Europe in the Middle Ages

by Ierne L. Plunket

The Massacre of St. Brice’s Day, as this drastic measure is usually called, brought on England a bitter revenge at the hands of the angry Vikings. One well-armed force after another landed on the coasts, combining in an attack on the Anglo-Saxon King that drove him from the country to seek refuge in France. Very shortly afterwards he died, and Cnut, one of the Danish leaders, forced the country to accept him as her ruler.

This accession of a Danish foe might have been expected to undo all the work of Alfred and his sons, but fortunately for England Cnut was no reckless Viking with his heart set on war for war’s sake. On the contrary, he was by nature a statesman who planned the foundation of a northern Empire with England as its central point. He maintained a bodyguard of Danish ‘Hus carls’ supported by a tax levied on his new subjects in order to ensure his personal safety and the fulfilment of his orders, but otherwise he showed himself an Englishman in every way he could. In especial he made large gifts to monasteries and convents, bestowed favour and lands on English nobles, and accepted the laws and customs of the country whose throne he had usurped. King of Denmark, and conqueror of England and Norway, he was anxious to ally his Empire with the nations of the Continent. With this in view he went on a pilgrimage to Rome to win the sympathy of the Pope and took a great deal of trouble to arrange foreign alliances. He himself married Emma, widow of Ethelred ‘the Rede-less’, and a sister of the Duke of Normandy, thus pleasing the English and bringing himself into touch with France.

The mention of Normandy brings us to a second invasion of Northmen, for the Normans, like Cnut himself, were of Scandinavian origin. When some of the Vikings during the ninth century had sailed up the Humber and the Thames in the search of plunder and homes, others, as Charlemagne, according to the chronicler, had foreseen, preferred the harbours of the Seine, the Somme, and the Loire. In their methods they showed the same reckless daring and brutality as the early invaders of England, leaving where they passed smoking ruins of towns and churches.

Charles ‘the Bald’ and the feeble remnant of the Carolingian line who succeeded him were quite unable to deal with this terror, and it was only the creation of a Duchy of Paris, whose forces were commanded by a fighting hero, Odo Capet, that saved the future capital of France.

‘History repeats itself,’ it is sometimes said; and certainly the fate that the Carolingian ‘Mayors of the Palace’ had meted out to their Merovingian kings their own descendants were destined to receive again in full measure.

In 987 died Louis ‘the Good-for-nothing’, the last of the Carolingian kings, leaving as heir to the throne an uncle, Charles, Duke of Lorraine. In his short reign Louis had shown himself feeble and profligate; and the nobles of northern France, weary of a royal House that like Ethelred of England preferred bribing the goodwill of invaders to fighting them, readily agreed to set Charles on one side and to take in his place Hugh Capet, Duke of Paris, descendant of the famous Odo.

‘Our crown goes not by inheritance,’ exclaimed the Archbishop of Reims, when sanctioning the usurper’s claims, ‘but by wisdom and noble blood.’

The House of Capet

The unfortunate Duke of Lorraine, captured after a vain attempt to gain his inheritance, perished in prison, and with him disappeared the Carolingians. The House of Capet, built on their ruin, survived in the direct line until the fourteenth century, and then in a younger branch, the Valois, until France in modern times was declared a republic.

Under the Capets France became not merely a collection of tribes and races as under the Merovingians, nor a section of a European Empire as under the House of Charlemagne, but a nation as we see her to-day, with separate interests and customs to distinguish her from other nations. This process of fusion was slow, and King Hugh and his immediate successors appeared in their own day more as powerful rulers of the small district in which they lived than as overlords of France. When they marched abroad at the head of a large army, achieving victories, outlying provinces hastily recognized them as suzerains, or overlords, but when they turned their backs and went home, the commands they had issued would be ignored and defied.