The principle is established from another side in the case of Norway. There the first notable monarchic unification had been wrought by the pagan Harold Fairhair (875), without the aid of Christianity; and the pagan resistance was so irreducible that revolters sailed off in all directions, finding footing in Scotland and Ireland, and in particular in Northern France and Iceland.[648] In the next generation the monarchy relapsed to the old position; and Harold's Christian son Hakon (educated in England) had to cede to the determined demands of the pagan majority, who forced him to join in the old heathen rites, and murdered the leading Christians;[649] a course followed by the further weakening of the power of the crown. The Danish Harald Bluetooth, son of Gorm, who then conquered Norway, sought to re-establish the Church by the sword; but Hakon Jarl, who followed, gave up Christianity in order to reign and again put it down by violence.[650] The next king to restore it, Olaf Tryggvason, who had met with Christianity in his wanderings in Greece, Russia, England, and Germany,[651] established that creed by brute force when he attained the throne (977), and again the spirit of local independence, abnormally conserved in Norway by the special separateness set up by the geographical conditions, fiercely resisted the new system as it had done the rule of Harold Fairhair, many defeated pagans withdrawing to remote glens and fastnesses, where to this day their mythology thrives.[652] On Olaf's final defeat and death (1000), his immediate successors, jarls supported by Denmark and Sweden, were content to leave paganism alone, as representing a too dangerous spirit of independence; and when St. Olaf, in turn, again undertook to crush it, he found he had but beaten down and alienated the forces that would have enabled him to resist Knut.[653] Danish "imperialism" had been evolved while the Norwegian kings were striving towards it; and St. Olaf was exiled, defeated, and slain (1030). His subsequent popularity is a mere posthumous Church-made cult of the Christian period.

The spread of Christianity among the Franks; in England; in Saxony by Charlemagne; in North Germany later; and among the Wends, Poles, Hungarians, and Bohemians, constantly exhibits the same phenomena. Always it is the duke or king who is "converted"; whereupon the people are either baptised in mass or dragooned for generations. A powerful king like Clovis could secure obedience; others, as in Scandinavia, Bohemia, and Wendland, lost life and kingdom in the attempt to crush at once paganism and local independence. Prussia was almost depopulated by sixty years of war before the Order of Teutonic Knights, who undertook to convert it on being awarded the territory, could extinguish by savagery its staunch paganism. The Christianisation of almost the whole of Northern Europe was thus a purely political process, accomplished in great part by the sword. See Hardwick, passim, and cp. the author's Short History of Christianity, pp. 211-16.

§ 2

The ultimate arrest of all aggression by the Scandinavian peoples is to be explained as a simple redressing of the balance between them and the States they had formerly plundered. To begin with, all the Scandinavian groups alike practised piracy[654] as against the more civilised States of Northern Europe; and piracy showed them the way to conquest and colonisation. At home their means of subsistence were pasturage, fishing, the chase, and an agriculture which cannot have been easily extensible beyond the most fertile soils; hence a constant pressure of population, promoting piracy and aggressive emigration. How the pressure was purposively met is not clear; but as the Scandinavian father, like the Greek and Roman, was free either to expose or bring up a new-born child,[655] there is a presumption that at some periods exposure was not uncommon.[656] There is even testimony, going back to the eighth century and recurring frequently as late as the twelfth, to the effect that a certain number of men were periodically sent away by lot when the mouths had visibly multiplied beyond the meat.

See, for instance, the Roman de Rou (1160), ed. Andresen, 1877-79, i, 18, 19, verses 208-25 of prologue. Pluquet, in a note on the passage in his edition (1827, i, 10), remarking that the usage is often mentioned, not only by Norman but by English and French annalists of the Middle Ages, adds that the oldest mention of all, in the Tractatus of Abbot Odo (d. 942), must be rejected, the document being apocryphal. That, however, is not the oldest mention by a long way. Paulus Diaconus (740-99) gives the statement in a very circumstantial form (cited by Rydberg, Teutonic Mythology, Eng. tr. p. 68) in his history of the Longobardians, his own stock, who he says came from Scandinavia. He testifies that he had actually talked with persons who had been in Scandinavia—his descriptions pointing to Scania. M. Pluquet notes (so also Crichton and Wheaton, i, 166-67) that no northern saga mentions the usage in question. But it was likely to be commemorated only by the stocks forced in that fashion to emigrate. The saga-making Icelanders were not among these. The old statement, finally, is in some measure corroborated by the testimony of Geijer, p. 84, as to the long subsistence of the Swedish practice of sending forth sons to seek their fortune by sea.

But without any such organised exodus there were adventurers enough.[657] Hence colonisations and conquests in Scotland, the Hebrides, Ireland, Iceland, Russia, England, and remote plundering expeditions by land and river, some getting as far south as Italy; one conquering expedition passing from Gaul through Arab Spain (827) and along the Mediterranean coasts, north and south; another passing through Russia to Constantinople. Thus the Norwegian and Danish stocks must have rooted in nearly every part of the British Islands; and the settlement in Gaul of a colony of revolters from Norway, in the reign of Harold Fairhair, built up one of the great provinces of France. Only in Iceland did the colonists preserve their language; hence, in terms of the hallucination of race, the assumption that the others "failed," when in reality they helped to constitute new races; no more "failing" in these cases than did the British stock in its North American colonies. It may be said, indeed, that the Teutonic stocks which overran Italy, Spain, and North Africa did in large part physically disappear thence, their physiological type having failed to survive as against the southern types. Even on that view, however, the impermanent type must in some degree have affected that which survived. In any case, the amalgamated Norse stock in Normandy, grown French-speaking, in turn overran England and part of Italy and Sicily, and, in the Crusades, formed new kingdoms in the East; while in the case of England, turning English-speaking, they again modified the stock of the nation. As against the notion that in this case there was "failure" either for French or for Normans, we might almost adopt the mot of M. Clémenceau and call England "a French colony gone wrong."[658] In terms of realities there has been no racial decease; it is but names and languages that have changed with the generations.

