his heorð-werod

holdost wiste.” (Thorpe, p. 132.)

This “heorð-werod” or hearth company are the personal following or comitatus (see above, p. 86) of the chief; to their exploits the poem is chiefly devoted. This battle of Maldon, like all our battles, will be found to contain many details leading to the illustration of the last and greatest battle on Senlac.

494. William of Malmesbury says of Harold (iii. 241), “Rex ipse pedes juxta vexillum stabat cum fratribus, ut, in commune periculo æquato, nemo de fuga cogitaret.” So Brihtnoth bids his men form a firm rank with the “board-wall” or line of shields;

“Hu hi sceoldon standan,

And þone stede healdan,

And bæd þæt hyra randan

Rihte heoldon

Fæste mid folmum,

And ne forhtedon na.” (p. 132.)

Mr. Conybeare mistook the meaning of the passage and the tactics of the English army when he translated “and þone stede healdan,” “how to guide their steeds.” It means “how to hold their stead or place.”

The English habit of fighting on foot is noticed with some exaggeration in the earliest description of our nation; ἄλκιμοι δέ εἰσι πάντων μάλιστα βαρβάρων ὧν ἡμεῖς ἴσμεν οἱ νησιῶται οὗτοι, ἔς τε τὰς ξυμβολὰς, πεζοὶ ἴασιν· οὐ γὰρ ὅσον εἰσὶ τοῦ ἱππεύειν ἀμελέτητοι, ἀλλ’ οὐδὲ ἵππον ὅ τι ποτέ ἐστιν ἐπίστασθαι σφίσι ξυμβαίνει, κ.τ.λ. Prokopios, Bell. Goth. iv. 20.

495. The only other Maccus whom I know anything of is the Under-king of Man, who was one of the princes who rowed Eadgar on the Dee. But what could he, or any one of his family or nation, be doing in the comitatus of an Ealdorman of the East-Saxons?

496. Compare however the discussion among the revolted Karians as to crossing the Maiandros. Herod. v. 118. Compare on the other hand the challenge to cross the Wear given by Edward the Third to the Scots in 1327. Froissart, i. c. xix. (vol. i. p. 20. ed. 1559); Longman, Edward III. i. 14. So the Parthians and Antonius, Plut. Ant. 49.

497. The weapon of close fight at Maldon, as at Brunanburh, was on both sides the sword. The Danish axe had not yet been introduced into England, and as late as Stamfordbridge Harold Hardrada wielded the sword. The bill is twice mentioned, and it is put into the hand of Brihtnoth himself; but it is plain that the bill here spoken of was a sword and not an axe;

“Ða Byrhtnoð bræd

Bill of sceðe,

Brád and brún-ecg.” (p. 136.)

Earlier in the poem the defensive and offensive weapons of the English appear distinctly as “Bord and brád swurd.” The early use of the epithet “brown” applied to a sword, common in later ballads, should be noticed.

498. The likeness struck Mr. Conybeare strongly, p. lxxxviii.

499. So I understand the lines,

“Wende þæs for-moni man

Þa he on meare rád,

On wlancan þam wicge,

Þæt wære hit ure hlaford.” (p. 138.)

Compare the flight of the French serving-boys on their masters’ horses at the approach of Chandos in 1369. Froissart, c. cclxxvii. (i. 383, 384); Longman, Edward III. ii. 167.

500. .sp 1

“Forþan wearð her on felda

Folc totwæmed,

Scyld-burh tobrocen.” (p. 138.)

501. So says the Ely History (ii. 6), which, on such a point, may be trusted. The Abbot supplied the loss with a mass of wax.

502. Is this Ælfwine a son of the banished Ealdorman Ælfric? “Ælfwine minister,” occasionally, but not very commonly, signs charters about this time.

503. So I understand the passage, as does Mr. Conybeare. But we have no mention of any inroad of this army into Northumberland.

504. Ammianus, xvi. 12. “Comites ejus, ducenti numero, et tres amici junctissimi, flagitium arbitrati post regem vivere vel pro rege non mori, si ita tulerit casus.” In this case, the King having surrendered, they “tradidere se vinciendos.”

505. Fl. Wig. A. 991. “Utrinque infinita multitudine cæsa, ipse dux occubuit, Danica vero fortuna vicit.” The Ely historian tries hard to turn the battle into a victory.

506. See her life in Bæda, iv. 19, 20.

507. The Ely History (ii. 3) gives the legend. With the slight improvement of painting Ælfthryth as a witch, it is the story of Joseph and Zuleikha, or of Bellerophontês and Anteia, over again, with such changes as were needed when the tale was transferred from a married woman to a widow. It should be remembered that Ælfthryth’s first husband Æthelwold seems to have been a nephew of Brihtnoth.

508. Hist. El. ii. 7. “Torquem auream, et cortinam [curtain] gestis viri sui intextam atque depositam, depictam in memoriam probitatis ejus, huic ecclesiæ donavit.” See Palgrave, Eng. Com. ii. ccccvi; Lingard, i. 278.

509. The Chronicles say expressly, “On þam geare man gerædde ƿæt man geald ærest gafol Deniscum mannum,” &c. But there is a curious piece of evidence to show that the possibility of such a measure was thought of long before. In the will of King Eadred in the Liber de Hyda, p. 153, he leaves sixteen hundred pounds “to þan þæt hi mege magan hu[n]gor and hæþenne here him fram aceapian, gif hie beþurfen.” The manuscript seems to be very corrupt, but there can be no doubt as to the meaning. The words are left out in the Latin and later English versions which follow.

510. Fl. Wig. A. 990. “Clericis a Cantuaria proturbatis, monachos induxit.”

511. See the preamble to the Peace in Thorpe, i. 284. Cf. Chron. and Fl. Wig. 991. The Chronicle mentions only the Archbishop, not the Ealdormen.

512. See above, p. 264, and Appendix CC.

513. I do not know where Æthelweard’s ealdormanship lay. If this Ælfric was Ealdorman of the Mercians, it is clear that his government would be directly threatened by an enemy who had probably had possession of a large part of East-Anglia and Essex.

514. See the Treaty in Thorpe, i. 284; Schmid, 204; and Appendix DD.

515. Chron. in anno. “Þa gerædde se cyning and ealle his witan.” So Florence; “Consilio jussuque regis Anglorum Ægelredi procerumque suorum.”

516. His name is Ælfstan both in the Chronicles and in Florence, through some confusion with a predecessor of that name, who died in 981.

517. See Appendix FF. Thored in the Chronicle is Eorl, Ælfric is Ealdorman. This distinction clearly marks out Thored as of Danish birth, or as holding a government within the Danish part of England.

518. Ammianus, xxvii. 8. “Lundinium vetus oppidum, quod Augustam posteritas appellavit.” xxviii. 3. “Ab Augusta profectus, quam veteres appellavere Lundinium.” He however himself elsewhere (xx. 1) speaks of “Lundinium” without any addition. The popular name of London survived the official name of Augusta, just as Sikyôn survived Dêmêtrias, as Mantineia survived Antigoneia, as Jerusalem survived Ælia Capitolina.

519. Tac. Ann. xiv. 33. On the origin of London, see Guest, Archæological Journal, 1866, No. xci. p. 159. Cf. Vita S. Bon., Pertz, ii. 338. “Pervenit ad locum ubi erat forum rerum venalium, et usque hodie antiquo Anglorum Saxonumque vocabulo appellatur Lundenwich.”

520. Bæda, Eccl. Hist. ii. 3.

521. Chron. 896. On the probability that the present Tower occupies the site of a fortress of Ælfred, see Mr. Earle’s note, p. 310.

522. Thorpe, Laws and Inst. i. 228; Kemble, Saxons in England, ii. 521.

523. Instituta Lundoniæ, Thorpe, i. 300.

524. Thorpe, i. 300; Lappenberg, Gesch. des hansischen Stahlhofes, p. 5. The great privilege of the “homines Imperatoris, qui veniebant in navibus suis,” seems to have been that they were, with certain exceptions, allowed to buy and sell on board their own ships, which doubtless exempted them from certain tolls to which others were liable.

525. See W. Malms. i. 93. Cf. above, p. 38.

526. Thorpe, i. 300. “Homines Imperatoris, qui veniebant in navibus suis, bonarum legum digni tenebantur, sicut et nos.”

527. See Appendix AA.

528. So it stands in the English version of the Brut y Tywysogion, in anno; “And Maredudd, son of Owain, paid to the Black Pagans a tribute of one penny for each person.” But in the Annales Cambriæ the transaction takes the milder form of a redemption of captives; “Maredut redemit captivos a gentilibus nigris, nummo pro unoquoque dato.”

529. His own dominions are described (Brut, 991) as Dyfed, Ceredigion, Gower, and Cydweli, answering to the modern counties of Pembroke, Cardigan, Caermarthen, and part of Glamorgan. In 985 he conquered Mona or Anglesey, Merioneth, and Gwynedd generally.

530. He is called Owen, Guyn, and Etwin. Was this last name borrowed from the English Eadwine? His English ally appears in the Brut as “Eclis the Great, a Saxon prince from the seas of the south.” The Annals call him Edelisi, that is, doubtless Æthelsige. See Appendix AA.

531. Brut y Tywysogion, 991. “Maredudd hired the pagans willing to join him.”

532. On Æthelred’s relations with Normandy see Appendix EE.

533. This is the conjecture of Lappenberg, ii. 153, Eng. Tr.

534. Will. Malms, ii. 166. “Et de hominibus regis vel inimicis suis nullum Ricardus recipiat, neque rex de suis, sine sigillo eorum.” Sigillum does not necessarily imply a seal in the later sense; a signature of any kind is enough.

535. See above, p. 269.

536. Chron. in anno. “Ac seo halige Godes modor on þam dæge hire mildheortnesse þære burhware gecydde, and hi ahredde wið heora feondum.” A good deal of the simple earnestness of the English is lost in Florence’s Latin, “Dei suæque genetricis Mariæ juvamine.”

537. Flor. Wig. “Furore simul et tristitia exasperati.”

538. It would, I imagine, be very hard to find out the exact point in Olaf Tryggvesson’s life when, according to his Saga (c. xiii.), he made expeditions in Britain, Ireland, and Scotland, attacking the heathen and keeping peace with the Christians. It would be hardly more difficult to identify the daughter of an Irish King and widow of an English Ealdorman, whom Olaf marries in the next chapter. See above, p. 269.

539. I conceive this to be the distinction intended by Florence, when he says “de tota West-Saxonia stippendium dabatur [“and hi mon þær fedde geond eall Westseaxena rice,” say the Chronicles]; de tota vero Anglia tributum, quod erat xvi. millia librarum, dependebatur.”

540. The confirmation of Olaf implies his previous baptism, and thereby remarkably confirms that part of the legend. But Adam of Bremen (ii. 34) has two quite different accounts, according to one of which Olaf learned Christianity in England for the first time, while, according to the other, he was converted in Norway by English missionaries. The one point in which all versions agree is to connect his conversion with England in some shape or other.

541. Ann. Camb.; Brut y Tywysogion, 994.

542. See Thietmar, iv. 16; Adam Brem. ii. 29.

543. The charters of this year in the Codex Diplomaticus (iii. 284, 286, and 288), one of King Æthelred and two of Æscwig, Bishop of Dorchester, belong to a meeting before the death of Sigeric, by whom they were signed. Those of the same year at pp. 281 and 290, which Ælfric signs as Archbishop-elect, must belong to a later meeting, probably that at which he was elected. He was consecrated next year (Chron. and Fl. Wig.). Had he held the bishopric of Ramsbury without consecration?

544. So the Chronicles, but only in the late Canterbury manuscript (Cott. Domit. A. viii.). This fact however is probably authentic; but what can be made of the story of Ælfric driving out the seculars from Christ Church, where Sigeric had already brought in monks? See above, p. 278.

545. See Bæda, Eccl. Hist. iv. 27, and the prose and verse lives of Saint Cuthberht in his Opera Historica Minora, pp. 3, 49. Also Sim. Dun., Eccl. Dun. lib. ii. c. 6, et seqq. (X Scriptt. 13).

546. Flor. Wig. 995.

547. Sim. Dun., Hist. Dun. iii. 2. “Comitans sanctissimi patris Cuthberti corpus universus populus in Dunelmum, locum quidem natura munitum, sed non facile habitabilem invenit, quoniam densissima undique silva totum occupaverat.” Compare the description of Durham given by William of Malmesbury, De Gest. Pont. p. 270, ed. Hamilton; “Dunelmum est collis, ab una vallis planitie paullatim et molli clivo turgescens in tumulum; et licet situ edito et prærupto rupium omnem aditum excludat hostium, tamen ibi moderni collibus imposuerunt castellum.” He then goes on to speak of the river and its fish. See also the Old-English poem on Durham printed at p. 153 of the Surtees edition of Simeon, and which is referred to by Simeon himself in his History of the Church of Durham, iii. 7. William also might seem to have had the poem before him.

548. A still closer parallel, though on a far smaller scale, may be found in Ireland in the ruined cathedral and archiepiscopal fortress which crown the famous rock of Cashel. Only at Sitten the church and the castle are on two distinct heights, as if Cashel and Glastonbury were set side by side.

549. Cod. Dipl. iii. 299.

550. Cod. Dipl. iii. 302. “Collecta haud minima sapientum multitudine in aula villæ regiæ quæ nuncupative a populis et [æt?] Calnæ vocitatur. Ac sic paucis interpositis ymeris [himeris, ἡμέραις] rursus advocata omnis exercitus, caterva pontificum, abbatum, ducum, optimatum nobiliumque quamplurimorum ad villam quæ ab indigenis Wanetincg agnominatur,” &c. &c. The whole passage is remarkable and valuable.

551. Thorpe, i. 280; Schmid, 198. The Wantage laws are said specially to be “æfter Engla lage.”

552. So Schmid, p. li. The use of the word Wapentake, a division confined to the North, and the special mention of the Five Boroughs, seem quite to bear out this conjecture.

553. “On Norðwalum,” say the Chronicles; so in Florence “septemtrionalem Britanniam.” These phrases do not mean North Wales as opposed to South, still less North Britain, in the sense of Scotland, but simply what we now call Wales as opposed to Cornwall. The part ravaged was doubtless the northern coast of the Bristol Channel.

554. Cod. Dipl. iii. 311.

555. That is, if we may trust the doubtful charters in Cod. Dipl. iii. 309, 311.

556. Cod. Dipl. iii. 306. See above, p. 267.

557. See the Chronicles (followed by Florence) for the years 998 and 999. I have worked the two descriptions together.

558. For the suggestion of the general line of thought in this paragraph I am indebted to Lappenberg, ii, 161.

559. See above, p. 104. Compare the practice of the Frankish Assemblies, Waitz, iii. 508.

560. Compare on this head a remarkable passage of William of Malmesbury, ii. 165. “Verumtamen multa mihi cogitanti mirum videtur cur homo, ut a majoribus accepimus, neque multum fatuus, neque nimis ignavus, in tam tristi pallore tot calamitatum vitam consumpserit. Cujus rei caussam si quis me interroget, non facile respondeam; nisi ducum defectionem, ex superbia regis prodeuntem.” This hardly goes to the root of the matter; but William’s perplexity clearly shows that the traditional character of Æthelred did not paint him as a mere idiot, but as a man with the capacity, though only the bare capacity, for better things. See also Palgrave’s Hist. of England and Normandy, iii. 103.

561. Such I understand to be the object of the departure of the Danish fleet. The Chronicles and Florence are quite colourless. “Se unfrið flota wæs ðæs sumeres gewend to Ricardes rice.” “Danorum classis præfata hoc anno Nortmanniam petit.” But Roger of Wendover (i. 434) inserts the qualification “hostiliter,” which is followed by Lappenberg (429. Eng. Tr. ii. 161). On this whole matter see Appendix EE.

562. On this Cumbrian expedition see Appendix FF.

563. See above, p. 291.

564. See above, p. 63.

565. See Appendix EE.

566. See Appendix SS.

567. See above, p. 253.

568. On this marriage and its results see the opening of the sixth book of Henry of Huntingdon. He clearly sees the connexion of events, and he as clearly believes that William’s kindred with Emma gave him some right to the English crown. “Ex hac conjunctione regis Anglorum et filiæ ducis Normannorum, Angliam juste, secundum jus gentium, Normanni et calumniati sunt et adepti sunt.” This is perhaps the strangest theory of international law on record.

569. Herod. v. 97. αὗται δὲ αἱ νέες ἀρχὴ κακῶν ἐγένοντο Ἕλλησί τε καὶ βαρβάροισι.

570. No writer mentions this but Geoffrey Gaimar (4126. M. H. B. 814), who is followed by Sir F. Palgrave (iii. 109). Henry of Huntingdon (M. H. B. 751 E) and Æthelred of Rievaux (X Scriptt. 362) distinctly make him send messengers. The statement of the Chronicles, which of course would be decisive, is less distinct, but it looks the same way; “And ða ón ðam ilcan lenctene com seo hlæfdige, Ricardes dohtor, hider to lande.” “And on ðysan ylcan geare, on lencten, com Ricardes dohtor Ymma hider to lande.”

571. I cannot answer positively for Harold the son of Cnut, but we shall come across evidence which makes it probable that he visited Denmark.

572. Chron. 855, and Florence (after Asser) more at length.

573. Greg. Turon. iv. 26; Bæda, i. 25.

574. See the section on Nomenclature in vol. v. p. 556.

575. Flor. Wig. A. 1002. “Eodem anno Emmam, Saxonice Ælfgivam vocatam, ducis Nortmannorum primi Ricardi filiam, rex Ægelredus duxit uxorem.” On the use of the word “Saxonice” see Appendix A. On the name Ælfgifu see vol. ii. Appendix BB, and vol. iii. Appendix S.

The Lady signs a great number of charters during the reigns of her husbands and sons by the name of Ælfgifu (in various spellings). “Emma” is rare, but we find it in Cod. Dipl. iv. 1; iv. 64; vi. 172, and once “Ælfgyfa Imma,” iv. 101. Of a charter of 997 (Cod. Dipl. iii. 299), where “Ælfgyua Ymma regina” makes a grant to Christ Church, I can make nothing. Mr. Kemble does not mark it as spurious, but the date shows that there is something wrong about it.

576. Geoffrey Gaimar (4138. M. H. B. 815), who is followed by Sir F. Palgrave (iii. 110), gives her as “drurie” or “dowaire,” Rockingham, Rutland, and the city of Winchester itself. In the course of our story we shall find both Emma and her successor Eadgyth specially connected with Winchester, and we shall also find that Emma unhappily possessed the city of Exeter or some rights over it.

