In the first year of his reign, on July 31, 1017, the young Danish king, now about twenty-two years of age, took to wife Emma of Normandy, widow of Ethelred, and probably thirteen years his senior. As to the motives for this somewhat surprising marriage we have no sufficient information. It may have been due to a politic desire to secure the friendship of Normandy; it may have been Canute’s wish to present to his English subjects an appearance of continuity in the domestic life of the palace of Winchester; or there may have been—who knows?—a romantic passion engendered when the future bride and bridegroom met during the negotiations after the siege of London.[199] The new queen certainly seems to have faithfully complied with the spirit of the Scriptural precept about the bride’s forgetting of former ties, but need she also have forgotten the children of her former marriage? The son whom she bore to Canute, and who was named Harthacnut, was the object of her fondest affection. Canute evidently ousted the memory of the inglorious Ethelred, whose sons Alfred and Edward lingered on at their uncle’s court, apparently forgotten by their mother, and with no effort on her part to bring about their return from exile.
It was perhaps only a coincidence, though an unfortunate one, that the second marriage of Emma, like her first, was accompanied, if not by a massacre, by a considerable sacrifice of human life. In 1017 Canute ordered the execution not only of Edwy, of the seed royal, and of Edric the traitor, but of “Northman, son of Leofwine the ealdorman, and Ethelweard, son of Ethelmaer the Fat, and Brihtric, son of Elfheah in Devonshire”. The last name is for us meaningless: Ethelweard is interesting as denoting the grandson of Ethelweard the Chronicler, the “Patrician,” as he calls himself; the man of royal descent and of pompous diction. The name of Northman, son of Leofwine, deserves further notice as being our first introduction to a family which was to play an important part in the next half-century of English history. For five generations, since the very beginning of the eighth century, the family of Leofwine had borne a high place in the kingdom of Mercia. This Leofwine himself in 997 signed charters as dux, that is ealdorman, of the province of the Hwiccas. It was his son Northman who now, we know not on what pretext or under what cloud of suspicion, was put to death by Canute. The king’s wrath seems not to have extended to the other members of Northman’s family; for his father Leofwine at once received the earldom of Mercia, vacated by the death of Edric, and there are some indications that his son Leofric received a minor earldom, possibly that of Chester, which may have been previously held by the slain Northman.[200]
About the same time as the family of Leofwine, a rival family, one which was to engrave its name yet more deeply on the pages of English history, begins to make its appearance, not yet indeed in the Chronicles, but in those invaluable charters which show us by the names of the attesting witnesses who at any given period were the most prominent personages in the English court. Godwine, son of Wulfnoth, is a man over whose ancestry there hangs a cloud of mystery, the result partly of the poverty of Anglo-Saxon nomenclature, which makes it often difficult to identify the particular Wulfnoth or Edric or Ethelweard of whom we are in quest. There are stories about him of a romantic kind, according to which he, as a cowherd’s son, had the good fortune to meet a king or an earl who had lost his way after one of the battles between Canute and Edmund; gave him a night’s shelter, and was rewarded by patronage which enabled the future Earl Godwine to get his foot planted on the first rung of the official ladder. For these stories, which we find chiefly in chroniclers of a much later age, there appears to be no sufficient foundation. On the whole it seems probable that he was the offspring neither of a thegn nor of a theow, but sprang from some middle stratum of Anglo-Saxon society. Whatever his origin may have been, he was evidently a man of energy and capacity, and he rose rapidly in the favour of Canute, who was perhaps glad to obtain the services of new men, neither suspected of too strong an attachment to their former master, Ethelred, nor branded with the shame of his betrayal. Already, in 1018, he had the rank of earl, of what district we are not informed. He is said to have accompanied Canute in 1019 on a visit which he paid to Denmark; and to have distinguished himself in a war against the Wends, probably in Pomerania, and on his return to England he was raised to the high and novel position of Earl of the West Saxons. Up to this time the kings of Cerdic’s line, while ruling other parts of England by ealdormen or earls, had kept Wessex, the cradle of their dynasty, under their own personal control: and their example was followed by Canute himself at the beginning of his reign. He had now, however, by the death of his obscure and contemptible brother Harold (1016), become the wearer of the Danish crown; and possibly cherishing visions of other and more widely reaching Scandinavian conquests, he determined to keep his hands free from the mere routine of government even in royal Wessex, and therefore handed that province over to the administration of his young and loyal henchman, Godwine. About the same time he further secured the new earl’s attachment to the Danish dynasty by marrying him to Gytha, daughter of his cousin, Thurgils Sprakalegg, and sister of his own brother-in-law, Ulf the Jarl. Such a connexion brought the new man, Godwine, very close to Danish royalty. It is possible[201] that, during all the earlier part of his career, Earl Godwine seemed to the English people almost more of a Dane than a Saxon.
