by Tom Holland
Nevertheless, as the new millennium drew ever nearer, it would have taken a perversely cheery sense of optimism to see in the gathering upsurge of Viking raids a boost to the prospects of anywhere in England. An alarming realisation was dawning over Ethelred: that there were simply too many pirates infesting English waters for them all to have originated in Ireland. So immense was the treasure piled up in his kingdom, it appeared, that its glint was showing even beyond the grey expanse of the mist-filled northern seas, in Scandinavia. How telling it was, for instance, that the most feared of all the Viking captains should have been a man “skilled in divination,”45 whose talent for throwing the bones of birds and reading in them the pattern of what might otherwise have remained hidden had won for him the sinister nickname of “Craccaben” – “Crowbone.” Olaf Trygvasson was a Norwegian, a man of the “North Way,” a realm so far distant from all that made for Christian order that even its women, it was said, grew beards, “and sorcerers and enchanters and other satellites of Antichrist” swarmed everywhere.46 Whether as a consequence of necromantic skills or not, Trygvasson certainly had a nose for loot; and sure enough, like a raven tracking the perfume of carrion, he had ended up haunting the English sea lanes.
By 991, such was the glamour and prestige of Trygvasson’s name that there were no fewer than ninety-two other ships sailing alongside his own, ravaging the coasts of Kent and Essex, plundering and burning almost unopposed. Then, in August, while camped near Maldon, north of the Thames estuary, Trygvasson and his fellow freebooters were finally pinned down by the English; challenged to cross from the island where their ships were moored, the Vikings did so, only to find themselves in danger of being wiped out.47 Savagely, they fought their corner until at last, with a bloody and desperate effort, they succeeded in putting the Essex men to flight. Left behind as a corpse on the field of battle was the English commander, Britnoth, a white-haired and valiant earl, who had stood with all his bodyguards together unyielding amid the slaughter, arrow-feathered, axe-hewn, refusing to bow.
His was a heroic end, to be sure; but although Britnoth himself had scorned to “buy off the onslaught of spears with tribute-money,”48 his defeat had left Ethelred with little alternative, if Kent and Essex were to be spared further ruin. Ten thousand pounds’ worth of taxes were duly levied, “Dane-geld,” as it came to be known; and yet even as this prodigious sum was handed over, everyone knew that it would serve only as a palliative. Trygvasson’s appetites had been fed, not satiated; and sure enough, in 994, he was back for more. First he led an assault on London; then, after that had been beaten back, he stole horses for his men, and cut a deep swath across the Wessex heartlands. An open challenge to Ethelred, in short, and a calculated insult too. All drew their breath, and waited to see what the King of England would do.
The counter-move, when it did come, proved a good deal less than glorious. No attempt was made to confront Trygvasson. Instead, Ethelred opted to put the screws on his hapless subjects once again. The sum raised this time was £16,000. The English, already the most heavily taxed people in Christendom, were predictably driven to much cursing by this initiative; and while the king himself, as the Lord’s anointed, remained immune to direct criticism, the same was not true of his advisers. Whispered under people’s breath, a punning title began to be applied to Ethelred: “unræd,” “the ill-advised.”49Yet this was uncharitable. A measure of bafflement in the royal counsels was only to be expected. Ethelred was adrift in uncharted waters. There was not another ruler anywhere in the Christian West, after all, who could boast of administering a more efficient government, or of governing a more prosperous people, or of raking in more cash for himself; and yet, bizarrely, rather than strengthening the kingdom, these same achievements appeared to be setting it only to totter. The more Ethelred found England’s wealth a source of vulnerability, the more, in his perplexity and desperation, he sought to turn it back to his advantage. So it was, groping his way to a possible solution, that he settled upon a two-pronged response: he would keep as firm a grip upon the royal mints as he possibly could, fortifying them, even transferring them, wherever feasible, to remote and primordially ancient hill-forts; simultaneously, he would try to spend his way out of trouble.
