Seven months was the venerable captive kept in the Danish camp, while the fruitless negotiations went on. At last on April 19, 1012, when the Danes were all excited by the arrival of the largest gafol that Ethelred had yet paid them, a gafol amounting to 48,000 pounds weight of silver; and when their hearts were also merry with wine brought from the shores of the Mediterranean, the archbishop was brought forth from his prison. The rude tribunal before which he was brought bore a name long afterwards well known in England: it was called “the hustings”. The time was Saturday evening, the eve of the first Sunday after Easter; the scene strangely dissonant with the many peaceful vespers of the archbishop’s past. The drunken barbarians, singing perchance some of their fathers’ rude war-songs, began to pelt the aged prisoner with the bones left over from their banquet, with the skulls of the oxen which they had slaughtered. Even so in Valhalla, according to the Viking mythology, had the gods amused themselves by pelting the invulnerable Balder with stones and other missiles, until the blind Hoder, inspired by mischief-working Loki, hurled the fatal mistletoe, which alone had power to deprive him of life. The brutal game went on and the air was filled with the drunken laughter of the barbarians at the old man’s misery. At last one of their number named Thrum, who had been confirmed by the archbishop only the day before, with kind cruelty clave his head with a battle-axe. “He fell down dead with the blow and his holy blood was spilled upon the earth, but his saintly soul went forth into God’s kingdom.” The martyrdom, for such in truth it was, took place at Greenwich. Next day the barbarians suffered the saint’s body to be removed to London, where it was received with all reverence by the bishop and burghers of the city, as well as by the bishop of Dorchester, and by them deposited in St. Paul’s cathedral. “And there,” says the Chronicle, “does God now show forth the wonder-working power of the holy martyr.” The translation of the remains to Canterbury will be described in a future chapter. Under the altered form of Saint Alphege, the name of the murdered archbishop still appears in the calendar of the English Church, which commemorates the day of his martyrdom, April the 19th.
* * * * *
Up to this point the Danish invasions of this period have been mere plundering and blackmailing raids, apparently with no thought of permanent conquest. Had that been the aim of the sea-rovers, all this cruel burning and slaughtering would have been beside the mark: for why should a conqueror utterly ruin a land which he meant to rule? In 1013, however, a change came over the character of the invasions. They became part of a regular scheme of conquest; and the old Danish king who brought with him Canute,[196] his son, determined to make the country his own. Sweyn landed in the estuary of the Humber: Northumbria, Lindsey and the Five Boroughs submitted to him and gave him hostages, whom he sent to the ships to be kept under his son’s guardianship. He ordered the inhabitants to feed and mount his soldiers; he restored the full Danish dominion over all the country beyond the Watling Street as it existed in the darkest years of the ninth century. He then crossed the Watling Street, harrying the midland counties. Oxford submitted, so did Winchester. He marched against London, losing many of his foolhardy soldiers in crossing the Thames. London as usual made a brave defence. Ethelred was there, and with Ethelred a strange ally, none other than Thurkill the Dane who had commanded the invading army in 1009. It was Thurkill’s men who had captured Canterbury and murderously pelted the holy Elfheah; but according to one contemporary authority Thurkill himself had tried to save him, offering the murderers all his treasures, “except only his ship,” if they would but be merciful. Possibly the remembrance of that scene, or some lessons in Christianity which he may have learned from the captive archbishop, induced him now to lower the Raven-banner and take service under Ethelred. Possibly, too, it was this notable defection which caused Sweyn to come over in person and pluck the ripe fruit, lest it should fall into the hands of one of his subjects.
The Danish king next moved westward to Bath, and received the submission of that ancient city and of all the western thegns, each one of whom had to give hostages, who were sent like the others to the Humber to be kept under Canute’s guardianship. Even the brave citizens of London saw that it was useless further to prolong the contest. They submitted, gave hostages and joined with the rest of England in acknowledging Sweyn as “full king”. There are indications that this great revolution was prompted not merely by the desire to end in any manner the dreadful period of Danish ravagings, but also by utter disgust at the character of Ethelred, who seems to have been not merely incapable but also lustful and cruel. In the years which we have been traversing, there are some strange entries in the Chronicle recording executions, blindings, confiscations, no doubt inflicted at the command of Ethelred; and William of Malmesbury, in quoting a letter from Thurkill to Sweyn, makes him thus describe the condition of England and her king. “The land is a fair land and a rich, but the king snores. Devoted to women and wine, he thinks of everything rather than war, and this makes him hateful to his subjects and ridiculous to foreigners. The generals are all jealous of one another: the country-folk are weak, and fly from the field at the first crash of battle.” This letter is probably not authentic, but its words show what was the traditional character of “the redeless king”.
