If Long Compton thou canst see,
King of England thou shalt be.15
Some antiquarians linked this petrified king to the invading Danes. Camden speculated that the place-name Rollright indicated a connection with Rollo, the Viking warrior who was credited as the founder of Normandy.16 Jennifer Westwood has compared the Rollright Stones legend to a number of other stories and folktales linking particular landmarks to prophecies about invasion and conquest, some of which we have already encountered in the context of medieval legends about Danish invasion.17 The general idea of the story, as she says, is ‘pass such-and-such a point and such-and-such will follow’, and these traditions are often expressed in rhyming prophecies. A similar tradition and rhyme to that found at Rollright is recorded of Edgcote in Northamptonshire; there it is linked with a place called Danesmoor, which was, of course, said to be the site of a battle against the Danes.18 The earliest recorded instance of this prophecy tradition appears to be the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle’s entry for the year 1006, when Svein Forkbeard and his army were overrunning Wessex, and defied the local boast (or prophecy) which said that ‘if they reached Cuckhamsley Barrow they would never get to the sea’; Cuckhamsley Barrow is about 35 miles from the Rollright Stones, to the south of Oxford. The boast recorded in the Chronicle appears to be part of the wider legendary tradition surrounding the supernatural power of burial-mounds and their influence on kingship, accession and invasion, and the story attached to the Rollright Stones may be, as Westwood suggests, a later folklore version of this motif, linked (as in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle) to an ancient landmark which pre-dates the Danish invasions by many years.
29. The Rollright Stones (Jason Ballard)
Danes’ skins and Danes’ blood
One particularly gruesome and surprisingly common tradition about the Danes is the story of ‘Danes’ skins’. A number of English churches preserve a legend telling how a Danish warrior attempted to rob the church, but was caught by the local people and flayed alive, and his tanned skin was then nailed to the church door as a warning to other would-be pillagers. This tradition is remarkably widely distributed, recorded from Kent to Yorkshire: Samuel Pepys was told of this legend when he visited Rochester Cathedral in 1661, and it is also recorded from Westminster Abbey, Stillingfleet in Yorkshire, Stogursey and Mark in Somerset, and the Essex churches of Copford, Hadstock and East Thurrock.19
It seems unlikely, to say the least, that all or indeed any of these doors were actually covered with the remains of captured Danish pirates. Most of the doors in question date from after the end of the Anglo-Saxon period, and it is probable that some of these ‘skins’ were simply animal leather, as it was fairly common in the Middle Ages for wooden doors to be protected in this way. However, some surviving fragments from various churches have been analysed, first in the nineteenth century and again in the 1970s, and while most turned out to be animal leather, the samples from Hadstock and Copford were judged to be probably human skin.20 Rather than being the skins of Viking pirates, it seems likely that these were the much later remains of executed criminals who were flayed after death. The practice of flaying was rare in medieval England, although it does appear in some medieval sources as a punishment for treason (not sacrilege): at the end of Havelok, the treacherous Danish usurper Godard is flayed as a punishment for his betrayal and murder of the royal children he had sworn to protect (Havelok, 2430–511).21 Even this fictional example is, however, imagined very differently from the kind of vigilante justice referenced in the ‘Danes’ skin’ legends: the romance describes Godard’s humiliating punishment with characteristic relish, but it is enacted through a formal judicial procedure, laid down by a parliament of Danes convened by the king.
The idea of ‘Danes’ skins’ is also found in other contexts in folklore. In Sussex, ‘Dane’s skin’ was a term for light, freckled skin, while in the south-west of England Danish blood was instead associated with red hair: in Somerset, red-haired people were once said to be ‘a bit touched with the Danes’, while in Wiltshire they were ‘crossed with the Danes’.22 Red hair generally has negative associations in folklore, so these comments were presumably not intended to be complimentary, and it suggests a broader application of the phrase than the ‘skins’ on the church doors. Even if there is no plausible historical basis for the legend of these ‘skins’, however, the fact that these were identified as Danes’ skins suggests how the idea of the Danes had captured the popular imagination. Rather than reflecting any real continuity of tradition from the early medieval period, this kind of story demonstrates the later medieval and early modern tendency to identify the Viking Age as a formative period of national conflict.
