Dragon Lords
Page 5
We need not imagine a direct connection between Óttarr’s verse and the Encomium’s story, but there must have been considerable overlap between the audiences of these two texts, people to whom the political resonances of these allusions to England’s Viking history were both meaningful and important. These texts are evidence of a dynamic, high-status Anglo-Scandinavian culture in England during Cnut’s reign, and this culture can be traced in other kinds of evidence too – not only in the areas previously associated with Danish settlement, but in pockets across the country. Cnut gave lands in England to a handful of high-ranking Danes, who married into English families and forged a mixed Anglo-Scandinavian elite, and although their numbers were probably small, in certain areas they were influential. Perhaps the most interesting example is the family of Godwine, the young Englishman who rose rapidly under Cnut to become earl of Wessex.58 Godwine married a Danish noblewoman named Gytha, a close family connection of the king (her brother was married to Cnut’s sister). Godwine and Gytha signalled their closeness to Cnut by naming their first children after Cnut’s father and grandfather, Svein and Harold, the names Cnut had given to his own two eldest sons. After Cnut’s death, the family of Godwine and Gytha would remain at the forefront of English politics, and Harold Godwineson, of course, briefly became king of England in 1066 – a last flare of glory for the Anglo-Danish elite in England. It is one of the ironies of English history that Harold Godwineson, often idolised in modern romantic interpretations of this period as the heroic defender of England against the Norman Conquest, owed his position to his father’s support of the Danish conqueror Cnut. Still more ironic, this icon of Englishness bore a name which would have seemed to his contemporaries to be markedly Scandinavian. In later chapters we will explore some of the Scandinavian legends associated with this prominent Anglo-Danish dynasty, whose family origin-myth had a long post-Conquest afterlife.
One telling marker of identity for the Anglo-Scandinavian elite promoted by Cnut seems to have been the foundation of churches in England dedicated to saints popular in the north, particularly St Olaf Haraldson, king of Norway, who was regarded as a martyr after his death in 1030. Cnut, who had been an enemy of Olaf in life, shrewdly promoted the martyr’s cult in death, and several churches dedicated to St Olaf in England in the decades after his death can be plausibly connected with powerful Scandinavians.59 Exeter, Chichester and Southwark, all areas linked with Gytha and Godwine, have eleventh-century churches dedicated to St Olaf; Siward, earl of Northumbria, another of the Danes who rose to prominence under Cnut and married into an English family, founded and dedicated a church to St Olaf in York. We will return to Siward, and his own legendary adventures, later on.
13. A carving from Winchester, perhaps originally part of a frieze at the Old Minster, where Cnut was buried. It may represent a scene from the Völsung legend
Siward and the family of Gytha and Godwine – culturally Scandinavian, but firmly established by interests and by family ties in England – may well have been the kind of people who understood and appreciated the view of Anglo-Danish history put forward by the skaldic poems and the Encomium: a dominant Danish dynasty ruling in England, with its roots in the triumphs of the Viking kings of ninth-century Northumbria. Their understanding of the legendary history of this great dynasty may have stretched back even further than this. In Winchester – the ancient centre of the kings of Wessex, the burial-place of Alfred the Great – there is intriguing evidence for the presence of Cnut and his Scandinavian followers, including a fragmentary carving, probably once part of a larger frieze, which appears to depict a scene from the Norse legend of Sigmund.60 Sigmund and his son Sigurðr, the dragon-slayer, were part of the greatest heroic cycle of Germanic legend, which is preserved in its fullest form in the later Norse Völsunga saga. The carving from Winchester has been interpreted as showing the moment at which Sigmund, bound and about to be devoured by a wolf, smears his mouth with honey to distract her from killing him. Sigmund, who is mentioned in Beowulf, was known to the Anglo-Saxons too, but at this time he may have been understood as an ancestor of the Danish kings, and therefore one of Cnut’s own forebears.61 To find this Scandinavian hero celebrated in Winchester, the spiritual heart of the kingdom of Wessex, is a remarkable testament to the extent of Cnut’s cultural and political influence. It is even possible that the carving of Sigmund was made to form part of Cnut’s own tomb – it is certainly striking enough for a king.
