I
Since the current of barbarian immigration which overthrew the civilisation of Rome in the West, probably no national movement of the kind has more profoundly affected the general course of history than the expansion of Scandinavia which fills the ninth and tenth centuries. Alike in their constructive and destructive work, in the foundation of new communities on conquered soil, as in the changes produced by reaction in the states with which they came in contact, the Northmen were calling into being the most characteristic features of the political system of medieval Europe. Their raids, an ever-present danger to those who dwelt near the shores of the narrow seas, wrecked the incipient centralisation of the Carolingian Empire, and gave fresh impetus to the forces which were already making for that organisation of society which we describe as feudalism; and yet in other lands the Northmen were to preserve their own archaic law and social custom longer than any other people of Germanic stock. The Northmen were to bring a new racial element into the life of Western Europe, but whether that element should adapt itself to the conditions of its new environment, or whether it should develop new forms of political association for itself, was a question determined by the pre-existing facts of history and geography.
For the geographical extent of Scandinavian enterprise is as remarkable as its political influence. At the close of the third quarter of the tenth century it seemed likely that the future destinies of northern Europe would be controlled by a great confederation of Scandinavian peoples. In the parent lands of Norway, Denmark, and Sweden three strong kingdoms had been created by Harold Fair Hair, Gorm the Old, and Eric of Upsala; the Orkneys and Shetlands formed a Norwegian earldom, and a number of vigorous Norse principalities had been planted along the east coast of Ireland. In the extreme north Scandinavian adventurers were already settling the inhospitable shores of Greenland, and lawless chieftains from Norway had created the strange republic of Iceland, whose stormy life was to leave an imperishable memorial in the wonderful literature of its sagas. Normandy was still the “pirates’ land” to the ecclesiastical writers of France, and the designation was correct in so far that the duchy still maintained frequent relations with the Scandinavian homeland and had as yet received no more than a superficial tincture of Latin Christianity. England, at the date we have chosen, was enjoying a brief respite between two spasms of the northern peril, but the wealthiest portion of the land was Scandinavian in the blood of its inhabitants, and within twenty years of the close of the century the whole country was to be united politically to the Scandinavian world.
The comparative failure of this great association of kindred peoples to control the subsequent history of northern Europe was due in the main to three causes. In the first place, over a great part of this vast area the Scandinavian element was too weak in mere numbers permanently to withstand the dead weight of the native population into which it had intruded itself. It was only in lands such as Iceland, where an autochthonous population did not exist, or where it was reduced to utter subjugation at the outset, as in the Orkneys, that the Scandinavian element permanently impressed its character upon the political life of the community. And in connection with this there is certainly to be noted a distinct decline in the energy of Scandinavian enterprise from about the middle of the eleventh century onward. For fully a hundred years after this time the Northern lands continued to send out sporadic bodies of men who raided more peaceful countries after the manner of the older Vikings, but Scandinavia produced no hero of more than local importance between Harold Hardrada and Gustavus Vasa. The old spirit was still alive in the North, as the stories of the kings of Norway in the Heimskringla show; but the exploits of Magnus Bareleg and Sigurd the Jerusalem-farer are of far less significance in general history than the exploits of Swegen Forkbeard and Olaf Tryggvasson, and trade and exploration more and more diverted the energy which in older times would have sought its vent in warlike adventure. And of equal importance with either of the causes which have just been described must be reckoned the attraction of Normandy within the political system of France. By this process Normandy was finally detached from its parent states; it participated ever more intimately in the national life of France, and the greatest achievement of the Norman race was performed when, under the leadership of William the Conqueror, it finally drew England from its Scandinavian connections, and united it to the richer world of western Europe. It was the loss of England which definitely compelled Scandinavia to relapse into isolation and comparative political insignificance.
