Europe in the Middle Ages

by Ierne L. Plunket

Northmen Raids

In their dragon-ships, the huge prows fashioned into the heads of fierce animals or monsters, the Viking ‘Earls’, weary of dicing and throwing the javelin at home, or exiled by their kings for some misdeeds, would sweep in fleets across the North Sea, some to explore Iceland and the far-off shores of Greenland and North America, some to burn the monasteries along the Irish coast, others to raid North Germany, France, or England. At first their only object was plunder, for unlike the Huns they did not despise the luxuries of civilization—only those who allowed its influence to make them ‘soft’. At a later date, when they met with little resistance, they began to build homes, and thus the east coast of England became settled with Danish colonies.

‘In this year’, says the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, writing under the date 855, ‘the heathen men for the first time remained over winter in Sheppey.’

Alfred the Great

During the fifty years that followed it seemed as if the invaders might sweep away the Anglo-Saxons as completely as the ancestors of these Anglo-Saxons had exterminated the original British inhabitants and their Roman conquerors. That they failed was largely due to one of the most famous of English kings, Alfred ‘the Great’, a prince of the royal house of Wessex. Wessex was a province lying mainly to the south of the River Thames, and at Wantage in Berkshire in the year 849 Alfred was born, cradled in an atmosphere of war and danger. From boyhood he fought by the side of his brothers in a long campaign of which the very victories could not hold at bay the restless Danes. When Alfred succeeded to the throne he secured a temporary peace and began to build a fleet and reform his army; but in a few years his enemies broke across his boundaries once more, and he himself, overwhelmed by their numbers, was forced to take refuge in the marshes of Somerset. Here at Athelney he built a fort and, collecting round him the English warriors of the neighbouring counties, organized so strong a resistance that at last he inflicted a decisive defeat upon the Danish army. King Guthrum, his enemy, sued for peace and at the Treaty of Wedmore consented to become a Christian and to recognize Alfred as King of Wessex, while he himself retained the Danelaw to the north of the Thames.

This was the beginning of a new England, for from this time Alfred and his descendants, having secured the freedom of Wessex, set themselves to win back bit by bit the territory held by the Danes. First of all under Edward ‘the Elder’, Alfred’s son, the middle kingdom of Mercia was won back, and the Danes beyond its border agreed to recognize the King of Wessex as their overlord, while later other Wessex rulers overran Northumbria and the South of Scotland, so that by the middle of the tenth century it could be said that ‘England from the Forth to the Channel was under one ruler’.

The winning back of the Danelaw had not been merely a matter of hewing down Northmen, nor did Alfred earn his title of ‘the Great’ because he could wield a sword bravely and lead other men who could do the same. He was a successful general because in an age of wild fighting he recognized the value of discipline and training. In order to obtain the type of men he required he increased the number of ‘Thegns’, that is, of nobles whose duty it was to serve the King as horsemen, while he reorganized the ‘fyrd’ or local militia. Henceforth, instead of a large army of peasants, who must be sent to their homes every autumn to reap the harvest, he arranged for the maintenance of a small force that he could keep in the field as long as required. Its arms were to be supplied by fellow villagers released from the obligation to serve themselves on this condition.

Alfred, besides remodelling his army, set up fortresses along his borders, and constructed a fleet; and, because he believed that no great nation can be built on war alone, he made wise laws and appointed judges, like Charlemagne’s Missi, to see that they were carried out. He also founded schools and tried, by translating books himself and inviting scholars to his court, to teach the men around him the glories and interests of peace. Amongst the books that he chose to set before his people in the Anglo-Saxon tongue was one called Pastoral Care, by the Pope Gregory who had wished to go to England as a missionary, and The Consolations of Philosophy, written by Boethius in prison.[4]

‘I have desired,’ said Alfred the Great, summing up his ideal of life, ‘to leave to the men who come after me my memory in good works’; and English people to-day, descendants of both Anglo-Saxons and their Danish foes, remember with pride and affection this ‘Wise King’, this ‘Truth-teller’, this ‘England’s darling’, as he was called in his own day, who like Charlemagne believed in patriotism, justice, and knowledge. For three-quarters of a century after Alfred’s death his descendants kept alive something at any rate of this spirit of greatness, but in 978 there succeeded to the crown a boy of ten called Ethelred, who as he grew up earned for himself the nickname of ‘rede-less’ or ‘man without advice’.

It is only fair before condemning Ethelred’s conduct to point out the heavy difficulties with which he was faced; both the renewed Danish attacks on his shores, and also the jealousies and feuds of his own nobles, the Earls, or ‘Ealdormen’, who had carved out large estates for themselves that they ruled as petty kings. Even a statesman like Alfred would have needed all his strength and tact to unite these powerful subjects under one banner in order to lead them against the invaders. Ethelred proved himself weak and without any power of leadership. The policy for which he has been chiefly remembered is his levy of a tax called ‘Danegeld’, or Danish gold, the sums of money that he raised from his reluctant subjects to pay the Danes to go away. As a wiser man would have realized, this really meant that he paid them to return in still larger numbers in order to obtain more money. At last, alarmed at the result of this policy, he did something still more short-sighted and less defensible: he ordered a general massacre of all the Danes in the kingdom.