14. The possible current location of Cnut’s remains, in a chest in Winchester Cathedral (Ealdgyth, via Wikimedia Commons)
After 1066: conquerors and martyrs
Exactly 50 years after Cnut’s victory at the Battle of Assandun – almost to the very day – England was conquered for the second time in a century. The Norman Conquest which began with the Battle of Hastings in 1066 had a deep and lasting impact on the society, governance, language and culture of England, and has assumed an emblematic status which Cnut’s conquest will never achieve: the single date ‘1066’ is still frequently used as a dividing-line, marking the end and beginning of distinct historical epochs, in a way ‘1016’ rarely is. In the decades following 1066, the distinction between the Norman and Danish conquerors was not so clear-cut, and their relative impact could not yet, of course, be perceived. From the end of the eleventh century come a number of thoughtful and influential narratives of Cnut’s conquest which link it to earlier Danish invasions, but which evidently interpret these events in the shadow of the more recent conquest. These texts, separated by more than half a century from the events they describe, are influenced in their view of the Danes by pressing contemporary concerns about foreign invasion, oppressive rule and cultural change.
In this period, a legend is first recorded which links the ninth-century Danish invasions of England with the eleventh-century conquest in a particularly dramatic way: the story that Svein Forkbeard was killed by the spirit of St Edmund of East Anglia, who appeared to the Danish king from beyond the grave and pierced him with a lance. Svein’s sudden death on 3 February 1014, less than three months after becoming king of England, was a remarkable reversal of fortune. The cause of his death is unknown, and contemporary sources do not speculate.62 As we have seen, the Encomium gives Svein a peaceful death, with an exemplary Christian final speech to his son, but by the end of the century, some writers were offering a supernatural explanation for this startling – to the English, almost miraculous – turn of events. The story that Svein was killed by St Edmund first appears in an account of Edmund’s miracles written at Bury St Edmunds by the monk and archdeacon Herman, completed in the 1090s.63 Herman’s work continues St Edmund’s story where Abbo’s Passio had left off, tracing the saint’s posthumous interventions in English politics from the tenth century up to 1096.
15. Svein Forkbeard invades England (British Library, Harley MS. 2278, f. 98v)
One of the miracles recounted by Herman tells how St Edmund appeared to Svein to defend his people from the Danish king’s unjust demands for taxation, and suddenly struck Svein dead. This story was to be a highly influential one, shaping the view of Svein and Cnut taken by John of Worcester and other twelfth-century historians.64 Herman compares it to the death of Julian the Apostate at the hands of St Mercurius, and he seems to have based some elements of his account on that story as told in Ælfric’s Life of St Basil.65 This story allows Herman to present Edmund as a powerful enemy of unjust rule in the present day as well as the past, and as the pre-eminent saintly defender of England, and particularly East Anglia, his kingdom in life and death. This unjust rule is imagined not as Viking raiding, but as oppressive taxation: for Herman, Svein’s real crime is ‘his imposition of the universal tribute: a misfortune still generating much suffering in England, which would be happy, prosperous, and sweet beyond measure were it not for the tributes imposed by its kings.’66 It is tax-collectors, not violent Vikings, who besiege Edmund’s city and prompt the saint to take action. This clearly has less to do with the Danes than with co
ntemporary objections to oppressive rule; rather than being stereotypical pagan opponents of Christianity, the Danes are here cast as generic unjust rulers. This seems to have made them almost interchangeable with comparable Norman oppressors: a slightly later story from nearby Ely, probably influenced by the episode of Svein and St Edmund, makes use of a very similar idea – the ghost of a saint appears, threatens an enemy attacking their abbey, and pierces him through with a lance – but replaces Svein Forkbeard with a Norman tax-collector.67 The impetus behind this legend is clear: Edmund has not only defended his people but avenged his own death from beyond the grave. This suggests a desire to link the earlier history of Danish invasion with later waves of conquest, and positions Edmund as a saint well placed to be the champion of East Anglia’s interests against all kinds of foreign oppression.
