throne, he was forced after three years of struggle to replace him on it. Even in later years it was by ties of blood and wedlock rather than by more direct bonds of subjection that the policy of Wessex strove to bring the Midland realm beneath its sway. It was in fact only by long and patient effort that this vague supremacy of the West-Saxon kings could have been developed into a national sovereignty; and the effort after such a sovereignty had hardly begun when it was suddenly broken by the coming of the Danes. CHAP. I. The England of Ecgberht. E The first Wikings. CHAPTER II. THE COMING OF THE WIKINGS. 829-858. IN the days of Beorhtric of Wessex, while Offa was still ruling in Mercia, and Ecgberht an exile at the court of Charles, "in the year 787, came three ships to the West-Saxon shores, "and then the reeve rode thereto, and would force them to go to the king's tun, for that he knew not what they were; and they slew folk." Two hundred years later, in the midst of the long warfare which opened with the landing of the pirate-band, the memory of 1 1 Eng. Chron. (Winch), a. 787, which adds, "These were the first ships of Danish men that sought land of Engle-folk." Munch however ("Det Norske Folks Historie," German transl. by Claussen, pt. iv. p. 186), points out that this entry dates at earliest from 891, when the Danes were really the assailants of Britain, and that a more contemporary entry may be found in the late Canterbury Chronicle (F), where the ships are called "of Northmen from Heretha-land." "It is a strong testimony to the age of this account that the Wikings are called Northmen, for this name was lost in England earlier than elsewhere." "The so-called Heretha-land," he adds, "from which these northmen came can be none other than Hardeland or Hardesyssel, in Jutland, for from Hördeland in Norway no descents from England had taken place at this time." that first warning of danger was still fresh in the minds of men. "Suddenly," ran the later tradition preserved in the royal West-Saxon house, "there came a Danish fleet, not very alarming, consisting of three long ships, and this was their first coming. When this came to the ears of the king's reeve, who was then in the tun which is called Dorchester, he mounted his horse and with a few men hastened to the port, thinking they were merchants rather than enemies, and addressing them with authority ordered them to be carried to the king's tun; and by them he and those who were with him were there slain. Now the name of this reeve was Beaduheard."1 Soon there were few tun-reeves who knew not what these strangers were, for six years later, in 793, their pirate-boats were ravaging the coast of Northumbria, plundering the monastery of Lindisfarne and murdering its monks; and in 794 they entered the Wear to pillage and burn the houses of Wearmouth and Jarrow. "He who can hear of this calamity," wrote Alcuin as the news reached him in Gaul of the ruin of the houses which enshrined within them the religious history of Northumbria, the houses of Aidan and Cuthberht, of Benedict Biscop and of Bæda, "he who can hear of this calamity and not cry to God on behalf of his country, has a heart not of flesh but of stone. "3 2 1 Æthelweard, a. 787. Ethelweard was a descendant of Ethelred I., and probably the ealdorman of the Western Provinces in the reign of Æthelred II. 2 Sim. Durh. Gest. Reg. 793, 794. 3 Alcuin Op. (Migne), pt. i. epist. xi. CHAP. II. The Coming of the Wikings. 829. 858. CHAP. II. The Coming of the 829858. The descent of the three strange ships did in fact herald a new conquest of Britain. It was but the beginning of a strife which was to last unbroken till the final triumph of the Norman conqueror. For The conquest nearly a hundred years to come the shores of England of England. were harried and its folk slain by successors of these northern pirates, till their scattered plunder-raids were merged in the more organized attack of the Danish sea-kings. The conquests of Ivar and Guthrum and Halfdene in the days of Ælfred were in their turn but the prelude to the bowing of all England to a foreign rule under Swein and Cnut. But in the end the fruit of the long attack slipped from Danish hands. The harvest indeed was reaped, but it was reaped by northmen who had ceased even in tongue to be northmen at all. Not the Danes of Denmark, but the Danes of Rouen, of Caen, of Bayeux, became lords of the realm of Alfred and Eadgar. It was the sword of the Normans which drove for the last time from English shores the fleet of the Danes. The Northern peoples. The new assailants announced themselves as men of the north, men from the lands beyond the Baltic; but this told Englishmen nothing. Though the Jutes who had shared in the conquest of Britain had been at least akin in blood with the dwellers on either side the Cattegat, their work had soon come to an end; and with it had ended for centuries all contact of the men of the north with Englishmen. It was not till the middle of the eighth century that dim news of heathen nations across the Baltic came from English missionaries who were toiling among the Saxons of the Elbe; and an English poet, CHAP. II. of the Wikings. 829858. it may be an English mission-priest in the older home of his race, wove fragments of northern sagas The Coming into his Christianized version of the song of Beowulf. But to the bulk of Englishmen as to the rest of Christendom, these peoples remained almost unknown. Their life had indeed till now been necessarily a home life; for instead of fighting and mingling with the world about them, they had had to battle for sheer existence with the stern winter, the barren soil, the stormy seas of the north. While Britain was passing through the ages of her conquest, her settlement, her religious and political reorganization, the Swede was hewing his way into the dense pine-forests that stretched like a sea of woodland between the bleak moorlands and wide lakes of his father-land; the Dane was finding a home in the reaches of birchwood and beechwood that covered the flat isles of the Baltic, and the Norwegian was winning field and farm from the steep slopes of his narrow fiords. 1 1 Olaf, King Ingiald's son, went westward with his men "to a river which comes from the north and falls into the Venner Lake and is called Klar river. There they set themselves down, turned to, and cleared the woods, burned, and then settled there. . . . Now when it was told of Olaf in Sweden that he was clearing the forests, they laughed at his doings and called him the Treefeller" (Olaf Trætelgia). Ynglinga Saga, c. 46, in Laing's translation of the "Heimskringla " ("Sea Kings of Norway"), vol. i. p. 255. So of an earlier king, Onund, "Sweden is a great forest land, and there are such great uninhabited forests in it that it is a journey of many days to cross them. Onund bestowed great pains and cost in clearing the woods and tilling the cleared land. ... Onund had roads made through all Sweden, both over morasses and mountains: and he was therefore called Onund Road-Maker" (Braut-Anund). Ynglinga Saga, c. 37, Laing, vol. i. 247. |