Dragon Lords
Page 15
si vus od mai [vus] combatez,
l[i] un de nus ad greignur tort,
ne savom liquels en ert mort.
Pur ço vus vol un offre fere
e ne m’en voil de rien retrere:
partum la terre dreit en dous,
l’une partie en aiez vus,
l’altre partie me remaigne!
(4315–33)
(Our Danish ancestors, I’ll have you know, have been ruling here for a very long time. Almost a thousand years before king Cerdic came to the throne, Danr was king. Cerdic was your ancestor, and king Danr was mine. A Dane held the land in chief from God. It was Mordred who granted Cerdic his fief; he never held it in chief, and your family is descended from him. In case you don’t already know, I’ll tell you that if you fight me, one of us is going to be in the wrong more than the other, though we don’t know which one of us will die as a result. This is why I’m willing to make you an offer – one that I will not seek to back down from: let us divide the kingdom exactly in two, with one part going to you and the other remaining with me.)9
Cnut repeats the argument attributed to the Danes by Gaimar as the first cause of Viking activity in England, and here the circumstances seem to validate it as a fair argument indicating a legitimate claim to rule the country. For Gaimar, the story of Dan explains why Cnut and Edmund chose to divide the country between them instead of proceeding with the planned single combat, because both have a well-founded right to claim sovereignty.
There are significant differences here from other contemporary narratives of this single combat, which do not engage in this way with the question of the justice of the Danish claim. The legend that Cnut and Edmund Ironside fought a duel in the wars of 1015–16 first appears as early as the Encomium Emmae Reginae, and became a story repeated in many different iterations by later historians.10 The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle says that the kings comon togædere, ‘came together’, to reach a settlement that would divide England between them, a phrase which probably only means that they met, but which seems later to have been interpreted to mean that they fought a duel.11 The Encomium says that single combat was proposed by Edmund, but never took place, because Cnut was too wise to fight when he could not be sure of victory. Here the challenge and Cnut’s refusal are set during the winter of 1015–16, and there is no connection between this episode and the partition of the kingdom; that division takes place several months later, after the battle at Assandun, and the Encomium says it was proposed by the traitor Eadric Streona. Apparently unwilling to support the principle of shared rule as a long-term solution to a contested kingdom, the Encomium casts both duel and division in a very negative light.12
By the twelfth century, however, a number of historians were claiming that this proposed single combat had actually taken place, usually at the very end of the war and after Assandun. Where Gaimar has Cnut arguing eloquently and, the narrative suggests, correctly about the right of both kings to rule England, most other chroniclers agree that Cnut stopped the combat because he was intimidated by his valiant English opponent. Of all the accounts of this supposed single combat, Gaimar’s is the most favourable to Cnut (except, of course, for the pro-Danish Encomium). William of Malmesbury has Cnut refuse to enter into combat because he is physically smaller than Edmund and fears the English king’s strength,13 while Henry of Huntingdon says that Edmund was winning the combat when Cnut stopped it to propose a settlement.14 Walter Map provides a dialogue between the two in which Cnut taunts Edmund for being short-winded, to which Edmund replies, ‘Not too short, if I can bring so great a king off his feet’; Map calls this a ‘memorable phrase’.15 By the early thirteenth century, Roger of Wendover has Cnut claiming to be so overwhelmingly impressed by Edmund’s virtues that he cannot fight him and is eager to be Edmund’s joint-king and sworn brother.16 In Gaimar’s account, it is rather the other way around: Edmund admires ‘how humbly and how justly the good king spoke to him’,17 and agrees to the division of the country along the lines proposed by the Danish king. His response to Cnut’s argument implicitly accepts it as a valid interpretation of the history, and Cnut’s offer to divide the kingdom, in this light, is a magnanimous one: he has a prior claim to rule the whole country, but chooses to reach a settlement to prevent either himself or Edmund from being killed in the combat.