16. St Edmund kills Svein Forkbeard (British Library, Harley MS. 2278, f. 103v)
This is reinforced by the fact that Svein is not the only Dane who is challenged and punished by St Edmund: Herman’s Miracula contains several other episodes in which the Danes are presented as foreign antagonists to Edmund and his cult. The Danes in these miracle-stories are cast in the role of sceptics, arrogant deniers of Edmund’s sanctity, who are miraculously confounded by the power of the saint. In one, a Danish nobleman who dares to peek beneath the cloth covering the saint’s litter is instantly blinded, but repents, and presents his golden armlets to Edmund;68 in another, set in the time of Edward the Confessor, the Danish Osgod Clapa is punished with madness for his presumption in entering Edmund’s church drunk and armed.69 Herman paints a memorable portrait of Osgod swaggering through the church, dressed in ‘the skins of wild animals’ and gold armlets, with his axe slung Danico more (‘in Danish fashion’) from his shoulder. The recurrence of the gold armlets from the earlier episode suggests they are to be understood as a marker of cultural difference, and the axe and the animal skins seem intended to suggest a wild, barbarian violence; Herman’s description of Osgod emphasises the man’s Danish identity and casts it in a distinctly negative light. Herman consistently characterises the Danes as arrogant and haughty, and repeatedly shows St Edmund humbling their pride.70
17. Osgod the Dane is punished at St Edmund’s tomb (British Library, Harley MS. 2278, f. 110v)
Within this context, however, he sets one example of Edmund’s power of conversion: the Danish conqueror Cnut, who is swiftly converted to the worship of the saint. There is evidence to suggest that Cnut took a particular interest in patronising the cult of St Edmund, and perhaps linked it to his own conquest – he supported the building of a new church at Bury St Edmunds, which was consecrated on the anniversary of the Battle of Assandun on 18 October.71 Herman extensively praises Cnut’s generosity to Edmund’s shrine, emphasising his difference from Svein. To underline this point, he twice uses the striking image of the wolf: he says that Cnut did not imitate his father’s wickedness, proving the truth of a proverb ‘The wolf is not nearly so big as he is made out to be’,72 and he also includes a short verse:
Que Saulum mutauit in Paulum
in eodem lupum magnum,
nunc habet ferum hominem
in Christianissimum regem.73
(He who changed Saul into Paul, the great wolf, now has made a wild man into a most Christian king.)
The image of a wolf acting against its nature is one found prominently in the hagiography of St Edmund: Abbo’s Passio famously tells how a wolf protected Edmund’s severed head when it was hidden by the Danes, allowing it to be found by his followers and rejoined to his body. With this language, Cnut is absorbed into the central imagery of Edmund’s cult, though not in a very flattering way: the wild barbarian king, like the wolf, is converted to the worship of the saint, and only on such terms can a Dane be accepted.
18. The ruins of the abbey church at Bury St Edmunds, where St Edmund’s shrine stood behind the high altar
It is useful to compare Herman’s narrative with a hagio- graphical text of the same period from Christ Church, Canterbury, which also engages with the Danish conquest from the perspective of the late eleventh century, but with a different and more sympathetic attitude to the Danes. It allows greater agency to the Danish conquerors, particularly to Cnut, and although it also shows the Danes converting to the veneration of English saints it does this by redeeming, rather than scorning, distinctive markers of Scandinavian identity. For Christ Church, this period of English history was of great significance, because the community’s two chief saints were archbishops of Canterbury who were both directly linked to the events of the Danish conquest: St Ælfheah, who was killed by a Danish army in 1012, after being captured during the Viking siege of Canterbury the previous year, and St Dunstan, who was credited with having prophesied the decades of Viking attacks which followed his death in 988. In the period between 1080 and 1093, accounts of both these saints were composed by Osbern, precentor of Christ Church. Osbern had been a member of the community of Christ Church since childhood, and it has been suggested on the basis of his name that he may have been of Danish descent.74 He had a long-standing personal attachment to the pre-Conquest saints of Christ Church, and his work attempts to interpret their lives for the benefit of a new, potentially sceptical audience in Anglo-Norman Canterbury.75 His work on Dunstan remained the most popular hagiographical text on that saint for centuries, and was responsible for popularising one of the