Lectures and Essays

by Goldwin Smith

It has been said that Christianity enervated the English and gave them over into the hands of the fresh and robust sons of nature. Asceticism and the abuse of monachism enervated the English. Asceticism taught the spiritual selfishness which flies from the world and abandons it to ruin instead of serving God by serving humanity. Kings and chieftains, under the hypocritical pretence of exchanging a worldly for an angelic life, buried themselves in the indolence, not seldom in the sensuality, of the cloister, when they ought to have been leading their people against the Dane. But Christianity formed the bond which held the English together, and the strength of their resistance. It inspired their patriot martyrs, it raised up to them a deliverer at their utmost need. The causes of Danish success are manifest; superior prowess and valour, sustained by more constant practice in war, of which the Saxon had probably had comparatively little since the final subjection of the Celt and the union of the Saxon kingdoms under Egbert; the imperfect character of that union, each kingdom retaining its own council and its own interests; and above all the command of the sea, which made the invaders ubiquitous, while the march of the defenders was delayed, and their junction prevented, by the woods and morasses of the uncleared island, in which the only roads worthy of the name were those left by the Romans.

It would be wrong to call the Northmen mere corsairs, or even to class them with piratical states such as Cilicia of old, or Barbary in more recent times. Their invasions were rather to be regarded as an after-act of the great migration of the Germanic tribes, one of the last waves of the flood which overwhelmed the Roman Empire, and deposited the germs of modern Christendom. They were, and but for the defensive energy of the Christianized Teuton would have been, to the Saxon what the Saxon had been to the Celt, whose sole monuments in England now are the names of hills and rivers, the usual epitaph of exterminated races. Like the Saxons the Northmen came by sea, untouched by those Roman influences, political and religious, by which most of the barbarians had been more or less transmuted before their actual irruption into the Empire. If they treated all the rest of mankind as their prey, this was the international law of heathendom, modified only by a politic humanity in the case of the Imperial Roman, who preferred enduring dominion to blood and booty. With Christianity came the idea, even now imperfectly realized, of the brotherhood of man. The Northmen were a memorable race, and English character, especially its maritime element, received in them a momentous addition. In their northern abodes they had undergone, no doubt, the most rigorous process of national selection. The sea-roving life, to which they were driven by the poverty of their soil, as the Scandinavian of our day is driven to emigration, intensified in them the vigour, the enterprise, and the independence of the Teuton. As has been said before, they were the first ocean sailors; for the Phoenicians, though adventurous had crept along the shore; and the Greeks and Romans had done the same. The Northman, stouter of heart than they, put forth into mid Atlantic. American antiquarians are anxious to believe in a Norse discovery of America. Norse colonies were planted in Greenland beyond what is now the limit of human habitation; and when a power grew up in his native seats which could not be brooked by the Northman's love of freedom, he founded amidst the unearthly scenery of Iceland a community which brought the image of a republic of the Homeric type far down into historic times. His race, widely dispersed in its course of adventure, and everywhere asserting its ascendancy, sat on the thrones of Normandy, Apulia, Sicily, England, Ireland, and even Russia, and gave heroic chiefs to the crusaders. The pirates were not without heart towards each other, nor without a rudimentary civilization, which included on the one hand a strong regard for freehold property in land, and on the other a passionate love of heroic days. Their mythology was the universal story of the progress of the sun and the changes of the year, but in a northern version, wild with storms and icebergs, gloomy with the darkness of Scandinavian winters. Their religion was a war religion, the lord of their hearts a war god; their only heaven was that of the brave, their only hell that of the coward; and the joys of Paradise were a renewal of the fierce combat and the fierce carouse of earth. Some of them wound themselves up on the eve of battle to a frenzy like that of a Malay running amuck. But this was, at all events, a religion of action, not of ceremonial or spell; and it quelled the fear of death. In some legends of the Norse mythology there is a humorous element which shows freedom of spirit; while in others, such as the legend of the death of Balder, there is a pathos not uncongenial to Christianity. The Northmen were not priest-ridden. Their gods were not monstrous and overwhelming forces like the hundred-handed idols of the Hindu, but human forms, their own high qualities idealized, like the gods of the Greek, though with Scandinavian force in place of Hellenic grace.