577. Eadgar the Ætheling was elected in 1066, but never crowned.

578. Will. Malms. ii. 165. “Etiam in uxorem adeo protervus erat ut vix eam cubili dignaretur, sed cum pellicibus volutatus regiam majestatem infamaret. Illa quoque conscientiam alti sanguinis spirans in maritum tumebat.”

I cannot light on Sir Francis Palgrave’s authority for making Emma fly back to Normandy within a year or two after her marriage (iii. III).

579. Will. Malms. ii. 177.

580. I have here tried to put together the account in the Winchester Chronicle (C.C.C.C. clxxiii.), which alone mentions Pallig and the Hampshire campaign, with the account of the operations in Devonshire given in the other versions. Æthelingadene has been taken for Alton in Hampshire, but the name Æthelingadene would hardly become Alton, and the place is in Sussex. See Cod. Dipl. iii. 324.

581. The men of higher rank are commonly foremost. See above, p. 274. Compare the battle of Strassburg in Ammianus (xvi. 12). “Exsiluit subito ardens optimatium globus, inter quos decernebant et reges, et sequente vulgo inter alios agmina nostrorum irrupit.”

582. Their descriptions, as given in the Winchester Chronicle, are worth noticing. There is Wulfhere the Bishop’s Thegn, and two other thegns who are called from their dwelling-places, Leofric æt Hwitciricean (Whitchurch) and Godwine æt Worðige (Worthy Martyr), Bishop Ælfsige’s son. This is Ælfsige, Bishop of Winchester, who was translated to Canterbury in 950, but died of the cold on the Alps on his way to Rome to get his pallium. (Flor. Wig. 959.)

583. See Mr. Earle’s note on the Chronicles, p. 334.

584. I get this from the words of the Winchester Chronicle, which mentions one part of the story only, combined with those of Florence, who mentions only the other part. The Winchester writer mentions the campaign in Hampshire, the treason of Pallig, the burning of Teignton, the peace, and adds, “and hy foran þa þanon tó Exanmuðan.” Florence has, “Memoratus paganorum exercitus, de Normannia Angliam revectus, ostium fluminis Eaxæ ingreditur.” This seems to be a satisfactory way of explaining it. The other Chronicles have simply, “Her com se here to Exanmuðan.”

585. The language of the Chronicles is remarkable. The fleet comes to Exmouth, “and eodon þa up to þære byrig.” There was no need to mention what borough. But Florence adds “urbem Exanceastram.”

586. See W. Malms. ii. 134; Palgrave, English Commonwealth, i. 463.

587. Mr. Kerslake very ingeniously traced out the boundary between the English and Welsh parts of Exeter in a paper read at the Exeter meeting of the Archæological Institute in 1873. The Welsh quarter, which lies to the north, is marked by the dedication of the churches within it to Welsh saints.

588. Thorpe, i. 220, 228; Schmid, 152, 156.

589. W. Malms. u. s. “Urbem igitur illam, quam contaminatæ gentis repurgio defæcaverat, turribus munivit, muro ex quadratis lapidibus cinxit.” Eadward the Elder had before fortified Towcester with a stone wall (“lapideo muro,” Fl. Wig. 918), but the wall of Exeter is distinctly said to have been of squared stone. The difference between a hedge and a wall was known ages before, when Ida fortified Bamburgh. “Sy wæs ærost mid hegge betined, and þær æfter mid wealle” (Chron. 547); but this “wall” need not have been of stone.

In short our accounts help us to four stages in the history of fortification. First, the hedge or palisade; secondly, the wall of earth, or of earth and rough stones combined; thirdly, the wall of masonry, as at Towcester; fourthly, the wall of squared stones, as at Exeter. The fifth stage, the Norman Castle, does not appear till the reign of Eadward the Confessor.

590. Chron. in anno. “Þær fæstlice feohtende wæron, ac him man swyðe fæstlice wiðstod and heardlice.”

591. Fl. Wig. in anno. “Dum murum illius destruere moliretur, a civibus urbem viriliter defendentibus repellitur [paganorum exercitus].”

592. Ib. “Unde nimis exasperatos more solito,” &c.

593. “Æt Peonnho” in the Chronicles; there seems no reason to doubt that this is the place.

594. Fl. Wig. in anno. “Angli pro militum paucitate Danorum multitudinem non ferentes.”

595. Cod. Dipl. iii. 318. “Talibus mandatorum Christi sententiis a meis frequentius præmonitus consiliariis, et ab ipso summo omnium largitore bonorum dirissimis hostium graviter nos depopulantium creberrime angustiatus flagellis, ego Æðelredus rex Anglorum [an unusually lowly style], ut supradictæ merear particeps fore promissionis, quoddam Christo et sancto suo, germano scilicet meo, Eadwardo, quem proprio cruore perfusum per multiplicia virtutum signa, ipse Dominus nostris mirificare dignatus est temporibus,” &c. &c. So afterwards, “quatenus adversus barbarorum insidias ipsa religiosa congregatio cum beati martyris cæterorumque sanctorum reliquiis,” &c., and “adepto postmodum, si Dei misericordia ita providerit, pacis tempore.” The observance of Eadward’s mass-day was ordered in 1008.

596. Cod. Dipl. vi. 140.

597. Ib. iii. 322. Ælfthryth could not have been dead very long, as she signs the charter of 999, in Cod. Dipl. iii. 312.

598. So William of Malmesbury, ii. 165; “Exagitabant illum umbræ fraternæ, diras exigentes inferias.” Yet Æthelred had no share in the murder; he only reaped, quite unconsciously, the advantage of his mother’s crime.

599. The joint action of the King and the Witan is well marked in the Chronicles; “Þa sende se cyning to þam flotan Leofsige ealdorman; and he þa, þæs cyninges worde and his witena, grið wið hi gesette.” Leofsige signs a charter of 997 (Cod. Dipl. iii. 304) as “Orientalium Saxonum dux.” He probably succeeded Brihtnoth. See above, p. 270. We find another mention of him in Cod. Dipl. vi. 129.

600. Chron. and Fl. in anno. See also Cod. Dipl. iii. 356, where the story is told. Æfic was “dish-thegn” to the young Æthelings. See Cod. Dipl. iii. 293. He had a brother Eadwine or Eadwig, mentioned in the same will, of whom we shall hear again. In Cod. Dipl. iii. 356 Æthelred calls him “præfectus meus, quem primatem inter primates meos taxavi.”

601. Cod. Dipl. iii. 356. “Inii consilium cum sapientibus regni mei petens, ut quid fieri placuisset de illo decernerent, placuitque in communes nobis eum exsulare et extorrem a nobis fieri cum complicibus suis.” Leofsige’s lands, after some difficulties on the part of his widowed sister Æthelflæd, who was herself banished, were granted in 1012 to Godwine, Bishop of Rochester, as personal property. There must be a mistake when “Leofsige ealdorman” signs a doubtful charter as late as 1006. Cod. Dipl. iii. 351.

602. “On þam ilcan lenctene.” I do not know why Mr. Thorpe translates it “autumn.”

603. To this meeting belongs the grant to the Thegn Godwine (Cod. Dipl. vi. 143), as it is signed by “Ælfgifu conlaterana regis.” But the following document (No. 1297) belongs to an earlier meeting, I suspect to an intermediate one. This year Eadwulf Archbishop of York died and was succeeded by Wulfstan Bishop of London, not Abbot Wulfstan, as Florence has it. Now the Charter quoted above (Cod. Dipl. iii. 322) is signed by Eadwulf and by Wulfstan as Bishop. This of course belongs to the first meeting. The Charter to Godwine, which the Lady signs, is also signed by Wulfstan as Archbishop. But No. 1297 (Cod. Dipl. vi. 145) is signed by Wulfstan as Bishop, and not by Eadwulf. This seems to point to an intermediate Gemót, held while the see of York was vacant, and at which Wulfstan was probably nominated to it.

604. On the details of the massacre, see Appendix GG.

605. See Appendix GG.

606. See above, p. 280.

607. Florence mentions him at Exeter, the Chronicles not till later in the year, but they seem to take him for granted.

608. The Chronicles have, “her was Exanceaster abrocen þunruh þone Franciscan ceorl Hugan, ðe seo hlæfdige hire hæfde geset to gerefan.” But Florence has, “per insilium, incuriam, et traditionem Nortmannici comitis Hugonis, quem regina Emma Domnaniæ præfecit.” Henry of Huntingdon (752 B) says, “Hugonem Normannum, quem ibi regina Emma vicecomitem [gerefan?] statuerat, in perniciem compegerunt.” Florence seems to have read eorl where our copies of the Chronicles have ceorl; also he seems to make Hugh Ealdorman of Devonshire, while in the Chronicles he is only reeve of Exeter. The “Frenchmen” of the Chronicles may always be Normans or not; most likely Hugh was a Norman.

The “insilium” of Florence is an attempt to express in Latin the negative form “unræd.” See above, p. 261.

609. Flor. Wig. “Civitatem Exanceastram infregit, spoliavit, murum ab orientali usque ad occidentalem portam destruxit.” This does not imply the complete destruction of the city. But Henry of Huntingdon says, “urbem totam funditus destruxerunt,” which is doubtless an exaggeration.

610. “Alfricus dux supra memoratus” says Florence; it is clear that this is Ælfric, the traitor of 992.

611. See above, p. 280.

612. Chron. 1003. “Þa gebræd he hine seocne, and ongan he hine brecan to spiwenne, and cwæð þæt he gesicled wære.”

613. Like Lydiadas at Ladokeia and Philopoimên at Sellasia. See Hist. Fed. Gov. i. 450, 497.

614. Flor. Wig. “A suis inimicis sine pugna divertit mœstissimus.” The Chronicles, and after them Florence and Henry, quote a proverb, “Þonne se heretoga wacað, þonne bið eall se here swiðe gehindred.”

615. See many passages in Grote’s History of Greece, especially the remarks on the death of Epameinôndas; x. 477.

616. Il. xx. 216;

κτίσσε δὲ Δαρδανίην, ἐπεὶ οὔπω Ἴλιος ἱρὴ

ἐν πεδίῳ πεπόλιστο, πόλις μερόπων ἀνθρώπων,

ἀλλ’ ἔθ’ ὑπωρείας ᾤκεον πολυπιδάκου Ἴδης.

Πολυπίδακος however would be the most inappropriate of epithets for Old Sarum, which, in the days of its greatness, was “well provided otherwise of all commodities, but wanted water so unreasonably as (a strange kind of merchandise) it was there to be sold.” (Godwin, translating William of Malmesbury, Gest. Pont. p. 183.)

617. The Chronicler here, though writing in prose, gets poetical, and calls the ships “horses of the wave”—“þær he wiste his yð hengestas.”

618. On Ulfcytel, see Appendix HH.

619. Chron. in anno. “Þa gerædde Ulfcytel wið þa witan on East-Englum.” Flor. Wig. “Cum majoribus East-Angliæ habito concilio.” See Kemble, ii. 257.

620. So I understand the narrative in the Chronicles, which seems to imply that the measures of Ulfcytel were taken as soon as the Danes began their march, but before they reached Thetford, while Florence does not mention Ulfcytel as doing anything till after he hears of the burning of the town.

621. I modernize the words of the Chronicles. “Swa hi sylfe sædon, þæt hi næfre wyrsan handplegan on Angelcynne ne gemetton, þonne Ulfcytel him to brohte.” So Florence, “ut enim ipsi testati sunt, durius et asperius bellum in Anglia numquam experti sunt quam illis dux Ulfketel intulerat.” Cf. Will. Malms. ii. 165.

622. Chron. in anno. “Þær wearð East-Engla folces seo yld [yldesta] ofslægan.” See on the sense of this word and its cognates, p. 75.]

623. Cod. Dipl. iii. 339; vi. 152.

624. On the rise of Eadric, see Appendix II.

625. On Wulfgeat, see Appendix II.

626. See Appendix KK.

627. “Id est Oppidi Canis,” says Florence. Perhaps Godwine was only a butcher, as Lappenberg makes him. This is the more usual mediæval sense of Carnifex, but the surname sounds as if he were an official person.

628. I give this story a place in the text with fear and trembling. Did it not rest on the authority of Florence, I should at once cast it aside as legendary. The hunting-party has a very mythical sound, being in fact part of the legend of Eadgar and Ælfthryth. (Cf. Dio, lxix. 2; ὡς ἐν θήρᾳ δῆθεν ἐπιβεβουλευκότες αὐτῷ.) And one might be a little suspicious as to Eadric’s position at Shrewsbury. Why should Eadric be more at home there than Ælfhelm? The teller of the tale might almost seem to have looked on Eadric as already Ealdorman of the Mercians, and as therefore naturally called on to receive his Northumbrian brother in one of the chief towns of his government. But for Florence to insert, like William of Malmesbury, a mere piece of a ballad without even the attraction of a miracle, is most unlikely. Florence, as I shall presently show, is not infallible, but few writers are less given to romance. I therefore accept the story, though I do not feel perfect confidence in it.

629. This story comes from a separate tract by Simeon of Durham on the Earls of the Northumbrians (X Scriptt. 79). By some strange confusion, it is there put under the year 979, the first year of Æthelred. If it happened at all, it must have happened in this year, the only one which suits the position of the King, Bishop, and Earl spoken of. Ealdhun became Bishop in 990, and removed the see to Durham in 995. Malcolm began to reign in 1004; a Northumbrian earldom became vacant in 1006. This fixes the date. The authority of Simeon is, I think, guaranty enough for the general truth of the story, and the silence of the Chronicles and Florence is not conclusive as to a Northumbrian matter. The story also derives some sort of confirmation from a passage of Fordun (Scot. Hist. iv. 39, p. 683, Gale), which is very vague and confused, but which at least implies warfare of some kind between Malcolm and Uhtred. “Othredum itaque comitem Anglicum, sed Danis subditum, cujus inter eos simultatis exortæ caussam nescio, Cumbriam prædari conantem, receptis prædis, juxta Burgum bello difficili superavit.”

630. See p. 292.

631. See Appendix KK.

632. The heads of the handsomest of the slain Scots, with their long twisted hair, were exposed on the walls of Durham. They were previously washed by four women, each of whom received a cow for her pains. So at least says Simeon, p. 80.

633. See Appendix II.

634. Sim. Dun. p. 80. So J. Wallingford, 546.

635. Florence says, “Cum iis fortiter dimicare statuit;” but there are no words exactly answering to them in the Chronicles.

636. So Florence, again without direct support from the Chronicles; “illi cum eo palam confligere nullatenus voluerunt.”

637. See Mr. Earle’s note, p. 335.

638. Chron. “And se here com þa ofer þa Martines mæssan to his fryðstole Wihtlande, ... and þa to þam middan wintran eodon him to heora gearwan feorme, út þurh Hamtunscire into Bearrucscire to Readingon.” So H. Hunt. M. H. B. 752 D. “Quæ parata erant hilariter comedentes.”

639. Chronn. “And wendon him ða andlang Æscesdune to Cwichelmes hlæwe.” It has been distinctly shown by Mr. James Parker that Æscesdún means the whole ridge which the Danes marched along from the east to the barrow at Cwichelmes hlæw. On the Scirgemót—was it not something more than a mere Scirgemót?—at Cwichelmeshlæw, see Cod. Dipl. iii. 292. The prophecy comes from the Chronicles; it is left out by Florence.

640. The Chronicler here becomes very emphatic and eloquent, setting down no doubt what he had seen with his own eyes. Florence, harmonizing eighty or ninety years after, is much briefer.

641. See Appendix II.

642. Thorpe, i. 304; Schmid, 220.

643. Cap. 2. “And úres hláfordes gerǽdnes and his witena is, þæt man cristene menn and unforworhte of earde ne sylle, ne huru on hǽðene leóde, ac beorge man geórne, þæt man þá sáwla ne forfare, þa Crist mid his ágenum lífe gebohte.” The same practice is forbidden in the Capitularies of Charles the Bald. See Waitz, iv. 288. So Smaragdus de Via Regia, c. 30 (D’Achery, i. 253); “Prohibe ergo, clementissime rex, ne in regno tuo captivitas fiat.”

644. The witeðeow seems to be forbidden by a capitulary of Charles the Great. Aquis, 813 (Pertz, iii. 189); “Ut vicarii eos qui pro furto se in servitio tradere cupiunt non consentiant.”

645. This seems to be implied in the word unforworhte—in the Latin text (Schmid, 237) insontem.

646. It occurs in nearly the same words in the Statute of Enham, c. 9, and in the Laws of Cnut, Thorpe, i. 376.

647. Cap. 16 (Thorpe, i. 308). “And Sce Eâdwardes mæsse-dæg witan habbað gecoren, þæt man freólsian sceal ofer eal Engla-land on xv. Kal. Aprilis.” Mark the way in which the Witan, as a matter of course, pass an ordinance on this matter, which a century or two later would have been held to be a matter of purely ecclesiastical concern.

648. Cap. 34, 35. “Ealle we scylan ǽnne God lúfian and weorðian, and ǽnne cristendóm georne healdan, and ælcne hǽðendóm mid ealle áweorpan.”

“And utan ǽnne cyne-hláford holdlíce healdan; and líf and land samod ealle werian, swá wel swá we betst magan, and God ealmihtigne inwerdre heortan fultumes biddan.”

649. Will. Malms. ii. 156.

650. See p. 280.

651. Cap. 27.

652. Cap. 28.

653. Cap. 26.

654. Thorpe, i. 314; Schmid, 226.

655. It is headed, “Be Witena gerǽdnessan.” The statute begins, “Ðis sindon þá gerǽdnessa, þe Engla rǽd-gifan gecuran and gecwǽdan, and geornlice lǽrdan, þæt man scolde healdan.” And many clauses begin, “And witena gerǽdnes is.” Mr. Kemble (ii. 212) remarks, “If it were not for one or two enactments referring to the safety of the royal person and the dignity of the crown, we might be almost tempted to imagine that the great councillors of state had met, during Æðelred’s flight from England, and passed these laws upon their own authority, without the King.”

This is possible, and even tempting, but on the whole I think they must belong to the years 1007–9. The great importance given to naval preparations seems distinctly to refer them to this time. After the return of Æthelred from Normandy in 1014 we read of no attempt at naval warfare.

