There are other indications that during the two centuries which had elapsed since the legislation of Ine, the tendency which was even then observable, towards the formation of large landed estates and the lessening of the number of free and independent ceorls, had been going forward. One cause which probably contributed to this result was the conversion of Folkland into Bookland: two terms which, after puzzling a whole generation of English historians, have at last, it may be hoped, yielded up their secret to the patient research of a foreign student of our institutions.[143] Folkland, it seems now safe to say, was “family land held by common right and without written evidence”.[144] Bookland was, as it is called by a Latin interpreter,[145] terra testamentalis, land over which the owner had full power of disposition by will, and his right to which rested on some “book” or written document, not on folk-right and immemorial custom. A striking illustration of the difference between the two kinds of property is afforded by the will of a certain ealdorman Alfred who was a contemporary of his great namesake the king.[146] This nobleman leaves the bulk of his large property, which is expressly stated to be bookland, to his widow and “our common bairn” Aldryth: but there is also a son, probably not born in wedlock, for whom he wishes to make provision. After leaving him a certain small “bookland” property, he adds: “If the king will let him have the folkland in addition to this bookland, then let him have and enjoy it”; if not, the widow is to convey to him certain other bookland estates. It is argued with much force that here we have the case of a nobleman owning large properties which have been conveyed to him by perhaps recent “books,” written instruments of purchase and sale, royal donations and the like. But he has inherited also another, probably smaller, property which has been in his family from time immemorial, is his by folk-right, and is called folkland. But this property is held subject to certain customary laws of inheritance, and is perhaps liable to reversion to other members of the kinship in default of male heirs. The ealdorman hopes for the king’s intervention on behalf of his son should any difficulty be made about his succession to the folkland, and, failing that, desires that the loss shall be made up to him out of the bookland estate, over which his disposing power is incontestable.
If, as there is reason to believe, the cases of conversion of folkland into bookland were frequent throughout the later Saxon centuries, if the slumbering rights of succession of distant members of the kinship were being barred by “books” granting the land to members of the royal household, to convents and churches, or simply confirming ordinary commercial transactions of sale and exchange, it is easy to see that the class of “twy-hind” ceorls would be sensibly diminished and the possessions of the “twelf-hynd” man, the thegn or the king’s retainer visibly increased. All these causes would augment the number of poor and struggling freemen who, especially in times of war and invasion during “the clash of mighty opposites,” were glad to sacrifice some part of their precarious independence by “commending” themselves to the protection of some powerful landowner.
CHAPTER XVIII.
ALFRED’S LAST DAYS.
From the peaceful labours which had occupied him for the last seven years, Alfred was recalled to the weary work of war by tidings of the return of the dreaded here to the English coast. During those seven years the chronicler had been nervously noting the deeds of “the army” beyond seas. They had been fighting chiefly in the north of Gaul, pressing up the rivers Somme, Seine and Marne, and even laying close siege for ten months (November, 885, to September, 886) to the city of Paris itself, a siege which the Emperor Charles the Fat had raised, not by arms but by the ignominious payment of tribute. It is easy to trace a connexion between these vehement attacks on Frankish territory and the resistance which, in our own country, from Athelney onwards, had been so valiantly offered by Alfred. But now the process was reversed, and the Northmen, severely handled by a Frankish king, were thrown back upon England. In the year 887 Charles the Fat, who had disgusted his subjects by his ignominious treaty with the Danes, was deposed from his imperial dignity, and Arnulf, his nephew, was chosen king by the Franks east of the Rhine, by whose aid he won for himself, nine years after, the grander title of emperor. In 891 he won a great victory over the Danes near the modern city of Louvain. Hereupon the Scandinavians, recognising that “Francia” was for the present closed against them by the might of this new German king, decided to try their fortune once more on the other side of the channel.