Converted to Christianity, the Northman transferred his enthusiasm, his martial prowess and his spirit of adventure from the service of Odin to that of Christ, and became a devotee and a crusader. But in his unconverted state he was an exterminating enemy of Christianity; and Christianity was the civilization as well as the religion of England.

Scarcely had the Saxon kingdom been united by Egbert, when the barks of the Northmen appeared, filling the English Charlemagne, no doubt, with the same foreboding sorrow with which they had filled his Frankish prototype and master. In the course of the half century which followed, the swarms of rovers constantly increased, and grew more pertinacious and daring in their attacks. Leaving their ships they took horses, extended their incursions inland, and formed in the interior of the country strongholds, into which they brought the plunder of the district. At last they in effect conquered the North and Midland, and set up a satrap king, as the agent of their extortion. They seem, like the Franks of Clovis, to have quartered themselves as "guests" upon the unhappy people of the land. The monasteries and churches were the special objects of their attacks, both as the seats of the hated religion, and as the centres of wealth; and their sword never spared a monk. Croyland, Peterborough, Huntingdon and Ely, were turned to blood- stained ashes. Edmund, the Christian chief of East Anglia, found a martyrdom, of which one of the holiest and most magnificent of English abbeys was afterwards the monument. The brave Algar, another East Anglian chieftain, having taken the holy sacrament with all his followers on the eve of battle, perished with them in a desperate struggle, overcome by the vulpine cunning of the marauders. Among the leaders of the Northmen were the terrible brothers Ingrar and Ubba, fired, if the Norse legend may be trusted, by revenge as well as by the love of plunder and horror; for they were the sons of that Ragnar Lodbrok who had perished in the serpent tower of the Saxon Ella. When Alfred appeared upon the scene, Wessex itself, the heritage of the house of Cerdic and the supreme kingdom, was in peril from the Pagans, who had firmly entrenched themselves at Reading, in the angle between the Thames and Kennet, and English Christianity was threatened with destruction.

A younger but a favourite child, Alfred was sent in his infancy by his father to Rome to receive the Pope's blessing. He was thus affiliated, as it were, to that Roman element, ecclesiastical and political, which, combined with the Christian and Teutonic elements, has made up English civilization. But he remained through life a true Teuton. He went a second time, in company with his father, to Rome, still a child, yet old enough, especially if he was precocious, to receive some impressions from the city of historic grandeur, ancient art, ecclesiastical order, centralized power. There is a pretty legend, denoting the docility of the boy and his love of learning, or at least of the national lays; but he was also a hunter and a warrior. From his youth he had a thorn in his flesh, in the shape of a mysterious disease, perhaps epilepsy, to which monkish chroniclers have given an ascetic and miraculous turn; and this enhances our sense of the hero's moral energy in the case of Alfred, as in that of William III.

As "Crown Prince," to use the phrase of a German writer, Alfred took part with his elder brother, King Ethelbert, in the mortal struggle against the Pagans, then raging around Reading and along the rich valley through which the 'Great Western Railway' now runs, and where a Saxon victory is commemorated by the White Horse, which forms the subject of a little work by Thomas Hughes, a true representative, if any there be, of the liegemen and soldiers of King Alfred. When Ethelbert was showing that in him at all events Christianity was not free from the ascetic taint, by continuing to hear mass in his tent when the moment had come for decisive action, Alfred charged up-hill "like a wild boar" against the heathen, and began a battle which, his brother at last coming up, ended in a great victory. The death of Ethelbert, in the midst of the crisis, placed the perilous crown on Alfred's head. Ethelbert left infant sons, but the monarchy was elective, though one of the line of Cerdic was always chosen; and those were the days of the real king, the ruler judge, and captain of the people, not of what Napoleon called the cochon a l'engrais a cinq millions par an. In pitched battles, eight of which were fought in rapid succession, the English held their own; but they were worn out, and at length could no longer be brought into the field. Whether a faint monkish tradition of the estrangement of the people by unpopular courses on the part of the young king has any substance of truth we cannot say.