But there was an arrest of military exodus from Scandinavia; and thenceforward the Norse-speaking stocks figure as more or less small and retiring communities. They gave up piracy and conquest only because they had to, Danish imperialism causing the arrest on a wide scale, as every monarchic unification had done on a small.[659] When Knut reigned over six kingdoms, piracy was necessarily checked as among these; and when Knut's empire broke up after his death through the repulsive powers of its component parts and the relative lack of resources in Denmark, the various States of north-western Europe, in the terms of the case, were more able than before to resist Norse attacks in general. In England, William the Conqueror was fain to keep them off by bribery and intrigue; but the States with the greater natural resources grew in strength, while those of Scandinavia could not. When the pirates began to get the worst of it, and when the Scandinavian kings had cause to dread reprisals from those of the west, piracy began to dwindle. The last regular practitioners were the pagan Wends, and the republican pagans of the city of Jomsborg, who plundered the Scandinavians as they had of yore plundered others; and after the Christianised Danish people had for a time defended themselves by voluntary associations, both sets of pirates were overthrown by an energetic Danish king. The suppression was under Christian auspices; but it is a conventional fallacy to attribute it to the influence of Christianity. It was simply an act of necessary progressive polity, like the suppression of the Cilician pirates by Pompeius.

Messrs. Crichton and Wheaton make the regulation statement that when Christianity was introduced into Scandinavia, "it corrected the abuses of an ill-regulated freedom; it banished vindictive quarrels and bloody dissensions; it put a restraint upon robberies and piracies; it humanised the public laws and softened the ferocity of public manners; it emancipated the peasantry from a miserable servitude, restored to them their natural rights, and created a relish for the blessings of peace and the comforts of life" (Scandinavia, i, 196). For the general and decisive disproof of these assertions it is necessary only to follow Messrs. Crichton and Wheaton's own narrative, pp. 201, 213, 216, 219, 230, 240, 244, 247, 275, 278, 280, 308, 312, 322, etc., and note their contrary generalisation at pp. 324, 325. It was his "Most Christian Majesty" Anund Jakob who got the nickname of Coal-burner for his law that the houses and effects of malefactors should be burned to the value of the harm they had done. The Swedes, polygamous before Christianity, continued to be so for generations as Christians (Crichton and Wheaton, i, 197, 198, citing Adam of Bremen. Cp. Grimm, Geschichte der deutschen Sprache, i, 18, 188.) Civil wars and ferocious feuds greatly multiplied in the early Christian period, apart altogether from pagan insurrections. Geijer, while erroneously attributing to Christianity the lessening of war between Scandinavia and the rest of the world, admits that the passions of strife, "hitherto turned in an external direction, now spent themselves in a domestic field of action, generating civil discord and war. Christianity, besides, dissolved the effective bond of the old social institutions" (p. 40). In that case it clearly cannot have been religious feeling that checked external war. As to piracy, that was later practised by Elizabethan Protestants and by the Huguenots of La Rochelle, when the opportunities were tempting. As to popular misery, it is told in the life of Anskar that the poor in ancient Sweden wore so few that the first Christians could find a use for their alms only in foreign countries (Geijer, p. 33). That difficulty has not prevailed since. Messrs. Crichton and Wheaton later admit that the Danish peasantry, free as pagans, "gradually sunk under the increasing power and influence of the feudal chiefs and the Romish hierarchy" (p. 227), and that the Crusades did not forward the emancipation of the serfs in Denmark as elsewhere, the peasantry on the contrary sinking into "a state of hopeless bondage" (pp. 251, 252).

§ 3

From the period of arrest of aggression, the economic and political history of the Scandinavian States is that of slightly expansible communities with comparatively small resources; and their high status to-day is the illustration of what civilisation may come to under such conditions. In the feudal period they made small material or intellectual progress. It is not probable that the Norse population was ever greater than in the eighteenth century, though Malthus had a surmise that it might anciently have been so:[660] the old belief that Scandinavia was the great officina gentium, the nursery of the races which overran the Roman Empire, is a delusion; but it is certain that the increase since the twelfth century has been even slower than the European average. In the absence of emigration, this meant for past centuries constant restraint of marriage through lack of houses and livelihoods—the preventive check in its most stringent form. Emigration there must have been; but the check must also have been strong. Thus, while the lot of the common people, in so far as it remained free, was likely to be comparatively comfortable, the land-owning classes, in the absence of industry and commerce, tended to become nearly all-powerful; and the Church, which inherits and does not squander, would engross most of the power if not specially checked. The conditions were thus as unfavourable to intellectual as to material progress.