most enduring explanations for the two conquests England suffered in the course of the eleventh century: Osbern says Dunstan, when consecrating Æthelred as king in 978, had prophesied that because he had come to power through the murder of his half-brother he would be punished by war and invasion, ‘until your kingdom is given to a foreign power whose customs and language the people you rule do not know’.76 As we have seen, Dunstan was already associated with prophetic knowledge of the Viking invasions early in the eleventh century; Osbern’s more dramatic formulation of Dunstan’s prophesy came to be so popular as an interpretation of Æthelred that in the later medieval period it was inscribed on the king’s tomb in Old St Paul’s, his epitaph and the final word on his reign.77
The idea of the Danes as the instruments of divine punishment was, as we have already seen, a widespread one, but elsewhere Osbern explores different potential interpretations of Danish invasion, telling instead how the Danes were converted and integrated into England through their veneration of English saints. In his Vita and Translatio of Ælfheah, both composed between 1080 and 1089, he describes Ælfheah’s death at the hands of the Danes and the return of his body to Canterbury a decade later, with the active involvement of Cnut.78 In explaining the events leading up to Ælfheah’s martyrdom, Osbern presents the Danish leaders Svein and Thorkell as wicked and aggressive pagan pirates, and the English as too weak to resist: ‘the land lay at the mercy of the raiders’ fury […] For Æthelred, king of the English, was as weak as he was unwarlike, in his conduct more like a monk than a soldier.’79 This follows the narrative of Æthelred’s reign which by the end of the eleventh century had become conventional, but there are two additional factors at play. As Osbern presents it, the Danes attack Canterbury because they are specifically targeting the archbishop, angry that Ælfheah has been working to convert many ordinary Danish soldiers to Christianity. It is suggested that they are deliberately seeking out Ælfheah, not raiding indiscriminately, and the rank and file of the Danish army are already being distinguished from their leaders, seen as potential subjects for conversion and redemption.
Another significant motivating force is the treachery of Eadric Streona, who incites the Danes to attack Canterbury. In a detail not found in any other source, Osbern claims that Eadric collaborated with the Danes because he sought revenge for his brother (not named by Osbern), a deceitful and proud man killed in a dispute with some noblemen of Canterbury. After Æthelred refuses to punish the culprits, Eadric goes to the Danes to seek vengeance for his brother. As we will see, the narrative traditions which developed around the Danish invasions in
the eleventh century and later frequently provide a personal motive for the decision to invade, and one of the most common is vengeance for the death of a sibling. Comparable explanations for Danish invasion are found in numerous other texts, including the Encomium Emmae Reginae, where Thorkell’s raiding in England is said to have been motivated by a desire to avenge a brother who had been killed in England.80 A revised version of Herman’s Miracula, written at Bury St Edmunds around 1100, adds a detail not found in Herman’s text, claiming that Thorkell came to East Anglia to avenge the death of his two sisters, who had been killed at Thetford amid the slaughter on St Brice’s Day, and in the following chapters we will see more examples from the twelfth century and afterwards.81 Osbern’s story about Eadric’s brother is an early example of this desire to explain the Danish invasions in terms of personal feuds, providing specific motives to provide a narrative justification (and sometimes a moral one) for what might otherwise appear to be random attacks.
Osbern presents Eadric’s attempt to recruit the Danes to his cause as a formal pact and a planned invasion. Eadric tells the Danes of the weakness and cowardice of the English, and they agree how to divide up the country once they have conquered it. The result of this pact is the siege and destruction of Canterbury, and the capture of the archbishop. For Osbern these events were a disaster not only for the city but for the whole of England; after describing the burning of the city and the capture of Ælfheah, he observes ‘Each singly would have been calamity enough to the kingdom – either the harm done to the priest or the deadly destruction of the city – so that deprived of either glory England would never from that time on regain her former status.’82 The siege and the death of Ælfheah together form a pivotal moment in the history of Canterbury and of England as a nation – and he surely has the Norman Conquest as well as the Danish invasion in mind here.