CHAP. VIII. Conquest. 9881016. and passing into the hands of the king of all EngThe Danish land, this tax practically brought home the national idea as it had never been brought home before. Its levy too must have necessitated the preliminary steps of a national survey, and of some record of that survey like the later Domesday book, in which, as it would seem, the hide was taken no longer as a local measure, but as a measure of value. The levy, again, of these taxes could only have been made by the royal reeve in each shire, whose post was thus raised to a higher importance, while their payment into the royal hoard implies that some such administrative machinery as the later exchequer for the due receipt and acquittal of these sums was already in existence, though unnoticed by our chroniclers. Attack under It is thus that our financial system traces itself back to the days of Æthelred. But its organization, like the attempt to re-organize the system of national defence, came too late. The country was cowed. During the past twenty years every shire in Wessex had been harried again and again, and if the rest of England had as yet been spared, the pirates had at any rate once carried their ravages over East-Anglia. So utterly had the fyrd system broken down that in the past year, when the Witan of Wessex was gathered together to repel the Danes, none could bethink them how "to drive out" the strangers, and as we have seen, a truce was purchased with hard cash. The attempt to command the sea broke down at the first trial of the new fleet. A detachment of eighty ships sent to clear the coast of Sussex of an English pirate' who was harrying 2 CHAP. VIII. Conquest. 9881016. it was dashed to pieces by a storm; and when the The Danish news reached the main force under the king the panic was so great that on the withdrawal of Æthelred the fleet went round to London and broke up. The ships had hardly gone home when a Danish squadron appeared in the Thames, ravaging Kent, harrying the Thames valley as far as Oxford, and burning that city. The leader of this force was Thurkill, a son of Strut-Harald, the jarl of Zeeland, and perhaps his father's successor in this jarldom, while his brother Sigwald was jarl at Jomsborg. Both had joined in the vow at Harald's funeral feast; but while the bulk of the Jomsborgers fell in the fight with Jarl Hakon, the two brothers returned unharmed to Denmark and it was to Thurkill that Swein intrusted forty ships with some three thousand men to carry on the attack on England. Small as the force was, the measures taken to meet it proved utterly ineffective. Even when his fyrd fronted the Danes, Eadric hindered it from engaging, and the wisdom of his caution was shown in the next year, 1010, when Thurkill's force sailed round to East-Anglia, and after a stout fight with Ulfcytel utterly defeated its 3 A charge brought against this "Child Wulfnoth, the SouthSaxon," by Eadric's brother, Brihtnoth, and the flight of Wulfnoth with his ships show the strife that was still going on between the nobles and the "new men" about the king. Eng. Chron. a. 1009. 2 The Chronicle says, "It was as though all were redeless." 3 The Chronicle says, "Ealdorman Eadric hindered it, as he ever did," but mentions no other instance. Florence of course greatly expands this entry. The Danish 988 1016. CHAP. VIII. fyrd. After harrying East-Anglia for three months, and ravaging the whole country to the "wild fens," Thurkill returned to the mouth of the Thames; but in a second raid suddenly swept westward into Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire, and thence along the Ouse to Bedford; a third took the pirates inland as far as Northampton, where they had burned the town and harried the land before the close of November; and thence passed over the Thames again to plunder Wessex and Wiltshire before returning at midwinter to their ships. The great tribute. The The rapidity of the Danish movements still as of old baffled resistance. "When they were east, then held men the fyrd west, and when they were at the south, then was our fyrd northwards." The Witan again gathered round Ethelred, and devised how to guard the land. But "though they devised somewhat, that stood not so much as a month." want of national unity could not be remedied by laws, and what most helped Thurkill was the growth of provincial isolation. All national organi zation seemed to have broken down.1 Eadric himself fell back into his own Myrcenarice," or Mercian realm, as it is still significantly called,* which had remained till this last raid of Thurkill's untouched by the pirates; and when a fresh withdrawal of the Danes was purchased by a promise of a yet larger tribute, he seized the moment to secure his "At last there was no leader that would gather forces, but each fled as he best might; nor at the last would shire help shire." Eng. Chron. 1010. 2 Eng. Chron. a. 1007. own western frontier against the Welsh, whose attacks must have been roused by the raids of the pirates, and carried his ravages along the whole Welsh coast as far as St. David's. But while he was busy with the Welsh Ethelred had failed to pay the tribute, and Thurkill again swooped upon Canterbury, sacked the town and seized Archbishop Elfheah as a hostage for its payment. Fresh promises were made, and in the spring of 1012 the Witan again met to provide the sum. An outbreak of drunken wrath, indeed, deprived the Danes of their hostage, for on his refusal to redeem himself Ælfheah was pelted by the drunken warriors with stones and ox-horns till one more pitiful clave his head with an axe. In spite, however, of this brutal deed the great tribute was paid, and the Danish fleet at last sailed away from the English coast. The CHAP. VIII. The Danish 988- Swein. Their leader Thurkill however remained with forty- Conquest of five ships as a mercenary in English pay. humiliation indeed to which the realm had stooped in the payment of the great tribute had been forced on it by more than its terror of Thurkill's force, for it must have been known now that a far more terrible attack under Swein himself was preparing in the North. In July, 1013, Swein appeared off the coast, and after landing at Sandwich suddenly entered the Humber. The size and number of his ships, the splendour of their equipment, the towers on their forecastles, the 1 Eng. Chron. a. 1011. 2 Ibid. 1012. The "Encomium Emma" (Langebek), ii. 475, represents the desertion of Thurkill and his detention of Swein's ships as a cause of Swein's after attack, The Danish Conquest. 988. 1016. CHAP. VIII. lions, eagles, and dragons of gold and silver which glittered on their topmasts, their brazen beaks, the colours that decked their keels,' showed that his aim was no mere plunder-raid. The time had in fact come for the conquest of England. Wessex, spent with the long strife, lay helpless and inactive, while Swein called on the Danelaw to finish the work which had been so long held in check by the vigour of the house of Alfred. But even Ælfred or Eadward would have failed to check it had it been backed, as now, by the armed force of Denmark itself. All was in fact over when the presence of Earl Uhtred with his Northumbrians in Swein's camp announced that the Danelaw had risen. The fiction of a single England, of an English Empire throughout Britain, which the clerks of Winchester had dressed up in the pompous titles of their charters, disappeared like a dream. The great ealdormen again showed themselves in their true light as disintegrating forces. Northumbrian earl joined Swein as an independent power. The East-Anglian ealdorman followed his example. The Lindsey folk and the Five Boroughs, all England north of Watling Street, submitted to him at Gainsborough, and hostages were delivered to him from every shire. Eadric seems to have withdrawn into his own Mercian ealdormanry along the Severn, and to have stood apart from the struggle. From Emperor and Lord of Britain Æthelred saw himself shrink at the hard touch of reality into a King of Wessex, and of a Wessex helpless before the junction of the rest of Britain with a foreign foe. 1 "Encom. Emme" (Langebek), ii. 476. The |