The country was now so tranquilly settling down under Canute’s rule that he felt himself able to dispense with the presence of “the army”. To him, as the chosen and anointed ruler of England, the marches and counter-marches, the harryings and the burnings of these fierce “sea-people” would be as little agreeable as to Alfred or Ethelred. One last and fearfully heavy gafol, no less than 72,000 pounds of silver, the equivalent probably of £1,500,000 sterling in our day, had to be raised and paid them, besides a further sum of 10,500 pounds, paid by the citizens of London alone. The army then, in 1018, returned to Denmark, only forty ships and their crews remaining with their peacefully triumphant king. Everything showed Canute’s desire to banish the memories of rapine and bloodshed which for so many years had been gathering round his father’s name and his own. He is said by one writer to have erected churches on all his battle-fields: he certainly did so (in 1020) on the bloodiest of them all, on Assandune. Earl Thurkill (not yet fallen into disgrace) with the archbishop of York, and many bishops, abbots and monks, joined in hallowing the minster there erected, a ceremony in which some have seen not only a commemoration of Canute’s “crowning mercy” but also an act of reparation for some share, direct or indirect, in the death of his Iron-sided rival. Another object of his devotion was East Anglian Edmund, who had been so barbarously done to death by Ingwar and Hubba. To this saint, it may be remembered, old Sweyn was said to have had a particular aversion, and from his ghostly apparition he was believed to have received his death-stroke. To appease the spirit of this royal martyr was now one of Canute’s most cherished desires. He reverenced his memory with a devotion as especial as his father’s hatred, and he, apparently, first gave to the great monastery of St. Edmundsbury that character of magnificence which distinguished it for so many centuries and gave it a place in the foremost rank of English sanctuaries.
In the seventh year of the new reign, 1023, Canute made the greatest of all reparations, that to the memory of the good archbishop whom drunken Danish seamen had brutally slain. The body of St. Alphege had been for some eleven years resting in St. Paul’s Church at London. It was more fitting that it should be laid in his own metropolitan church of Canterbury, and thither accordingly it was translated by the king’s orders. The delight with which Englishmen saw this tardy reparation to their dead countryman’s memory, rendered by a Danish king, shines forth in the enthusiastic pages of the Chronicle. The writer describes how “by full leave” of the king, archbishop Ethelnoth and Bryhtwine, bishop of Sherborne, took up the body from the tomb; how “the glorious king and the archbishop and suffragan bishops and earls and a great multitude, clerical and lay, carried on a ship St. Alphege’s holy body over the Thames to Southwark, and committed the holy martyr to the care of Ethelnoth and his companions, who then with a goodly band and with winsome joy bare him to Rochester. Then on the third day came the Lady Emma with her kingly bairn Harthacnut [aged five], and they all with great pomp and gladness and singing of psalms bare the holy archbishop into Canterbury.” The whole proceedings occupied seven days, and on June 15, 1023, the martyr’s body was finally deposited on the north side of the altar in Christ Church.
In like manner as Canute had honoured the memory of St. Edmund of East Anglia and St. Alphege of Canterbury, is he said to have dealt with the sepulchre of Edmund Ironside at Glastonbury. Towards the end of his reign he determined (says William of Malmesbury in his classical style) “to visit the Manes of him whom he was wont to call his brother Edmund. Having offered up his prayers, he placed upon the tomb a pallium inwoven with divers colours, representing figures of peacocks, which may still be seen there.” By his side stood Ethelnoth, archbishop of Canterbury, the seventh monk who had gone forth from Glastonbury to preside over the English Church. Before leaving the venerable minster in which rested the bones of so many of his predecessors, Canute gave a charter confirming to the church of the Virgin Mary in Glastonbury all its previous privileges. This charter was said to be given “by the advice of Ethelnoth, the bishops and my nobles, for love of the heavenly kingdom, for the pardon of my crimes and the forgiveness of the sins of my brother King Edmund”.
