CHAP. VII.

The Great Ealdormen..

955988.

primate's see, were ravaged by the young king's order.1 Dunstan was still powerful enough to awe the government by a threat of excommunication, but in 988 the last check which his existence had enforced on the ealdormen was removed, and the wild wailing with which the crowds who filled the streets of Canterbury hailed the archbishop's death showed their prevision of the ills which were to fall on the England that had been wrested by one ill deed from his grasp.

1 Eng. Chron. a. 986.

CHAPTER VIII.

THE DANISH CONQUEST.

988-1016.

WE have followed the course of the political and administrative changes which had been brought upon England by the coming of the Danes, and have seen how changes even more important had been brought about in the structure of society; though in the one case as in the other the result of Danish presence was not so much any direct modification of English life, as the furtherance and hastening forward of a process of natural developement. It was indeed the break-up of the old social organization that united with the political disintegration of the country to reduce it to the state of weakness which startles us at the close of Eadgar's days, and it is in the degradation of the class in

1 "Towards the closing period of the Anglo-Saxon polity I should imagine that nearly every acre of land in England had become boc-land; and that as a consequence of this the condition of the free-man became depressed, while the estates of the lords increased in number and extent. In this way the ceorlas or free cultivators gradually vanished, yielding to the ever-growing force of the nobler class, accepting a dependent position upon their boc-land, and standing to right in their courts, instead of their own old

The social revolution.

CHAP. VIII.

which its true strength lay, and not in any outer The Danish attack, that we must look for the cause of the ruin

Conquest.

9881016.

which now hung over the English realm. From Ælfred's day it had been assumed that no man could exist without a lord, and the "lordless man" became a sort of outlaw in the realm. The free-man, the very base of the older English constitution, died down more and more into the "villein" the man who did suit and service to a master, who followed him to the field, who looked to his court for justice, who rendered days of service in his demesne. Eadgar's reign saw the practical completion of this great social revolution. It went on indeed unequally, and was never wholly complete. Free ceorls remained; and they remained in far larger numbers throughout northern England than in the south. But the bulk of the ceorls had disappeared. The free social organization of the earlier English conquerors of Britain was passing into the social organization which we call

county gemótas; while the lords themselves ran riot, dealt with their once free neighbours at their own discretion, and filled the land with civil dissensions which not even the terrors of foreign invasion could still. Nothing can be more clear than that the universal breaking up of society in the time of Ethelred had its source in the ruin of the old free organization of the country. The successes of Swegen and Cnut, and even of William the Norman, had much deeper causes than the mere gain or loss of one or more battles. A nation never falls till the citadel of its moral being' has been betrayed and become untenable. Northern invasions will not account for the state of brigandage which Æthelred and his Witan deplore in so many of their laws. The ruin of the free cultivators and the overgrowth of the lords are much more likely causes." (Kemble, "Saxons in England," i. 306, 307.)

feudalism; and the very foundations of the old order were broken up in the degradation of the freeman and in the up-growth of the lord with his dependent villeins. The same tendencies drew the lesser thegns around the greater nobles, and these around the provincial ealdormen. And this social revolution necessarily brought a political revolution in its train. The independence and rivalry of the great ealdormen seemed about to wreck completely the unity of the State. Even in the Church the bishop was parted from the clergy, as the clergy itself was reft asunder by the strife of regular with secular. Nothing indeed but a force from without could weld these warring elements again into a nation; but the very weakness which they brought about made the work of such a force easy, and laid England prostrate at the foot of the Dane.

CHAP. VIII.

The Danish
Conquest.

9881016.

of the

Danes.

During the years of Ethelwine's rule a new storm The kingdom had been gathering in the north. At the close of the ninth century the kingdoms of the Danes had felt the same impulse towards national consolidation which had already given birth to Norway; and their union is attributed to Gorm the Old. The physical character of the isles and of the Danish territory on the mainland aided in the rapid developement of a great monarchy; the flat country, penetrated everywhere by arms of the sea, offered few natural obstacles to the carrying out of a single will; and from the first

1 Gorm, according to Adam of Bremen, came of the stock of a Norwegian conqueror, Hardegon or Harthacnut; but nothing is known of his previous history, save that he had fought among the Wikings at Haslo in 882.

2 Dahlmann, "Gesch. von Dännemark," i. 68, 128.

CHAP. VIII.

The Danish
Conquest.

988

1016.

we find in Denmark no hereditary jarls, as in Norway, nor petty chiefs surviving under their overlord, as in Sweden, but the rule of a king whose nobles were mere dependents on his court. Under Gorm therefore the whole strength of the Danes was gathered up in a single hand. We have already seen how great that strength was. While the northmen of Jutland were waging their war with the Empire, and the northmen of Norway mastering the string of isles from Ireland to the Faroes, the Danes, who had grown up in silence round a centre which tradition places at Lethra in Zeeland, came suddenly to the front and struck fiercely to east and to west.1 In 853 they strove to conquer Courland in the Baltic. In 866 they landed under Inguar on the shores of Britain; and the long and bitter warfare which ended in the establishment of the Danelaw in this island must have absorbed their energies till the struggle at home which set Gorm on the throne at Lethra about the close of the ninth century. Of that struggle or of the king's rule in his new realm we know nothing; but the strength which came of union was soon shown

1 The stories of Othere and Wulfstan, in Ælfred's "Orosius," are the first authentic accounts of this eastern Denmark, a name which the description of Othere restricts to the islands and lands east of the Great Belt, and thus denies as yet to Jutland. Wulfstan too speaks of Denmark as a well-known kingdom with the same bounds. But of its history at this time we know nothing, save from some sagas which tell of a king's seat at Lethra. (Dahlmann, i. 61.) The Frankish chroniclers are busy with their assailants from South Jutland; the English tell of the Danes who reached their shores, but say nothing of their mother-land. Indeed the strength of the latter is only a matter of inference from the vigour of its outer attacks.