But the Norman Conquest of England was a many-sided event, and its influence on the political destiny of Scandinavia is not its most important aspect. The events of 1066 derive their peculiar interest from the fact that they supply a final answer to the great problem which underlies the whole history of England in the eleventh century—the problem whether England should spend the most critical period of the Middle Ages in political association with Scandinavia or with France. The mere fact that the question at issue can be stated in this simple form is of itself a matter of much significance; for it implies that the continuance of the independent life of England had already in 1000 become, if not an impossibility, at least a very remote contingency. To explain why this was so will be the object of the following pages, for it was the weakness of the Anglo-Saxon polity which permitted the success of William of Normandy, as it gave occasion of conquest to Cnut of Denmark before him, and the ill governance on which their triumph was founded takes its main origin from events which happened a hundred years before the elder of them was born.
At the beginning of the third quarter of the ninth century, England was in a state of utter chaos under the terrible strain of the Danish wars. Up to the present it has not been possible to distinguish with any certainty between the various branches of the great Scandinavian race which co-operated in the attack on England, nor is the question of great importance for our immediate purpose. The same may be said of the details of the war, the essential results of which were that the midland kingdom of Mercia was overrun and divided in 874 into an English and a Danish portion; that England, north of the Humber, became a Danish kingdom in or about 875; and that Wessex, after having been brought to the brink of ruin by that portion of the Northern host which had not founded a permanent settlement in the north, was saved by its King Alfred in a victory which he won over the invaders at Edington in Wiltshire, in 878. As a result of this battle, and of some further successes which he gained at a later date, Alfred was enabled to add to his dominions that half of the old kingdom of Mercia which the Danes had not already appropriated[[4]]; a district which included London and the shires west of Buckinghamshire, Northamptonshire, Leicestershire, and Derbyshire. For the first half of the tenth century, the main interest of English history centres round the relations between the rulers of Wessex and its Mercian dependency, and the people of the Danelaw.
As the final result of twenty years of incessant warfare, the Danes had succeeded in establishing three independent states on English soil. Guthrum, the leader with whom Alfred had fought at Edington, founded in East Anglia and the eastern midlands a short-lived kingdom which had been reconquered by Edward the Elder before his death in or about 924. To the north of Guthrum’s kingdom came the singular association of the Five Boroughs of Derby, Nottingham, Lincoln, Leicester, and Stamford, whose territory most probably comprised the shires to which the first four of them have given name, together with Rutland and north-east Northamptonshire. Apart from its anomalous government, of which nothing is really known, this district is distinguished from Guthrum’s kingdom by the fact that the Danish invaders settled there in great numbers, founded many new villages, and left their impress upon the administrative and fiscal arrangements of the country. The Five Boroughs were occupied by Edward the Elder and conquered by his son Edmund, but their association was remembered in common speech as late as the time of the wars of Ethelred and Swegen, and the district, as surveyed in Domesday Book, is distinguished very sharply from the shires to its south and west.[[5]]
Beyond the Humber the Northmen had founded the kingdom of York, which maintained its independent existence down to Athelstan’s time and which was only connected with the south of England by the slackest of political ties when William the Conqueror landed at Pevensey. In this kingdom, whose history is very imperfectly known, but of which abundant numismatic memorials remain, the Norwegian element appears to have predominated over the Danish and its kings were closely connected with the rulers of the Norse settlements in Ireland. But the peculiar importance of this Northumbrian kingdom lies in the persistent particularism which it continued to display long after it had been nominally merged in the kingdom of the English. Its inhabitants were barbarous beyond the ordinary savagery of the Anglo-Saxons, and bitterly resented any attempt to make them conform to the low standard of order which obtained elsewhere in the land. Among so anarchical a people, it would be useless to look for any definite political ideas, and the situation was complicated by the union of Scandinavian Yorkshire with English Bernicia in one earldom, so that it is difficult to say how far the separatist spirit of Northumbria was due to the racial differences which distinguished it from the rest of the land, how far to surviving memories of the old kingdom which had existed before the wars of the ninth century, and how far to simple impatience of ordered rule by whomsoever administered. But the existence of such a spirit is beyond all doubt; it manifested itself in 957 when Northumbria joined with Mercia in rejecting King Edwy of Wessex; it is strikingly illustrated in the northern legend which represents the sons of Ethelred the Unready as offering Northumbria to Olaf of Norway as the price of his assistance in their struggle with Cnut; it came to the front in 1065, when the northern men rebelled against their southern earl, Tostig Godwinsson; it culminated in the resistance which they offered to William of Normandy, and was finally suppressed in the harrying to which he subjected their province in the winter of 1069. For a century and a half the men of Northumbria had persisted in sullen antagonism to the political supremacy of Wessex.
