Powerless as Ethelred was to defend our island from her foes, he could at least imitate their ravages in that portion of it which was not under his immediate rule. “In the year 1000 he marched into Cumberland and harried very nearly the whole of it.” Even here, however, his unrivalled genius for failure showed itself. His ships—the remnant probably of those collected in the previous year—were to have met him at Chester and co-operated in his campaign. This they failed to do, but “they sailed to the Isle of Man and ravaged there”. These last words throw a little light on what is otherwise not only an obscure but an utterly purposeless proceeding. We know from other sources that Man was an island stronghold of the Norse pirates, and there are, as we have seen, indications that from thence a stream of Scandinavian settlers passed into Cumberland towards the close of the tenth century. It is true that Norse rather than Danish seems to have been the character of the settlement in the Isle of Man, but as the Scandinavian sea-rovers were still acting generally in concert against the English, this fact need not prevent us from seeing in this Cumbrian raid an act of energy on Ethelred’s part against the Danish invaders.
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Two strangely contrasted events, a marriage and a massacre, fill up the record for 1002. There had been apparently some desultory warfare between Ethelred and Richard the Good, son of Richard the Fearless, duke of Normandy. An expedition against the Cotentin, the western horn of Normandy, had proved, like many of Ethelred’s undertakings, unsuccessful, and now the English king, his first wife being dead, in order to strengthen himself by a foreign alliance, sued for and obtained the hand of Richard’s sister Emma in marriage. The bride was brought over to England with much pomp in the spring of 1002 by the magnates of the realm who had been sent to escort her. An attempt was made to change her name to the Saxon Aelfgyfu (Elgiva), but the Norman “Emma” is that by which she has ever been known in history. She bore to Ethelred two sons, Alfred and Edward (the Confessor). Queen Emma, who was known as the “gemma Normannorum,” was probably beautiful after the fair type of her Scandinavian ancestors, but her character is not an attractive one, and indirectly her connexion with the royal family of Wessex wrought much harm to England. Henry of Huntingdon (writing of course after the Norman conquest) makes the extraordinary statement that “from this union of an English king with the daughter of a Norman duke, the Normans justly, according to the law of nations, challenged and obtained possession of the English land”. He goes on to say, however, that a certain man of God had prophesied that because of the enormous crimes of the English people, their addiction to murder, treason, drunkenness, and neglect of the house of the Lord, “an unlooked-for dominion should come upon them from France, and even the nation of the Scots, whom they held most vile, should also rule over them to their deserved confusion”.
After narrating the payment of the third gafol to the Danes (24,000 pounds), the chronicler proceeds: “In that year the king ordered all the Danish men who were in England to be slain on St. Bricius’ Day, November 13, because the king was informed that they wished to plot against his life and afterwards against the lives of all his witan, and so to have the kingdom easily for themselves”. A most extraordinary statement is this, describing an event even more unintelligible than the other events in this inexplicable reign. The alleged murder of all Danish men reminds us of the Sicilian Vespers, but the historical parallel may be deceptive. The Chronicle speaks only of the murder of “Danish men”; the statements of later Chronicles extending the massacre to women and children are probably oratorical amplifications. Henry of Huntingdon gives us an interesting personal touch when he says: “In our boyhood we heard from some very ancient men that the aforesaid king sent letters to each city, according to which the English on the same day and hour, either hewed down the unsuspecting Danes with their swords or, having suddenly arrested them, burned them with fire”. Notwithstanding statements like this, it may be safely asserted that all the thousands of Danish men who were scattered over England, in the Danelaw and elsewhere, did not perish on St. Brice’s Day. Nor is this probably the Chronicle’s meaning. We learn from another version of the Chronicle that in the previous year (1001) Pallig, whom we know to have been a Danish jarl and brother-in-law of King Sweyn, “fell off from Ethelred, contrary to all the assurances that he had given him, although the king had well gifted him with villages and gold and silver”; and that he had joined the Danes who were invading Devonshire. On the somewhat doubtful authority of William of Malmesbury we are assured that this Pallig, his wife and child were killed in the massacre. This may suggest to us that the real character of the event of St. Brice’s Day was a kind of coup d’état; the summary and treacherous execution of all the Danes who of recent years had flocked into Wessex and taken service in the court and camp of Ethelred. Even so, the deed was sufficiently atrocious, but not impossible, as the murder of all the Danes on English soil would certainly have been.
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Passing over some important events, among them the brave defence of East Anglia by its ealdorman Ulfcytel (“No worse hand-play did the Danes ever meet with from Englishmen than that which Ulfcytel gave them”), we come to the year 1008, for which the Chronicle gives us the following important but perplexing entry: “Now the king bade that through all England men should regularly build ships, that is for 300 hides ... and for 10 hides a skiff, and for 8 hides a helmet and coat of mail”.