656. See above, p. 52.

657. See Appendix LL.

658. Cod. Dipl. iii. 352.

659. On the ship-money see Mr. Bruce’s Prefaces to the Calendars of State Papers for 1634–5, pp. xxv. et seqq., and for 1635, pp. x. et seqq.

660. Hen. Hunt. M. H. B. 753 A.

661. Will. Gem. v. 7. But this writer makes Swegen sail to Northumberland immediately after the massacre in 1002, whereas he did not go thither till 1013. So it is impossible to fix the time to which the treaty should be referred. William may have confounded York and Exeter, or the treaty may belong to a time later than Swegen’s invasion of Northumberland.

662. Will. Gem. v. 8; Roman de Rou, 6868.

663. I here follow the words of the Chronicles almost literally.

664. See Appendix HH.

665. See Appendix MM.

666. Chron. “And þohte þæt he him micles wordes wyrcan sæolde.”

667. “Þa ðis þus cuð wǽs tó þam oðerum scipum þær se cyng wǽs, hu ða oþre geferdon, hit wæs þa swilc hit eall rædleas wǽre; and ferde sé cyning him hám, and þá ealdormen and ða heahwitan, and forleton þa scipu ðús leohtlice; and þæt folc þa þæt on ðam scipon wæron fercodon [þa scypo] eft to Lundene, and leton ealles þeodscypes geswinc ðus leohtlice fórwurðan, and næs sé sige na betere þe eall Angelcyn tó hopode.”

668. On the career and character of Thurkill, see Appendix NN.

669. See Chron. and Florence in anno, and cf. Appendix NN.

670. See above, p. 323.

671. “East-Centingas.” Chron.

672. That is, if Rochester, with the strange diocese which modern arrangements have attached to it, can any longer be looked upon as a Kentish bishopric.

673. Flor. 1009. “Rex ... multis millibus armatorum instructus, et, ut totus erat exercitus, mori vel vincere paratus.” But the Chronicles guarantee only the devotion of the army, not that of its leader.

674. The Chronicles say only “Ac hit wæs þa þuruh Eadric ealdorman gelet, swa hit gyt æfre wæs.” Florence describes the meaning of this “letting;” “Insidiis et perplexis orationibus ne prœlium inirent, sed ea vice suos hostes abire permitterent, modis omnibus allaboravit.”

675. One can hardly conceive that the movements of the Danes were at all regulated by Lent and Easter; yet the language of our authority seems to imply it.

676. Chronn. in anno. The Danes are met by “Ulfcytel mid his fyrde.” We then read, “sona flugon East-Engle. Þa stod Grantabricscir fæstlice ongean.” The treason of Thurcytel and the names of the slain also come from the Chronicles. Florence adds the name of the place, Ringmere, which occurs also in the confused accounts in the Sagas. See Appendix HH and TT.

677. See Appendix SS.

678. See above, p. 314.

679. See Appendix OO.

680. “Man,” according to the familiar German idiom; it is impossible to modernize the English without it, unless the whole force were to be lost.

681. Heafodman = Captain, like the German Hauptmann.

682. “And þonne hi tó scipon ferdon, þonne sceolde fyrd ut éft ongean þæt hi up woldan; þonne ferde seo fyrd ham, and þonne bí wæron be easton þonne heold man fyrde be westan, and þonne hí wæron be suðan, þonne wæs ure fyrd be norðan. Þonne bead man eallan witan to cynge, and man sceolde þonne rædan hu man þisne eard werian sceolde. Ac þeah mon þonne hwæt rædde, þæt ne stód furðon ænne monað. Æt nextan næs nan heafodman þet fyrde gaderian wolde, ac ælc fleah swa hí mæst mihte, ne furðon nan scír nolde oþre gelæstan æt nextan.”

683. The Chronicles and Florence give the names. William of Malmesbury, though professing to be at least half an Englishman, is too dainty to copy the uncouth names of English shires. “Cum numerentur in Anglia triginta duo pagi, illi jam sedecim invaserant, quorum nomina propter barbariem linguæ scribere refugio.” (ii. 165.)

684. The Chronicles reckon Hastings, “Hæstingas,” as distinct from Sussex.

685. Chron. and Flor. Wig. in anno. Thietmar, who, for a time, becomes an authority of some value, is amusing in the way in which he brings in English affairs (vii. 26, ap. Pertz, iii. 847). “Audivi sæpius numero, Anglos, ab angelica facie, id est pulcra, sive quod in angulo istius terræ siti sunt, dictos, ineffabilem miseriam a Sueino, Haraldi filio, immiti Danorum rege, perpessos esse, et ad id coactos, ut qui prius tributarii erant principis apostolorum Petri ac sancti patris eorum Gregorii spirituales filii, immundis canibus impositum sibi censum quotannis solverent, et maximam regni suimet partem, capto ac interemto habitatore, tunc hosti fiducialiter in habitandam inviti relinquerent.” This last clause reads more like a description of the settlement of Guthrum than of anything that happened in Swegen’s time.

686. “Ealle þas ungesealða us gelumpon þurh unrædes.” Is there an allusion to the name of Æthelred, and is this the origin of his nickname of Unready? See above, p. 261.

687. It is suggested by Lappenberg, ii. 175.

688. The last entry is in 991 (see above, p. 284). The next is in 1033. Yet these Chronicles are rather lavish than otherwise of notices of English affairs.

689. Brut y Tywysogion, 1011. “One year and one thousand and ten was the year of Christ, when Menevia was devastated by the Saxons, to wit, by Entris and Ubis.” Annales Camb. 1012. “Menevia a Saxonibus vastata est, scilicet Edris et Ubis.” Ann. Menevenses, 1011 (Angl. Sacr. ii. 648). “Menevia vastatur a Saxonibus, scilicet Edrich et Umbrich.” Here at last we get Eadric’s right name; who Ubis or Umbrich may have been it is vain to guess.

690. On the siege of Canterbury and martyrdom of Ælfheah, see Appendix PP.

691. The signatures of Godwine of Rochester seem to extend from 995 to 1046. Professor Stubbs (Reg. Sac. Angl. 17, 18) seems uncertain whether they belong to one man or two. The famous Odo held the see of Bayeux for as long a time.

692. Will. Malms, ii. 184. But see Wharton’s note to Osbern, Anglia Sacra, ii. 124. Ælfheah’s sojourn at Glastonbury seems doubtful. He was a monk at Bath, and he probably was Abbot there. (Flor. Wig. 984.) It should be remembered that Bath was then an independent abbey. See vol. iv. p. 421.

693. See Appendix PP.

694. Pelting people with bones at dinner seems to have been an established Danish custom. It is allowed as the punishment of certain lesser offences by Cnut’s “Witherlags Ret.” Swegen Aggesson, ap. Langebek, iii. 148. See also a mythical story in Saxo, 115.

695. See vol. iv. p. 442.

696. On Thurkill’s conduct, see Appendix NN.

697. See above, pp. 308–309.

698. See Encomium Emmæ, i. 2, and Appendix NN.

699. Encomium Emmæ, i. 4.

700. Compare the saying of Thurkill just before; he will give any quantity of gold and silver, anything except his ship, to redeem the life of Ælfheah.

701. Compare the description of the splendid ship given by Godwine to Harthacnut, Flor. Wig. 1040. Archbishop Ælfric also leaves King Æthelred his best ship with its accoutrements. Cod. Dipl. iii. 351.

702. See above, p. 329.

703. He “soon” (sona) submitted, say the Chronicles; “sine cunctatione” says Florence. William of Malmesbury (ii. 176) makes the most of it; “Non quod in illorum mentibus genuinus ille calor, et dominorum impatiens, refriguerit, sed quod princeps eorum Uhtredus primus exemplum dederit.”

704. See above, p. 62.

705. “Sibi lectos auxiliarios de deditis sumens,” says Florence. This seems also implied in the words of the Chronicles; “And hé þá wende syððan suðweard mid fulre fyrde.” Fyrd means the legal military array of an English district; the Danish army is always here.

706. The Chronicles distinctly mark the geographical limit of his ravages; “And syððan hé com ofer Wætlinga stræte, hi wrohton þæt mæste yfel þe ænig here don mihte.”

707. Flor. Wig. “Suis edictum posuit, videlicet, ut agros vastarent,” &c.

708. William of Malmesbury (ii. 177), in the middle of his confused narrative of this reign, lavishes a vast amount of fine writing on this siege of London. The drowning of the Danes in the Thames is attributed to the valour of the citizens, with which it clearly had nothing to do. His character of the Londoners does not badly describe that of the English generally; “Laudandi prorsus viri, et quos Mars ipse collata non sperneret hasta, si ducem habuissent.” But the Londoners had a leader, only William throughout refuses to name any honourable act of Thurkill.

709. Florence ventures to say, “Æthelredus ... muros viriliter defendit.”

710. See Appendix QQ.

711. Compare Thucydides’ comment (iv. 12) on the battle at Pylos, where the natural parts of the Lacedæmonians and the Athenians were reversed in the like way; ἐς τοῦτό τε περιέστη ἡ τύχη ὥστε Ἀθηναίους μὲν ἐκ γῆς τε καὶ ταύτης Λακωνικῆς ἀμύνεσθαι ἐκείνους ἐπιπλέοντας, Λακεδαιμονίους δὲ ἐκ νεῶν τε καὶ ἐς τὴν ἑαυτῶν πολεμίαν οὖσαν ἐπ’ Ἀθηναίους ἀποβαίνειν.

712. The Chronicles distinctly make Emma and her sons go at two different times, and they rather imply that Emma went of her own accord. “Seo hlæfdige wende þa ofer sǽ to hire broðor Ricarde and Ælfsige abbod of Burh mid hire; and se cyning sende Ælfun bisceop mid þam æðelingum Eadwearde and Ælfrede ofer sǽ.” Florence and William mix up the two things together, but this trait in Emma’s character should not be forgotten.

713. William of Malmesbury (ii. 177), seemingly to avoid naming Thurkill, confuses everything. He makes Æthelred fly secretly from London to Southampton, and thence to the Isle of Wight. He there holds a synod of Bishops and Abbots (see Appendix OO), makes a long speech to them, and sends Emma and the children across. Roger of Wendover tells the same story, only without mentioning the Bishops. William of Jumièges (v. 7) has a romance about Æthelred bringing over some hidden treasures which he kept concealed at Winchester. He fancies that Æthelred was living there, whereas the city was in the power of Swegen. William, by this secret flight of Æthelred, at least avoids this absurdity.

714. Roger of Wendover sends him across with a hundred and forty “milites.” For a minute and highly-coloured version of the whole story, see Mr. St. John, ii. 34.

715. Chron. 1013. “Þa bead Swegen ful gyld and metsunge to hís here ðóne winter, and Þurkyl bead þæt ylce to ðam here þé læg æt Grenawíc, and for eallon þam hí heregodon swa oft swa hí woldon.”

716. See above, pp. 44, 162, 268.

717. The epithet of Great however, in Danish annals, belongs not to him but to his grandson Swegen Estrithson. Chron. Roskild. ap. Langebek, i. 378.

718. See Appendix QQ.

719. “Clericos,” says Florence; for Saint Eadmund’s was then held by secular priests. It was Cnut who first placed monks there.

720. Florence calls it “generale placitum,” the same name which he applies to the “mycel gemót,” the “magnum placitum,” of the next year.

721. “Magno cruciatus tormento, tertio nonas Februarii miserabili morte vitam finivit.”

722. “Swegen geendode his dagas,” says the Chronicle, not a very usual expression. It is applied two years afterwards to Æthelred, and, long before, under 946, to the first Eadmund.

723. “Animam remittendo cœlestibus,” says the Encomiast (i. 5); “diro corporis cruciatu ad tartara transmissus,” says Roger of Wendover (i. 449).

724. The Encomiast (i. 3 et al.) has more to tell of Harold than other writers. He makes Harold the younger brother, which seems odd. Harold is not mentioned by Saxo, but his name is found in the Danish chronicles. According to the Chronicle of Eric (Lang. i. 159), the Danes deposed Harold and elected Cnut, then deposed Cnut, on account of his frequent absences from Denmark, and restored Harold, on whose death Cnut finally succeeded. In the Knytlinga Saga, c. 8, Harold dies before Swegen.

725. The Knytlinga Saga seems (Johnstone, 101) to make him only ten years old in 1008; but nothing can be made of its chronology.

726. Chron. “And cwædon þat him nan hlaford leofra nære þonne heora gecynda hlaford [in the Canterbury Chronicle cyne-hlaford], gif he hi rihtlicor healdan wolde þonne he ær dyde.”

727. Flor. Wig. 1014. “Promittens se ... in omnibus eorum voluntati consensurum consiliis acquieturum.”

728. Florence says only, “Principes se non amplius Danicum regem admissuros in Angliam unanimiter spoponderunt.” But the Chronicles say expressly, “æfre ælcne Deniscne cyning utlah of Englalande gecwædon.”

729. Thorpe, i. 340; Schmid, p. 242.

730. §§ 36, 37, 38. “And wíse wǽran worold-witan þe tó god-cundan rihtlagan worold-laga settan, folce tó steóre, and Crist and cyninge gerihtan þá bóte, þár man swá scolde manega for neóde gewildan tó rihte.”

“Ac on þám gemótan, þeáh rǽdlice wurðan on namcúðan stowan, æfter Eádgares líf-dagum, Cristes lage wanodan, and cyninges lage lytledon.”

“And þa man getwǽmde, þæt ǽr wǽs gemǽne Criste and cyninge on woroldlícre steóre, and á hit weorð þé wyrse for Gode and for worlde; cume nú to bóte, gif hit God wille.” Cf. § 43, where the three Kings are named.

731. Printed in Hickes’ Thesaurus, vol. i. pt. iii. p. 99. See Appendix RR.

732. Northern tradition assigns to Olaf Haraldsson, afterwards Saint Olaf, a share in this campaign on the English side. But the account, like most of the accounts in the sagas, is utterly unintelligible. See Appendix VV.

733. The comment of the Chronicler is remarkable; “And wearð þæt earme folc þus beswicen þurh hine.” Cnut betrayed them to Æthelred!

734. The Chronicles say twenty-one, Florence, thirty thousand. Henry of Huntingdon follows the Chronicles.

735. See Appendix NN.

736. Chron. and Flor. in anno. Henry of Huntingdon introduces the fact with the words, “Addidit autem Dominus malis solitis malum insolitum.”

737. On the children of Æthelred see Appendix SS.

738. See the story in Will. Malms. Gest. Pont. p. 315, ed. Hamilton.

739. See the Chronicles in the years 571 and 777.

740. See above, p. 316, and Appendix GG, and the curious story recorded in the charter of Æthelred, 995, in Cod. Dipl. vi. 128. We there hear of the church of Saint Helen, which has vanished in later times, and we get the name of “Winsige, præpositus on Oxonaforda.”

741. Chron. in anno. “þæt mycel Gemót.” Flor. Wig. “Magnum placitum.” W. Malms. “Magnum concilium.” The one Charter (Cod. Dipl. vi. 167) of this year, and therefore probably of this Gemót, is a grant to Bishop Beorhtwold (Brihtwold) of Sherborne of lands at Chilton in Berkshire, formerly held by Wulfgeat, who was disgraced and his property confiscated in 1006.

742. The Five Boroughs with the addition of York and Chester. Such at least is the probable conjecture of Lingard, i. 296.

743. If Eadric was now restored to his old office of Ealdorman of the Mercians, Oxford would be a town in his government, and the duty of hospitality towards the Witan from other districts would naturally fall upon him. See above, p. 327.

744. The marriage of Eadmund and his establishment in the North are recorded by the Chronicles and by Florence, but more fully by William of Malmesbury. As his details in no way contradict, but in some degree explain, the account in the Chronicles, I do not scruple to follow him.

745. “Visam concupivit, concupitæ communionem habuit,” says William. That the “communio” was a lawful marriage is clear from the distinct words of the Chronicles and from William’s own words afterwards. The presence of Ealdgyth at Oxford suggests a question whether the Witan usually brought their wives with them to these assemblies. The question is not a frivolous one, as it bears on another, namely the time which meetings of this sort usually lasted.

All the Chronicles speak of Eadmund’s wife as Sigeferth’s widow, and Florence gives her the name of Ealdgyth. But in the will of Wulfric (Cod. Dipl. vi. 149) we find an Ealdgyth wife of Morkere. Is there a mistake of any kind, or did the brothers marry wives bearing the same name?

746. I speak vaguely, because William of Malmesbury surely goes too far when he speaks of “comitatus Sigeferdi, qui apud Northanhimbros amplissimus erat.”

747. Was this submission willing or unwilling? The Chronicles are neutral. “Gerad sona ealle Sigeferðes áre and Morcores; and þæt folc eal to him beah.” Florence says, “Terram Sigeferthi et Morkeri invasit, ac populum illarum sibi subjugavit.” But William has, “Comitatum ... suapte industria vendicavit, hominibus ejusdem provinciæ in obsequium ejus facile cedentibus.”

748. The Roskild Annals (Langebek, i. 376) make Eadmund imprison Cnut and Olaf of Norway (who is here said to have accompanied Swegen); but who, in other accounts (see Appendix VV), was vigorously fighting on the English side. They escape from prison and fly to Bremen, where Archbishop Unwan baptizes them. For this writer’s wonderful succession of the English Kings, see also Appendix VV.

749. Encomium Emmæ, ii. 2.

750. The presence of Harold is asserted by Thietmar, vii. 28.

751. This is the version of the Encomiast, ii. 3. See Appendix NN.

752. Enc. Emmæ, ii. 4.

753. Chron. Rosk. ap. Lang. i. 376.

754. Enc. Emmæ, ii. 4. “In tanta expeditione nullus inveniebatur servus, nullus ex servo libertus, nullus ignobilis, nullus senili ætate debilis. Omnes enim erant nobiles, omnes plenæ ætatis robore valentes.” When nobles were so plentiful, one is tempted to ask in what nobility consisted?

755. “Be norðan,” say the Chronicles.

756. See Appendix NN.

757. They crossed “cum multo equitatu,” says Florence; “mid his here” say the Chronicles, only the Peterborough and Canterbury manuscripts (one of which, Canterbury, omits the words “mid his here”) add “clx. scipa.” Do they mean that Cnut sailed up the Thames? The other reading is distinctly preferable.

758. Here is a distinct allusion to the various passages in the laws of this reign, denouncing penalties on those who fail to attend the royal muster. See above, p. 337.