30. St Botolph’s, Hadstock, in Essex, a possible site of the church built by Cnut in commemoration of the 1016 Battle of Assandun
But there may also be particular local resonances to this widespread tradition, since some of the churches where it appears are in fact associated with the Danes in one way or another. The existence of this tradition in seventeenth-century Rochester is noteworthy, since we have seen that one medieval story about the death of Beorn, son of Lothbrok, claimed he was swallowed up by the earth near Rochester; it is not clear where this idea originated, but there may have been some kind of imagined link between Beorn and Rochester in the later Middle Ages. Hadstock is even more interesting. This church is close to one of the possible sites for the Battle of Assandun, the last battle fought between Cnut and Edmund Ironside, which took place on 18 October 1016. This was the battle at which Cnut ‘won for himself all the English nation’, as the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle puts it, but its location has never been identified. The most likely sites are either Ashdon, close to Hadstock in north-west Essex, or Ashingdon, in the south-east of the county. A few years after becoming king, Cnut founded a minster church near the site of the battle to commemorate his victory, and St Botolph’s in Hadstock has been suggested as a likely candidate for this church, which would have been an important and impressive building.23 If Hadstock is Cnut’s church, the presence of a ‘Dane’s skin’ legend here is intriguing. The door of this church has been dated to the mid-eleventh century (a little later than Cnut’s foundation of 1020) – is it possible that some local awareness persisted here of a connection between this church and the Danes?
31. The eleventh-century door of St Botolph’s, Hadstock, said to have once been covered by a ‘Dane’s skin’
This is not the only piece of folklore from the area around Hadstock which is linked to the Danes and the Battle of Assandun. Local tradition, of uncertain date, claims that the battle was believed to have been fought at a certain Red Field – ‘red’ indicating that blood had been shed there – and that weapons had been dug up in the area.24 Hadstock and Ashdon are close to the Bartlow Hills, a Roman cemetery of round barrows long popularly associated with a battle between the English and Danes.25 These hills are the largest Roman barrows in Britain; there were originally seven, of which three remain.26 Their name has sometimes been recorded as the ‘Battle Hills’, and Camden noted that local lore said they were built to bury a slain Danish army:
The country people say that they were reared after a field there fought against the Danes. For, Dane-wort which with bloud-red berries, commeth up heere plenteously, they still call by no other name than Danes-bloud, of the number of Danes that were there slaine, verily beleeving that it blometh from their bloud.27
‘Dane-wort’ and ‘Danes-blood’ are part of another widely distributed tradition, the idea that certain plants grew on battlefields where the blood of Viking armies had been shed.28 The same story and similar names are attached in different parts of the country to the pasque flower, the snake’s head fritillary and the clustered bell-flower, all of which bear purple or reddish flowers reminiscent of the colour of blood. ‘Dane-wort’ usually refers to the dwarf elder, which has stems and leaves which turn red in September and fruit which when ripe yields a purple-red juice. The berries are poisonous, and Somerset tradition sai
d this was because it grew from the bodies of slaughtered Danes.29 It grows in churchyards and in disturbed soil, so may indeed have flourished around tumuli and battlegrounds, and been associated with the dead. These names are not recorded before the sixteenth century, but the Anglo-Saxons called the dwarf-elder wealhwyrt, in which the first element may mean either ‘foreigner’ (wealh) or ‘slaughter’ (wæl), and either interpretation seems to indicate that a connection between this plant and blood shed in battle against a foreign army goes back a long way.30 A parallel tradition is also recorded from Sweden, where the names Danskablod and mannablod were used for the dwarf elder, believed to have sprung from the blood of Danes fallen in battle.31
The folklore association between battlefields and the bloodred flowers which grow upon them is a very common one, found across the world, and it is an idea still familiar in modern Britain from the Remembrance Day poppy. The prevalence of the ‘Danes’ blood’ idea, though, like the ‘Danes’ skins’, illustrates how the Danes had come to take on the role of archetypal enemies: any despoiler of a church must have been a Dane, any battle and bloodshed must have had conflict with Danes at the root.