There is evidently something omitted in this sentence, and it is generally agreed that the “Worcester” version of the Chronicle which fills up the lacuna with the words “one great ship” has much to recommend it, though the scribe himself may not have understood correctly the meaning of the passage. We may perhaps draw from it this conclusion, that in each county every unit of three hundred hides was called upon to furnish one large warship; the owner of ten hides (1,200 acres?) a light skiff not much bigger than a boat, the owner of eight hides (960 acres?) a helmet and a coat of mail. Whatever difficulty there may be in this obscure passage, it is interesting to note that we have here the origin of “ship-money”. The great case of Rex v. Hampden in the Exchequer Chamber was connected by a distinct chain of causation with the Danish sea-rovers’ movements in the early years of the eleventh century. As usual, these large preparations came to nothing, although (says the chronicler) “as the books tell us, never in no king’s day were so many ships seen in England as were now gathered together at Sandwich”. But domestic dissension and one man’s treachery ruined all (1009).
The new traitor who now emerges from obscurity, and for the next ten years exercises a malign influence on England’s fortunes, is Edric Streona, who was in 1007 set over Mercia as ealdorman. Florence of Worcester ascribes to him the murder of Elfhelm, ealdorman of Northumbria, in a forest near Shrewsbury, and thus draws his general character: “The aforesaid Edric, son of Ethelric, was a man of low origin, whose tongue had procured for him riches and rank, clever in wit, pleasant in speech, but one who surpassed all the men of his time in envy, faithlessness and cruelty”. We have here a more dangerous type of man than his predecessor Elfric; a man who will not be afraid to lead armies to battle, though it may be to their deliberately planned ruin; a man who will have the courage to plot and execute crimes which would have been too much for the delicate digestion of Elfric. Edric had a large band of brothers, who no doubt shared the profits and the enmities which attended his sudden elevation. One of these named Brihtric accused a nobleman named Child Wulfnoth to the king, evidently hoping to profit by the forfeiture of his estates. Thus driven into rebellion, Wulfnoth took to piracy, persuaded twenty ships’ crews out of the king’s fleet to join him, and ravaged the southern coast like a Dane. Brihtric with eighty ships went forth against him, boasting that he would bring back Wulfnoth, alive or dead, but he was overtaken by a terrible storm which battered and thrashed the ships and drove many of them on shore. These Brihtric burned; the others were with difficulty conveyed up the Thames to London. Thus, through the intrigues of one man, Edric’s brother, did the great naval force waste its energies on an inglorious civil war, “and we had not,” says the chronicler, “the happiness nor the honour that we hoped to derive from an efficient navy any more than in previous years”. Of course now, when “the immense hostile army came to Sandwich, there were no ships to meet it”. The Danes landed in Kent, besieged Canterbury, were bought off by a special local gafol of 3,000 pounds, and marched on into Berkshire, harrying and burning. For once Ethelred showed some energy, made a levy en masse of his people, outmarched the Danes and was on the point of cutting off their retreat to their ships. The English peasant soldiers of the fyrd were keen to attack them and avenge the burning of their homesteads and the slaughter of their brethren, “but it was all hindered, now as ever, by Edric the ealdorman”. In November the invaders took up their winter quarters in Kent, drawing their supplies from the counties on both sides of the Thames, “and many a time they attacked the town of London. But God be thanked, she yet stands sound and well, and they have ever fared ill before her walls.”
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The years 1011 and 1012 were made sadly memorable by the successful siege of Canterbury and the murder of its archbishop. The siege lasted from September 8 to 29, and it is hinted that it would not so soon have ended but for the treason of Elfmaer, Abbot of St. Augustine’s, whose life had once been saved by the archbishop whom he now betrayed. This archbishop was Elfheah or Alphege, whom we met with seventeen years before when he was sent, as bishop of Winchester, to negotiate with Olaf Tryggvason. He had been for six years archbishop of Canterbury, when he had to witness the capture of the hitherto inviolate city of St. Augustine by the pagans. Besides the archbishop, other great persons, a king’s reeve, a bishop and an abbess were taken prisoners, but these latter seem to have been allowed to ransom themselves. “Abbot Elfmaer”—significant entry—“was suffered to depart.” The Danes searched the city through and through; and the spoil collected and the ransoms paid doubtless made this raid one of the most profitable of their speculations. The archbishop, however, was a perplexing prize. His captors had formed extravagant ideas of what an archbishop’s ransom ought to be, and when they named their price, the archbishop would not hear of his flock being subjected for his sake to such a terrible exaction; and not only would do nothing himself, but positively forbade all the faithful to take any steps towards procuring his ransom.