The pirate king Guthrum agreed to become a
Christian, and was allowed to settle with his men in North-eastern England. Soon after that we find English and “settled” Danes fighting valiantly for their country against fresh bands of Danish pirates. We may call Alfred the first real “King of England”; he picked up the threads of the national life which the
Danes had cut to pieces. He translated good books into the Saxon tongue; he started the great history of England, called the “ Chronicle,”
which was kept year by year, in more than one monastery, down to 1154. He and his son
Edward, and his grandsons Athelstan and
Edmund, built fleets and fortresses, armed their people afresh and compelled them to fight in their own defence. For some years every fresh band of pirates met a warm reception and every rising of the Danes within the country was beaten down. King Edgar, 959-75, was called “The Peaceful,” and boasted that he had been rowed about on the river Dee by six lesser kings.
It was a brief respite,
For all about the shadowy kings,
Denmark’s grim ravens cowered their wings;
and in the reign of Edgar’s foolish son, Ethelred the Unready, the pirates came back more determined than before. Sweyn, king of
Denmark, came in person, and his son Canute;
and this time the Danes intended a thorough and wholesale conquest. This time Wessex fell also; even Canterbury was sacked, and its archbishop pelted to death with beef-bones after dinner. The “wise men” of unwise
Ethelred were as useless as the House of Commons would be to-day if there were a big invasion. They talked, but did nothing. A country in such a plight wants a man to lead it to war;
not thirty “wise men” or six hundred mem-bers of Parliament, with a sprinkling of traitors among them, to discuss how to make peace.
Ethelred’s “wise men” could only recommend him to buy off the Danes with hard cash called
“Danegold” or “Dane-geld.” The Danes pocketed the silver pennies, laughed, and came back for more. When for a moment there arose a hero, Ethelred’s son, Edmund Ironside,
he fought in one year, as Alfred had fought,
six pitched battles and almost beat Canute.
Then he agreed to divide the island with Canute,
and was murdered in the next year (1017).
Canute ruled England until his death in 1053.
He ruled Denmark and Norway also, and was in fact a sort of Northern Emperor.
It is always a temptation to an armed and agile nation
To call upon a neighbour and to sayi
“ We invaded you last night — we are quite prepared to fight,
Unless you pay us cash to go away.”
And that is called asking for Dane-geld,
And the people who ask it explain
That you’ve only to pay ‘em the Danegeld
And then you’ll get rid of the Dane!
It is always a temptation to a rich and lazy nation
To puff and look important and to say:
“Though we know we should defeat you, we have not the time to meet you,
We will therefore pay you cash to go away.”
And that is called paying the Dane-geld;
But we’ve proved it again and again,
That if once you have paid him the
Dane-geld
You never get rid of the Dane!
It is wrong to put temptation in the path of any nation,
For fear they should succumb and go astray,
So when you are requested to pay up or be molested,
You will find it better policy to say:
“We never pay any one Dane-geld,
No matter how trifling the cost,
For the end of that game is oppression and shame,
And the nation that plays it is lost!”
And Canute ruled England righteously. He turned Christian, he rebuilt the abbeys and churches which his ancestors had burned, hekept a strong little army of English or Danish soldiers about his person, and he kept order and peace. His sons, however, were good for nothing; and in 1042 Edward, the younger son of Ethelred, was recalled from “Normandy,”
whither he had been sent to be out of Canute’s way, and ruled England as king till 1066.
Now, as we approach the end of the Saxon period of our history let us take a look at our foreign neighbours. Those who will be important to us are four in number.
Denmark and Norway; except in the reign of Canute, these were always hostile.
Scotland, once Pict-land, the district north of the Forth and Clyde. Celtic “Scots”
from Ireland had conquered Celtic Picts from the sixth to the ninth century. They had brought with them the Christian faith, which had been preached in Ireland by St. Patrick in the fifth century. These Scots and Picts continually raided Northumbria, just as the
Picts had raided Roman Britain; and Canute had bought off their raids by giving to them all the land as far south as the Tweed, which thus became the “border,” as we have it to-day, between England and Scotland. Cumberland and
Lancashire seem to have remained an independent Celtic country till the end of the eleventh century, just as Wales did till the thirteenth.
Flanders, that is, roughly speaking, the modern Holland and Belgium; a land already famous both for pirates and traders; it lies right opposite the mouth of the Thames, and was just the place where the pirates could sell the gold candlesticks which they stole out of English churches.