But the fact remained that within fifty years of Alfred’s death the house of Wessex had succeeded in extending its sway, in name at least, over all the Scandinavian settlers within the limits of England. The “Rex Westsaxonum” had become the “Rex Anglorum,” and Edmund and Edgar ruled over a kingdom which to all appearance was far more coherent than the France of Louis d’Outremer and Hugh Capet. But the appearance was very deceptive, and the failure of the kings of Wessex was so intimately connected with the success of William the Conqueror that its causes demand attention here.
In the first place, the assimilation of the Scandinavian settlers into the body of the English nation should not hide from us the fact that a new and disturbing element had in effect been intruded into the native population. This amalgamation was very far from resulting in a homogeneous compound. The creation of the “Danelaw” in its legal sense—that is, a district whose inhabitants obeyed a new law perfectly distinct from that of any native kingdom—was an event of the greatest consequence. It imposed a tangible obstacle to the unification of the country which was never overcome until the entire system of old English law had become obsolete. The very fact that the geographical area of the Danelaw did not correspond with that of any English kingdom or group of kingdoms makes its legal individuality all the more remarkable. The differences of customary practice which distinguished the east from the west and south were a permanent witness to the success of the Danes in England and they applied to just those matters which concerned most deeply the ordinary life of the common people. A man of Warwickshire would realise the fact that his limbs were valued at a higher or lower rate than those of his neighbour of Leicestershire, when he would be profoundly indifferent to the actions of the ruler of both counties in the palace at Winchester.
More important for our purpose than these general legal peculiarities were the manifold anomalies of the Old English land law. Were it not for the existence of Domesday Book we should be in great part ignorant of the main features of this system; as it is we need have no hesitation in carrying back the tenurial customs which obtained in 1066 well beyond the beginning of the century. So far as the evidence before us at present goes, it suggests that for an indefinite period before the Norman Conquest the social structure of the English people had remained in a condition of unstable equilibrium; in a state intermediate between the primitive organisation of Anglo-Saxon society and the feudalism, though rudimentary, of contemporary France. However strong the tie of kindred may have been in drawing men together into agrarian communities in former days, by the eleventh century at latest its influence had been replaced by seignorial pressure and the growth of a manorial economy. Of itself this was a natural and healthy process, but in England, from a variety of causes it had been arrested at an early stage. The relationship between lord and man was the basis of the English social order, but this relationship over a great part of the country was still essentially a personal matter; its stability had not universally acquired that tenurial guarantee which was the rule in the Frankish kingdom. The ordinary free man of inferior rank was expected to have over him a lord who would be responsible for his good behaviour, but the evidence which proves this proves also that in numberless cases the relationship was dissoluble at the will of the inferior party. In the Domesday survey of the eastern counties, for example, no formula occurs with more striking frequency than that which asserts that such and such a free man “could depart with his land whither it pleased him”; a formula implying clearly enough that the man in question could withdraw himself and his land from the control of his temporary lord, and seek, apparently at any time, another patron according to the dictate of his own fancy. In such a system there is room for few only of the ideas characteristic of continental feudalism; it is clear that the man in no effective sense holds his land of his lord, nor is the former’s tenure conditional upon the rendering of service to the latter. The tie between lord and man was that of patronage rather than vassalage; and its essential instability meant that the whole of the English social order was correspondingly weak and unstable. The Old English state had accepted the principle that a man must needs look for protection to someone stronger than himself, but it had not advanced to the further idea that, for the mere sake of social cohesion, the relationship thus created must be made certain, permanent, and, so far as might be, uniform throughout the whole land.
