Autumn was now approaching and it was important that the men of Essex should not be attacked while they were gathering in their harvest. Accordingly Alfred encamped in the neighbourhood of London. One day he rode up the Lea to reconnoitre the Danish position, and something in the course of the river suggested to his mind, fertile in expedients and enriched by the study of ancient historians, that it might be possible so to obstruct it as to hinder the escape of the Danes. The scheme ripened; he set two bodies of troops to erect works above and below the station of the ships. Ere the works were finished the Danes saw that their position was being made untenable; they abandoned the ships—probably by night—and marched off, still no doubt through the friendly Danelaw, till they came to Bridgnorth on the Severn, where they again wrought a work and fixed their winter quarters. While the fyrd rode after them towards the north, the men of London-burh came out and captured the ships, some of which they broke up and others, the more serviceable, they towed down stream to London. Such was the strange campaign of the Lea. Any one who knows the Lea in its present conditions, who has seen the sleepy bargemen gliding along from lock to lock, the anglers sitting all day on the banks which Izaak Walton has made classic ground, all the indescribable restfulness and tranquillity of the scene, will feel the contrast between this peaceful Present and the days when Alfred’s men were toiling at their noisy labours and when the heathens howled forth their execrations on finding their passage barred by the Saxons.
In the following summer (896) “the here went some to East Anglia, some to Northumbria, and those who were moneyless got them ships and fared over sea to the Seine. Thus had the army,” says the chronicler, “not utterly broken all the English race. But they were more fearfully broken during those three years by pestilence both of cattle and of men, especially because the most eminent of the king’s thegns died in those three years.” The chronicler then gives the name and rank of the chief victims of the plague: the bishops of Rochester and Dorchester, the ealdormen of Kent, Essex and Hants, a king’s thegn of Sussex, the town-reeve of Winchester, a grand constable (king’s horse-thegn) and many others.
Though the great land invasion was thus defeated, the king had still to deal with a harassing swarm of sea-pirates, whose long ships named “ashes,” built of the wood of the ill-omened ash tree, were constantly appearing off the southern coast, often manned by insurgent Danes from East Anglia and Northumbria. In order to grapple with these pestilent enemies Alfred turned shipbuilder. He may have already taken some steps towards this end, but the following entry in the Chronicle for the year 897 (= 896) is the earliest definite information that we receive as to the beginnings of England’s navy: “Then King Alfred bade build long ships against the ashes; they were full nigh twice as long as the others. Some had sixty oars, some more. They were both swifter and steadier and eke higher than the others. They were not built on Frisian nor yet on Danish lines, but as he himself thought that they might be most serviceable.”
An engagement of no great importance, which is, however, described in great detail by the chronicler, took place between the pirates and nine of the new ships which had been despatched by Alfred to stop their depredations, and had sealed them up in some estuary or land-locked bay (such as Brading harbour) in the Isle of Wight. While the tide was high the crews of the big English ships captured and slew to their hearts’ content, but when the tide ebbed they were left aground, as the chronicler says, “very inconveniently” half on one side of the estuary and half on the other, with the Danish ashes, also aground, between them. At dead low water the shore was firm enough for the Danish pirates to climb down out of their ship, paddle across the sands and challenge a fight with the crews of the three English ships nearest to them. For such small contending forces the battle seems to have been a bloody one. One hundred and twenty Danes fell and sixty-two English, but among these latter were many men of high rank, a king’s reeve and a king’s companion (geneat), and also many of the Frisian captains and sailors whom Alfred, knowing their nautical skill, had attracted to his service. When the battle was ended, in came the flowing tide, on which the Danish ships could float out to sea while the larger ships of the new navy were still lying “very inconveniently aground”. So the three pirate ships escaped for the time, but they were sorely strained and damaged, so that they could not all sail round the coast of Sussex. Two were wrecked on that coast, and their crews being brought to Winchester and led into the king’s presence, were ordered by him to be hanged. This order was not like the usual clemency of the king, but he probably felt that it was necessary to repress with a strong hand movements which were now no longer warfare but mere brigandage. The third ship escaped both the winds and the English pursuers, and landed her crew, a troop of sore-wounded and weary men, on the East Anglian coast.