759. The Chronicles mention the ravaging without assigning any cause; Florence adds, “quia adversus Danorum exercitum ad pugnam exire noluerunt.” William of Malmesbury sets forth the policy of this severe course at some length.

760. “Bea þa for nede,” say the Chronicles; William of Malmesbury again expands at some length. Simeon (X Scriptt. p. 80) makes Cnut summon Uhtred to submit, to which summons the Earl returns a spirited reply. But after Æthelred’s death he yielded. The chronology is wrong, as Uhtred certainly submitted before Æthelred’s death, but the facts are likely enough.

761. His extent of territory is well marked by William of Malmesbury; “Commendatis West-Saxonibus, et Merciorum parte quam subjecerat, ducibus suis, ipse in Northanhimbros profectus.” London probably protected Essex. We hear nothing of East-Anglia, but see Appendix NN.

762. The murders of Uhtred and Thurcytel are mentioned in the Chronicles; Florence adds the name of Thurbrand. The other details come from the tract of Simeon before quoted. The share of Eadric in the business comes from one version of the Chronicles.

763. The Earl thus appointed appears as Yric, Egricus, Iricius, Hyrc. Yet Mr. Thorpe not only, in his edition of Florence, invests Eadric himself with the earldom, but thrusts—without any sign of interpolation—this erroneous statement into the text of his translation of Lappenberg (ii. 186), whereas, in the original (452), Lappenberg is silent about the fate of Uhtred altogether. On the past history of Eric, see the Saga of Olaf Haraldsson, c. 13; Laing’s Heimskringla, ii. 192.

764. The Chronicles seem to place Eadmund’s departure for London after the submission of Uhtred, Florence places it before. William says, “Ita subjectis omnibus, Edmundum, per semetra fugitantem, non prius persequi destitit [Cnuto] quam Londoniam ad patrem pervenisse cognosceret.”

765. William adds, “usque post pascha quievit, ut cum omnibus copiis urbem adoriretur.”

766. On all the points of the Double Election, see Appendix TT.

767. “Unanimi consensu,” says Florence.

768. See Appendix SS.

769. This surname is not only found in the Latin writers, but also in the poem in the Chronicles on the return of Eadmund’s son Eadward in 1057;

“Eadmund cing

Irensíd was geclypod

For his snellscipe.”

770. On the order of events in the war of Cnut and Eadmund, see Appendix VV.

771. The date is fixed in the Chronicles, “to þam gangdagum;” so in Florence, “circa rogationes.”

772. The first ditch is recorded in the Chronicles, which say expressly, “Hi ða dulfon áne mycle díc on suð healfe.” William of Malmesbury (ii. 18o), though he places the work later, after the battle of Sherstone, speaks of the other ditch which surrounded the city, reaching no doubt from the river to the river again; “fossa etiam urbem, qua fluvio Tamensi non alluitur, foris totam cinxerat.” That these are not two descriptions of the same ditch appears from the account in Florence, which takes in both; “in australi parte Tamensis magnam scrobem foderunt, et naves suas in occidentalem plagam pontis traxerunt; dein urbem alta lataque fossa et obsidione cingentes,” &c. &c. I therefore, with Lappenberg (ii. 188), understand the story as I have told it in the text; the phrase “traxerunt” (so in the Chronicles “drogon”) seems to mean that the ships were towed along the new-made canal.

773. Flor. Wig. “In West-Saxoniam abierunt propere, et regi Eadmundo Ferreo-Lateri spatium congregandi exercitum non dedere, quibus tamen ille cum exercitu quem in tantillo spatio congregaret, Dei fretus auxilio, audacter in Dorsetania occurrit.” On “Dorsetania” see Appendix VV.

774. The scene of Eadmund’s battle “æt Peonnan wið Gillingahám” (Chron.), “in loco qui Peonnum vocatur, juxta Gillingaham” (Flor.), is undoubtedly Pen Selwood. I am far from being so certain whether the spot “æt Peonnum” (Chron. 658), where Cenwealh defeated the Welsh, is the same, or another of the Pens in the same county. The word Pen (head) is a specimen of the Celtic names which still survive in the local nomenclature of this Teutonized, but not purely Teutonic, district. Close to Pen Selwood, “Pen Pits” and a neighbouring encampment called Orchard Castle supply good primæval studies. The latter is not unlike a miniature model of the more renowned hill of Senlac.

775. “Æfter middansumere,” say the Chronicles; Florence adds that the first day of the battle was “Lunæ dies.”

776. “Ælmær Dyrling,” “Ælmarus Dilectus.” Florence alone adds, “Algarus filius Meawes,” and implies, still more distinctly than the Chronicles, that Ælfmær and Ælfgar, as well as Eadric, were bound to Eadmund by some special tie—“qui ei auxilio esse debuerunt.”

777. Flor. Wig. “Optimum quemque in primam aciem subducit, cæterum exercitum in subsidiis locat.” We must remember these tactics when we come to the great fight of Senlac.

778. “Lanceis et gladiis pugna geritur.” See above, p. 273.

779. “Strenui militis et boni imperatoris officia simul exsequebatur” (so Il. iii. 179, ἀμφότερον βασιλεύς τ’ ἀγαθὸς κρατερός τ’ αἰχμητής), says Florence, who grows eloquent on Eadmund’s exploits. This praise must have been common to every general of those days who deserved to be called a general at all; yet it is often recorded to the special honour of particular commanders, as we shall find it in a very marked way of both Harold and William. William of Malmesbury (Hist. Nov. ii. 34) speaks in the same way of Earl Robert of Gloucester; “Ubicumque commode fieri posse videbat, et militis et ducis probe officium exequebatur.” Yet Abbot Suger, in his life of Lewis the Fat (c. 20; Duchesne, Scriptt. Franc. iv. 304), blames his own hero because “ultra quam deceret majestatem, miles emeritus militis officio, non regis, singulariter decertabat.” So Orderic (885 D) says of William of Flanders, “ipse ducis et militis officio plerumque fungebatur unde a caris tutoribus pro illo formidantibus crebro redarguebatur.”

780. On this incident, see Appendix VV.

781. Fl. Wig. “Ut naturalem dominum [no doubt cyne-hláford] requisivit illum.”

782. Ib. “Exercitu vice tertia congregato.” The armies seem always to disperse after an action, whether a victory or a defeat. I conceive that the local levies, like the Highlanders ages afterwards, returned home after each battle, while the immediate following of the King or Ealdorman largely remained with him. An invader had the advantage that all his troops were comitatus; the Danes had no means of going back to their houses and families.

783. Flor. Wig. “Rex Eadmundus Ferreum Latus exercitum fortem de tota Anglia quarto congregavit.”

784. I adopt the description of William of Malmesbury, evidently a fragment of a ballad; “Fluvius ille Rofensem urbem præterfluens, violentus et rapaci gurgite minax, mœnia pulcra lavat.”

785. See above, p. 45. Was it any confused remembrance of this fact which led the Encomiast (see Appendix VV) to make Cnut’s army winter in Sheppey now?

786. On the site of Assandun see Appendix VV.

787. The battle of Assandun in several points suggests that of Senlac, and the details given of Assandun help to explain several questions connected with the later fight. Henry of Huntingdon preserves some very valuable hints on this head.

788. Hen. Hunt. “Loco regio relicto, quod erat ex more inter draconem et insigne quod vocatur Standard.” The full importance of this passage will be seen at a later stage of my history. The West-Saxon Dragon figures prominently in Henry’s narrative of the battle of Burford in 752 (see above, p. 38). In Saxo (p. 192) the dragons become eagles, but this is clearly only by way of being classical, as one Tymmo, a valiant Dane from Zealand, figures as aquilifer on the other side, when he surely ought to have been corvifer.

789. The Danish Raven, according to the story, opened its mouth and fluttered its wings before a victory, but held its wings down before a defeat. The legend is well known; I get it on this occasion from the Encomiast, whose tale is chiefly valuable as witnessing to the presence of Thurkill. See Appendix VV.

790. Flor. Wig. “Interea Canutus paullatim in æquum locum suos deducit.”

791. Ibid. “Rex Eadmundus aciem, sicuti instruxerat, velociter movet, et repente signo dato Danos invadit.” This seems to imply the charge down hill. In the rhetoric of Henry of Huntingdon we may spy out fragments of a ballad which may have rivalled those of Brunanburh and Maldon; “Loco regio relicto ... cucurrit terribilis in aciem primam. Vibrans igitur gladium electum et brachio juvenis Edmundi dignum, modo fulminis fidit aciem,” &c. So Hist. Ram. lxxii. (Gale, i. 433); “Ædricus ... videns Ædmundum furore fulmineo hostium aciem penetrantem.” Cf. Draco Normannicus, i. 318;

“Fulguris instar habens hostibus ense fremit.”

As the Danes no doubt keep their shield-wall, we may compare the charge of the Alemanni in the battle of Strassburg, Ammianus, xvi. 12; “Barbari in modum exarsere flammarum, nexamque scutorum compagem, quæ nostros in modum testudinis tuebatur, scindebant ictibus gladiorum adsiduis.”

Mark that the sword is still the English weapon.

792. Chron. “Eadric ... aswác swa his cynehlaforde and ealre Angelcynnes þeode.”

793. Chron. “Þær ahte Cnut sige, and gefeht him alle Engla þeode.” See Mr. Earle’s note, p. 340.

794. Chron. “And eall Angelcynnes duguð þar wearð fordon.”

795. See above, p. 283.

796. Will. Malms. ii. 180. “Ulfkillus Est-Anglorum comes, perpetuam jam famam meritus tempore Swani, quando, primus omnium piratas adorsus, spem dedit posse illos superari.”

797. See above, p. 264.

798. See the story in Appendix AA.

799. Florence, by an odd forestalling, calls him “Lindicolinensis.”

800. “Qui ad exorandum Deum pro milite bellum agente convenerant,” says Florence. So the Ramsey historian (lxxii.); “Qui, cum multis aliis religiosis personis, juxta morem Anglorum veterem, ibidem convenerant, non armis, sed orationum suppetiis, pugnantem exercitum juvaturi.” Yet I confess that the calm way in which the Chronicles reckon the prelates among the slain alongside of the ealdormen looks to me the other way.

801. See above, pp. 279, 340.

802. Ealhstan, Bishop of Sherborne, fills a prominent place in the wars of the ninth century. See the Chronicles in the years 823, 845. (Cf. 871 and Will. Malms. ii. 131, for other fighting prelates of that age.) Of Ealdred’s exploits, mostly unlucky, we shall hear much in the course of the next fifty years. Another warrior Bishop will be found in the Chronicles under the year 1056.

803. Enc. Emm. ii. 11.

804. Enc. Emm. ii. 11. “Londoniam repetentes, saniora sibi quærunt consilia.” I do not fully understand these words.

805. Hist. Ram. lxxiii.; Hist. Elien. ii. 21 (Gale, 502; Stewart, 196). The Ramsey historian grudges the possession of Eadnoth’s body to the rival house, and will hardly believe the miracles which were said to vindicate the claim of Ely. It is rather odd that the Ely historian mentions neither the miracles nor the burial of Eadnoth, but he goes on to say that the Ely monks went to the field with certain of the relics of their church, which were lost. Some, he says, said that Cnut carried them away and placed them at Canterbury. Such a pious robbery would be quite in harmony with Cnut’s later character.

806. Fl. Wig. 1016. “Occisus est in ea pugna ... totus fere globus nobilitatis Anglorum, qui nullo in bello majus umquam vulnus quam ibi acceperunt.” W. Malms. ii. 180. “Ibi Cnuto regnum expugnavit, ibi omne decus Angliæ occubuit, ibi flos patriæ totus emarcuit.” H. Hunt. M. H. B. 756 B. “Illic igitur miranda strages Anglorum facta est; illic occisus est ... omnis flos nobilitatis Brittanniæ.” For the entry in the Chronicles, see p. 393, note 3.

807. See Appendix WW.

808. Flor. Wig. “Licet invitus, ad ultimum quum consentiret.”

809. On this conference between Eadmund and Cnut, and the process by which in most later accounts it has grown into a single combat between the rival Kings, see Appendix WW.

810. So I infer from the proceedings of Cnut after the death of Eadmund.

811. As Glaukos and Diomêdês, Il. vi. 230 et seqq.; Hektôr and Aias, vii. 303. Compare the brotherhood among the early Moslems; Muir’s Life of Mahomet, iii. 17. The same institution is found among the Dalmatian Morlacchi, where the sworn brothers or sisters (Pobratimi and Posestrime) were united by a special religious ceremony. See Fortis, Viaggio in Dalmazia, i. 58 (cf. Grote’s Greece, ii. 117); Petter, Dalmazien, i. 226. It seems to exist among other Slaves as well, and we shall come across other cases in our own story.

812. “Armis et vestibus mutatis,” says Florence, but, if the tradition as to the personal stature of the two kings be correct, a judgement of Cyrus would have been presently needed to restore the clothes to their former owners.

813. See the extract from the Encomium in Appendix WW.

814. See Appendix XX.

815. Chronn. “His lic lið on Glæstingabyrig mid his ealdan fæder Eadgare.”

816. On the Glastonbury tombs, see Willis, Architectural History of Glastonbury, p. 33. The first burying-place of Eadmund was before the high altar (Will. Malms. de Ant. Glast. Eccl. ap. Gale, p. 306). His tomb must have been removed on the Invention of Arthur in the time of Henry the Second.

817. “De bellis vero regis Edmundi, et de fortitudine ejus, nonne hæc scripta sunt in historiis veterum cum laude summa?” H. Hunt. M. H. B. 755 D.

In a Melrose manuscript, lately printed at Göttingen (for which I have to thank Dr. Pauli), there are verses in honour of Eadmund’s later Scottish descendant William the Lion and of Eadmund himself. His panegyric runs;

“Firma basis fidei, plebis protectio, regni

Tutor solque suo tempore solus erat.

In cives clemens, in principe civis, in hostes

Atrox, multiplici dote beatus homo.”

His battles and victories are reckoned at twelve;

“Mirum! bis seno conflixit Marte, thriumfus,

Tot totiens victis intitulavit eum.”

A West-Saxon poet might perhaps not have added;

“A! nullum ejus post ortum breviter fero talem,

Anglia se doleat non genuisse virum.”

Such a reign as Eadmund’s was not likely to be rich in documents. There is one charter (Cod. Dipl. iii. 369) of “Eadmundus æðeling rex,” granting lands “æt Pegecyrcan” (Peakirk in Northamptonshire) to the New Minster at Winchester. Its style, less turgid than that of most Latin documents of the kind, may be characteristic either of the man or of the circumstances of the time. The time when Eadmund was most likely to exercise acts of sovereignty in Northamptonshire would be in the autumn of 1016, between the battles of Otford and Assandun, when he was drawing troops from Lindesey and other distant parts of the kingdom.

818. Our authorities for this period are nearly the same as those for the reign of Æthelred. The Chronicles and Florence are still our main guides, and, as Florence draws nearer to his own time, he more commonly inserts independent matter which is not to be found in the Chronicles. We get the same kind of supplementary help as before from the secondary English authorities, the later and the local writers. We have the same hard task as before in trying to reconcile the English accounts with the various Scandinavian sagas and chronicles. The Encomium Emmæ becomes of greater importance, but it must still be used with caution, as it is clear that the writer, though contemporary, was deeply prejudiced and often very ill informed. We now also begin to draw our first help from one most valuable document, the contemporary Life of Eadward the Confessor, published by Mr. Luard. This was written, between the years 1066 and 1074, by one who was intimately acquainted with Godwine and his family, and it helps us to many facts and aspects of facts which are not to be found elsewhere. But the most important point with regard to our authorities for this time is that we must now cease to quote the English Chronicles as one work. The differences between the various copies now begin to assume a real historical importance. The narratives often differ widely from each other, and often show widely different ways of looking at men and things. They show that something very like the distinction of Whig and Tory can be traced as far back as the eleventh century. I first pointed out the difference of feeling which the different Chronicles display with regard to Godwine in a paper on the Earl’s Life and Death, in the Archæological Journal for 1854–1855. Since that time Mr. Earle, in the Introduction to his “Two of the Saxon Chronicles Parallel,” has gone fully and exhaustively into the matter from his point of view, and has given what may be called biographies of the various records which are commonly confounded under the name of “the Saxon Chronicle.” I shall hereafter follow Mr. Earle’s nomenclature (grounded on that of Jocelin, Secretary to Archbishop Parker), and shall quote them as follows. The manuscript commonly quoted as “C. C. C. C. clxxiv.” I quote as the Winchester Chronicle. For our period this Chronicle contains only a few entries added at Canterbury. “Cott. Tib. B. i.” is the Abingdon Chronicle, the only one hostile to Godwine. “Cod. Tib. B. iv.” is the Worcester Chronicle. “Bodl. Laud. 636” is the Peterborough Chronicle, strongly Godwinist. (This part however was composed at Worcester, the Chronicle being transcribed and continued at Peterborough.) “Cott. Domit. A. viii.” is Canterbury, the least valuable of all, but of more importance now than in earlier times.

819. Cnut or Knud, in one syllable, is this King’s true name, and the best Latin form is Cnuto, according to the usual way of Latinizing Scandinavian names. See above, p. 165. The form Canutus seems to have arisen from Pope Paschal the Second’s inability to say Cnut. The later King Cnut, the supposed martyr, was therefore canonized by him as “Sanctus Canutus.” See Æthelnoth’s Life of Saint Cnut, capp. iv. vi. xxxiii. (Langebek, iii. 340, 382). The writer, an English monk settled in Denmark, thinks the lengthening of the name a great honour, and compares it with the change from Abram to Abraham; but he somewhat inconsistently cuts down his own name to Ailnothus.

820. Nothing can be made of the unintelligible story in Snorro (c. 25; Laing, ii. 21, and see Appendix VV), according to which the sons of Æthelred and Emma, assisted by Olaf of Norway and his foster-father Rane, made an unsuccessful attempt upon England after Eadmund’s death. The tale may have arisen from some confusion with the later attempt on behalf of the Æthelings made by Duke Robert of Normandy. Snorro is throughout, as we shall often have occasion to see, most ill informed on English affairs. Can this Rane be the same as Ranig, whom we find Earl of the Magesætas twenty years later?

821. See above, p. 367.

822. See above, p. 381.

823. On Cnut’s apparently territorial title, see Appendix M.

824. On the accession of Cnut to the whole kingdom, see Appendix TT.

825. I borrow the title from Florence’s description of Cnut’s son Harold, “Rex Merciorum et Northhymbrorum,” in recording the analogous event of 1037.