On the whole it is probable that this result was mainly due to the peculiar settlement which the Danish question had received in the early tenth century. Had the Danes conquered Wessex in Alfred’s time, so that the whole of England had been parcelled out among four or five independent Scandinavian states, the growth of seignorial control over free men and their land might have been indefinitely postponed. Had Alfred’s successors been able to effect the incorporation of the Danelaw with the kingdom of Wessex, the incipient manorialism of the south might have been extended to the east and a rough uniformity of custom in this way secured, giving scope for the gradual development of feudalism according to the continental model. But the actual course of history decided that the native kingdom of Wessex should survive, assert its superiority over the Scandinavian portion of the land, and yet be unable to achieve the conformity of its alien subjects to its own social organisation. Such at least is the conclusion suggested to us by the evidence of Domesday Book. Broadly speaking, Wessex and its border shires had presented in 1066 social phenomena which Norman lawyers were able to co-ordinate with the prevailing conditions of their native land. In Wessex each village would probably belong to a single lord, its land would fall into the familiar divisions of demesne and “terra villanorum,” its men would owe labour service to their master. But beyond the Warwick Avon and the Watling Street, the Normans encountered agrarian conditions which were evidently unfamiliar to them, and to which they could not easily apply the descriptive formula which so admirably suited the social arrangements of the south. They had no previous knowledge of wide tracts of land whose inhabitants knew no lord of lower rank than king, earl, or bishop; of villages which furnished a meagre subsistence to five, eight, or ten manorial lords; of estates whose owner could claim service from men whose dwellings were scattered over half a county. In twenty years the Normans, by conscious alterations, had done more to unify the social custom of England than had been accomplished by the gradual processes of internal development in the previous century; but it was the social division, underlying the obvious political decentralisation of the country, which had sent down the Old English state with a crash before the first attack of the Normans themselves.
But social evils of this kind do their work beneath the surface of a nation’s history, and it is the complete decentralisation of the Old English commonwealth which first occurs to our minds when we wish to explain the double conquest which the land sustained in the eleventh century; a decentralisation expressed in the creation of the vast earldoms which controlled the politics of England in the last years of its independence. The growth of these earldoms is in many respects obscure; to a limited extent they represent old kingdoms which had lost their independence, but in the main they are fortuitous agglomerations of territory, continually changing their shape as the intrigues of their holders or the political sense of the king of Wessex might from time to time determine. From the narrative of the Danish war presented by the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, it seems certain that each county south of Thames possessed an earl of its own in the ninth century; but this arrangement appears to have been modified by Edward the Elder, and it has been estimated that from the accession of Edward to the close of the tenth century Wessex and English Mercia were divided into a group of earldoms whose number never exceeded eight, a change which inevitably magnified the importance of the individual earl. In the meantime, Northumbria and the territory of the Five Boroughs were being ruled by men of Scandinavian blood, who claimed the title of earl but are very rarely found in attendance at the courts of the King of Wessex.[[6]] In the wars of Ethelred II. and Edmund Ironside with Swegen and Cnut, the issue of each campaign is decided by the attitude of such men as Aelfric, ealdorman of Hampshire, or Eadric of Mercia, to whom it belonged of right to lead the forces of their respected earldoms, and who seem to have carried their troops from one side to the other without being influenced in the smallest degree by any tie of allegiance which would bind them permanently to either the English or the Danish king. To Cnut himself is commonly attributed a reorganisation of the earldoms, in which their number was temporarily reduced to four, and in which for the first time Wessex as a whole was placed on an equality with the other provincial governments. The simplicity of this arrangement was soon distorted by the occasional dismemberment of the West Saxon and Mercian earldoms, and by the creation of subordinate governments within their limits; but throughout the reign of Edward the Confessor it is the earls of Wessex, Mercia, East Anglia, and Northumbria who direct the policy of the kingdom.
The privileges and powers inherent in the dignity of an earl were very considerable. We have already referred to his military authority, but he also seems to have enjoyed a judicial prerogative overriding the competence of the local assemblies of the hundred. His wergild was seemingly fixed at a higher rate than that of the ordinary noble, and the fine paid to him for a breach of his peace was half the amount which would be paid to the king, and double the amount paid to the thegn on account of a similar offence.[[7]] More important from the standpoint of politics was the fact that in every shire certain lands seem to have been appurtenant to the comital office,[[8]] and these lands formed a territorial nucleus around which an unscrupulous man like Godwine could gather the vast estates of which Domesday reveals him to have been in possession. In practice, too, it was the earls who seem to have gained more than any other men of rank by the growth of that system of patronage which has been described in a preceding paragraph; the natural influence of their position attracted to them the unattached free men of their spheres of government, and they became possessed of a body of personal retainers who might be expected to fight for them at any crisis in their fortunes and who would not be unduly scrupulous as to the causes of a quarrel in which they might be called upon to take part. Fortified by such advantages, the earls were able at an early date to make their dignities hereditary under all normal circumstances, and the attempt of Ethelred to nominate an earl of his own choice to Mercia in the person of Eadric Streona, and of Edward the Confessor to displace the house of Godwine in Wessex in 1051, led to disaster in each case, though the occasion of the respective disasters was somewhat different.
Just as the power of the great earls limited the executive freedom of the monarchy, so in general matters of policy the king’s will was circumscribed by the opinion of the body of his counsellors, his Witanagemot. Now and then a strong king might perhaps enforce the conformity of his witan to his personal wishes; but the majority of the later Anglo-Saxon kings were not strong, and when, on rare occasions, we obtain a glimpse into the deliberations of the king and the wise men, it is the latter who decide the course of action which shall be pursued.[[9]] That this was a serious evil cannot possibly be disputed. The political supremacy of the Witanagemot bears no analogy to constitutional government in the modern sense of the term: the witan were not responsible to the nation; they were not, in fact, responsible to anybody, for a king who tried to insist on their obedience to his will might find himself, like Ethelred II., deserted by his leading nobles at some critical moment. Also, if we estimate the merit of a course of policy by its results, we shall not be disposed to rate the wisdom of the wise men very highly. In 1066 England was found with an obsolete army, a financial system out of all relation to the facts on which it was nominally based, and a social order lacking the prerequisites of stability and consistency; that the country had recently received a comprehensive restatement of its ancient laws was due not to its wise men, but to its Danish conqueror Cnut. The composition of the Witanagemot—a haphazard collection of earls, bishops, royal officials, and wealthy thegns—afforded no security that its leading spirits would be men of integrity and intelligence; if it gave influence to men like Dunstan and Earl Leofric of Mercia, men who were honestly anxious to further the national welfare, it gave equal influence to unscrupulous politicians like Eadric Streona and Godwine of Wessex. The results of twenty-five years of government by the Witanagemot would supply a justification, if one were needed, for the single-minded autocracy of the Anglo-Norman kings.
The early history of the Witanagemot, like that of so many departments of the Anglo-Saxon constitution, is beset by frequent difficulties; but it seems certain that the period following the middle of the tenth century witnessed a great extension of its actual influence. In part, no doubt, this is due to the increasing power of its individual members, on which we have already commented in the case of the earls, but we certainly should not fail to take into account the personal character of the kings of England during this time. The last members of the royal house of Wessex are a feeble folk. Their physical weakness is illustrated less by the rapidity with which king succeeded king in the tenth century—for Edmund and Edward the Martyr perished by violence—than by the ominous childlessness of members of the royal house. Of the seven kings whose accession falls within the tenth century, four died without offspring. The average fertility of the royal house is somewhat raised by the enormous family of Ethelred the Unready; but fifty years after his death his male line was solely represented by an old man and a boy, neither of whom was destined to leave issue. Nor do the kings of this period appear in a much more favourable light when judged by their political achievements. Edward the Elder, Athelstan, and Edmund make a creditable group of sovereigns enough, though their success in the work they had in hand, the incorporation of Scandinavian England into the kingdom of Wessex, was, as we have seen, extremely limited. Edred, the next king, crippled as he was by some hopeless disease, made a brave attempt to assert the supremacy of Wessex over the midlands and north, but Edwy his successor was a mere child, and under him the southern kingdom once more becomes bounded by the Thames and Bristol Avon. The reign of Edgar was undoubtedly regarded by the men of the next generation as a season of good law and governance, and the king himself is portrayed as a model prince by the monastic historians of the twelfth century; but on the one hand the long misery of Ethelred’s time of itself made men look back regretfully to Edgar’s twenty years of comparative quiet, and also there can be no doubt that the king’s association with St. Dunstan gave him a specious advantage in the eyes of posterity.[[10]] Nothing in Edgar’s recorded actions entitles him to be regarded as a ruler of exceptional ability. The short reign of Edward the Martyr is fully occupied by the struggle between the monastic party and its opponents, in which the young king cannot be said to play an independent part at all, and the twenty years during which Ethelred II. misconducted the affairs of England form a period which for sheer wretchedness probably has no equal in the national history. Had Ethelred been a ruler of some political capacity, his title of “the Unready,” in so far as it implies an unwillingness on his part to submit to the dictation of the Witanagemot, would be a most honourable mark of distinction; but the series of inopportune acts[[11]] and futile expedients which mark the exercise of his royal initiative were the immediate causes of a national overthrow comparable only to the Norman conquest itself. With Edmund Ironside we reach a man who has deservedly won for himself a place in the accepted list of English heroes and we may admit his claim to be reckoned a bright exception to the prevailing decadence of the West Saxon house, while at the same time we realise that the circumstances of his stormy career left him no opportunity of showing how far he was capable of grappling with the social and political evils which were the undoing of his country. And then, after twenty-five years of Danish rule, the mysterious and strangely unattractive figure of Edward the Confessor closes the regnal line of his ancient dynasty. Of Edward we shall have to speak at more length in the sequel, noting here only the fact that under his ineffective rule all the centrifugal tendencies which we have considered received an acceleration which flung the Old English state into fragments before the first impact of the Norman chivalry.
It follows from all this that, according to whatever standard of political value we make our judgment, the England of the tenth and eleventh centuries will be found utterly lacking in all qualities which make a state strong and keep it efficient. The racial differences which existed within the kingdom were stereotyped in its laws. The principles which underlay its social structure were inconsistent and incoherent. It possessed no administrative system worthy of the name and the executive action of its king was fettered by the independence of his counsellors and rendered ineffective by the practical autonomy of the provincial governments into which the land was divided. The ancient stock of its kings had long ceased to produce rulers capable of rectifying the prevailing disorganisation and was shortly to perish through the physical sterility of its members. Nor were these political evils counterbalanced by excellence in other fields of human activity. Great movements were afoot in the rest of Europe. The Normans were revolutionising the art of war. The Spanish kingdoms were trying their young strength in the first battles of the great crusade which fills their medieval history; in Italy the great conception of the church purified, and independent of the feudal world, was slowly drawing towards its realisation. England has nothing of the kind to show; her isolation from the current of continental life was almost complete, and the great Danish struggle of the ninth century had proved to be the last work undertaken by independent England for the cause of European civilisation. In Alfred, the protagonist of that struggle, the royal house of Wessex had given birth to a national hero, but no one had completed the task which he left unfulfilled.