On Rolf’s death or abdication in 927 his son, William Longsword, became duke and reigned for fifteen years. He was a man of keen and polished intellect, with many noble, even with some holy, aspirations, but with a strange duality in his nature, perhaps the result of the mingled strain of Viking and Romanised Frank that was in his blood, for his mother is said to have been a Frankish lady of noble birth. A conflict had begun between two sections of his subjects, between the men of Rouen and its neighbourhood, who were fast becoming Frenchmen, and the men of the district round Bayeux, who remained obstinate Danes; and in this conflict William veered first to one side, then to the other. Moreover in the confused welter of French politics he played an eminently inconsistent and unwise part, showing that amidst the intriguing, grasping but adroit counts of Northern Gaul he never felt himself completely at home, but was uneasily conscious that he was still looked upon by them as dux piratarum. He would fain have been faithful to the royal line, to which his father owed his legalised position in the country; and in 936 he heartily co-operated with Hugh the Great in bringing back Athelstan’s nephew, Louis IV. d’Outremer, from his English exile and crowning him king; but, changeable as a weather-cock, he was almost as often found among the enemies of Louis IV. as in the ranks of his friends. Unfaithfulness begat unfaithfulness; the man who had been on each side in every quarrel made himself enemies all round, and in 942, having been treacherously invited to a conference on an island in the Somme, he was there foully murdered by a band of noble conspirators, among whom we regret to find Arnulf of Flanders, grandson of our own Alfred, first and foremost.
On the death of William Longsword, his little son Richard, though not born in lawful wedlock—this was almost the rule in the Norman line—was unanimously accepted as his successor. The boy, only ten years old, was soon plunged into a whirlpool of troubles, from which even his father’s old and faithful counsellors could hardly have extricated him, had he not himself shown that cool, patient, self-sustained courage which earned for him his historical surname, “the Fearless”. Though the Norman historians may have somewhat embroidered the romantic history of his captivity and escape, there can be little doubt that two dangerous neighbours, King Louis IV. and Count Hugh the Great, coveted the orphan boy’s inheritance; nor that, but for the loyalty of the Norman warriors to the son of their dead chieftain, and the astute management of two or three of his father’s old friends, they would have succeeded in making it their own. Soon after the death of William Longsword King Louis came to Rouen, ostensibly as the friend and protector of the little duke. He seems, however, to have practically taken the government of the country into his own hands, while the boy Richard, who was transferred to the court of Laon “that he might be there educated as beseemed a Christian prince,” found the school of knighthood every day becoming more like a prison. However, Richard’s faithful guardian, Osmund, succeeded in smuggling him out of the castle, according to the legend, “in a truss of hay”. The Normans, tired of the financial exactions of the ministers of Louis, rose in open revolt and gathered round their just recovered prince; the invasion of Louis with a formidable army was neutralised by that of Harold, a chieftain from Scandinavia, who, in 945, on the urgent appeal of Richard came to the help of his brother-Northmen. A battle followed, the battle of the Dive, in which Louis was utterly defeated, and he was soon after taken prisoner. Thus were the tables now turned, Louis who was of late the jailer being now the captive; nor did he regain his liberty till he had surrendered the rock fortress of Laon, almost his last remaining possession, to the omnivorous Count Hugh the Great, and had—so say the Norman writers—formally released Duke Richard from all ties of feudal dependence. Whether this be literally true or not, there is no doubt that Richard “commended” himself to the count of Paris. Thus even before Hugh Capet became King of France, the duke of Normandy was already his most powerful vassal. This fact, coupled with the steady and effectual help which Richard gave to the younger Hugh in his patient upward progress to the throne, deserves to be remembered when in later ages we have to deal with the relations, more often hostile than friendly, between the Norman-English vassal and the French lord paramount.
At the period which we have reached in English history, the date of the death of Dunstan (988), Richard the Fearless was a middle-aged man of fifty-five years. He had been reigning for forty-five years, and was the father of a numerous progeny—not born in wedlock—by a Danish woman named Gunnor, whom he married after the death of his lawful wife Emma, sister of Hugh Capet. His marriage with Emma was childless. In the year 996 he died and was succeeded by his son Richard the Good.