826. On the brothers of Eadmund who were living, see Appendix SS.

827. See above, p. 397, and Appendix WW.

828. Fl. 1016. “Fratres et filios Eadmundi omnino despexerunt, eosque reges esse negaverunt.” Compare the former exclusion of the whole house of Æthelred. See above, p. 381.

829. Fl. 1017. “Fœdus etiam cum principibus et omni populo (see Appendix Q) ipse, et illi cum ipso percusserunt.”

830. See Appendix TT.

831. On the two Eadwigs, see Appendix YY.

832. The fourfold division is well marked in a Charter of Æthelred (Cod. Dipl. iii. 314), which is said to be witnessed by thegns “ǽgðer ge of West-Sexan, ge of Myrcean, ge of Denon, ge of Englon.” The “Danes” here must mean the Northumbrians, and the “English,” distinctively so called, the East-Angles.

833. Florence calls Thurkill and Eric comites, Eadric alone dux. I conceive that comes is meant to translate eorl, and dux to translate ealdorman. Probably Eadric kept the English title; if so, it was its last use in the old half-kingly sense, and in a year or two the title dies out altogether from the Chronicles, though its use still goes on in private documents, and even in Cnut’s own Laws.

834. See above, p. 379.

835. So we now apply the title of Lord Lieutenant—the nearest modern approach to the ancient Ealdorman—both to the Viceroy of the ancient kingdom of Ireland and to the military chief of a single county.

836. On the origin of Godwine, see Appendix ZZ.

837. Vita Eadw. ap. Luard, p. 392. “Quum consilio cautissimus, tum bellicis rebus ab ipso rege probatus est strenuissimus. Erat quoque morum æqualitate tam cunctis quam ipsi regi gratissimus, assiduo laboris accinctu incomparabilis, jocunda et prompta affabilitate omnibus affabilis.” Presently he is “profundus eloquio.” William of Malmesbury also (ii. 197) speaks of Godwine’s eloquence; “Homo affectati leporis, et ingenue gentilitia lingua eloquens, mirus dicere, mirus populo persuadere quæ placerent.”

838. See Appendix ZZ.

839. See Appendix AAA.

840. On the marriage of Cnut and Emma, see Appendix BBB.

841. Will. Malms, ii. 181. “Ut, dum consuetæ dominæ deferrent obsequium, minus Danorum suspirarent imperium.”

842. See Appendix VV.

843. Hen. Hunt. M. H. B. 752 A. “Emma, Normannorum gemma.” So Godfrey, Prior of Winchester, in the Epigrammata Historica printed in Wright’s Satirical Poets, ii. 148;

“Splendidior gemma meriti splendoribus Emma.”

844. Flod. A. 951; Richer, ii. 101; Palgrave, ii. 619. Lewis himself was much younger than his wife Gerberga, daughter of Henry the Fowler and widow of Gilbert of Lotharingia.

845. See Appendix BBB.

846. See above, p. 315.

847. See above, p. 406.

848. See above, p. 374. Alberic of Trois-Fontaines (51) makes them children of Eadwig.

849. Flor. Wig. 1017.

850. This rumour is preserved by the so-called Bromton, 907. Though the authority of this writer is as low as anything can be, the trait is characteristic, and savours of a contemporary scandal-monger.

851. Sigrid, widow of Eric the Victorious, and mother of Olaf of Sweden, was mother of Cnut by her second marriage with Swegen. J. Magni Hist. Goth. xvii, 17, 18 (Rome, 1554) Olaf died in 1018. Swedish tradition says much of his friendship and hereditary alliance with England, especially with King “Mildredus” or “Eldredus,” of all which I find no trace in English history.

852. Adam Brem. ii. 50, 56.

853. Florence, followed by Roger of Wendover, calls the Hungarian King Solomon. But Solomon did not begin to reign till 1063. Stephen died in 1038. Thwrocz, Chron. Hung. c. xxxiv.; Scriptt. Rev. Hung. (Wien 1746), p. 98. The Chronicles at this stage are silent on the matter, but the poem in the Worcester Chronicle under 1057 says that Cnut sent Eadward “on Ungerland to beswicane”—Sweden is not mentioned. Adam of Bremen (ii. 51) gives them another refuge; “in Ruzziam exsilio damnati.” So Karamsin, Hist. de Russie, ii. 48.

854. So Florence; “in nativitate Domini, cum esset Lundoniæ.” A different order of events might perhaps be inferred from the Chronicles; but Florence is clearly more careful in his arrangement in this place.

855. “Æðelmæres þæs greatan,” say the Abingdon, Worcester, and Peterborough annalists. What kind of greatness is implied? This may be the Æthelweard who is said to have failed to slay Eadwig; but this Æthelweard and this Æthelmær must be distinguished from the real or supposed brothers of Eadric. So Brihtric must be distinguished from the Brihtric of the year 1009.

856. See Appendix CCC.

857. Hist. Eves. 84. “Cnuto ... fecit occidi Edricum ... cum quo etiam et aliis pluribus suis militibus, quidam potens homo, Normannus vocabulo, frater scilicet hujus Leofrici comitis, perimitur ejus jussione.”

858. See below, p. 418.

859. Florence (1017) asserts their injustice; the victims died “sine culpa.”

860. As Lappenberg (ii. 200) seems to think, on the strength of a passage in the Ramsey History, c. 84. If this be the necessary meaning of the Ramsey writer, his authority is very small on such a point, and the general course of Cnut’s conduct looks quite the other way.

861. See Appendix SS.

862. See above, p. 379.

863. On the different versions of the tale, see Appendix DDD.

864. So Florence; “Quia timebat insidiis ab eo aliquando circumveniri, sicut domini sui priores Ægelredus et Eadmundus frequenter sunt circumventi.”

865. See above, pp. 278, 326.

866. See above, p. 205, 233.

867. See Appendix CCC.

868. Thietmar, viii. 5. “In Anglis triginta navium habitatores piratæ a rege eorum, Suenni regis filio, Deo gratias, occisi sunt; et qui prius cum patre hujus erat invasor et assiduus destructor provinciæ, nunc solus sedit defensor, ut in Libycis basiliscus arenis cultore vacuis.”

869. It took some time to collect these large sums. Thus the Danegeld voted in 1011 was paid in 1012. See above, pp. 350–355. This Danegeld is referred to in Heming’s Worcester Cartulary, 248 (Mon. Angl. i. 595), a passage to which I shall have to refer again.

870. £10500, according to the Abingdon and Worcester Chronicles and Florence. £11000, according to the Peterborough and Canterbury Chronicles.

871. See above, p. 373.

872. The Abingdon Chronicle has only, “And Dene and Engle wurdon sæmmæle æt Oxnaforda.” The Worcester annalist makes the important addition, “to Eadgares lage.” So Florence; “Angli et Dani apud Oxenafordam de lege regis Eadgari tenenda concordes sunt effecti.”

873. See above, p. 218.

874. William of Malmesbury has a remarkable passage to this effect; “Omnes enim leges ab antiquis regibus, et maxime ab antecessore suo Ethelredo latas, sub interminatione regiæ mulctæ perpetuis temporibus observari præcepit [Cnuto]; in quarum custodiam etiam nunc tempore bonorum sub nomine regis Edwardi juratur, non quod ille statuerit, sed quod observarit.” (ii. § 183.)

875. See above, p. 65.

876. “Incomparabilis Eadgarus,” says Cnut in his Glastonbury Charter, which, if spurious, as marked by Mr. Kemble (Cod. Dipl. iv. 40), is at least older than William of Malmesbury (ii. § 185).

877. “Nec dicto deterius fuit factum,” says William of Malmesbury, ii. 183. So in ii. 181; “Ita quum omnis Anglia pareret uni, ille ingenti studio Anglos sibi conciliare, æquum illis jus cum Danis suis in consessu, in concilio, in prœlio, concedere.”

878. See above, pp. 370–375.

879. Adam Brem. ii. 63. “Aliquando visitans Danos, aliquando Nortmannos [Norwegians], sæpissime autem sedit in Anglia.”

880. See above, p. 366.

881. Chronn. in anno; Fl. Wig.

882. On the exploits and marriage of Godwine see Appendix EEE.

883. Saxo (193) tells the tale at length. Florence also (1049) admits the pedigree; “Ulfus, filius Spraclingi, filius Ursi.” “Ursus” is seemingly the half-human Biorn, not the bear himself. Cf. Appendix WWW.

884. See Appendix ZZ.

885. He signs, as far as I know, only two Charters; one (Cod. Dipl. iv. 15) in company with Leofwine, the other (Cod. Dipl. vi. 190) in company with Leofric. This last, which is very unusual, is not signed by Godwine, and the “Harold eorl” who signs it must, as I shall presently show, be distinguished from his son.

886. Saxo, 195–7. See Appendix GGG.

887. All the Chronicles, and also Florence, mention this banishment of Æthelweard.

888. On Godwine’s West-Saxon earldom, see Appendix AAA.

889. Chron. and Flor. Wig. in anno.

890. See Appendix II.

891. The Canterbury Chronicle is fuller than the others on this head, calling the building “an mynster of stane and lime.” This is one of the passages which have been strangely applied to prove that stone architecture was hardly known in England before the Norman Conquest. Any one who knows the buildings of Essex, as compared with those of Somerset or Northamptonshire, will at once see that the notice of a stone building as something singular must be purely local. The present church of Ashington contains no detail earlier than the last years of the twelfth century; but I suspect that the walls are mainly those of Cnut’s minster.

892. Will. Malms. ii. 185, and see below.

893. Chron. Cant. “And gief hit [the minster] his anum preoste þas nama was Stigand.” William of Malmesbury (ii. 181) calls it “basilica,” but goes on to say, “Nunc, ut fertur, modica est ecclesia presbytero parochiano delegata.” The words “minster,” “monasterium” (as applied to the church as distinguished from the conventual buildings), “moutier,” are used very vaguely, and often mean merely a church of any kind.

894. Perhaps the little collegiate church of Battlefield, founded to commemorate Henry the Fourth’s victory, called the Battle of Shrewsbury, is a nearer parallel to Assandun than Battle Abbey or Batalha.

895. The monks of Battle came from Marmoutier. Chron. de Bello, p. 7.

896. I assume, with Mr. St. John (Four Conquests, ii. 69), that this Stigand is no other than the future Archbishop. Stigand the priest signs charters of Cnut in 1033 (Cod. Dipl. iv. 46) and 1035 (vi. 185), and one without date (vi. 187), and one of Harthacnut in 1042 (iv. 65). He seems to be the only person of the name who signs. He was chaplain to Harold Harefoot (Fl. Wig. 1038), as well as to Cnut and Eadward.

897. Chron. and Fl. Wig. in anno. See Appendix NN.

898. See Appendix NN and SS.

899. See Appendix QQQ.

900. Eric’s last signature is in 1023. Cod. Dipl. iv. 26.

901. See Appendix FFF.

902. Fl. Wig. 1029. “Timebat enim ab illo vel vita privari vel regno expelli.” Hakon’s connexion by marriage with Cnut rests on the authority of Florence, in anno. His blood-kindred as his sister’s son comes from Snorro, c. 19 (Laing, ii. 15).

903. Snorro, c. 139 (Laing, ii. 192). This is what Florence (1029) must mean, when he says, “Quasi legationis causa, in exsilium misit.”

904. The Chronicles contain no mention of Hakon’s banishment, but the Abingdon Chronicle mentions his death at sea in 1030; “And þæs geres ǽr ðám fórferde Hacun se dohtiga eorl on sǽ.” Florence (1030) records his death at sea, but also mentions the other account. In the wild invective of Osbern (Trans. S. Elf. ap. Ang. Sac. ii. 144) we have an Earl Hakon, perhaps the same, who stabs himself; “propono ducem Haconem proprio se mucrone transverberantem.” A charter of 1031 (Cod. Dipl. iv. 35), with a signature of Hakon, must be spurious or inaccurate in its date.

905. Florence (1044) mentions the second marriage of Gunhild. This Harold signs a charter of 1033 (Cod. Dipl. iv. 43), and another (vi. 190) along with the Earls Ulf, Eglaf, Leofric, and Eric. These signatures must be carefully distinguished from the early signatures of Harold the son of Godwine.

906. Fl. Wig. 1046.

907. See Appendix GGG.

908. Fl. Wig. 1041, and vol. ii. Appendix G. Thored was perhaps Thurkill’s nephew. At least a “Ðorð Ðurcylles nefa” signs a charter of Cnut in 1023 (Cod. Dipl. iv. 38), but of course it may be another Thored and another Thurkill. There are many signatures which may belong to this Thored, as iv. 23, vi. 187, and vi. 191, where he appears as “Ðored steallere.”

909. On the Northumbrian Earls, see Appendix KK.

910. There is one charter of Cnut (Cod. Dipl. iv. 43) signed by a crowd of Danish names otherwise unknown. But this is a charter relating wholly to Northumbrian affairs, and the signatures are no doubt those of local thegns, many of whom were most likely not followers of Cnut, but descendants of the Danish settlers in Ælfred’s time.

911. Something of this sort, which is quite likely in itself, is implied in some stories told by the Ramsey historian, who enters into much detail about various Danish thegns at this time. For instance, in cap. lxxxiv. (p. 440) we read about the Dane Thurkill when summoned before the Bishop’s court; “Quo citato apparere contemnente, a severitate tamen meritæ ultionis censuit episcopus ad tempus temperandum, ne Anglus Dacum ad regis injuriam injuste vexare diceretur.” Cnut however steps in to support the law against his grantee.

In cap. lxxxvi. again is a story about a Danish thegn, who greatly oppressed the neighbouring “rustici,” who conspired his death. He is “vir factiosus et dives, qui Anglorum animos ex suo ponderans, illis Dacos fore semper exosos, quod patriam suam invasissent, et sibi insidias, occulte tamen propter metum regis, ab eis parari arbitratus.” He escapes by selling his estate to the Bishop, who was always on the look-out for such chances, and who gave it to Ramsey abbey. The really important point in the story is an allusion to Welsh robbers (“Britones latrones”) as still possible in Huntingdonshire in the time of Cnut.

912. Eurip. Phœn. 534;

εἴπερ γὰρ ἀδικεῖν χρὴ, τυραννίδος πέρι

κάλλιστον ἀδικεῖν τἄλλα δ’ εὐσεβεῖν χρεών.

913. On the disputed date of Cnut’s journey to Rome, see Appendix HHH.

914. See Appendix III.

915. i. I. “Þæt is þonne ǽrest, þæt hió ofer ealle óðre þingc ǽnne God æfre, woldan lúfian and wurðian, and ǽnne cristendóm ánrǽdlice healdan, and Cnut cingc lúfian mid rihtan getrywðan.” Cnut’s Laws form two divisions, ecclesiastical and secular (woruldcunde), but both alike are enacted by the King and his Witan. I quote the Ecclesiastical as i., the Secular as ii.

916. i. 17. The words of Æthelred’s statute (see above, p. 337) are repeated.

917. i. 15. Cf. the Capitularies, Waitz, iv. 311, 315.

918. ii. 5.

919. ii. 3.

920. “Mid mínan witenan rǽde” is the form in the preamble of the Secular Laws.

921. ii. 18. Here the English title Ealdorman is used, but in a later clause (ii. 72) we find the highest rank described as Earls, clearly in the later and not in the earlier sense of the word, as the Earl is distinctly marked as superior to the King’s Thegn.

922. ii. 18. “And þǽr beo on þǽre scire bisceop and se ealdorman, and þǽr ægðer tǽcan ge Godes riht ge woruld-riht.” See Appendix K.

923. i. 20.

924. ii. 12, 14, 15.

925. ii. 15, 45, 49, 63, 66, 72, 84.

926. See above, p. 66.

927. ii. 81. On the severe hunting code which bears the name of Cnut see Appendix III.

928. Hist. Rams. c. 85. p. 441. “Quum quadem vice rex Cnuto more assueto regni fines peragraret.” Cf. below, p. 441.

929. See Appendix III.

930. See Appendix GGG.

931. Prior Godfrey (Satirical Poets, ii. 148) thus sums up his character;

“Quique cruentus erat et in hostes prædo superbus,

In sibi subjectos regis habebat opus.

Mensæ sæpe suæ convivia festa relinquens,

Pauperibus monachis intererat socius.

Post posita pompa turbæ mediator agentis,

Conservus servis serviit ille Dei.”

932. Hen. Hunt. M. H. B. 757 E. Cnut, as a constitutional King, had less power over the elements than the despotic Lewis the Eleventh. See the story in Kirk, Charles the Bold, ii. 10.

933. Hist. El. ii. 27 (p. 505). Every one knows the lines, somewhat modernized as they must have been by the transcriber;

“Merie sungen ðe muneches binnen Ely,

Ða Cnut ching reu ðer by;

Roweð, cnihtes, noer ðe land,

And here we þes muneches sæng.”

934. Hist. El. ii. 27 (p. 505).

935. Bromton, X Scriptt. 909.

936. Fl. Wig. 1020. “Æthelnothus, qui bonus appellabatur, nobilis viri Ægelmari filius.” Æthelnoth was not improbably brother of Æthelweard, one of the victims of 1017. If so, his promotion was of a piece with the favour shown by Cnut to the father and son of Northman, a fellow-sufferer with Æthelweard. See above, p. 414. William of Malmesbury (ii. 184) tells us of the influence for good which Æthelnoth exercised over Cnut; “Regem ipsum auctoritate sanctitudinis in bonis actibus mulcens, in excessibus terrens.” See also the extract from Osbern (Trans. S. Elph. Ang. Sacr. ii. 144) in Appendix TT.

937. Will. Malms. ii. 181. “Loca omnia in quibus pugnaverat, et præcipue Assandunam, ecclesiis insignivit.”

938. See above, p. 366.

939. Will. Malms. ii. 181. “Monasteria per Angliam suis et patris excursionibus partim fœdata, partim eruta, reparavit.”

940. Will. Malms, u. s.; Rog. Wend. i. 464; Tho. Eli. ap. Ang. Sacr. i. 608; John of Oxenedes, p. 19. Earl Thurkill, the Lady Emma, and Ælfwine, Bishop of the East-Angles, aided in the foundation. The monks came partly from Holm, partly from Ely; the Abbot “Uvius” or Wido—either of them very strange names—was from Holm. Of the canons, some took the vows, others were provided for elsewhere. The change of foundation took place in 1020, but the new church was not consecrated till 1032. Flor. Wig. in anno.