In some of these versions of the story Cnut stakes his claim to England on the grounds that his father had ruled the kingdom (if only for two months), and he, like Edmund, can therefore claim to be his father’s heir.18 The argument put forward by Gaimar’s Cnut is more complex than this, however, and reiterates what Gaimar has already said about the motivation behind Danish raids on England. This speech, like that earlier passage, is Gaimar’s attempt to explain why the Danes believed themselves to have a prior right to the country, dating back to before the foundation of the kingdom of Wessex. The idea that the Saxons were granted land in England by Mordred, nephew of King Arthur, is found in Geoffrey of Monmouth, but it is Gaimar’s innovation to claim there was a period of Danish rule in England long pre-dating the coming of the Saxons.19
This seems to be an instance where Gaimar is closer to Scandinavian or Anglo-Danish tradition than to the English sources. King Dan does not appear in any other sources from England, but there are several references in Scandinavian historical writing to a king named Dan, progenitor of the Danes.20 Saxo Grammaticus begins the first book of the Gesta Danorum by naming Dan and Angul, sons of Humbli, as the originators of the Danish and English nations, respectively. According to Saxo, this Dan was the grandfather of Sciold (Scyld), from whom the Scyldings were descended.21 Although various other etymological interpretations of the name ‘Danes’ were current (Saxo himself mentions that Dudo of St Quentin derives the name from ‘Danaans’), Dan is found in a number of other Scandinavian sources too. A King Dan is also mentioned in the twelfth-century Chronicon Lethrense (c.1170), as the son of a king of Sweden, who ruled Denmark in the time of the Emperor Augustus and gave his name to the Danes.22 Snorri Sturluson, in the prologue to Heimskringla and in Ynglinga saga, says that Dan was the first person to be called king by the Danes.23 King Dan is probably a purely legendary figure, a back-formation from the name of the Danes, as Angul is from the English.24 Although these brief references do not say whether Dan was thought to have ever held land in England, it seems possible that the ultimate source of Gaimar’s information may have been connected to these Scandinavian traditions. The idea that the Danes ruled in England before the invasions of the ninth century does also appear in some late Norse sagas; Hrólfs saga kraka, for instance, has a Danish man as the second king to rule Northumbria after the foundation of that kingdom.25 In England, the idea of a historical Danish claim to rule is mentioned in some other sources of the later twelfth century: Richard FitzNigel, writing in the 1170s, says in his Dialogue of the Exchequer that the Danes invaded England in the Anglo-Saxon period not just for plunder but because, ‘as the history of Britain tells more fully’, they claimed an ancient legal right to rule England.26 It is possible, however, that this is a reference to Gaimar’s Estoire (or the lost portion of it dealing with the history of the Britons) so it may not be independent evidence for the idea.
This is not the only occasion where Gaimar seems to have had access to sources for Viking Age history which were unknown to other chroniclers, and which give a different slant to his interpretation of England’s Danish past. Particularly notable is his lengthy narrative about the Viking capture of York in 866–7, which describes how the Danes were invited to invade Northumbria as part of a feud between the Northumbrian nobles and their king.27 In this story, Gaimar tells how the Northumbrian king Osberht (here called Osbryht) rapes the wife of a man named Buern Butsecarl, a noble and valiant sailor. Buern, seeking to avenge his wife, goes to the Danes and incites them to attack Northumbria to punish Osbryht. Buern’s supporters depose Osbryht and replace him with Ælla, and Buern brings the Danes to York, where they capture and kill Osbryht. While this is going
on, the new king Ælla is out in the woods hunting. He boasts to his knights about how many deer he has caught and killed, and a mysterious blind man, overhearing them, tells him the Danes have caught more – they have captured York and killed many men. Ælla refuses to believe him, but the blind man says that the truth of his words will be proved by this: Ælla’s nephew Orrum will be the first one killed in the next battle at York. In a vain effort to defeat this prophecy, Ælla shuts up his nephew in a tower and returns to York, but his nephew escapes by jumping out of the tower, using two shields as makeshift wings. He rushes off to fight against the Danes and he and Ælla are both killed in battle – and as the blind man foretold, the Danes triumph. Gaimar notes that Ælla was killed at a place called Ellecroft, and adds that ‘in the very centre of England’ stands a cross which the English call Ellecross (neither place has been identified).
