At last, close upon Whitsuntide, Alfred emerged from the forest of Selwood, which seems to have hitherto served him as cover, collected round him at “Egbert’s Stone” the men of three counties, Somerset, Wilts and Hants (who, as the chronicler beautifully says, “were fain of their recovered king”), and by two days’ marches came up with the Danish army at Ethandune.[135] Here he won a crushing victory. The Danes fled to their fortified camp, probably at Chippenham; Alfred pursued them, shut them up in their stronghold and besieged it for a fortnight. Then came offers of submission, and a promise to withdraw from Wessex. Hostages and oaths were again offered to the conqueror, and—what was more significant—“the army promised that their king, Guthrum, should receive the rite of baptism”.
Alfred returned to the neighbourhood of Athelney, and there waited for the pagan chief’s fulfilment of his promise. He was not disappointed; Guthrum came with thirty of his chiefs to Aller, near Athelney, was baptised and received in rising from the font the Saxon name of Athelstan. It is probable, though not expressly stated, that his thirty warriors were baptised with him. The two kings then went together to Wedmore, a royal vill under the Mendips, where Alfred for twelve nights gave the new convert hospitable entertainment. Guthrum-Athelstan laid aside the white robes of the catechumen at the end of a week, and departed laden with gifts by his spiritual father. “The army” cleared out of Wessex and marched to Cirencester. The most dangerous of Alfred’s wars with the Danes was ended, and the land had rest for fourteen years.
CHAPTER XVII.
ALFRED AT PEACE.
The fourteen years which followed the Peace of Wedmore (878 to 892) were, as has been said, in the main years of peace, and may be considered to justify the heading of this chapter; yet that peace was not all unbroken, nor was Alfred’s Danish godson always a placid and peaceful Christian. There were still some slight heavings of the barbarian sea, which must be shortly described before we turn to the much more interesting subject of Alfred’s peaceful labours. The main condition of the Peace of Wedmore was that the Danes should evacuate Wessex. The agreement that the Watling Street should be the boundary between the two nations cannot be stated to have been one of the conditions of the peace now concluded. We have, in fact, no accurate information as to the territorial arrangements of 878. The extremely interesting document called Aelfredes and Guthrumes Frith (the peace of Alfred and Guthrum) must belong to some later year than the meeting at Wedmore, and the course of the history seems to justify us in assigning it to the year 885 or thereabouts.[136]
After Guthrum and his men had lingered for some time in the neighbourhood of Cirencester, they marched across England to East Anglia (879), and made a permanent settlement there, “occupying and dividing the land”. This probably means that they exchanged the destructive excitement of the life of the viking for the peaceful existence of the husbandman. But when, five years later, in 884, a division of “the army” which had been ravaging Gaul came to Kent and besieged Rochester, the sight of their fellow-countrymen, harrying on the other side of the Thames estuary, seems to have been too much for Danish self-control. Guthrum “broke peace with King Alfred,” and probably sent some of his men to help in the siege. Alfred, however, set to work to besiege the besiegers, who had “wrought another fastness round themselves,” and in the end forced them to abandon their enterprise, leave their horses as the prize of victory, and depart over seas. He then proceeded to chastise the East Anglian Danes for their breach of faith, sending a fleet against them from Kent which won a signal victory. Notwithstanding a subsequent defeat, his operations must have been on the whole successful, for he rescued London from the Danish yoke and concluded, probably in 885, that treaty with Guthrum which as before said is still extant, bearing the title of Alfred’s and Guthrum’s frith.