Derided it might have been; but as a policy, this was in fact very much in the grand tradition of measures adopted by harassed kings. The payment made to Trygvasson had come with a number of familiar strings attached. Like Rollo, he had been obliged to become a Christian; to cease his plundering; to ally himself with the very lord whom he had previously been assailing. Not, however, that it was any part of Ethelred’s intentions to see a new Normandy established on English soil. Far from it. The presence of Viking ships in Norman ports, and of English slaves and loot in Norman markets, had not gone un remarked across the Channel. Indeed, such was the bad blood between the lords of England and Normandy that the Pope himself had been obliged to intervene, and remind the Count of Rouen of his Christian duty not to fraternise with pirates. Richard had duly apologised, signed a treaty – and continued precisely as before. Menacing evidence, it must have struck Ethelred, that even a baptised Northman could never wholly be de-fanged. Plunder, it appeared, would always be his truest god. No matter that Olaf Trygvasson, at his baptism, had become Ethelred’s godson; clearly, it was out of the question for him to be permitted to put down roots in England.
Fortunately, Trygvasson himself agreed. His ambitions were set higher than Rollo’s. Already the toast of excitable poets across the entire Viking world, and rolling in English silver, he had become fired with the zeal of a true convert as well: convinced that Providence had personally chosen him to become King of the North Way, and bring his countrymen to the faith of Christ. It was an intoxicating notion – and one that had first come to him, it would later be claimed, as the result of a fortuitous encounter with a prophetic hermit. Far likelier, however, it was Ethelred, enthroned amid the wealth and magnificence proper to his exalted rank, who had first whispered in Trygvasson’s ear that he too might aspire to wear the crown of a Christian king. Certainly, as the Norwegian captain headed off for his homeland, stopping occasionally along the way to loot and murder in the name of the Prince of Peace, he did so with his godfather’s fervent blessing. Well might Ethelred have breathed a sigh of relief. His triumph had been a considerable one. Compared with Trygvasson and his war bands, the Vikings left behind in English waters were a nuisance, little more. Fields might still be burned, manors plundered and captives stolen; but Ethelred, in the approach to the Millennium, was starting to throw his own weight around on a far more swaggering scale. In the year 1000, he led one expedition in person, northwards into Scotland, ravaging with the best of them, while a second was dispatched to Normandy, there to launch a raid on the Vikings and give the pirates a taste of their own medicine. Two years later, and Ethelred appeared a sufficiently intimidating figure to persuade the Count of Rouen himself to come to heel, and patch up a second treaty. “And then in the spring the Lady, Richard’s daughter, came to this land.”50 So an Englishman reported the arrival in Wessex of Emma, Richard II’s sister, a woman of formidable intelligence, talent and ambition, and fully worthy of a king. Sent by her brother to set the seal on his new alliance, she was married to Ethelred that very spring. Seated beside her royal husband, Emma appeared to the English a living reassurance that the worst was over: that the wheat field of Ethelred’s kingdom had been secured at last against the trampling of foreign feet, and bloody flames, and blight, and storms, and ruin.
Yet for Ethelred himself there remained one final step to be taken. Charged as he was by God with the defence of the English people, and aware, as he surely must have been, of the awful significance of the dawning of the new millennium, how could he not have dreaded what else, aside from wheat, might be flourishing in the rich soil of his kingdom? “He who sows the good seed is the Son of Man.” So Christ had explained to His disciples. “The field is the world, and the good seed means the sons of the kingdom; th
e weeds are the sons of the evil one, and the enemy who sowed them is the devil; the harvest is the close of the age, and the reapers are angels. Just as the weeds are gathered and burned with fire, so will it be at the close of the age.”51 And now, it seemed, the close of the age was at hand; so it was time to gather the weeds and consign them all to the flames. Though Trygvasson and his men were gone, there were other Northmen, Danes, living openly in the towns of England, merchants drawn there in huge numbers by the peerless wealth of the kingdom, and living peaceably enough, it was true – but Northmen nevertheless. Who, then, could tell what atrocities they might be plotting? Who tell what succour they might provide a Viking invader? And so it was, as Ethelred’s self-justification put it, “that a decree was sent out by me with the counsel of my leading men and magnates, to the effect that all the Danes who had sprung up in the island, sprouting like weeds among the wheat, were to be destroyed by a most just extermination – and this decree was to be put into effect even as far as death.”52
The massacre took place on 13 November: St. Brice’s Day. It was, if the bald descriptions of contemporaries are to be trusted, awesomely comprehensive. Ethelred was evidently as efficient at organising a pogrom as he was at stinging his subjects for taxes. Considerations of Christian charity appear not to have moderated the ruthlessness with which the operation was carried out. In one particularly chilling episode, in Oxford, the Danes were incinerated as they huddled together for protection inside a church. Far from serving as a reassurance to the English that their kingdom was being secured against the coming of Antichrist, such an act of desecration led many to dread the opposite. “But of that day and hour no one knows.”53 These were the familiar words deployed by Wulfstan, London’s bishop, and Ethelred’s most brilliant counsellor, as he sought to reassure his flock that the end time was still to arrive; yet even he could not conceal from his listeners what the surest portent of Antichrist was to be. The casting down of God’s temple, of God’s house: such was to be the sign.