The operations of the five years that followed (892–896[147]) are described by the Chronicle in great detail and with unusual vividness and vigour. A recent editor[148] calls the six or seven pages devoted to these campaigns “the most remarkable piece of writing in the whole series of chronicles”. It is allowable to conjecture that such a narrative, if not from Alfred’s own pen, comes from some person in the immediate neighbourhood of the king. Fresh and vivid, however, as the narrative is, it is not easy to discover therefrom the precise sequence of events. Different bands of Danes are seen to be operating in different parts of the kingdom, and the difficulty which they probably felt in combining their efforts meets also the historian who seeks to combine their narratives. Here it will be sufficient to indicate some of the principal stages of the contest.
The invasion of 892 seems to have been made by two bodies of Danes, acting to some extent independently of each other. “The great army” which had been defeated by Arnulf at Louvain, went westwards from Flanders to Boulogne, embarked from the latter port “with horses and all” in a fleet of 250 ships, and sailed across to the Kentish coast. According to their usual custom they made use of a river channel to penetrate into the interior; but the river up which they fared and which probably entered the sea at Lymne, has long since disappeared in that region of silted-up streams. Up the river they towed their ships for four miles, and there they found a “work” half finished and defended by a few rustics. Their capture of this work well illustrates a remark of Asser’s that “of the many forts which Alfred ordered to be built, some were never begun and others, begun too late, were not finished when the enemy broke in upon them by land and sea,” causing tardy repentance and shame on the part of the disobedient builders. The Danish army then constructed for themselves a “work” at Appledore, some twenty miles west of Hythe. The nature of these “works,” of which we hear so much at this point of the history, is explained to us by the Frankish chronicler who describes the Emperor Arnulf’s victory in 891, and who tells us that the Northmen “had according to their usual manner fortified themselves with wood and heaped-up earth”.[149] The description points to a mound crowned with a palisading, such as the Romans had used to protect their encampments.
Meanwhile another horde, not so large as the first, and fleeing, not so much from the conquering sword of Arnulf, as from the famine which waited upon their own destructive footsteps, having crossed the channel with eighty ships, had entered the Thames and made a “work” in Kent near the Isle of Sheppey. The leader of this band was the far-famed Haesten or Hasting, a pirate who had sailed up the Loire to ravage Central Gaul in the year 866, and in the twenty-six years which followed had not often rested from the work of devastation. Between these two invading armies Alfred took up a position (893) in the great Andredesweald which stretched along the whole length of Kent and Sussex dividing the two counties, and from thence or from the burhs or fortresses which he had erected, forays were constantly made with some success on the unwelcome visitors. So things seem to have remained through the winter. At Easter the larger host, having broken up from Appledore, wandered through Hants and Berks, ravaging as they went. The young “Etheling” Edward, son of Alfred, being informed of their movements, and having collected his troops, pursued the spoil-laden plunderers and came up with them at Farnham. He fought them and gained a complete victory; the booty was all recovered and the robbers in their desperation swam the Thames without waiting to find a ford, and made their way up the little stream of the Hertfordshire Colne to the river island of Thorney. There apparently Edward was forced to leave them, for the fyrd was divided into two parts, each bound to serve for six months only. The time for relieving guard had now arrived, and while one half was marching “thitherward” (to the front) and the other half homeward, the favourable moment passed away for pursuing the Danes, whose king had been wounded in the late encounter. Some of the enemy penetrated to the coast, collected a hundred ships and sailed westward to make a raid on Devonshire, whither Alfred was forced to follow them.