Normandy, the great province on the north coast of France, of which the river Seine is the centre. This land the great Danish pirate, Rollo, had harried early in the tenth century, until the wearied King of France gave it him to keep, on condition that he would become a Christian. The “Normans,” that is North-men, married French wives, and became the cleverest, the fiercest, and, according to the ideas of the day, the most pious of Frenchmen. They did not cease to be adventurers, and we find their young men seeking their fortunes all over Europe. They thought their Saxon neighbours very slow and stupid fellows, who were somehow in possession of a very desirable island which they managed very badly, and which it was the Norman’s duty to take if possible.
Now King Edward was at heart more a
Norman than an Englishman, so pious that he was called “the Confessor,” always confessing sins that he had not committed, and for-getting his real sin, which was the neglect of the defence of his island. Like the Normans, he despised his own people. He gave himself away to his young cousin, Duke William of
Normandy, and would have liked to give the crown and land of England as well — in fact,
he made some sort of promise to do so — and he filled his court with Norman favourites and bishops. England had never yet been a united country. Ethelred, and Canute after him, had allowed great “aldermen” or earls to govern it, one for Northumbria, one for Mercia,
one for Wessex; Edward continued the same plan, and so these great earls were more powerful than the King himself. Northumbria and
Mercia were largely Danish at heart and looked more to Denmark than to Wessex for a king.
It was on Wessex, then, that the main resistance to Normandy would fall if the Normans attacked England.
Edward had no children, and as he drew toward his death, the great Earl Harold of
Wessex had to make up his mind whether he would submit to Duke William of Normandy,
or call in Danish help, or seize the crown of England for himself. Ambition and patriotism both said “Seize it”; and on Edward’s death, in January 1066, Harold did so.
Danes and Norwegians were on the alerttoo; and it looked as if England might be crushed between two sets of enemies. For
William had long been preparing for a spring at it: he had won the friendship of Flanders;
and he had the Pope on his side, for the English Church was by no means too obedient to the Pope at this time. William now set about collecti
ng a great army of the best fighting men that France, Brittany, and Flanders could produce. Our brave Harold, on his side, got the .Wessex men under arms, and kept them watching all the summer. Northern
England could not help him, for, a month before William landed from France, a mighty
Norwegian host appeared in the Humber.
Harold, then, had to prepare to meet two invasions; and most gallantly he met them.
He flew to York, smashed the Norwegians to pieces at Stamford Bridge, and flew south again: but before he reached London William had landed in Sussex. There, upon October
14th, on or near the spot where Battle Abbey now stands, was fought the Battle of Hastings,
one of the most decisive battles in history. It was the fight of French cavalry and archers against the English and Danish foot-soldiers and axe-men, a fight of valour and cunning against valour without cunning. All day they fought, till, in the autumn darkness, the lastof Harold’s axe-men had fallen beside their dying King, and the few English survivors had fled toward London. One of them left a bag of coins in a ditch at Sedlescombe, which was dug out a few years ago; the poor little silver pieces are a token of the many foreign countries with which Old England had dealings.
The Battle of Hastings decided, though not even William knew it, that the great, slow,
dogged English race was to be governed and disciplined (and at first severely bullied in the process) by a small number of the cleverest,
strongest, most adventurous race then alive.
Nothing more was wanted to make our island the greatest country in the world. The Saxons had been sinking down into a sleepy, fat, drunken,
unenterprising folk. The Normans were temperate in food and drink, highly educated, as education went in those days, restless, and fiery. They brought England back by the scruff of the neck into the family of European nations, back into close touch with the Roman
Church, to which a series of vigorous and clever Popes was then giving a new life. Such remains of Roman ideas of government and order as were left in Europe were saved for us by the Normans. The great Roman empire was like a ship that had been wrecked on a beach; its cargo was plundered by nationafter nation. But if any nation had got the lion’s share of its leavings it was the Frenchmen, and through the Frenchmen the Normans, and through the Normans the English.
It cost William about six years of utterly ruthless warfare to become master of all England. England resisted him bit by bit; its leaders had a dozen different plans; he had but one plan, and he drove it through. He was going to make an England that would resist the next invader as one “people. He had to do terrible things: he had to harry all Yorkshire into a desert; he had to drive all the bravest
English leaders into forest and fen, or over the
Scottish border, and to kill them when he caught them. He spared no man who stood in his way, but he spared all who asked his mercy. He could not subdue Scotland; but once he marched to the Tay and brought the
Scottish king Malcolm to his knees for the time.
William could not quite give up the plan of governing England by great earls; he was obliged to reward the most powerful of his
French followers with huge grants of English land; and these followers, who had been quite accustomed to rebel against him in Normandy,
often rebelled against him and his descendants in England. But his gifts of land were nearly always scattered in such a way that one greatman might have land perhaps in ten different counties, but not too much in any one place.