941. John of Oxenedes, pp. 19, 291.

942. Cnut’s visit to Glastonbury is described, and the charter given at length, by William of Malmesbury, ii. 184, 5. See Cod. Dipl. iv. 40.

943. On the “lignea basilica,” represented by the Lady chapel, commonly called that of Saint Joseph, see above, p. 427. On its history, see Professor Willis’s Architectural History of Glastonbury, pp. 3, 47, where the tract of William of Malmesbury De Antiquitate Glastoniensis Ecclesiæ is made use of with the author’s accustomed skill.

944. See above, p. 399.

945. Will. Malms. Gest. Reg. ii. 184. “Super sepulcrum pallium misit versicoloribus figuris pavonum, ut videtur, intextum.”

946. The translation is recorded by Florence and all the Chronicles, under the year 1023, but the Worcester Chronicle alone enters into any details. Osbern, the biographer of Ælfheah, describes his translation at great length in a special tract; Anglia Sacra, ii. 143.

947. Will. Malms, ii. 181.

948. See above, pp. 275, 394.

949. Hist. Rams. lxxxi. p. 437. The description of the second church, built near the first, reminds one of Glastonbury, and is worthy the attention of the architectural antiquary.

950. Ib. lxxx. “Interea Cnuto rex Christianissimus nulli prædecessorum suorum regum comparatione virtutum vel bellica exercitatione inferior, cœpit sanctam ecclesiam enixissime venerari, et religiosorum caussis virorum patrocinari, eleemosynis profluere, justas leges, vel novas condere, vel antiquitus conditas observare. Quumque non solum Angliæ, sed et Daciæ simul et Norguegiæ principaretur, erat tamen humilitate cernuus, usus venerei parcus, alloquio dulcis, ad bona suadibilis, ad misericordiam proclivis, amatorum pacis amator fidissimus, in eos autem, qui vel latrocinio vel deprædatione jura regni violassent, ultor severissimus.”

951. Adam of Bremen (ii. 53) mentions several of them, as Bernhard in Scania, Gerbrand in Zealand, Reginberht in Funen. These hardly sound like the names of Englishmen. Gerbrand signs an English charter as Bishop of Roskild in 1022. Cod. Dipl. iv. 13.

952. Will. Malms. ii. 186.

953. This very curious story is told at length by Eadmer (Hist. Nov. ii. 416). The Archbishop comes “audita divitis fama regni Anglorum.” Eadmer contrasts the days of Cnut with his own; “Illis quippe diebus hic mos Anglis erat patrocinia sanctorum omnibus sæculi rebus anteferre.” Æthelnoth gave the Archbishop a splendidly embroidered cope, a specimen of English workmanship (“cappam illi valde pretiosam aurifrigio ex omni parte ornatam dedit”).

954. Chron. S. Max., Labbé, ii. 209. “Anno MXLIX. Kalendis Novembris dedicatum est monasterium S. Hilarii Pictavensis.... Istud monasterium magna ex parte construxerat regina Anglorum per manus Gauterii Coorlandi.” This must mean Emma and not Eadgyth.

955. Compare Snorro’s description of the reign of Cnut (c. 139; Laing, ii. 194); “In his whole kingdom [seemingly both England and Denmark] peace was so well established that no man dared break it. The people of the country kept their peace towards each other, and had their old country law: and for this he was greatly celebrated in all countries.”]

956. On the Housecarls, see Appendix KKK.

957. See, above all, the account of the “heorð-werod” of Brihtnoth at Maldon. See above, p. 271.

958. On the “Witherlags Ret” or “Leges Castrenses” of Cnut, see Appendix KKK.

959. See vol. iii. ch. xiv., end of § 2.

960. See above, p. 351.

961. See above, p. 344, and Lappenberg’s note at p. 475 in the original. Mr. Thorpe (ii. 210) has turned Eilaf or Eglaf into Ulf, to the utter perversion of Lappenberg’s meaning. Eglaf’s name is attached to several charters of Cnut. See Cod. Dipl. iv. 2, 28, 29. On the death of Cnut he is said (Brut y Tywysogion, 1036), for what cause we are not told, to have left England and to have sought a refuge in Germany. One can hardly doubt as to the identity of these two Eglafs; yet the words of the Brut (1020) might almost make us think that Eglaf was some wandering wiking; “After that Eilad (al. Eilaf) came to the isle of Britain, and Dyved was devastated and Menevia was demolished.”

962. Ann. Camb. 1022. “Eilaf vastavit Demetiam. Menevia fracta est.”

963. Ann. Camb. 1035; Brut. 1033.

964. See above, p. 379.

965. See above, p. 429.

966. On the Northumbrian Earls see Appendix KK, and on the cession of Lothian see Appendix I.

967. On Cnut’s relations with Scotland, see Appendix LL.

968. Simeon (Hist. Eccl. Dun. iii. 5); “De ecclesia quam inceperat solam turrim occidentalem imperfectam reliquit.”

969. Simeon, Hist. Dun. iii. 6; Flor. Wig. 1020.

970. See Appendix I.

971. See Appendix LLL.

972. See Appendix LLL.

973. See above, p. 131, and Appendix G.

974. Fordun, iv. 43 (Gale, p. 686). But see Robertson, i. 100 et seqq.

975. Fordun, iv. 44; Chron. 1034.

976. Fordun, iv. 44. “Malcolmo Cumbriæ regionem pater statim ut coronatus est donavit.”

977. The Saga of Olaf Haraldsson or Saint Olaf forms the greater part of the second volume of Mr. Laing’s translation of Snorro’s Heimskringla. I use it freely, though with caution, for Northern affairs. It is at all events more trustworthy than Saxo and Swegen Aggesson.

978. See Adam of Bremen, ii. 55 (cf. 59). His words are remarkable; “Inter Chnut et Olaph, regem Nortmannorum, continuum fuit bellum, nec cessavit omnibus diebus vitæ eorum; Danis pro imperio certantibus, Nortmannis vero pugnantibus pro libertate. In qua re justior mihi visa est caussa Olaph, cui bellum necessarium magis fuit quam voluntarium.” He goes on with an elaborate panegyric on Olaf. Adam’s judgement is clearly right on the whole, though Cnut had perhaps as much to say for himself as warlike kings commonly have.

On the name Nortmanni, see Appendix T.

979. Snorro’s account (c. 139; Laing, ii. 192) is here very distinct.

980. See above, p. 379.

981. See above, p. 370, and Appendix VV.

982. See Adam of Bremen, ii. 55, and cf. Florence, 1027.

983. Adam, u. s.

984. Snorro, c. 74 (Laing, ii. 84).

985. Snorro, c. 140 (Laing, ii. 194).

986. On this battle see Appendix MMM.

987. Flor. Wig. 1027; Saxo, 196. “Olavum vero per Norvagiensium quosdam pecunia a se corruptos domestico bello opprimendum curavit.” Snorro, capp. 165, 171, 175. In an earlier part of his story (c. 34) Snorro remarks that the Norwegians preferred a foreign and absentee King, who simply took tribute, and let the ancient laws and usages alone, while a native and resident King commonly interfered with them.

988. Snorro, c. 180. The entry in the Durham Annals is “Cnut Rex Anglorum fit et rex Danorum.” Here is one of the common confusions between Danes and Norwegians; but it shows a remembrance of the fact (see above, p. 422) that Cnut had not become King of England and Denmark at the same time.

989. See Snorro, c. 235 et seqq.; Flor. Wig. 1030; Adam, ii. 55, 59. The battle is a well attested fact, yet Adam says; “Alii dicunt eum in bello peremptum, quidam vero in medio populi circo ad ludibrium magis expositum.” [The title of “martyr” seemingly suggested the amphitheatre.] “Sunt alii qui asserunt illum in gratia regis Chnut latenter occisum, quod et magis verum esse non diffidimus, eo quod regnum ejus invasit.”]

990. See Appendix NNN.

991. See Appendix NNN.

992. William the Third of Poitiers and Fifth of Aquitaine reigned from 990 to 1029. His connexion with Cnut is described by Ademar (iii. 41; ap. Pertz, iv. 134); “Necnon et regem Danamarcorum et Anglorum, nomine Canotum, ita sibi summo favore devinxerat, ut singulis annis legationes eorum exciperet pretiosis cum muneribus, ipseque pretiosiora eis remitteret munera.” The book is described as “Codex literis aureis scriptus, in quo nomina sanctorum distincta cum imaginibus continebatur.” Conc. Lemov. 1031; ap. Labbé, Conc. ix. 882, quoted by Pertz. Cnut and Emma, as we shall see again, had rather a fancy for making presents of books.

993. See above, p. 221.

994. See above, pp. 164, 254.

995. In Rudolf Glaber (ii. 2) Richard appears as “Rotomagorum dux.” Duke or Earl of Rouen (Rudu Jarl) is also the title which the Norman princes bear in the Northern Sagas. See Vita Olai Trygg. p. 263, and Laing, ii. 16. Richard is “dux” here; he is “Rotomagorum comes” in cap. 8, and “Princeps” in iii. 1. In Ademar (iii. 55) he is “Comes Rotomensis” and “Rotomagi.” Richard calls himself (D’Achery, iii. 386) “Marchio Nortmanniæ.” See Appendix T.

996. See above, p. 185.

997. King Robert in 1006 confirmed the foundation of Fécamp, “pia petitione dilectissimi fidelis nostri Ricardi comitis.” Gallia Christiana, xi. Inst. 8. One can hardly fancy this formula being used fifty years earlier or fifty years later.

998. This is a very common act of formal submission, even when submission was merely formal; but, after being very common under Richard, it dies out under William.

999. King Robert’s domestic troubles, his uncanonical marriage with his first wife, and the bondage in which he lived to his second, are well known. Constance, according to Rudolf Glaber (iii. 9), was “avarissima, maritique magistra.” The flocking of her southern countrymen to the court of Paris is described by Rudolf in language which reminds one of England under Henry the Third.

1000. This Burgundian war is described by R. Glaber, ii. 8; Will. Gem. v. 15. The Norman contingent is said to have amounted to 30,000 men.

1001. See Sigebert’s Chron. 1006 (Pertz, vi. 354), and the Gesta Episc. Cameracensium, i. 33 (Pertz, vii. 414, 435). Both writers allow Robert the title of “Francorum rex;” Richard is in Sigebert “Comes Nortmannorum,” in the Gesta “Rotomagensium dux.” (In the Chronicon Scotorum, p. 266, he is “Ricard rí Frainge.”) I need hardly say that the Emperor Henry the Second was a canonized saint, and King Robert certainly deserved that honour as much as many who received it.

1002. The marriage contract of Judith is given in Martène and Durand’s Thesaurus Novus, i. 123. She founded the abbey of Bernay in 1013. W. Gem. vii. 22. See Neustria Pia, 398. Her church is standing, though desecrated, a noble example of early Norman Romanesque.

1003. W. Gem. v. 13. Count Geoffrey going on a pilgrimage to Rome, left his dominions and his sons “sub ducis advocatu.” He died on his way home.

1004. On the war with Odo, see W. Gem. v. 10–12; Roman de Rou, 6588–6974. Cf. R. Glaber, iii. 2, 9.

1005. “Castrum Tegulense,” W. Gem. v. 10. “Tuillieres,” Roman de Rou, 6627.

1006. See above, p. 255.

1007. See above, pp. 285, 302.

1008. See above, pp. 216, et seqq., 234.

1009. “Adscitis Britonibus cum Normannorum legionibus,” says William of Jumièges, v. 10.

1010. W. Gem. v. 11; Roman de Rou, 6885–6928. On Dol, see vol. iii. ch. xii. § 4.

1011. The names in William of Jumièges are Olavus and Lacman. The printed text of the Roman de Rou has Golan and Coman, but the manuscripts seem to have various forms, Solan, Laman, and Olef. Mr. Thorpe (Lappenberg, Norman Kings, p. 35) points out the error of Depping (ii. 177) and Prevost (Roman de Rou, i. 346), who suppose this Olaf to be Olaf Tryggvesson. Nothing can be plainer than that both William and Wace meant their Olaf for Olaf Haraldsson, as they speak of his subsequent martyrdom. Mr. Thorpe adds, “Lagman is the name of an office. Angl. lawman.” So it is, and names of offices, from Pharaoh onwards, have often been mistaken for proper names; but would a King, specially a King of the sea, be called a Lawman? Lagman too is a real Scandinavian name. Lagman, Harold, and Olaf appear as brothers in the history of Man (Chron. Man. 4. ed. Munch, A. 1075.) Mr. Thorpe also supposes that the two Kings were “two petty Scandinavian potentates from Ireland.” Depping (ii. 175) identifies this expedition with one in which certain Northmen from Denmark and Ireland invaded Aquitaine (Ademar, iii. 53, ap. Pertz, iv. 139); but this is placed by Pertz in 1020, and the whole story is quite different. Wherever a wiking shows himself, he brings a mythical atmosphere with him.

1012. Will. Gem. v. 12. “Robertus ... verens ne ab eis Francia demoliretur.”

1013. Ib. “Satrapas regiminis sui convocavit, ambosque discordes ad se apud Coldras convenire mandavit.” This is a somewhat lordly style for a French King to use towards a Norman Duke, but it is a Norman writer who records it. On the rarity of such assemblies in France, see above, p. 248.

1014. Will. Gem. v. 12; Roman de Rou, 6975. This of course proves that Olaf Haraldsson is meant, but it proves nothing as to the historic value of the story.

1015. See above, pp. 287–291.

1016. The Norman Conquest of Sicily was actually later than that of England; but then the conquest of Apulia and the conquest of Sicily were merely two acts of the same drama.

1017. Challon, or Cabillo, in ducal Burgundy, which must be distinguished from Châlons, or Catalauni, in Champagne.

1018. Will. Gem. v. 16; Roman de Rou, 7292–7370.

1019. See above, p. 234.

1020. Will. Gem. vii. 3.

1021. See above, pp. 252, 253.

1022. According to Ademar, who records several of his exploits, he daily slew and boiled a Saracen prisoner, and compelled the comrades of the slain man to eat of his flesh. He himself only pretended to partake. Ademar, iii. 55 (Pertz, iv. 140). Some of the first crusaders (Ord. Vit. 749 A) were driven by hunger to eat the flesh of Turks, but their superiors were grieved and ashamed. Richard Cœur de Lion, according to some legends, went a step further; he ate freely, and pronounced that no other meat was so strengthening for an Englishman.

1023. R. Glaber, iii. 1. “Normannorum audacissimus, nomine Rodulphus, qui etiam comiti Richardo displicuerat, cujus iram metuem,” &c. Cf. Ademar, iii. 55.

1024. The respectful way in which Rudolf (u. s.) speaks of the Eastern Empire is worth notice. We read of “Imperator Basilius sancti Imperii Constantinopolitani,” “tributa, quæ Romano debentur Imperio,” namely by the Italian cities, &c.

1025. I speak of course only of such civilization as is implied in progress in science, art, and learning. Political civilization came neither from the East nor from the West nor yet from the South.

1026. See p. 301.

1027. See p. 342.

1028. See p. 361.

1029. W. Gem. v. 17. “Cunctos Normannorum principes apud Fiscannum convocat.” “Richardum filium suum consultu sapientum [mid his Witena geþeaht] præfecit suo ducatui, et Robertum fratrem ejus comitatui Oximensi, ut inde illi persolveret debitum obsequii.” See above, p. 173. Was Richard associated with his father in the duchy before his father’s death? The idea is suggested by a signature of “Richardus Tertius” in De Lisle, Saint Sauveur le Vicomte, Preuves, pp. 7, 9. The former charter is given in full in Neustria Pia, 215–218, The latter seems very distinct. It has the signatures, “Signum Richardi secundi ducis. Signum Richardi tertii ducis.” So the son of Henry the Second was known after his coronation as Henry the Third.

1030. Will. Gem. vi. 2. “Cum suorum nonnullis, ut plurimi rettulerunt, veneno mortem obiit.” So Roman de Rou, 7434 et seqq. William of Malmesbury (ii. 178) more distinctly mentions the suspicion against Robert; “Opinio certe incerta vagatur, quod conniventia fratris Roberti ... vim juveni venefica consciverit.” So Chron. Turon. (Duchesne, iii. 360); “Hic dicitur veneno necasse Richardum fratrem suum.”

1031. Richard left a young son, Nicolas, seemingly illegitimate (see Palgrave, iii. 137–142), who became a monk, and died Abbot of Saint Ouen’s in 1092. Will. Gem. vi. 2; Ord. Vit. 710 A, who records how he began, but did not finish, the abbey church. Of his work only a small part at the east end remains.

1032. There is no authority whatever for his common name of Robert the Devil which seems to have arisen from confounding him with the hero of some popular romance. The Norman historians give him a singularly good character, and certainly, unless he had a hand in his brother’s death, no great crime is recorded of him. We hear absolutely nothing of any such cruelties on his part as are recorded of many princes of that age. (See Will. Gem. vi. 3; Roman de Rou, 7453.) Altogether his actions might make us think that he was of the same generous and impulsive disposition as his forefather William Longsword (see above, p. 193). His conduct in the external relations of his duchy was far more honourable than that of William; but then he had no Hugh of Paris or Herbert of Vermandois to lead him astray. For another character of Robert, see below, p. 478.

1033. Bishop Guy of Amiens goes a step further, and makes Robert actually conquer England; Carmen de Bello, 331;

“Normannos proavus [Willelmi sc.] superavit, avusque Britannos;

Anglorum genitor sub juga colla dedit.”

1034. Archbishop Robert his uncle, William of Belesme (of whose family more anon), and Hugh Bishop of Bayeux, who was son of Rudolf of Ivry (see above, p. 258), and therefore first cousin to Robert’s father. See Will. Gem. vi. 3–5; Roman de Rou, 7591 et seqq.

1035. Will. Gem. vi. 8; Roman de Rou, 7755–7896.

1036. See Appendix OOO.

1037. Will. Gem. vi. 6. The younger Baldwin had married Adela, daughter of King Robert and the nominal widow of Duke Richard the Third.

1038. Rud. Glaber, iii. 9 (Duchesne, iv. 36). Cf. above, p. 241.

1039. Ib. “Hujusmodi enim fama ubique provinciarum percitus peroptabatur a multis, præcipue ab Italicis, ut sibi imperaret, in Imperium sublimari.” If there is any truth in this rumour, the date maybe fixed to the year 1022, when the Empire was vacant by the death of Henry the First or Second.