Resistance against the Danes
As ‘the Danes’ had become such a convenient national enemy, those who had fought against them were celebrated as national heroes. The popularity of Guy of Warwick, defender of England against a Viking invasion, endured well into the eighteenth century; enthusiasts of this hero could visit ‘Guy’s Cliff ’ in Warwick, which was said to be the place where Guy had spent his last pious days as a hermit. Although Warwick claimed Guy as its own, other towns also made a play for him: in the sixteenth century, Coventry rivalled nearby Warwick by displaying a bone of the giant boar supposedly slain by Guy.32 He was remembered too in Winchester, the supposed site of his single combat against the Danish champion Colbrand: in the fourteenth century visitors could marvel at the vanquished Colbrand’s axe, hanging in Winchester Cathedral.33 Guy’s legend is perhaps one of the best examples of how traditions about the Danes could endure and evolve from their medieval beginnings: from his origins in the family myth of an Anglo-Norman aristocratic dynasty and his chivalric adventures in the medieval romances, Guy became a hero who fulfilled the role of giant-killer and even the slayer of a monstrous cow.34
Similarly, Wiltshire tradition celebrated a local man named John Rattlebone, who had supposedly fought for Edmund Ironside against the Danes at the Battle of Sherston in 1016. This story is first recorded in the seventeenth century by John Aubrey, who says that a small carved figure in Sherston church was believed to represent Rattlebone; in the battle Rattlebone was mortally wounded, but staunched the flow of blood by pressing a stone tile to his wound, and fought to the bitter end.35 Just as folk etymology provided a variety of battlefields and burial-sites belonging to ‘the Danes’, so celebration of the resistance could also be developed out of place-names: Camden records that the inhabitants of Manchester believed that their town derived its name from the valiant way their ancestors had fought against the Danes, and in honour of their manly endeavours, they had been rewarded with the name Manchester, ‘city of men’. (Camden politely notes his own doubts about this etymology, since the name, as he knew, long pre-dated the Danish invasions.)36
In the late medieval period, victory over the Danes was also linked with the customs of Hocktide, a festival celebrated on the second Monday and Tuesday after Easter.37 The chief activity associated with Hocktide involved groups of women capturing men and binding them with ropes until they paid a small ransom to be freed. This was apparently a kind of post-Easter festival of misrule, but the origins of these Hocktide customs – and even the name of the festival – are very obscure. It was first recorded in London in 1406 and became popular over the course of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, mostly within a fairly restricted area in the south of England. The late emergence of the custom notwithstanding, however, Hocktide was retrospectively explained as a celebration of Anglo-Saxon victory over the Danes: it was variously said to commemorate the St Brice’s Day massacre in 1002, the death of the last Danish king, Harthacnut, in 1042, or an unspecified occasion when a group of Saxon women outwitted and captured some invading Danes.38 (It is probably worth noting that St Brice’s Day is in November, and Harthacnut died in June; neither date was connected in any way to Easter.) In Coventry the townspeople re-enacted their ancestors’ supposed triumph over the Danes with a yearly Hock Tuesday play; although suppressed in the sixteenth century, it was revived and performed before Queen Elizabeth in 1575.39 Hocktide had almost entirely died out by the end of the seventeenth century. The only place which still celebrates a version of the festival is Hungerford in Berkshire, but – despite the medieval legend that the town took its name from the Danish warrior Ivar – the Danes do not feature in modern Hungerford’s Hocktide festivities.