Gaimar probably learned of this story from Lincolnshire sources, but it seems possible that it was in origin a Northumbrian tradition, as York and the two Northumbrian kings feature so prominently. There are some points of contact here with the East Anglian traditions about Ivar and Ubbe which we looked at in Chapter 2, but there are numerous important differences too. This is also a story of revenge, but in this case the Danes are not the ones injured – they are merely the instruments of Buern’s vengeance on the king.28 As in the story of Lothbrok’s murder, it is a man named Beorn who is responsible for bringing the Danes to England, but Gaimar’s Buern Butsecarl is envisaged very differently from Edmund’s murderous huntsman – he is the hero of the story, a noble man standing up against a tyrannous king. The most significant difference is, of course, the culpability attached to the English kings, Osbryht and (to a much lesser degree) Ælla, and in this respect Gaimar again seems to be closer to Norse tradition than to the English stories about Lothbrok and the innocent Edmund. In Scandinavian tradition, it is Ælla who is responsible for bringing about the Danish invasion because he puts Ragnar to death in a snake-pit. Here, however, this take on the story aligns with Gaimar’s own broader interest in figures like Buern as rebels against the unjust exercise of royal power – he favours stories which emphasise that kings must be subject to the law and respect the rights of their vassals.29
The story of the blind man’s prophecy is also an intriguing element, which suggests without stating outright that the fate of the wicked king Osbryht had some kind of divine sanction. Ian Short notes that this is one of the rare moments where supernatural influences appear in Gaimar’s narrative, apart from in the Havelok story, his other extended narrative about the Danes.30 We might compare the blind man to the mysterious prophet Siward meets who tells him of his destiny; in Old Norse literature an encounter with a mysterious, prophetic old man, one-eyed or blind, is often a sign that someone has met Odin, who walks the world in disguise helping his favoured heroes and foretelling the fates of men. Ælla’s blind man might be drawn from a version of this trope, but Gaimar again adapts it to suit his interest in the punishment of kings who violate the law – there is perhaps a sense that Ælla, in attempting to defy the prophecy and save his nephew from his appointed fate, has sinned against the proper workings of divine justice.
Some of this narrative may have come from local legend about the Danish invasions, and there is similar legendary material in the story that follows, of St Edmund’s death at the hands of the Danes. Although Gaimar says he will not write at great length about Edmund because more information is available about him elsewhere, he has several details about Edmund’s death not found in other sources, such as the name of the man who finally cuts off Edmund’s head after he has been shot full of arrows (named by Gaimar as Coran Colbe), and a riddling dialogue between Edmund and the Danes.31 Even if this material has its roots in the Anglo-Scandinavian society of twelfth-century Lincolnshire, however, the Estoire incorporates it into a much larger narrative of English and British history. Gaimar’s Estoire retells the story of pre-Conquest England for a Norman aristocratic audience who may have seen themselves as the latest in a long line of conquerors, relatively new to England but nonetheless heirs to its history and land.32 In this text, history, romance and legend blend to such an extent that they become indistinguishable, and together they form a persuasive narrative in which England – and particularly the East Midlands, the home of Gaimar’s patrons – emerges as an area which has been contested between many different rulers over the centuries. Within the Estoire the Danes, like the Anglo-Saxons and the Normans, can stake their claim to rule on historical precedent and ancestral right.