Leaving “the great army” for a time, we turn to follow the fortunes of Hasting. It seems that he had pretended to imitate the example of Guthrum (who had died three years before, at peace with Alfred), and had expressed his willingness to become a Christian. He gave hostages, swore oaths of peace and friendship, and was probably baptised along with his two sons, the godfathers being Alfred and his son-in-law Ethelred of Mercia, his stout ally in all these campaigns. But some turn in the fortunes of war, perhaps the disloyal attitude of the Danes of Northumbria and Mercia, who were hungering for war, sent Hasting again into armed opposition. He made a “work” at Benfleet in the south-east corner of Essex, and as soon as it was finished he began, as the chronicler says with indignation, to harry that realm of Mercia which Ethelred, his godfather, was bound to defend. Alfred, who had been summoned to Exeter by the tidings of another Danish raid, now returned rapidly to London where a strong burh had been built, a stout-hearted body of citizens having been sworn to defend it. Marching forth with these and with his own troops, he assailed the “work” at Benfleet and carried it by storm. Great spoil was found there as well as many women and children—a sure token that the Northmen had come to settle in the land. All the treasure was gathered within the safe shelter of London-burh, but Alfred, recognising the obligations of spiritual kindred, though Hasting had so soon forgotten them, restored to the old pirate his wife and her two sons. After this the two Danish armies seem to have united and to have made a great “work” at Shoebury in Essex, not far from the abandoned Benfleet. Hasting henceforward fades out of the narrative, possibly unwilling to continue to fight against his generous foe.[150]
The avowed union of all the men of the “Danelaw” (as the district settled by the Danes was now called), both in East Anglia and Northumbria, gave a new character to the war. It was no longer a mere descent of sea-rovers on Kent or Devonshire; it was a terrible internal struggle, and all along the Watling Street, the boundary between the two kingdoms, the shuttle of war flew swiftly. Leaving their camp at Shoebury, the Danes marched up the valley of the Thames and across the country to the Severn. But now the whole forces of the kingdom were collected for the contest. Not only Ethelred of Mercia but “the Ealdormen of Wilts and Somerset and such of the king’s thegns as were then at home at the works, gathered together from every town east of the Parret, from both sides of Selwood, from the north of the Thames and the west of the Severn, and with them came also”—a memorable addition—“some part of the North Welsh race”. Evidently the Welshmen had learned by experience that there were worse enemies than the Saxons, and probably also the righteous rule of Alfred had won their confidence. The army thus collected marched after the Danes and came up with them at a place called Buttington on the Severn. For many weeks the two armies sat watching each other, the river flowing between them. At last, after the Danes had eaten most of their horses, they sallied forth and crossed the river to fight. The battle which followed was a bloody one, many of the king’s thegns falling; but the slaughter on the Danish side was greater, and victory remained with the English. Back into Essex fled the beaten remnant of the army, but having ere winter gathered to them many helpers from the Danelaw, and having entrusted ships and wives and property to the care of the East Angles, they once more followed the Watling Street into Cheshire, which for some reason or other (possibly connected with the Danish conquest of Ireland) they persistently made the objective of their campaign. Day and night they marched, till they came to the estuary of the Dee. Here, still surrounded by its grass-grown walls, lay the silent and ruined city which had for near four centuries resounded to the shouts of the twentieth legion, “Valerian and Victorious”. In its desolation it yet bore the name of “the camp of the legions” (lega-ceaster), but it was “a waste Chester”. A Chester it is still, by its picturesque medieval architecture pre-eminent above all others of its kind, but happily no longer waste. The fyrd hastened with all speed after the here, but failed to overtake them ere they had taken refuge in the ghostly city. They had, therefore, to be satisfied with destroying all the cattle and corn in the neighbourhood, slaying some straggling Danes and leaving nought but a hungry wilderness round the survivors. The blockade of Chester (894) was not a strict one; before long the Danes, urged by famine, broke out of the city, and escaping into the friendly Danelaw marched across the country to the island of Mersea at the mouth of the Blackwater, not far from their old winter quarters in Essex. At the same time the invaders who had been troubling Devonshire sailed homeward, but on their way harried the west of Sussex, until the burg-ware (townsfolk) of Chichester issued forth to battle, routed them, slew many hundreds, and captured some of their ships. Throughout this second Danish war, the martial ardour of the inhabitants of the burhs built or refortified by the king is very conspicuous.
It was now apparently 895, the fourth year since the great scip-here had appeared off the coast of Kent. The Danes who had wintered in Mersea, still hankering doubtless after the spoil of London, sailed round to the estuary of the Thames and towed their ships up the sluggish waters of the Lea, which now forms the boundary between Essex and Middlesex. Here, about twenty miles above London—that is, probably in the neighbourhood of Bishop Stortford—they wrought a “work,” and remained encamped for six months. When summer came a multitude of the burg-ware of London marched forth to storm the Danish work. This time, unfortunately, civic valour did not triumph. The burg-ware were put to flight, and four of the king’s thegns, who had been acting as their leaders, were slain.