And now the stones of a church lay smoking in the heart of England, greasy with human ashes, a veritable charnel-house. If truly a sign, then it was a threatening one indeed.
Ragnarok
Strange tales were told of Olav Trygvasson’s return to Norway. One day, it was claimed, after he had successfully toppled the local strongman and driven him to a squalid end in a pigsty, decapitated by his own thrall, the new king was in a fit mood to be entertained. At his side there suddenly appeared an old man, cloaked and white-haired, with only a single eye. Entering into conversation with the stranger, Trygvasson found that there was nothing the old man did not seem to know, nor any question to which he could not give an answer. All evening the two of them talked; and even though the king was eventually persuaded to retire to bed by a twitchy English bishop who had grown suspicious of the one-eyed stranger, Trygvasson could still not bear to end the conversation, continuing it even as he lay on his furs, late into the night. At last, the old man left him, and the king fell asleep; but his dreams were strange and feverish. Waking up abruptly, he cried out for the stranger again. Even though his servants searched high and low, however, the old man could not be found; and Trygvasson, brought to his senses by daylight, shuddered at his close escape. When it was reported to him that two sides of beef, a gift from the stranger, had been used in a stew, he ordered the entire cooking pot flung out. A godly and responsible act: for clearly, it was out of the question for him, as a follower of Christ, to feast on meat supplied by Odin.
Quite what his own followers thought of their king’s scruples as they watched their supper turn fly-blown out on the dungheap, we are not told. Some, no doubt, would have felt roundly puzzled. A lord with any instinct for self-preservation denied nothing to his retinue. The supply of good things to the men who fought for him, whether beef, or golden armlets, or red cloaks, or coats of mail, was the only sure duty that a leader of Northmen had. Fail in that, and his doom would be swift. Trygvasson, who had never travelled anywhere but wolves and ravens attended on him, who had become the hero of myriad gore-bespattered songs, who had made all the West bleed so that he could bestow its treasures upon his warriors, was certainly not the man to have forgotten this basic truth. The beef he had been obliged to throw out would surely have been replaced with meat stolen or extorted from some other source. His tables would never have been permitted to stand empty. That same evening, no doubt, as his followers feasted in his hall, Trygvasson, the peerless ring-giver, would have scattered gold among them, or else ornamented helmets, or perhaps sword-belts clad in silver, wondrous treasures set to glitter by the blazing fire.