Besides, every landowner, big or little, had to swear a strong oath to be faithful to the King.
All gifts of land were to come only from the
King, all courts of justice should depend upon the King alone. It remained for William’s great-grandson Henry II to put all this down in black and white, in ink, on parchment.
Henry knew, what even William had not learned, that the pen is a much more terrible and lasting recorder than the sword.
In a word, William would be King not only of Wessex but of every rood of English land and of all men dwelling thereon. And so the country began once more to enjoy a peace it had never known since the Roman legions left. The sons of the very men who had fought
William at Hastings flew to fight for William against some rebel Norman earl, and earls and other men found that if they wanted to play the game of rebellion they had better go back to France. And the actual number of Normans who remained in England and took root was really very small, though among them we should find nearly all the nobles,
bishops, great abbots, and other leaders of the people. Very few Norman women came, so these men married English wives, and, within150 years, all difference between Normans and Englishmen had vanished. The Norman
Conquest of 1066 was the beginning of the history of the English race as one people and of England as a great power in Europe.
You might say, indeed:
England’s on the anvil — hear the hammers ring —
Clanging from the Severn to the Tyne!
Never was a blacksmith like our Norman
King —
England’s being hammered, hammered,
hammered into line!
England’s on the anvil! Heavy are the blows!
(But the work will be a marvel when it’s done)
Little bits of kingdoms cannot stand against their foes.
England’s being hammered, hammered,
hammered into one!
There shall be one people — it shall serve one
Lord —
(Neither Priest nor Baron shall escape!)
It shall have one speech and law, soul and strength and sword.
England’s being hammered, hammered,
hammered into shape!
CHAPTER III
THE NORMAN KINGS 1066-1154
So at last there was going to be a real government in this country, and it was going to do its duty. Few kings in the Middle Ages had any high idea of their “duty toward their people”
such as a great Roman emperor had, or such as King George V has. They chiefly thought of their country as a property, or “estate,” which they were going to cultivate mainly for their own benefit. But the better a king’s “ estate “
was cultivated, the better off were the people on it; and, when I say the “ people,” I mean every one except a few, perhaps a couple of hundred of the “barons” or greatest landowners. A
king could only grow very rich and powerful when his country was at peace at home and well armed against foreign foes; his people could only grow rich under the same conditions.
Not so the great barons. Each of them could most easily increase his riches at the expense of some other great baron or of the king; and the people who lived near him would be the firstto suffer if lie were allowed to do so. William had been obliged to allow his barons and earls to judge and govern their tenants in accordance with those
“feudal” customs which had come to be universal in Western Europe since Roman law had been lost and strong government with it. The great kings who succeeded him slowly, painfully, out of scanty material, had to recreate a strong government, and, so, to give peace and order.
Now of the first four, whom alone we call
“Norman” kings, three were wise and strong —
William I, William II, and Henry I — and the fourth, Stephen, was foolish and weak. So,
while the first sixty-nine years after the conquest were a time of increasing peace and prosperity, the next nineteen were the most dreadful period in our history.
Remember that the Norman barons were only five or six generations removed from the fierce
Danish pirates who followed Rollo to France.
There, as there were no strong kings to restrain them, they had been accustomed to build castles and to make their tenants fight for them in their private quarrels. When they got to
England, and grew richer in lands and tenants than they had been in Norma
ndy, they expected to play their familiar game with even greater success. Their kings, however, from the first,
determined they should not do so.
William found, in the slow, undisciplined old
Saxon life, several things which served him to keep his barons in order. For instance, there was an officer in every county called a sheriff-,
he collected the King’s rents and taxes; he presided over the rude court of justice which was held in every county; he was supposed to lead to battle the free landowners of that county.
William made his sheriffs much more powerful,
and made them responsible for the peace of their counties. In England, too, there had been few castles, and these only stockades of wood on the top of earthen mounds; whereas in
France every baron had a castle. On the
Welsh and Scottish borders William was obliged to allow, and even to encourage, his followers to build castles, but elsewhere he forbade it.
But he built a great many royal castles and filled them with faithful paid soldiers. Again,
in Normandy there had been barons as rich in lands and money as the Duke himself; but
William kept enormous tracts of English land in his own hands, and so made the Crown ten times richer than any baron. In Normandy the Duke had no real system of taxes; in England the King could and did levy a regular tax of so many shillings on each estate. Ethelred had begun this in order to get money to bribe the Danes; the later kings had continued it.
Many estates were, however, free from this tax, and no doubt it was always difficult to collect. So, in 1085, William sent officers to every village and county in England to find out who must pay the tax and how much each must pay. These officers called together a sort of
Complete Works of Rudyard Kipling (Illustrated) Page 828