Utter gloom now settled down upon the Christian king and people. Had Alfred yielded to his inclinations, he would probably have followed the example of his brother-in-law, Buhred of Mercia, and sought a congenial retreat amidst the churches and libraries of Rome; asceticism would have afforded him a pretext for so doing; but he remained at the post of duty. Athelney, a little island in the marshes of Somersetshire—then marshes, now drained and a fruitful plain—to which he retired with the few followers left him, has been aptly compared to the mountains of Asturias, which formed the last asylum of Christianity in Spain. A jewel with the legend in Anglo-Saxon, "Alfred caused me to be made," was found near the spot, and is now in the University Museum at Oxford. A similar island in the marshes of Cambridgeshire formed the last rallying point of English patriotism against the Norman Conquest. Of course, after the deliverance, a halo of legends gathered around Athelney. The legends of the king disguised as a peasant in the cottage of the herdsman, and of the king disguised as a harper in the camp of the Dane, are familiar to childhood. There is also a legend of the miraculous appearance of the great Saxon Saint Cuthbert. The king in his extreme need had gone to fish in a neighbouring stream, but had caught nothing, and was trying to comfort himself by reading the Psalms, when a poor man came to the door and begged for a piece of bread. The king gave him half his last loaf and the little wine left in the pitcher. The beggar vanished; the loaf was unbroken, the pitcher brimful of wine; and fishermen came in bringing a rich haul of fish from the river. In the night St. Cuthbert appeared to the king in a dream and promised him victory. We see at least what notion the generations nearest to him had of the character of Alfred.

At last the heart of the oppressed people turned to its king, and the time arrived for a war of liberation. But on the morrow of victory Alfred compromised with the Northmen. He despaired, it seems, of their final expulsion, and thought it better, if possible, to make them Englishmen and Christians, and, to convert them into a barrier against their foreign and heathen brethren. We see in this politic moderation at once a trait of national character and a proof that the exploits of Alfred are not mythical. By the treaty of Wedmore, the northeastern part of England became the portion of the Dane, where he was to dwell in peace with the Saxon people, and in allegiance to their king, but under his own laws—an arrangement which had nothing strange in it when law was only the custom of the tribe. As a part of the compact, Guthorm led over his Northmen from the allegiance of Odin to that of Christ, and was himself baptized by the Christian name of Athelstan. When religions were national, or rather tribal, conversions were tribal too. The Northmen of East Anglia had not so far put off their heathen propensities or their savage perfidy as to remain perfectly true to their covenant: but, on the whole, Alfred's policy of compromise and assimilation was successful. A new section of heathen Teutonism was incorporated into Christendom, and England absorbed a large Norse population whose dwelling-place is still marked by the names of places, and perhaps in some measure by the features and character of the people. In the fishermen of Whitby, for example, a town with a Danish name, there is a peculiarity which is probably Scandinavian.

The transaction resembled the cession of Normandy to Rolf and his followers by the Carlovingian King of France. But the cession of Normandy marked the dissolution of the Carlovingian monarchy: from the cession of East Anglia to Guthorm dates a regeneration of the monarchy of Cerdic.

Alfred had rescued the country. But the country which he had rescued was a wreck. The Church, the great organ of civilization as well as of spiritual life, was ruined. The monasteries were in ashes. The monks of St. Cuthbert were wandering from place to place, with the relics of the great northern Saint. The worship of Woden seemed on the point of returning. The clergy had exchanged the missal and censer for the battle-axe, and had become secularized and brutalized by the conflict. The learning of the Order was dead. The Latin language, the tongue of the Church, of literature, of education, was almost extinct. Alfred himself says that he could not recollect a priest, south of the Thames, who understood the Latin service or could translate a document from the Latin when he became king. Political institutions were in an equal state of disorganization. Spiritual, intellectual, civil life—everything was to be restored; and Alfred undertook to restore everything. No man in these days stands alone, or towers in unapproachable superiority above his fellows. Nor can any man now play all the parts. A division of labour has taken place in all spheres. The time when the missionaries at once converted and civilized the forefathers of European Christendom, when Charlemagne or Alfred was the master spirit in everything, has passed away, and with it the day of hero-worship, of rational hero- worship, has departed, at least for the European nations. The more backward races may still need, and have reason to venerate, a Peter the Great.