No wonder that the king of the ancient gods had paid him a call. The scene of a great lord sharing plunder with his followers was one well known to delight Odin; and perhaps, as the story of Trygvasson’s late-night conversation implies, it did indeed require an effort of will for any Northman, even a baptised one, to send the “All-father” on his way. Yet Trygvasson himself, whose entire career had been an exercise in worshipping force, had ultimately not hesitated in his loyalty to Christ – and for much the same reason that his own retinue continued to follow him. Far from cramping his style as a warlord, the Christian God appeared to offer him and all his predatory appetites, all his lust for power and gold, all his relish for combat, devastation and scenes of bloodshed, gratification on a truly awesome scale. As befitted a man so ambidextrous that he could hurl a spear simultaneously from both hands, Trygvasson certainly felt no call to choose between his new religion and his career as a marauder – for the one served to fuel the other. With the same buccaneering enthusiasm that he had previously brought to pillaging the English, he now swaggered up and down the North Way, smashing idols, menacing local pagan leaders and forcing conversions at the point of his sword. No matter the resentful mutterings he left behind him in his wake, Trygvasson was not the man for qualms: everything that he did was calculated to redound to his own glory. He had seen enough of Christendom, and of the dignity, the splendour and the wealth of her kings, to know that heathendom offered nothing to compare. Just as Christ reigned supreme over other gods, so would he, as the image of Christ, reign supreme over his countrymen.
His countrymen, not surprisingly, responded with varying degrees of resentment and alarm to this. The arrogance of braggart warlords was nothing new in Scandinavia. Loot pilfered from Christendom had long served to strengthen the mighty, great chiefs as well as kings, at the expense of lesser men. Here, perhaps, rather than in the consequences of excessive rutting, as Christian moralists liked to claim, lay the true reason for the waves of emigration that had sent so many Northmen over the years sailing for Normandy, Britain and Ireland. Some, indeed, had sailed even further west. Beyond the setting of the sun, dotted across “the northern region of the earth from where all waters pass down,”54 adventurers from Scandinavia had discovered a succession of darksome islands, sundered realms formed of glaciers, and mountains, and the occasional expanse of grass. “Iceland,” the first-found of these had been named – fittingly enough, it appeared, if the claims of travellers were to be believed, for it was reported that any Icelander who ventured out into the open during wintertime, and then so far forgot himself as to wipe his nose, would find it snapping off, “frozen mucus and all,”55 and be obliged to discard it in the snow. Other inconveniences persisted all the year round, even into the nightless summers: from the troublemaking spirits who had lived in Iceland since the beginning of time, and would lure the distracted to their ruin amid lava fields or into pools of hissing mud, to the island’s notoriously indigestible food, its seaweed, suet and buttered porridge, which played such hell with the settlers’ stomachs that the glaciers were said to echo to the thundering of their farts.
The world of the Northmen
Such drawbacks notwithstanding, however, Iceland had filled up rapidly in the decades that followed the arrival of the first colonisers, back in the 870s – so much so that by the 930s all the prime farmland had been taken. Me
n had duly begun to scan around for fresh horizons. In 986, during a time of terrible famine in Iceland, an expedition of some twenty-five ships had set sail for a vast and empty land that lay even further west: “Greenland” as it had been named by an early prospector, somewhat disingenuously, for all its eastern flank stood barricaded by colossal walls of gleaming ice. On the western coast, however, along the margins of jagged fjords, there were indeed patches of grass, and even meadows, to be found; and it was on these, at an unimaginable distance from the fjords of their ancestral homeland, that the settlers from Iceland, some 450 of them in all, had sought to put down their roots.
“A house of your own, however mean, is good.”56 Nothing better illustrated the passionate intensity with which the Northmen clung to this conviction than their scattered presence, by the side of the bleak immensity of the western ocean, on the windswept shores of Greenland. Their new home may have been teeming with wildlife, but it was in almost all other ways barren of resources; and so it was not surprising that some of the colonists, in their quest for timber, above all, should have continued to strike out west. Over the succeeding years, such expeditions would bring back reports of yet further islands, including one, named “Vinland” by those who claimed to have discovered it, on which grapes were said to grow wild, “producing excellent wine”:57 a fabulous story. Perhaps, as the tall tales told by the Greenlanders suggested, there did indeed lie strange lands along the westernmost limits of the world; but if so, then they might just as well not have existed at all, for it was clearly out of the question to settle such fearsomely distant isles. Some few of the more lunatic among the explorers, it would subsequently be claimed, had made the attempt – but their enterprises had failed. Vinland – if it truly existed – was a stepping stone too far, that much was evident. The settlers’ lines of communication, drawn out as they had been over many thousands of miles, across savage and storm-swept seas, a whole world away from Scandinavia, had been stretched to breaking point.