In this group of stories we might also include the legends which proliferated about Alfred the Great’s battles against the Danes, which usually involve a mixture of antiquarian investigation of the Anglo-Saxon sources mingled with a great deal of imagination. Alfred was already a larger-than-life figure in historical writing by the end of the Anglo-Saxon period, and the growth of legends around him only accelerated after the Norman Conquest as he became idealised as ‘England’s darling’, wise ruler and defender of his kingdom against invasion. Some of the most well-known traditions about his resistance to the Danes are, however, of much later date: for instance, the idea that Alfred cut or restored the White Horse of Uffington to celebrate his victory over the Danes was first put forward in 1738, and became popular with Alfred’s many Victorian admirers.40
Not all the Danish links produced by folk etymology and antiquarian speculation cast Danes as the enemy, although most did. The town of Knutsford in Cheshire, which presumably took its name from a Scandinavian settler or landowner named Cnut (Old Norse Knútr), claimed that this Cnut was in fact the eleventh-century king of England. (Cnut was a fairly common name, and there is no particular reason to think the king was the town’s namesake.) Local legend explains that the name arose when Cnut, with his army, forded the river that runs through the town. After crossing the river he sat down to shake the sand from his shoes, just at the moment when a wedding party happened to be passing by. He wished the couple joy, and as many children as there were grains of sand in his shoe. This was said to be the origin of the town’s custom of ‘sanding’, decorating the street in front of a bride’s house with elaborate patterns drawn in coloured sand.41
It is unusual, but not unique, to find Cnut featuring in local folklore as a benevolent fairytale king. He was remembered in a similarly positive light at Ely, as early as the twelfth century,42 and in the area around Ramsey and Peterborough. It was said that Cnut had a fishing-box at Bodsey, near Ramsey, and that his children would travel by boat between Peterborough and Ramsey on their way to school. One day a storm blew up as they were crossing Whittlesey Mere, and two of Cnut’s sons were drowned. They were buried at Bodsey, and local tradition claimed their tombstone could once be seen in the dining room of Bodsey House. To prevent any more such tragedies, the story goes, Cnut had a ditch cut on the border between Huntingdonshire and Cambridgeshire, which was known as ‘Knouts-delf’ or ‘Kings-delf ’.43
And, of course, a number of towns in England proudly claim to be the place where Cnut tried to hold back the tide. This is today perhaps the most genuinely popular piece of folklore about Cnut, still commonly cited (and commonly misunderstood) as a warning against arrogance or the foolishness of trying to command what is beyond one’s control. The story dates back to the first half of the twelfth century, when it was first told by Henry of Huntingdon and Gaimar; they both regard it as an illustration of Cnut’s wisdom and piety, demonstrating how Cnut, as a Christian Viking king, knew better than anyone that only God can control the sea.44 Gaimar says that the incident took place on the banks of the Thames at Westminster, while Henry does not specify a location. Over the years, however, it
has been variously claimed to have taken place at Southampton, Bosham in Sussex, Canewdon in Essex (another argument from folk etymology, deriving the name ‘Canewdon’ from ‘Canute’), and Gainsborough in Lincolnshire. These towns vigorously defend their claims to be the place where Cnut really tried to hold back the sea (or the tide of the River Trent, in Gainsborough’s case). As the event is unlikely to have happened at all, unfortunately none of these claims can be substantiated, but it is an example of how enduring some of the medieval legends about the Danes have been – there are still places keen to celebrate a link with the most successful of all Viking kings.
32. A modern memorial to Cnut at Shaftesbury Abbey, showing the king demonstrating that he could not command the waves
Some of this has taken us a long way from the medieval texts, but there are elements of these more recent traditions which resonate with some of the earlier narratives – particularly the sense that Viking invasion can serve as an explanation for the characteristics, landscape or customs of certain English places. Today many parts of England are proud of their Viking heritage, and look to it as an explanation for some of the ways in which the former Danelaw differs from the rest of England. York is full of memorials to its Viking history (though not to Siward, who is known today, if he is known at all, from his role in Macbeth), while Grimsby still remembers Grim and Havelok. The medieval stories we have been looking at suggest that some of the inhabitants of these regions in the medieval period were no less interested in why the Vikings came to England, what they did there, and what legacy they might have left to their descendants. It is striking how often these stories focus on ancestry and heredity, from St Oda, growing from his Danish origins ‘like a rose among thorns’, to the fathers and sons of the Edmund/Lothbrok legends, the lines of paternal descent traced in the story of Siward (with the tell-tale ears of a bear), and Havelok, who comes into the care of a succession of adoptive fathers, good and bad, but in the end proves himself his Danish father’s son. Part of this is what happens as history becomes legend, as national conflicts are reimagined as personal struggles driven by private motives such as vengeance or love, and it reflects, too, the place of these stories in the family mythology of prominent aristocratic dynasties, both Anglo-Scandinavian and Anglo-Norman, who preserved and promoted legends about their distinguished ancestors. The family relationships which proliferate at the end of Havelok – a happy ending driven by marriages between English and Danish characters, adopted siblings, and the promise of many future children – draw attention to the recurring interest in these narratives in bonds of kinship as well as kingship. Perhaps this derives from a sense that for medieval writers and audiences in the former Danelaw, exploring the history of the Vikings in England was an opportunity not only to consider an important and formative moment in regional and national history, but also to tell stories of their ancestors.
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