28. Guy of Warwick fights a dragon (British Library, Yates Thompson MS. 13, f. 14)
The Danes in Guy of Warwick
The idea of a historical Danish right to rule England also appears in the context of an Anglo-Norman retelling of Anglo-Saxon history in the corpus of romance texts which centre on the hero Guy of Warwick. Although Guy’s adventures are nominally set in Anglo-Saxon England, in the reign of a king named Æthelstan, Guy cannot be identified with any real figure; his exploits are essentially fictitious, placing a Norman knight within an imagined version of the Anglo-Saxon past. Guy was one of the most celebrated heroes of medieval romance, and his story survives in multiple incarnations.33 The earliest is an Anglo-Norman verse romance, Gui de Warewic, which was written in England in the first decades of the thirteenth century;34 this may have been composed by a canon of Osney Abbey near Oxford, working under the patronage of the family of the Earls of Warwick.35 There are also several Middle English versions of the romance surviving in manuscripts of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries,36 which differ from each other in various ways, but in general bear a close relationship to the Anglo-Norman poem.37 As well as the verse romances in Anglo-Norman and English, there are also accounts of the Guy legend in a number of chronicles from the fourteenth century, which find a place for Guy’s adventures in the reign of the tenth-century Æthelstan, reconciling the romance with their sources despite the absence of Guy’s exploits from any contemporary historical record.38 Guy was claimed as an ancestor by the Earls of Warwick, who began to name their sons after their supposed tenth-century forebear, and in time the historicity of the romance was reinforced by physical evidence of his existence: ‘Guy’s Cliff ’ in Warwick was pointed out as the site of his hermitage, and the axe of his defeated enemy Colbrand could supposedly be seen in Winchester Cathedral in the fourteenth century.39 The historical veracity of the Guy legend only began to be a subject of doubt in the seventeenth century, by which time Guy had become one of the best-known heroes in English literature.40
The basic story of Guy tells of a young knight who tries to win the woman he loves by a series of adventures, then in time repents for his youthful exploits, gives up the knightly life, and becomes a pilgrim and hermit in penance for his sins. Over the course of his lengthy career Guy has many adventures abroad, but we are concerned here with two episodes in the story, from the beginning and the end of Guy’s life, which both take place in England. Each involves him fighting on behalf of the English king Æthelstan, in the first case against an Irish dragon which has been terrorising Northumbria, and in the second against an invading Danish army. In this second episode, called back from his life of penance by his country’s desperate need, Guy takes on the Danes’ champion Colbrand in single combat and repels the invasion.
The two episodes in which Guy fights for Æthelstan – against the dragon and against the Danes – are set apart in several ways from the rest of his exploits. They are instances where the romance takes a particular interest in the pre-Conquest setting of the story, drawing on developing ideas about historical writing in the vernacular, and the first has sometimes been taken as a prefiguring of the second.41 Although the two English episodes form only a small proportion of Guy’s many adventures, they became the most celebrated of his feats: he is named as a famous dragon-slayer in Beves of Hamtoun for his victory over the dragon in Northumbria, and subsequent versions of the story singled out his combat against Colbr
and for special attention.42 Because the king in the Guy story is called Æthelstan, these two episodes have often been linked to the reign of the tenth-century king of that name: medieval chroniclers who found a place for Guy in Anglo-Saxon history usually located him in the time of Æthelstan, and both the dragon-fight and the Danish invasion have been interpreted as fictionalised versions of Æthelstan’s famous victory at Brunanburh in 937 (although Guy’s single combat is actually set in Winchester).43 One of the combatants at Brunanburh was Olaf Guthfrithson, king of Dublin and York; the name of the leader of Guy’s Danish invasion (Anlaf, a version of the Norse name Olaf)44 and the fact that it is a dragon from Ireland which terrorises Northumbria have both led to speculation that a narrative about Brunanburh lies somewhere behind these two episodes.45
It is true that the battle at Brunanburh was the subject of numerous legends – we have seen one of the narratives associated with it in the story of St Oda and the broken sword, and this is only one of several representations of the battle in English and Norse literature.46 Æthelstan’s fame may explain why this name was chosen for the king in the Guy of Warwick legend, but in fact Guy’s Æthelstan has very little in common with his Anglo-Saxon namesake. Much like the protagonist of the fourteenth-century romance Athelston, this Æthelstan is a fictional character whose name is attributable to contemporary views of the Anglo-Saxon past rather than to any resemblance to the historical king.47 The presentation of the king and the Danish invasion in the Guy story are in fact both more reminiscent of medieval historians’ descriptions of the reign of Æthelred the Unready, with a weak and passive king and an England helpless before the threat of Viking invasion. In the romances the English are presented collectively as craven and feeble, and the king as unable to defend his kingdom. At the Danes’ first appearance, Æthelstan’s counsellors tell him he will find many brave Englishmen to fight on his behalf, but when the challenge to single combat actually comes, there is no one but Guy. The general impression is of a nation in decline, weakened not only by external attack but by failings and cowardice among the nobility. No one comes forward to answer Æthelstan’s request for a champion to fight Colbrand (they all stand around and stare at the ground in embarrassment), and when Guy makes enquiries about the brave knights he knew in England before his pilgrimage abroad, he is told they are absent or dead. As Æthelstan despairingly concludes: