Shields resounding,
War-horns sounding,
Hild is shouting in the din!
Arrows singing,
Mail-coats ringing—
Odin makes our Olaf win!”[35]
Chapter XXIV
Canute the Great (1017–1035)
Canute, or Knut, the son of Sweyn, was in England when his father died. The Danes immediately elected him king, and he lay at Lindsey with his fleet when Ethelred returned to claim the kingdom. Canute was one of the greatest kings who ever ruled in England. Though he began his reign with an exhibition of ruthless cruelty by mutilating the high-born young nobles whom Sweyn had placed in his charge, cutting off their ears and noses, and afterwards boasting of his act, which made the English fear that they had in him a cruel master, as time went on his mind seems to have widened out into channels of broad and humane government. Even the English in the end agreed in styling him Canute the Great, a title they had heretofore given only to their own Alfred and Athelstan, the most constant enemies of the Danes. Canute’s ambitions were immense; he dreamed of no less a kingdom than the whole North of Europe, from England and Scotland on the west to Sweden on the East. Denmark and Norway he intended to weld into one country, over which he was to reign from England; for it was his intention no longer to rule England as a foreign conqueror, but to identify himself with the country to which he had come and to be in every way an Englishman. He determined that the country over which he ruled should retain its own laws, and that the Church should be fostered and all ancient dues discharged and rights respected. In the fifteenth year of his reign he expressed his ideas of government in a letter which he wrote to his people from Rome. It is worth while to listen to what he says. “I call to witness and command my counsellors, to whom I have entrusted the counsels of the kingdom,” he writes, “that they by no means, either through fear of myself or favour to any powerful person, suffer, henceforth, any injustice, or cause such to be done, in all my kingdom.... I command all sheriffs or governors throughout my whole kingdom not to commit injustice towards any man, rich or poor, but to allow all, noble and ignoble, alike to enjoy impartial law, from which they are never to deviate, either in hope of royal favour or for the sake of amassing money for myself; for I have no need to accumulate money by unjust exaction.... You yourselves know that I have never spared, nor will I spare, either myself or my labours for the needful service of my whole people.... I have vowed to God Himself, henceforth to reform my life in all things, and justly and piously to govern the kingdoms and the peoples subject to me, and to maintain equal justice in all things.”
These are the words of a high-minded man and a good sovereign; and our English annals tell us that they were not mere words, but were borne out by all Canute’s acts.
Yet at the beginning of his reign there was little sign that the King would rise above the level of his father Sweyn’s mode of life. His mutilation of the young hostages was only one example of this. When he began to reign he divided the kingdom into four parts, retaining Wessex, and placing Mercia, East Anglia, and Northumbria each under a separate chief. Two of these chiefs, Eirik and Thorkill the Tall, are well known in Norse history. Earl Eirik, or Eric, as he is called in the English chronicles, had been, as we have read, fighting on the side of the Danish King, Sweyn, against his own sovereign, Olaf Trygveson, at the battle of Svold.[36] He was son of Earl Hakon, the most powerful lord in Norway and the ruler of Norway before Olaf came to the throne[37]; after his fall and Olaf’s succession Earl Eirik and his brother, with many valiant men who were of their family, had left the country and gone over to Denmark. Eirik entered Sweyn Fork-beard’s service and married his daughter in 996; he spent his time in cruising and harrying, until he joined Sweyn in his wars against Olaf; and after Olaf’s disappearance at the battle of Svold Earl Eirik became owner of his war-vessel the Long Serpent, and of great booty besides. He and Sweyn and the Swedish King divided Norway between them, and Eirik got a large share and the title of earl, and he allowed himself to be baptized.