1040. R. Glaber, iii. 9 (Duchesne, iv. p. 37).

1041. Rudolf (iii. 9) seems to know nothing of the Norman intervention, but attributes the reconciliation to the mediation of Fulk of Anjou. The Norman story is given in Will. Gem. vi. 7; Roman de Rou, 7685–7752. See also the Tours Chronicle, ap. Duchesne, iii. 361, and Will. Malms. ii. 187. But both these writers confound Henry’s brothers in a strange way. They say that the eldest brother Odo did not succeed because of his incapacity; “quia stultus erat;” “Odo major natu hebes.” Now Robert had a son Odo, but he was the fourth in order of birth (“Odo vero frater eorum privatus permansit.” Chron. ap. Duchesne, iii. 86), and he was able (see vol. iii. p. 145) to be put in at least nominal command of an army. The Tours writer also makes Constance favour Henry, but both distinctly recognize the action of Duke Robert; “Henricus regnavit auxilio matris et Roberti ducis Normanniæ.” So William of Malmesbury; “Henricus, maxime annitente Roberto Normanno, coronatus est priusquam plane pater exspirasset.” Even here there is a confusion between Henry’s coronation and his restoration by Robert.

1042. On these events and on those which follow, see Appendix PPP.

1043. See Appendix NNN.

1044. Will. Gem. vi. 10. “Ille salubribus monitis ejus non adquievit, sed legatos infectis rebus nihil lætum portantes remisit.”

1045. “Nimia tempestate acti ad insulam quæ Gersus vocatur,” says William of Jumièges. “Gersus” is a singular form for an island which is also called Cæsarea, but whose last syllable, like that of its neighbours, has a very Teutonic sound. Sir F. Palgrave (iii. 176) remarks that this is the first time that Jersey is spoken of in mediæval history. Wace (7937) seems to have thought that a special description of the position of his native island was needed;

“Gersui est prez de Costentin,

Là ù Normendie prent fin;

En mer est devers occident,

Al fiè de Normendie appent.”

1046. Will. Gem. vi. 10. “Quod puto ita factura esse, Deo auctore, pro Edwardo rege, quem disponebat in futuro regnare sine sanguinis effusione.” William of Malmesbury is vaguer and more discreet; “per occultum scilicet Dei judicium, in cujus voluntate sunt potestates regnorum omnium.”

1047. Ib. vi. 11.

1048. Ib.

1049. William of Malmesbury winds up his story with the singular statement; “Relliquiæ ratium, multo tempore dissolutarum, Rotomagi adhuc nostra ætate visebantur.”

1050. Will. Gem. vi. 12. “Quibus ad liquidum sopitis, en, adsunt legati Roberto duci a Chunuto rege directi.”

1051. Will. Gem. vi. 12. “Pace rata in diebus suis eo quod valida gravaretur incommoditate corporali.” So John of Wallingford (550); “Quadam molestia tactus Cnuto, et sibi et caussæ suæ timuit, et sub quotidiana formidine discidium et periculum, quod ex parte illa imminere sensit, studuit terminare.” No doubt these writers fancied Cnut, who died at the age of forty, to have been quite an old man. Cf. above, p. 254.

1052. It will be seen that I do not look on a single expression of William of Malmesbury (ii. 188) as evidence enough to prove the existence of a party in England in favour of the Æthelings.

1053. Robert died in 1035. Will. Gem. vi. 13. So Florence in anno. The Peterborough and Canterbury Chronicles place his death in 1031.

1054. See William of Jumièges, vi. 12, who however does not distinctly connect the pilgrimage with the death of his brother. But William of Malmesbury says distinctly, “cujus rei gemens conscientiam.” So the Tours Chronicle quoted above (p. 468); “Quare ... nudipes Hierusalem abiit.”

1055. Will. Malms. ii. 178. “Apud Nicæam urbem Bithyniæ dies implevit, veneno, ut fertur, interceptus; auctore ministro Radulfo, cognomento Mowino, qui scelus illud spe ducatus animo suo extorserit; sed Normanniam regressus, re cognita, ab omnibus quasi monstrum exsufflatus, in exsilium perpetuum discessit.” So Roman de Rou, 8372.

1056. Will. Gem. vii. 22. “At Robertus ... antequam Hierusalem pergeret, monasterium Sancti Vigoris Ceratii ædificare cœpit.” So Roman de Rou, 7465 et seqq., 8390. On Cerisy, see Neustria Pia, 429.

1057. Roman de Rou, 8391.

1058. Will. Gem. vii. 1. “Roberti magni ducis.”

1059. Ib. vi. 13. “Sepultus est etiam in basilica sanctæ Mariæ a suis, intra mœnia Nicenæ civitatis.” According to the Chronicle of Saint Wandrille (D’Achery, ii. 288) Robert’s burial in this church was a favour the like of which had never before been granted to any man. This writer altogether casts aside the tale of Robert being poisoned. “Divino, ut credi fas est, judicio decessit, qui jam unus eorum effectus erat, quibus, ut apostolus conqueritur, dignus non erat mundus.” Evil counsellors had led him astray in youth; but he repented of his misdeeds—why did he neither marry Herleva nor take back Estrith?—and gradually reached this high degree of perfection.

1060. The death of Cnut at Shaftesbury is asserted by all the Chronicles and Florence in anno, and by William of Malmesbury, ii. 187. On Saxo’s wild fable about his death, see Appendix PPP.

1061. On the division of Cnut’s dominions at his death, see Appendix QQQ.

1062. See above, p. 109.

1063. On the disputed election between Harold and Harthacnut, see Appendix RRR.

1064. See above, p. 477, and Appendix RRR.

1065. The accounts in the Abingdon and Worcester Chronicles, the only copies which mention the seizure, would seem to imply that it took place while Harold was still only a candidate for the Crown. Florence (in anno) indeed says, “Is tamen, adepta regia dignitate, misit Wintoniam suos constipatores celerrime, et gazarum opumque quas rex Canutus Algivæ reliquerat reginæ majorem melioremque partem ademit illi tyrannice.” So Roger of Wendover, i. 473. But Harold could hardly have ventured on this after the peaceful division of the kingdom, and this business is quite different from Harold’s expulsion of Emma in 1037, though it is confounded with it by Roger.

1066. I believe there were people who, on the accession of the present Queen, regretted the separation between England and Hannover.

1067. See Appendix RRR.

1068. Will. Malms, ii. 188. “Elegerunt eum [Haroldum] Dani et Londoniæ cives, qui jam pene in barbarorum mores propter frequentem convictum transierant.”

1069. Grote’s Hist. of Greece, iv. 205.

1070. See p. 265.

1071. See p. 418 and Appendix CCC.

1072. See Appendix RRR.

1073. See p. 396 and Appendix WW.

1074. See Appendix RRR.

1075. Ib.

1076. On the whole story and the various shapes which it takes, see Appendix SSS.

1077. Will. Pict. 37. “Heraldum Angli deserere nolebant, vel (quod est credibilius) non audebant, metuentes affore Danos ad protectionem sive citatam ultionem ejus.” So Roman de Rou, 9783;

“Mais li Engleiz, ki bien saveient

Ke li frere venir debveient,

Nes’ voudrent mie recoillir

Ne en la terre retenir.

Herout li fils Kenut dotoent,

U poet cel estre k’il l’amoent.”

1078. “Portus Icius,” Will. Pict. “Wincant,” Wace. “Portus Wissanti,” Will. Gem. Since Dr. Guest’s exposition of the matter, it is hardly necessary to say that “Portius Itius” or “Icius” is not Boulogne, still less Walcheren.

1079. Will. Pict. 38. “Officium suum benigne promisit, oscula dans ad fidem ac dextram.”

1080. “Evisceratos.” Bromton (X Scriptt. 935) describes the process; “Quidam namque dicunt quod, primordiis viscerum ejus umbilico aperto extractis et ad stipitem ligatis, ipsum tantis vicibus stimulis ferreis circumduxerunt, donec novissima viscerum extrahebantur; et sic proditione Godwini apud Ely mortuus est Alfredus.”

1081. “Cui dum oculi effoderentur, cultro cerebrum violavit mucro.” Will. Pict. So the Ely History, edited by Stewart, p. 209, where the narrative is made up from Florence and William of Poitiers. The Ely History in Gale (ii. 32. p. 508) follows Florence only.

1082. Eadward, as we have seen, had forty ships; Ælfred came “accuratius quam frater antea adversus vim præparatus.” So the Roman de Rou (9806) speaks of his “grant navie.”

1083. See Appendix SSS.

1084. Some were scalped; “nonnullos cute capitis abstracta cruciavit.”

1085. .sp 1

“Ne wearð dreorlicre dǽd

Gedon on þison earde;

Syþþan Dene comon,

And her frið namon.”

The Chronicler’s way of reckoning is changed since the days of Brunanburh, when the fight was the greatest ever fought

“Siþþan eastan hider

Engle and Seaxe

Up becoman

Ofer bradbrimu,” &c.

1086. “At the west end, near the steeple, in the south portice.” This makes one think that the present arrangements of the west front of Ely reproduce something far earlier.

1087. See Appendix BBB.

1088. The letter is given at length in the Encomium Emmæ, iii. 3. The letter is confessedly a forgery of Harold; it may very likely be a pure invention of the Encomiast; still anything professing to be a private letter, as distinguished from a legal document, is a curiosity at this stage of English history.

1089. “Bononiensium paucos.” I need hardly say that Wissant is in the county of Boulogne, and that the county of Boulogne comes within the limits of Flanders in the wider sense of the word.

1090. Enc. Emm. iii. 4. “Illi comes Godwinus est obvius factus, et eum in sua suscepit fide, ejusque fit mox miles cum sacramenti affirmatione.”

1091. “Devians eum a Londonia.” This writer seems not to know that Emma was at Winchester.

1092. “Mane rediturus,” says the Encomiast, “ut domino suo serviret cum debita honorificentia.”

1093. Enc. Emm. iii. 6. “A milite primum irrisus est iniquissimo; deinde contemptibiliores eliguntur, ut horum ab insania flendus juvenis dijudicetur. Qui, judices constituti, decreverunt,” &c. We are here on the dangerous ground of martyrology, and we must be on our guard against the evident wish, shown in all such cases, to make the sufferings of Ælfred follow the pattern of the sufferings of Christ. Possibly too, in the language about these judges, whoever they were, we may discern an allusion to Saint Paul’s precept, 1 Cor. vi. 4.

1094. Our history gives us several examples of murders, and of murders left unpunished. But of legal executions for political offences we never hear, except during the proscription in the early days of Cnut.

1095. Cf. Baron Maseres’ note on the Encomium, p. 31.

1096. See Appendix SSS.

1097. Vita Eadw. 401. See Appendix SSS.

1098. See below, p. 514.

1099. Chronn. “Forðan hit hleoðrode þa swiðe toward Haraldes, þeh hit unriht wære.”

1100. It will be seen that my view is built mainly on the account in the Encomium Emmæ.

1101. The year of Ælfred’s death was the year of the marriage of his half-sister Gunhild. See above, p. 455, and Appendix NNN.

1102. See Snorro, Saga viii. capp. 6, 7 (Laing, ii. 364); Adam Brem. ii. 74.

1103. So the Abingdon and Worcester Chronicles, those which do not distinctly mention the division; “Her man geceas Harold ofer eall to kyninge; and forsoc Harðacnut, forþam he wæs to lange on Denmarcon.” So Florence; “Haroldus Rex Merciorum et Northhymbrorum, ut per totam regnaret Angliam, a principibus et omni populo rex eligitur. Heardecanutus vero, quia in Denemarcia moras innexuit, et ad Angliam, ut rogabatur, venire distulit, penitus abjicitur.”

1104. See above, p. 106, and Appendix R.

1105. See above, p. 405.

1106. All the Chronicles mention the banishment or “driving out” of Ælfgifu-Emma. The expression is the same as that which is used in the years 963 and 964 for the expulsion of secular priests from several churches, and in 1045 for the banishment of Gunhild. One would like to know in what this driving out differed from regular outlawry. Possibly the driving out involved an actual personal removal, while the banishment involved in a sentence of outlawry was only constructive, like the Roman aquæ et ignis interdictio. Godwine, on his outlawry, was allowed five days to leave the country (Peterborough Chronicle, 1051). The tone of the Worcester and Abingdon Chronicles certainly seems to imply that the measure was a harsher one than that of ordinary outlawry; “And man draf ut his [Harðacnutes] modor Ælfgyfe þa cwene [a rare use of that word instead of hlæfdige], butan ælcere mildheortnesse, ongean þone wallendan winter.” Florence translates, describing her as “Alfgiva, quondam Anglorum regina.” Does this imply any formal deposition from royal rank?

1107. Enc. Emm. iii. 7; Will. Malms. ii. 188. On Adela, see above, p. 469.

1108. The Encomiast (iii. 1), after mentioning Æthelnoth’s refusal to crown Harold, continues; “Tandem desperatus abscessit, et episcopalem benedictionem adeo sprevit, ut non solum ipsam odiret benedictionem, verum etiam universam fugeret Christianitatis religionem. Namque, dum alii ecclesiam Christiano more missam audire subintrarent, ipse aut saltus canibus ad venandum cinxit, aut quibuslibet aliis vilissimis rebus occupavit, ut tantum declinare posset quod odivit.” There is also what seems to be an allusion to the alleged irreligion of Harold in a foreign Chronicle, the Annals of Hildesheim, Pertz, iii. 100; “Hiemali tempore Chnuht, rex Danorum et Anglorum, immatura morte præventus obivit, et Christiana religio ab ipso fideliter exculta periclitari cœpit.” Yet Harold is not mentioned, and the entry goes on with only partial accuracy; “Filius ejus junior, Haerdechunt nomine, regnum ipsius post eum consensu provincialium obtinuit.”

1109. There is a very remarkable document of this reign, in which Harold appears, if not as a benefactor, at least not as an enemy, of churchmen. See Ellis, Introduction to Domesday, ii. 142; Cod. Dipl. iv. 56; Thorpe, Dipl. 338. Certain revenues at Sandwich belonging to Christ Church at Canterbury had been seized by the King’s officers, and partly alienated to the rival monastery of Saint Augustine’s. It appears however that this was done without the order or knowledge of Harold, who was then sick at Oxford, and who, on learning the fact, expressed great indignation and ordered restitution. Mr. Kemble dates the document in 1038, but it is clear that it must, as Sir Henry Ellis says, belong to 1039, or perhaps to the beginning of 1040.

1110. See Hook, Archbishops, i. 487; Stubbs, Reg. Sacr. Angl. p. 19. He appears as at once royal chaplain and monk in a charter of Cnut in Cod. Dipl. vi. 190, and he is addressed as Bishop in two charters of the same King addressed to the thegns of Kent. Cod. Dipl. vi. 187, 189. Dean Hook and Professor Stubbs place his suffragan see at the ancient church of Saint Martin near Canterbury.

1111. See Florence, 1038; Hook, i. 505 (where the appointment is attributed to Harthacnut). But none of the Chronicles mention the story.

1112. See Florence, 1038, compared with 1046.

1113. “Forðam he wæs nehst his [Eadwardes] modor rǽde,” says the Abingdon Chronicle of Stigand under the year 1043.

1114. He was in attendance on Harold in his last sickness, whether as a political or as a spiritual adviser. Cod. Dipl. iv. 56.

1115. The Chroniclers, even while condemning the driving out of Emma, speak of it in the same breath with the election of Harold, as if they were both alike popular acts; “Man geceas Harold ... and forsoc Harðacnut ... and man draf út his modor.”

1116. Chron. Ab. and Fl. Wig. in anno. Thurkill—there were many of the name—Ælfgeat, and “many other good men” were also killed. See also Annales Cambriæ and Brut y Tywysogion in anno.

1117. Sim. Dun. Hist. Dun. iii. 9 (X Scriptt. 33). “Defuncto Cnut, quum filius ejus Haroldus jam quintum annum in regno ... gereret.”

1118. See above, p. 328.

1119. See above, p. 448.

1120. The story is told by Simeon of Durham, Hist. Dun. iii. 6, and more briefly by Florence, 1020. The canons of Durham are met to choose a Bishop after the three years’ widowhood of the see which followed the death of Ealdhun (see above, p. 448); Eadmund asks in joke why they do not choose him; they forthwith choose him in earnest, but agree to consult Saint Cuthberht; a voice issuing from his tomb thrice names Eadmund as Bishop. Eadmund now objects, on the ground of his not being a monk like his predecessors—an odd reason to give to a chapter of seculars—but the election is approved by King Cnut, Eadmund makes his profession as a monk, and he is consecrated by Archbishop Wulfstan. This story seems to imply a degree of freedom of election in capitular bodies of which we find a few, but only a few traces at this time. Bishoprics are in most cases filled directly by the King, with the assent of his Witan, without any mention of the monks or canons. But see the history of Saint Wulfstan, vol. ii. chap. ix.

1121. Sim. Hist. Dun. iii. 5.

1122. So I understand the words of Simeon, Hist. Dun. iii. 9; “Magna parte equitum suorum ab his qui obsidebantur interfecta, confusus aufugit, fugiens pedites interfectos amisit.” The mention of “equites” need not imply that the Scottish army contained cavalry strictly so called, that is, men who used their horses in actual battle. It is enough to justify the expression if, among the Scots, as among the English, the chief men rode to the field (see above, p. 271); the chief men, as usual, would suffer most severely in the actual combat, while those among them who survived would have the advantage in flight. There is another entry in the Durham Annals which places both this siege and the death of Harold in 1039. “Hoc anno Dunechanus rex Scotorum cum exercitu magno Dunelmum obsidens, fugatus ab obsessis, magnam suorum multitudinem amisit.”

1123. Sim. Hist. Dun. iii. 9. “Quorum capita in forum collata in stipitibus sunt suspensa.” See above, p. 329.

1124. Snorro, Saga viii. 7 (Laing, ii. 364); Chron. Rosk. ap. Lang. i. 377. Cf. above, p. 397.

1125. Enc. Emm. iii. 8.

1126. Ib.

1127. Chron. Ab. 1039. “And her com éc Hardacnut to Bricge, þar his modor wæs.” Enc. Emm. u. s., where we have a story about a tempest and a vision.

