settlement along the Frankish coast might have grown CHAP. III. of the Danelaw. 858878. into a territory stretching over much of Gaul. In a The Making word, Christendom would have seen the rise of a power upon its border which might have changed the fortunes of the western world. Such political considerations indeed can hardly have affected any save the leaders of the northern warriors, but for every warrior there was the ceaseless pressure of the pirates' greed. Now that its abbeys were wrecked there was little booty to be got from Ireland; and even Gaul, wasted as it had been for half a century, was ceasing to be a prey worth much fighting for. Britain however still lay practically untouched. No spoiler's hand had fallen on most of its greater monasteries. No pirate's hand had as yet wrung ransom from its royal hoards. From the opening of Ethelred's reign therefore Britain became the main field of northern attack. 2 of the Danes. The name, however, under which its assailants The coming were known suggests that a reason for the choice of this new field of warfare, even more powerful than greed or ambition, lay in the appearance of a new body of assailants. It is now that we first hear of the Danes. The assailants of the Franks had been drawn, as we have seen, from the northmen of South Jutland, those of Ireland from the northmen of Norway. But while these earlier Wikings were doing their work on either side of Britain, another people of 1 Hen. Huntingdon, "Hist. Angl." lib. v. proœm. (ed. Arnold, p. 138) puts this well. "Daci vero terram. non obtinere sed prædari studebant, et omnia destruere, non dominari cupiebant." 2 See Dahlmann, "Gesch. von Dannemark,” i. p. 65. CHAP. III. of the Danelaw. 858878. the same Scandinavian blood had been taking form The Making along the south-western coast of the present Sweden, and had spread from thence over Zeeland with its fellow isles and the north of our Jutland.' These were the men who now came to the front under the name of the Danes; and that they brought a new force and a more national life to the struggle is plain from the character which it immediately took. The petty squadrons which had till now harassed the coast of Britain made way for hosts larger than had fallen on any country in the west; while raid and foray were replaced by the regular campaigns of armies who marched to conquer, and whose aim was to settle on the land they had won. Character of their warfare. The numbers in which the Danes drew together showed their consciousness that the work they were taking in hand was work such as the pirates had never taken in hand before. But their numbers are far from explaining the rapidity and completeness of their success in the coming strife. The real force of the northern warriors in fact everywhere lay not in numbers but in their superiority as soldiers to the men they met. As assailants indeed their natural advantages were great; for their mastery of the sea gave them along every coast a secure basis of operations, while every river furnished a road for their advance. But the caution and audacity with which 2 1 From Othere's voyage (in Ælfred's "Orosius ") which is our earliest historical authority, it is clear that the Danes had reached these limits before the close of the ninth century. 2 It is possible that the boats which may be seen making up the Humber with the tide to Goole and the Trent, and which are still known as "keels," may fairly represent to us "keels" of they availed themselves of these advantages showed a natural genius for war. To seize a headland or a slip of land at a river mouth, to draw a trench across it and back their trench with earthworks, to haul up their vessels within this camp and assign it a campguard, was the prelude to each northern foray; and it was only when their line of retreat was secured that they pushed into the heart of the land. From the moment of their advance caution seemed exchanged for a reckless daring. But their daring was far from being reckless. They were in fact the first European warriors who realized the value of quick movement in war. The earliest work of the marauders was to seize horses; once mounted, they rode pillaging into the heart of the land; and the speed with which they hurried along baffled all existing means of defence. While alarm beacons were flaming out on hill and headland, while shire-reeve and town-reeve were mustering men for the fyrd, the Dane had already swooped upon abbey and grange. When the shirehost was fairly mustered the foe was back within his earlier times. Their large, red-brown sails, about seventy feet long, are but a few feet shorter than that of the Wikings' ship of Gokstad; sails of that kind rising above the fringe of reeds and over the long reaches of marsh-land must often have struck terror into the dwellers on the Humbrian shores. (A.S.G.) 1 In their own land, which was penetrated throughout by arms of the sea, no spot lay more than ten miles from the water, and the whole country was thus necessarily exposed to pirate raids, such as those of the Wendish sea-rovers who for a time made a part of the coast of Jutland a mere desert. It was under these conditions that the Danes had learned their special mode of warfare. See Dahlmann's "Geschichte von Dannemark," vol. i., pp. 129, 136. (A.S.G.) CHAP. III. The Making of the Danelaw. 858 878. CHAP. III. of the Danelaw. 858878. camp; and the country folk wasted their valour upon The Making entrenchments which held them easily at bay till the black boats were shoved off to sea again. Nor was this all. The Danes were as superior to their opponents in tactics as in strategy. An encounter between the shire-levies and the pirates was a struggle of militia with regular soldiers. The Scandinavian war-band was a band of drilled warriors, tried in a hundred forays, knit together by discipline and mutual trust, grouped round a leader of their own choosing, and armed from head to foot. Outnumber them as they might, a host of farmers hurried from their ploughs, armed with what weapons each found to hand, were no match for soldiers such as these. The Danes in 1 It was now nearly fourteen years since the Danes had appeared in the western seas. In 852 a force of these “Dubhgaill" or Dark Strangers made its way to the Irish coast under a sea-king called Olaf the Fair, himself no Dane, but a son of one of the petty rulers of the Norwegian Upland; and after hard fighting with the "Finn-Gaill" or White Strangers, the Norwegians whom it found in possession of the pirate field, the Danes withdrew to return four years after in overwhelming force. From 856 the Wikings about Ireland submitted to Olaf, and his occupation of Dublin made it the centre of the Ostmen.2 At the same time Ivar the Boneless, who, whether a son of the 1 The Landnama Book calls him a son of King Ingialld, who came of the stock of Halfdan Whitefoot, King of Upland. 2 Todd, "War of Gaedhill and Gaill," Intr. p. lxxviii.-ix. "Ostmen" was the name given to the pirates settled on the east coast of Ireland. (A.S.G.) mysterious Ragnar Lodbrok or no, was a Skioldung, CHAP. IIJ. of the Danelaw. 858878. or of the kingly race among the Danes, seems from The Making the Irish annals to have been fighting in Munster. But for ten years we see nothing more of these leaders or of their Danish followers; and it is not till 866 that we find them united in an attack on the greater island of Britain. While the Ostmen gathered in a fleet of two hundred vessels under Olaf the Fair, and threw themselves on the Scotkingdom across the Firth of Forth, a Danish host from Scandinavia itself, under Ivar the Boneless, landed in 866 on the shores of East-Anglia.1 We can hardly doubt that this district had been the object of many attacks since the raid on its shores which is recorded more than twenty years before,2 for the Danes were suffered to winter within its bounds, and it was only in the spring of 867 that they horsed themselves and rode for the north. in York. Their aim was Northumbria; and as they struck The Danes over Mid-Britain for York they found the country torn by the wonted anarchy, and two rivals contending, as of old, for the throne. Though the claimants united in presence of this common danger, their union 1 The English Chronicle calls it a "micel here," but namės no leader. Æthelweard however calls it "classis tyranni Igwares;" and the Chronicle names Inguar and his brother Hubba as leaders of the "here" when it conquered East-Anglia four years later. The lists of after writers are made up of all the names mentioned in the subsequent story. I have omitted all reference to the legend of Ragnar Lodbrok's death, which does not make its appearance for a couple of centuries. 2 Eng. Chron. a. 838. |