If the provisions of Wedmore had made the Watling Street the boundary between the two nationalities, which is doubtful, the treaty now concluded was certainly more favourable to the English. It went from the Thames northwards “up the Lea to its source, then straight on to Bedford, and then up along the Ouse to the Watling Street,” which throughout a large part of its further course became practically the boundary of the two nations. This line gave to the English king London, previously abandoned to the Danes, and with London the region round it north of the Thames and west of the Lea, which had previously formed part of the kingdom of Essex, but which now, perhaps, received a special organisation of its own, and the name that it has since borne for ten centuries, Middlesex. It also gave to Alfred the larger and fairer half of Mercia, being in fact all that portion of the midland counties which lies south and west of the London and North Western Railway,[137] together with half of Hertfordshire and two-thirds of Bedfordshire. But then, on the other hand, it is true that the rest of Mercia, East Anglia, Essex (mutilated) and Northumbria were practically handed over to the Danes, either as personal rulers or as over-lords. This surrender has often been treated as a wise and politic act of self-sacrifice on Alfred’s part, a view which was the natural result of the historical teaching which spoke of Egbert and his descendants as unquestioned monarchs of all Anglo-Saxon Britain. Now, however, that we see what a precarious and shadowy thing was the supremacy of the ninth century Kings of Wessex over northern and midland England, a supremacy which under a feeble king like Ethelwulf perhaps almost vanished into nothingness, we can see that the settlement which generally (though incorrectly) goes by the name of the Peace of Wedmore was not so great a sacrifice on Alfred’s part as we used to imagine. Bitter doubtless it was to Alfred as to every patriotic heart among the “Angel-cyn” to see the Dane so firmly rooted in the north and east of England, but that was the actual position of affairs, and he, as a statesman, was bound to recognise it. On the other hand, the larger half of Mercia now came under Alfred’s personal rule and was irrevocably joined to his realm, and this great new kingdom was now preparing to enter the lists against the Scandinavian invaders with a fairer prospect of success than could ever have been entertained by the disunited, mutually suspicious states of the “Heptarchy”. As has been already pointed out, the Dane was the real though involuntary creator of a united England.
It is worth our while to notice the language of the great frith which thus settled the boundary of the two races. It professes to be concluded “between Alfred, king, and Guthrum, king, and all the witan of the English kinship, and all the folk that is in East Anglia, for themselves and for their offspring”. “If any man be slain, as we hold all equally dear, both Englishmen and Danes, the penalty shall be eight half-marks of pure gold,[138] but if he be a ceorl or freed-man on gafol [rented] land, the penalty shall be 200 scillings.” “And we all agreed on this day when men swore their [mutual] oaths that neither bond nor free shall fare unto the [Danish] army without leave, nor shall any one of them come to us. Should it happen that one of them wishes to have business with us, or one of us with them, in respect of land or cattle, that is to be permitted only on condition of his giving hostages for the observance of the peace and as a testimony that he has a clean back,” in other words, that his past record is that of a peaceable neighbour.
Evidently the continuance of friendly relations between the two races, parted only by two small streams and the old Roman road, was felt to be precarious, and both rulers agreed that the less they mingled with one another the better.
* * * * *
It is pleasant to turn from the monotonous story of the conflict with the Danes to the subject of Alfred’s family life. In 868, three years before “the year of battles” and his own accession to the throne, he married a noble Mercian lady named Ealhswith, daughter of Ethelred, ealdorman of the Gaini(?), and descended on her mother’s side from the royal family of Mercia. By this lady (who survived him three years) Alfred had five children who grew up. The eldest, Ethelfled, when little more than a child, was given in marriage to Ethelred, ealdorman of the Mercians, and became, after her father’s death, a personage of great importance, ruling her mother’s country with spirit and success under the proud title of “Lady of the Mercians”. The next child, Edward, who was eventually his father’s successor, had for his especial companion his sister Elfrida. “When he was not hunting or engaged in other manly exercises, he was with her learning the psalter or books of Saxon poetry, showing affability and gentleness towards all, both natives and foreigners, and ever in complete subjection to his father.” In after life the two playmates were widely separated. The boy became Edward the Elder, one of the greatest of English kings; the girl was sent across the seas to become the wife of Baldwin II. of Flanders, son of Judith of France, and her husband the handsome forester. After more than two centuries the brother and sister playmates were once more to meet in the persons of their progeny, when Elfrida’s descendant Henry Beauclerk, son of Matilda of Flanders, married Matilda of Scotland, descended in the seventh degree from Edward the Elder. Of the two other children of Alfred, we know only that Ethelgiva was early dedicated to the monastic life, becoming Abbess of Shaftesbury; and that Ethelweard, the youngest of the family, was a pupil in a court school founded by his father, probably in imitation of the similar institutions founded by Charlemagne, in which the sons of the nobility and some others were taught to read books both Latin and Anglo-Saxon, and also learned to write. Ethelweard (who must not be confounded with his kinsman of the same name, author of a chronicle) seems to have specially profited by this training, and was probably the most learned member of his family.