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The origin of the house, which in after ages bore the name of Plantagenet and which held in the tenth century the countship of Anjou, is hidden in clouds of legend; but the legend itself does not dare to say that their forebears were always noble, nor to assign to them, as to so many of their princely contemporaries, a descent from the great Emperor Charles. The legendary ancestor of the Counts of Anjou is a certain Tortulf or Tertullus, a Breton forester to whom a doubtful Carolingian king, probably Charles the Bald, is said to have assigned a woodland district known as the Blackbird’s Nest (Nid de Merle), on condition of repelling the Danish attacks on the valley of the Loire. The special interest attaching to the history of the Angevin counts, in addition to the fact that they were the ancestors of so many of our English sovereigns, lies in the tenacity of purpose with which they pursued their policy of aggrandisement, gradually converting their little marchland on the east of Brittany, a small and precarious possession, into an extensive and powerful state in one of the fairest regions of France. With their Breton neighbours on the west, with Maine and Normandy on the north, they were frequently at war, but their most bitter and enduring conflicts were with the Counts of Blois on the east, and it was at their expense that the most important of the Angevin conquests was effected. This is a fact which it will be well to bear in mind when we find Henry of Anjou and Stephen of Blois, heirs of a feud which had already lasted in France for two centuries, contending on English soil for the crown of England.
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The history of Denmark during the first century and a half of the Viking raids is involved in great obscurity; but about the time when Edward the Elder was reigning in England we emerge into clearer light, and find a king named Gorm the Old reigning over a united Denmark, with, however, some obligations of vassalage towards the German king, Henry the Saxon. On his death or abdication towards the middle of the tenth century began the long and prosperous reign of Harold Blaatand (Blue-Tooth), which lasted for about fifty years and was the great period of consolidation for the Danish kingdom. In 977 Harold, in conjunction with two Norwegian allies, made an expedition to Norway by which he obtained possession of a considerable part of that country and acquired a sort of feudal supremacy over the whole. In his relations with the German emperors Harold was less fortunate. He was apparently compelled to submit to Otto I., and as one of the conditions of peace, he and his son Sweyn were forced to receive Christian baptism. The conversion of the son at any rate was not sincere, and dissensions broke out between him and his father. The old king was defeated and fled the country. He was restored for a short time, again attacked by Sweyn, and died of his wounds received in battle.
Thus, in the fourteenth year of Ethelred’s reign, the throne of Denmark was occupied by the stern pagan Swegen or Sweyn. No tenderness will he show to Christian churches or monasteries in any land that he may invade; and any king or people that shall do him wrong may expect to receive terrible retribution.
The early, doubtless in large measure legendary, history of Norway, as told in the Heimskringla Saga, is full of romantic interest, but is beside our present purpose. The great unifier of the Norwegian kingdom was Harold Fair-hair, whose long reign ended before the middle of the tenth century. In the eleventh year of his age he found himself lord of a small kingdom between Lake Wener and the Dovrefield Mountains. When he came to manhood he wooed the fair Gytha for his wife, but the damsel declared that she would marry no man who did not rule the whole of Norway, as Gorm ruled all Denmark and Eric the whole of Sweden. Hereupon Harold, having vowed not to cut his hair till he had accomplished the prescribed task, began a series of expeditions northwards, which did in the course of years make him master of the whole of what we now call Norway. He married Gytha, but she was only one of many wives and concubines by whom he begat countless children, whose wars and alliances, whose rivalries and reconciliations, fill Norwegian history in the tenth century as English history in the fifteenth is filled by the broils of the Plantagenets. This is that Harold who sent the infant Hakon to be educated at the court of Athelstan; and Hakon, as has been said, having been educated by his great foster-father in the Christian religion and trained in all arts that became a Saxon Etheling, went back to his fatherland, reigned there after his father’s death as Hakon the Good, and vainly endeavoured to Christianise his people. Another Harold and another Hakon followed in quick succession, sometimes owning, sometimes rejecting, the over-lordship of Denmark. At the period which we have now reached, the rising star is that of Olaf Tryggvason, great-grandson of Fair-hair, not yet king of Norway but a great and popular Viking, whose name will be heard with terror in Essex and in Kent, in Sussex and in Hampshire.