Page images
PDF
EPUB

CHAP. VII.

The Great Ealdormen.

955988.

"His

removed from his path the king whom Dunstan had set there. It was they who profited by the blow. Dunstan withdrew powerless to Canterbury after the coronation of Æthelred, who was still but ten years old,' and left the realm to the government of the king's mother and her kinsmen, Ethelwine and Brihtnoth. The new rulers made little effort to hide their part in the deed, for Eadward was buried at Wareham without the pomp that befitted a king's burial, and no vengeance was sought for his murder. kinsmen," the chronicle says bitterly, "would not avenge him." But the pitifulness which has ever underlain the stern temper of Englishmen awoke at the thought of the murdered youth who lay unavenged in the grave to which he had been hurried. He was counted a martyr, and in the year which followed his death Ealdorman Elfhere was strengthened by the popular sympathy to show his devotion to the king whose policy he had doubtless directed by fetching

1 See Will. Malm. "Gest. Reg." (ed. Hardy), i. 257. The crowning was at Kingston, and we still possess the coronation oath that Dunstan exacted. "This writing is copied, letter for letter, from the writing which Archbishop Dunstan delivered to our lord at Kingston on the very day when he was consecrated King, and he forbad him to give any other pledge but this pledge, which he laid upon Christ's altar, as the bishop instructed him: In the name of the Holy Trinity, three things do I promise to this Christian people, my subjects: first, that I will hold God's Church and all the Christian people of my realm in true peace; second, that I will forbid all rapine and injustice to men of all conditions; third, that I promise and enjoin justice and mercy in all judgments, whereby the just and merciful God may give us all His eternal favour, who liveth and reigneth.' Kemble, "Sax. in Eng." ii. 35, 36, note.

[ocr errors]

Eadward's bones from Wareham and burying them. with much worship at Shaftesbury.1

The new burial was followed by a burst of pity which forced even Ethelwine and the court to a show of reverence. "They that would not bow afore to his living body now bow humbly on knees to his dead bones.” 2 But foully as it had been won, the power was now in the hands of the two eastern ealdormen, and for a time all went well. During the eleven years from 979 to 990, when the young king reached manhood, there is hardly any internal history to record. Danish and Norwegian pirates indeed appeared at the opening of this period at Southampton, Chester, Cornwall, and Portland, but though their presence shows a loss of that hold on the seas which Eadgar and Dunstan had so jealously maintained, they were probably driven off by the English fleet. The hostility of the ealdormen and their boy-king was directed rather against internal foes, against Dunstan and Ælfhere. That Ælfhere was strong enough to oppose them was shown by his solemn translation of Eadward's bones; but three years later they were freed from all rivalry by his death, for though his son Elfric followed him as ealdorman of Mercia, his opponents succeeded in driving him into exile in 985, and in putting an end for the time to his ealdordom. The archbishop, who had withdrawn to Canterbury, was roused from his retirement by a quarrel of the king's councillors with the see of Rochester, in which the lands of that bishopric, dependent as it was on the 1 Eng. Chron. a. 980. 2 Eng. Chron. a. 979.

3 Eng. Chron. a. 983.

3

4

[blocks in formation]

CHAP. VII.

The Great Ealdormen.

955. 988.

Death of Dunstan

The Great Ealdormen.

955988.

CHAP. VII. primate's see, were ravaged by the young king's order. 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.

Conquest.

9881016.

which its true strength lay, and not in any outer The Danish attack, that we must look for the cause of the ruin which now hung over the English realm. From Elfred'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.)

« PreviousContinue »