1128. Adam Brem. ii. 72. “Contra quem frater a Dania veniens in Flandria classem adunavit. Sed rex Anglorum, morte præventus, bellum diremit.”

1129. In the charter mentioned above (p. 504) we find some details of Harold’s sickness; “And wæs se king þa binnan Oxnaforde swyðe geseocled, swa þæt he læg orwene his lífes.” When he hears of the wrong done to Christ Church, “Ða læg se king and sweartode eall mid þare sage.”

1130. That Harold died at Oxford is plain from the above passage, and from the Peterborough Chronicle. Florence says “obiit Lundoniæ.” He probably had the Worcester Chronicle before him, and inferred the place of his death from the place of his burial. William of Malmesbury agrees with the Chronicler.

1131. Chronn. Petrib. and Cant.; Fl. Wig. in anno; Will. Malms. ii. 188.

1132. Will. Malms, ii. 188. “Anglis et Danis in unam sententiam convenientibus.” So Hen. Hunt. M. H. B. 758 C, speaking of his landing at Sandwich; “Hardecnut ... susceptus est [underfangen] et electus in regem simul ab Anglis et Dacis.” This comes, with improvements, from the Peterborough Chronicle; “On þis ilcan geare com Hardacnut cyng to Sandwic ... and he was sona underfangen ge fram Anglum ge fram Denum.” Taken alone this might imply that Harthacnut came over, like Ælfred, to seek his fortune, only with a luckier result; but the other Chronicles distinctly assert the previous embassy and therefore imply the previous election.

1133. Chronn. Ab. and Wig. “And man sende æfter Harðacnute to Brygce; wende þæt man wel dyde.” So Florence, “bene se facere putantes.”

1134. See Hist. Rams. c. 94, 95, for the embassy and for an accompanying miracle. Ælfweard was a somewhat remarkable person. He was first a monk of Ramsey and then Abbot of Evesham, which office he held in plurality with his bishopric. The church of Evesham had fluctuated more than once between monks and secular canons, the canons being last introduced by Ælfhere of Mercia in the disputes which followed the death of Eadgar. See above, p. 263. Many of the estates fell into the hands of laymen, especially into those of Godwine of Lindesey, who died at Assandun. They were recovered from Godwine by a legal process, seemingly before the Witan of Mercia (“coram multis principibus hujus patriæ”), by the Abbot Brihtmær. But Godwine seized them again during the absence of Æthelred in Normandy in 1013. One almost fancies that this must have been by a grant from Swegen, to whom Lindesey was one of the first parts of England to submit. See above, p. 358. Æthelred on his return in 1014 appointed Ælfweard Abbot, who again expelled Godwine, seemingly by force (“fretus auxilio Dei atque regis ... cum magna fortitudine hinc expulit”). The local chronicler looks on Godwine’s death at Assandun as the punishment of this sacrilege; “Godwinus vero qui eas injuste habuit eodem anno(?) Dei nutu in bello contra regem Danorum, Cnutonem Sweinonis filium, facto occisus est.” These stories of occupations of monastic lands by powerful men, or in their names, meet us at every turn. See above, p. 505. Ælfweard received the bishopric of London from Cnut, who is called his kinsman, about 1035. We shall hear of him again. See Chron. Abb. Evesham, pp. 78–83.

1135. Rog. Wend. i. 477. So Fl. Wig. “Regnique solio mox sublimatur.” The place comes from Rishanger, 427.

1136. Will. Pict. ap. Maseres, 39. “Hardechunutus ... generi materno similior, non qua pater aut frater crudelitate regnabat neque interitum Edwardi sed provectum volebat. Ob morbos etiam quos frequenter patiebatur, plus Deum in oculis habebat, et vitæ humanæ brevitatem.”

1137. See his charters for a grant to Saint Eadmund’s (Cod. Dipl. iv. 60), to Abingdon (iv. 65), to Ramsey (vi. 192. Hist. Rams. c. 97 et seqq.), to Bishop Ælfwine of Winchester and his successors (iv. 68). The Ramsey charter runs in the joint names of Harthacnut and his mother.

1138. Hen. Hunt. M. H. B. 758 D. “Claræ indolis et benignæ juventutis fuerat suis. Tantæ namque largitatis fertur fuisse ut prandia regalia quattuor in die vicibus omni curiæ suæ faceret apponi, malens a vocatis posita fercula dimitti quam a non vocatis apponenda fercula reposci.” Henry then goes on to lament the niggardly practice of the Kings of his own time who provided only one meal daily. The Ramsey historian (c. 102) calls him “vir prædicandæ indolis et eximiæ in miseros pietatis.” King John also was a great almsman.

1139. Chron. Petrib. 1040. “On his [Haroldes] dagum man geald xvi scipan æt ælcere hamulan [hamelan in Chron. Ab.] viii marcan.” On the word hamulan Mr. Earle (p. 343) remarks, “This being a dative feminine, the nom. must be hamule, hamele; at first perhaps signifying a rowlock-strap, and so symbolizing some subdivision of the crew. There is not money enough to give eight marcs to every rower.” The “hamule” then would be analogous to the “lance” in mediæval armies. But Florence clearly took it to mean a single rower; “Octo marcas unicuique suæ classis remigi.”

1140. Chronn. Ab. Wig. “And him wæs þa unhold eall þæt his ær gyrnde; and he ne gefræmde eac naht cynelices þa hwile þe he rixode.” Florence divides this description, putting the latter clause now, and the former after what I take to be the second Danegeld.

1141. See Appendix TTT.

1142. “Stir majorem domus,” says Florence.

1143. Florence seems to put the two Danegelds together, but the Peterborough Chronicle (1039, 1040) clearly distinguishes them. There is a reference to this Danegeld in Heming’s Worcester Cartulary, 348 (Mon. Angl. i. 593), in which it is compared with the earlier Danegelds of Æthelred and Cnut, see above, pp. 371, 418, and declared to have been heavier than any of them; “Sicuti factum est temporibus Athelredi, regis Anglorum, vastante et depopulante hanc patriam pagano rege Danorum Swein nomine, quum maximum et prope importabile tributum tota Anglia reddere cogeretur. Ob hujus itaque tam gravis tributi exactionem omnia fere ornamenta hujus ecclesiæ distracta sunt, tabulæ altaris, argento et auro paratæ, spoliatæ sunt, textus exornati, calices confracti, cruces conflatæ, ad ultimum etiam terræ et villulæ pecuniis distractæ sunt. Simili modo etiam actum est regnante Cnut filio suo, et adhuc graviora vectigalia superaddita sunt temporibus regni filii Cnut, cujus nomen erat Hardecnut.”

1144. Florence here inserts the remark, from the Worcester and Abingdon Chronicles, “Quapropter omnibus qui prius adventum ejus desiderabant magnopere factus est exosus summopere.”

1145. Flor. Wig. in anno. “Accusantibus illos Ælfrico Eboracensi archiepiscopo et quibusdam aliis.”

1146. Ib. “Episcopatum Wigornensem Livingo abstulit et Ælfrico dedit, sed sequenti anno ablatum Ælfrico, Livingo secum pacificato benigne reddidit.”

1147. Will. Malms. ii. 188. “Illum episcopatu expulit, sed post annum pecunia serenatus restituit.”

1148. Ib. “Godwinum quoque obliquis oculis intuitus, ad sacramentum purgationis compulit.”

1149. Flor. Wig. in anno. “Cum totius fere Angliæ principibus et ministris dignioribus regi juravit.”

1150. See Appendix VVV.

1151. See above, pp. 354, 357.

1152. See above, p. 340.

1153. See above, p. 357.

1154. Except in one Danish Chronicle (Chron. Erici, ap. Lang. i. 159), who ludicrously attributes to Harthacnut, not only his father’s military legislation, but his mythical exploits in various parts of the world. “Unde tempore suo super omnes reges mundi terribilis et laudabilis exstitit. Transivit etiam cum Imperatore in Italiam ad domandum nationes exteras. Obiit autem in Anglia.”

1155. The ship and its crew are described by Florence, 1040; William of Malmesbury, ii. 188.

1156. Will. Malms. “Ne singula enumerem armis omnibus instructos in quibus fulgor cum terrore certans sub auro ferrum occuleret.”

1157. “Securis Danica” in both accounts.

1158. Henry of Huntingdon (M. H. B. 728 E) arms both West-Saxons and Mercians at Burford “gladiis et securibus Amazonicis.” The Amazons are of course a flourish of Henry’s own out of Horace; but the axes may very likely come from a ballad. The axe, as antiquarian researches show, was in use almost everywhere from the earliest times, but the earlier axes are something quite different from the vast two-handed weapons wielded at Stamfordbridge and Senlac. This last clearly supplanted the sword as the characteristic English weapon from about this time. See above, pp. 273, 391.

1159. Villehardouin, c. 95. “Et li Griffon orent mis d’Englois et de Danois à totes les haches.” Nikêtas, Alex. iii. (351 B. ed. Paris, 1647). εἰ καὶ πρὸς τῶν ἐπικούρων Ῥωμαίοις Πισσαίων καὶ τῶν πελεκυφόρων βαρβάρων γενναιότερον ἀπεκρούσθησαν, καὶ τραυματίαι οἱ πλείους ἀνέζευξαν.

1160. Bromton (so to call him) must have had some authority before him when he made the significant remark (X Scriptt. 934), “Iste rex Hardeknoutus per totum tempus quo regnavit regnum Scotiæ subjectum pacifice habebat.”

1161. See above, pp. 350, 353.

1162. Flor. Wig. 1041. “Rex Anglorum Heardecanutus suos huscarlas misit per omnes regni sui provincias ad exigendum quod indixerat tributum.”

1163. See Appendix KKK.

1164. “Ut piratis suis necessaria ministrarent,” says Roger of Wendover, i. 479.

1165. See above, p. 316.

1166. Flor. Wig. in anno. “In cujusdam turris Wigornensis monasterii solario.” This can hardly mean the principal tower of the church.

1167. Besides the ravaging of districts as chastisement for treason or defection in war (see above, pp. 371, 378), we find a similar case even in the peaceful reign of Eadgar. See above, p. 65.

1168. See above, p. 514.

1169. So I understand William of Malmesbury, De Gest. Pont. iii. p. 154 “Quin et Wigorniensibus pro repulsa episcopatus infensus auctor Hardecnuto fuit ut, quod illi pertinacius exactoribus regiorum vectigalium obstiterant, urbem incenderet, fortunas civium abraderet.” If the “repulsa episcopatus” meant the restoration of the see to Lyfing by the King’s act, this could be no offence on the part of the citizens of Worcester.

1170. On the dates of Siward’s promotions, see Appendix WWW.

1171. Florence calls him “Comes Mediterraneorum.” His earldom included Huntingdonshire. See a charter of Harthacnut and Emma addressed “Turri comiti” (Cod. Dipl. vi. 192). I do not find any of his signatures as Earl, but he is doubtless the same as Ðord, Ðored, &c., in various spellings, who signs several charters of Cnut as “minister” and “miles.”

1172. See above, p. 404. “Hrani dux” signs as early as 1023. Cod. Dipl. iv. 27. We find him holding a Scirgemót with Bishop Æthelstan and others in Cod. Dipl. iv. 54. He there bears the title of Ealdorman, and we find that his son, like some other English-born sons of Danish settlers, bore the English name of Eadwine.

1173. Fl. Wig. “Paucos vel e civibus vel provincialibus ceperunt aut occiderunt, quia præcognito adventu eorum, provinciales quoque locorum fugerant.”

1174. Ib. “Munitione facta, tamdiu se viriliter adversus suos inimicos defenderant.”

1175. The existence of the beaver in Britain within historical memory seems proved by such names as Beverege, Beverley, perhaps, but less likely, Beverstone (Byferesstan, Chron. Petrib. 1048) in Gloucestershire. Giraldus Cambrensis (Topog. Hibern. i. 21. p. 709 Camden) speaks of beavers in his time in the Teifi, but in the Teifi only.

1176. The Worcester writer Heming seems inclined to make the most of the mischief. To his description of the Danegeld, quoted already (see above, p. 513), he adds that Harthacnut “etiam totam istam provinciam hostili exercitu ferro et igne depopulavit.”

1177. “Ælfrico adhuc Wigornensem pontificatum tenente,” says Florence, a significant expression, which seems silently to confirm the charge brought against Ælfric of being the author of the whole business.

1178. Robert of Gloucester, p. 558;

“þe bissop Walter of Wurcetre asoiled hom alle þere,

and prechede hom, þat hii adde of deþ þe lasse fere.”

1179. Will. Malms. ii. 188. “Contumeliam famæ, et amori suo detrimentum ingessit.”

1180. The coming of Eadward and his friendly reception by Harthacnut is asserted by all the Chronicles and by Florence; they do not distinctly affirm that Harthacnut sent for him, but it is surely a natural inference. The invitation is distinctly asserted by the Encomiast, p. 39. William of Malmesbury however (ii. 188) seems to imply that Eadward came uninvited; “Germanum Edwardum, annosæ peregrinationis tædio, et spe fraternæ necessitudinis, natale solum revisentem, obviis, ut aiunt, manibus excipiens indulgentissime retinuit.”

1181. Cnut married Emma in 1017. Harthacnut was therefore born between 1018 and 1023, when he visited Canterbury as a child. Chron. Wig. 1023.

1182. See the extract from William of Poitiers in p. 511.

1183. Enc. Emm. 39. “Fraterno correptus amore, nuncios mittit ad Edvardum, rogans ut veniens secum obtineret regnum.” Saxo (202) assigns quite another motive; “Edvardum fratrem, quem ejusdem nominis[!] pater ex Immæ matrimonio sustulit, in regni societatem adsciscit; non quod fraterno illum adfectu coleret, sed ut ejus ambitionem munificentia ac liberalitate præcurreret, regnique parte potitum totum cupere prohiberet.”]

1184. Chronn. Abb. et Wig. “He wunode þa swa on his broðor hirede, þa hwile þe he leofode.” Fl. Wig. “A fratre suo Heardecanuto rege susceptus honorifice in curia sua mansit.”

1185. See above, p. 317.

1186. Ord. Vit. 655 C; Hist. Rams. c. 116.

1187. “Timidus dux Radulfus,” says Florence, 1055.

1188. See above, pp. 330, 379.

1189. See Appendix KK.

1190. See above, p. 379.

1191. See Appendix KK.

1192. A Carl, apparently the same, signs several charters of Cnut.

1193. Sim. Dun. X Scriptt. 81; De Gestis, 204.

1194. Sim. Dun. 81. “Diutina maris tempestate impediti, cœptum iter relinquentes, domum sunt reversi.”

1195. See above, p. 327. This story has a mythical sound; still a hunting-party would give unusual opportunities both to commit such a murder and afterwards to represent it as an accident. The fate of William Rufus is a familiar example. Simeon (p. 81) says that, in his time, the place of the murder was marked by a small stone cross.

1196. See above, p. 520.

1197. Will. Malms. iii. 253. On the origin of Siward, see Appendix WWW.

1198. Ealdred (Sim. Dun. 82) had five daughters, three of whom were named “Elfleda,” that is, I suppose, Æthelflæd. Of these Siward married one, who was the mother of the famous Waltheof. Did the two other Æthelflæds die in infancy?

1199. Sim. Dun. De Gestis, 204. “Qui, quum superbia extolleretur, Brittones satis atrociter devastavit.”

1200. Ib. “Sed tertio post anno, quum ad Hardecanutum reconciliandus in pace venisset, interfectus est a Siwardo.” So the Abingdon and Worcester Chronicles, 1041; “And on þison geare eac swác Harðacnut Eadulfe under gryðe, and he was þa wedloga.” This independent statement gives the strongest possible confirmation to Simeon’s whole story. Florence does not mention the murder of Eadwulf.

1201. Sim. Dun. u. s. “Siwardus, qui post illum totius provinciæ Northanhymbrorum, id est ab Humbra usque Twedam, comitatum habuit.” Ann. Dun. 1043. “Comes Siward vastavit Northanhymbrorum provinciam.” This seems to be put during the ten months of the imperfect episcopate of Eadred.

1202. Sim. Hist. Dun. iii. 9. p. 33. “Defunctus est in Glocestre, quum apud regem ibidem moraretur.” Gloucester was, at least under Eadward and William, the usual place for the Midwinter festival. Chron. Petrib. 1087. Eadward also is found at Gloucester somewhat earlier in the year. Flor. Wig. 1043.

1203. Simeon (Hist. Dun. iii. 9) says, “Præsulatum illius ecclesiæ primus ex ordine clericali festinavit obtinere.” See above, p. 507.

1204. So I understand the words (Sim. Dun. u. s.), “Intraturus quippe ecclesiam, subita infirmitate corripitur, decidensque in lectum, decimo mense moritur.”

1205. So at least it would appear from Adam of Bremen, ii. 74. “Magnus statim invadens Daniam, possedit duo regna, Hardechnut rege Danorum cum exercitu morante in Anglia.” But it is hard to make this agree with the Saga of Magnus, which speaks of no occupation of Denmark by Magnus till after Harthacnut’s death.

1206. Adam, ii. 73.

1207. Ib. 74.

1208. Chronn. Ab. et Wig. “Her forðferde Harðacnut swa þæt he æt his drince stod.”

1209. See Appendix XXX.

1210. “Osgodus Clapa, magnæ vir potentiæ,” says Florence. The Waltham writer De Inventione (c. 13) corrupts Clapa into Scalp, and his daughter’s name into Glitha.

1211. De Inv. 1–10. The first inhabitants were sixty-six persons who were cured by the relic, and who devoted themselves to its honour. “De quibus ... in primis instituta est villa Walthamensis, nam antea nihil erat in loco nisi vile domicilium ad succurrendum quum caussa venandi accederet illuc heros ille.” This happened “regnante Cnuto et Anglis imperante.”

1212. Ib. 7. “Ei præ gaudio a senectute et senio [a subtle distinction], sicut aquilæ, juventus renovatur.”

1213. Fl. Wig. “Dum ... lætus, sospes, et hilaris, cum sponsa prædicta et quibusdam viris bibens staret.” Cf. Chron. Petrib.

1214. Chronn. Ab. et Wig. “Mid egeslicum anginne.”

1215. Chronn. Petr. et Cant. The latter adds, “His moder for his sawle gief into niwan mynstre S. Valentines heafod ðas martires.”

1216. See the next Chapter and Appendix YYY.

TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES

Typos fixed; non-standard spelling and dialect retained.

Used numbers for footnotes, placing them all at the end of the last chapter.