Recognising that his sceptre was broken, Ethelred sent the Lady Emma and her two sons across the sea to her brother in Normandy. He himself lingered for a while, first on shipboard in the Thames; then in the Isle of Wight, where he seems to have spent his Christmas; and then he too escaped to “Richard’s Land,” as the chroniclers call the duchy of Normandy. Thus then had Sweyn, the heathen and the parricide, king of Denmark by inheritance and of England by conquest, reached the summit of his earthly ambition: and having reached it, he was speedily removed by death. According to the legend related by Symeon of Durham, his death was a punishment for his contemptuous behaviour towards St. Edmund of East Anglia. Often had he spoken in a disrespectful manner of this martyred king, declaring that his saintship was an idle tale; and, what was more serious, he had announced to the monks of St. Edmundsbury that unless by a certain day a heavy tax which he had laid upon their monastery was paid, he would march thither with his men, give the sanctuary to the flames and put its inmates to death with a variety of torments. On the very day before his threatened expedition he was sitting on his horse at Gainsborough surrounded by the armed assembly of his warriors. Suddenly he cried out, “Help me, comrades! help! yonder is Saint Edmund who is coming to slay me”. While he was thus speaking, an unseen hand transfixed him with a spear: he fell from his war-horse and died at nightfall in great agony. Such is the legend. The Chronicle records only the simple fact that “at Candlemas on February 3, 1014, Sweyn ended his days, and all the fleet chose Cnut for their king”. The dead monarch seems to have reigned as “full king” over England for barely a month after the flight of Ethelred. His death led to a sudden shifting of the scene.
* * * * *
“Then all the witan, lay and clerical, resolved that they would send for King Ethelred, and they said that no lord should be dearer to them than their natural born lord, if only he would govern more righteously than he had done aforetime. Then the king sent hither his son Edward with his messengers, and bade greeting to all his people, and said that he would be to them a gracious lord and would amend all the things of which they complained, and that everything which they had done or said against him should be forgiven, on condition that they would all firmly and loyally adhere to him. Thus was full friendship made fast between them with word and pledge on either side; and they pronounced every Danish king outlawed from England for ever. Then came King Ethelred in spring-tide home to his own people, and gladly was he received by all of them.”
It was an easy matter for the witan to declare every Danish king an outlaw; to expel the young and vigorous Canute from the kingdom was a very different affair. At this time the Dane’s strongest position was in Lincolnshire, his naval base of operations being still doubtless the estuary of the Humber. The men of Lindsey had resorted to him at Gainsborough, and had undertaken to supply him with horses and to go forth together with him and harry. But now when Ethelred with “a full fyrd” appeared in Lincolnshire, Canute who was not ready for fight, stole away to his ships and sailed forth from the Humber, leaving “the poor folk whom he had deceived” to their king’s vengeance. Ethelred then “harried and burned and slew every man who could be got at”. Evidently the long years of war had thoroughly brutalised both the combatants. Canute, enraged probably by the proceedings of the witan, sailed round to Sandwich, and there landed the luckless hostages who had been delivered to his father by the northern shires in 1013. He chopped off their hands and noses and then, apparently, let them return to their homes. This savage mutilation is the greatest piece of barbarity that stands recorded against him. Meanwhile the portion of the fleet which Thurkill commanded lay at Greenwich, and from thence, though professing to support the cause of Ethelred, ravaged the country as much as they pleased. Thus for the unhappy peasants there was little to choose between Thurkill and Canute.
In the following year, 1015, there was a great meeting of the witan at Oxford, and here Edric, of whose treasons we have lately heard but little, distinguished himself by a characteristic piece of villainy. There were two thegns, probably brothers, named Sigeferth and Morcar, men with large estates and holding highest rank in the Five, or as they were now called, the Seven Boroughs (York and Chester were perhaps the two new additions to the old group). These men Edric, when he met them at the witenagemot, invited into his chamber and there he treacherously slew them. According to the somewhat doubtful story of William of Malmesbury, he had first made their henchmen drunk, and then when they, too late, sought to avenge their lords, Edric’s followers overpowered them, chased them into the church of St. Frideswide and slew them there. The king was evidently consenting to the death of these men, and purposed to bestow their broad lands on their murderer. But now came a strange overturn. Sigeferth’s widow had been by royal order conveyed to Malmesbury, probably with the intention of immuring her in the convent. Thither also, after a short interval, went the king’s son, the Etheling Edmund Ironside, whom we now hear of for the first time, but who was to be the protagonist in the next two years’ combat. He wooed the widow of Sigeferth; he perhaps promised to take vengeance on her husband’s murderers; he married her, contrary to the king’s command, and then early in September he marched to the Seven Boroughs, presented himself as the avenger of the murdered thegns and the heir of one of them, made himself master of all their domains and received the submission of their people.
The king was now lying at Cosham,[197] stricken with mortal sickness, and could exercise little influence on the course of events. The hopes of the nation must have all rested on Edmund, who certainly showed in these two years courage and activity, though he may have inherited some of his father’s incapacity for reading the characters of men. Thus, notwithstanding the breach between them, which he should have known to be deadly, he accepted the offered help of Edric Streona who repaired to his standard in the north, only to exercise his usual paralysing influence on the army, and then deserted to Canute, inducing the crews of the forty ships at Greenwich to follow his example.