Not more than four years of rest seem to have been granted to Alfred after the repulse of this last invasion before death ended his labours. There can be little doubt that some part at least of that plentiful literary harvest which was described in the preceding chapter belongs to these closing years. Especially interesting is it to note that, according to the judgment of the most careful modern inquirers, the king’s metrical translation of Boethius should be referred to this period. The proem to that translation alludes to “the manifold worldly cares that oft troubled him both in mind and body” when he was turning it from Latin into English prose, and then again to the cares, apparently the yet heavier cares, “that in his days came upon the kingdom to which he had succeeded,” but which did not prevent him—so high was his value for the great Consolatio—from “working it up once more into verse” as the reader may now behold it. All these cares were now at an end, and ended, too, all his noble toil for the defence, the enlightenment and the guidance of his people. He died on October 26, 900,[151] in the fifty-third year of his age, and was buried in St. Swithun’s monastery at Winchester. In 903, however (according to the legend told by William of Malmesbury), as “the delirious fancies of the canons” declared that the king’s ghost, resuming possession of his corpse, wandered at night through their cells, the royal remains were transferred to the New Minster, founded by his son in fulfilment of a plan which Alfred himself had formed and had confided to his friend and spiritual adviser, Grimbald the Frank. In the reign of Henry I. the monks of New Minster migrated from their narrow domain within the city to a large and convenient site called Hyde Mead, on its northern side, and in their migration they took with them the body of the king. At the suppression of the monasteries Hyde Abbey fell into decay, and near the close of the eighteenth century the Hampshire magistrates purchased the site for the purpose of erecting thereon a county jail. The tombs were ruthlessly opened, the stone coffins were turned into horse troughs, the lead which covered a coffin, presumably Alfred’s, was sold for two guineas, and apparently the dust of the great king himself was scattered to the winds. No leader of the Danish army could have shown greater zest in the work of desecration. This New Minster at Winchester was consecrated by one of Alfred’s friends, Archbishop Plegmund, and numbered another of his friends, Grimbald, as first on its list of abbots. Its records, known as the Liber Monasterii de Hyda, furnish us with some valuable information concerning the reigns of Alfred and his sons.
As for the great king himself, several of the chroniclers, especially his kinsman, Ethelweard, and Florence of Worcester, have celebrated his praises in fitting terms, but his best epitaph is contained in three simple words of an unknown scribe of the twelfth century, “Alfred, England’s Darling”. His fame and the glory of his noble character have grown brighter as the centuries have rolled by, and at this day he is really nearer to the hearts of Englishmen than all, save one, of his successors.
NOTE.
ON THE EXTENT OF THE DANELAW.
The political boundaries of the Danish state recognised after the Peace of Wedmore have been sufficiently indicated by historians, and it may be said that for all practical purposes they nearly coincide with the old Roman road called the Watling Street, the sphere of Danish influence lying to the north and east, that of Saxon influence and rule to the south and west of that line, which, as previously remarked, coincides very nearly with the line of the London and North Western Railway. There is, however, another question both interesting and important: “To what extent did the Danish population fill up the district thus assigned to them?” In other words, “How far did the ethnological coincide with the political boundary?” This is a question which we have not as yet sufficient materials to answer fully or accurately. Much study and much patient research on the part of our local antiquaries, study of dialects and research in sepulchral tumuli, will probably be needed before we can say with certainty: “Here the old Anglian population remained preponderant, and here the Danish or Norwegian immigrants so filled the land as to make it practically a Scandinavian district”. But in the meantime some help is gained from a consideration of the place-names in the several districts of England; only we must beware of looking at the conclusions thus arrived at as final and irreversible.
Broadly, however, we may say with some confidence that place-names ending in ton, ham, yard and worth are Saxon or Anglian; those ending in by, thorpe and toft are Danish; in thwaite, garth, beck, haugh, and fell, Norwegian; in borough, probably Anglian; in wick or wich, if inland, Saxon, if near the sea-coast, Danish. Applying these tests we find evidence of considerable Danish settlements, but no Danish preponderance, in Norfolk and Suffolk. The great fen district round Peterborough seems to have been an impassable barrier, and we find no Danish names to the west of it; on the other hand, the Humber and the Wash must have been constantly visited by the ships of the vikings, for their shores swarm with Danish names. As has been said by Mr. Isaac Taylor,[152] “A district in Lincolnshire, about nine miles by twelve, between Tattersall, New Bolingbroke, Horncastle and Spilsby, would appear to have been more exclusively Danish than any other in the kingdom. In this small space there are some forty unmistakably Danish village names, such as Kirby, Moorby, Enderby, etc., all denoting the fixed residence of a Danish population.” “The Danish local names radiate from the Wash.[153] In Leicestershire, Rutland, Northamptonshire and Yorkshire the Danish names preponderate over those of the Anglo-Saxon type; while Cambridgeshire, Huntingdonshire, Bedfordshire and the adjacent counties, protected by the fens, present scarcely a single Danish name.” There can be no more striking proof of the absolute preponderance of the Danish element in the north-east corner of Yorkshire (where probably the influence of the invaders radiated from the estuary of the Tees) than the fact that Streanæshalc itself, the Anglian sanctuary, home of St. Hilda and meeting-place of the great Paschal Synod, meekly bowed its head to the alien yoke and accepted the Danish name of Whitby.
In the midland counties the most striking proof of the numerical superiority of the Danes was exhibited by the powerful confederation of the five boroughs, Leicester, Lincoln, Nottingham, Stamford and Derby. It is true that only one of these bore an unmistakably Danish name, but the part which they played politically, their strong offensive and defensive alliance, seems to confirm the generally accepted conclusion that the five boroughs were essentially a Danish confederation. Going further north we find very slight indications of Danish settlement in Durham and Northumberland. This part of Northumbria the invaders seem to have visited only for ravage, not for settlement, being satisfied to leave it under the rule of some subservient earl, who might or might not be of their own race. Further north still, across the Scottish border, Danish names die out altogether; but when we go far enough we find abundant traces of the other great stream of Scandinavian invasion, the Norwegian, and about this a few words must be said in reference, not to Scotland (Shetland, Orkney, Hebrides, etc.), but to the western coast of England.