With the description of these expiatory rites our information as to the internal history of England under Canute comes to an end. This part of the Chronicle is extremely meagre, but probably its very sterility is partly an illustration of the proverb, “Happy is the nation that has no annals”. After all the agonies of the Danish invasions, now that a wise and masterful Dane sat upon the English throne, the land had rest for twenty years. In external affairs Canute played an important part, which we shall have to consider in relation to (1) Scotland, (2) the Empire and the Papacy, and (3) Norway.
(1) Events of great and lasting significance took place on the Scottish border in the reign of Canute, but to understand them we must go back into the reign of his predecessor, and take up for the last time the story of the wanderings of the incorruptible body of St. Cuthbert. For 112 years that precious relic had reposed at Chester-le-Street, but in 995 Bishop Aldhun, who had for five years presided over the diocese which still bore the name of deserted Lindisfarne, filled with fear of Danish invasions and “forewarned by a heavenly oracle,” carried the body farther inland, to the abbey of Ripon. After four months it was considered safe to re-transport it to its former home; but when the bearers reached a certain place on the banks of the Wear, called Wrdelau, the holy body became immovable as a mountain and refused to be carried an inch farther. It was revealed to a monk named Eadmer that the neighbouring hill of Dunhelm, splendidly and strongly placed in the midst of a fruitful land, and overlooking the windings of a beautiful river, was meant to be the saint’s next and final resting-place. Thither accordingly, with joy and gladness, the holy body was carried. The little wattled church which was erected over it was the predecessor of a noble cathedral, the grandest specimen of Norman architecture that our country can boast: and Bishop Aldhun, who lived for twenty-four years after the translation, was the first of the long line of bishops of Durham.
Almost at once we find the prelates of this see important factors in Northumbrian politics. Aldhun gave his daughter, Ecgfrida (born no doubt before he became an ecclesiastic), in marriage to “a youth of great energy and skilled in military affairs,” named Uhtred, who was practically taking the management of affairs out of the hands of his father, Earl Waltheof, as that aged man, self-immured in Bamburgh, was doing naught for the defence of his country. Thus, when in 1006 Malcolm II., King of Scots, taking advantage, doubtless, of the distracted state of England during the Danish invasions, collected the whole army of Scotland, entered Northumbria, laid it waste with fire and sword, and then besieged the new city of Durham, it was Uhtred who gathered troops together and went to the help of the bishop, his father-in-law. As old Waltheof still continued inactive he, on his own responsibility, summoned the fyrd of Northumberland, joined it to that of the citizens of York, and with the large army thus collected fell on the Scottish besiegers of Durham and won a complete victory. King Malcolm only escaped with difficulty, and a multitude of his followers were slain. The anonymous chronicler[202] who relates these events, tells us that “the daintier heads of the slain, with their hair inwoven according to the then prevalent fashion, were by Uhtred’s orders carried to Durham, fixed on stakes, and placed at intervals round the circuit of the walls, having first been washed by four women, to each of whom he gave a cow as the reward of her labours”. That little detail concerning the women’s payment for their ghastly toil looks like a bit of genuine tradition.
Such was the great English victory of 1006. Now for its fatal reversal twelve years later. The victorious Uhtred, who had become in the meantime Earl of Northumbria and son-in-law of Ethelred, was, as we have seen,[203] put to death by order of Canute, or rather perhaps assassinated at his instigation by a private enemy, just as the struggle between the Danish and English kings was coming to a crisis. The Danish earl, Eric, whom Canute had set over Deira, and the Englishman, Eadwulf Cutel, who had succeeded to some portion of his brother Uhtred’s power over Bernicia, were probably known by Malcolm to be inefficient men, not likely to combine for the common defence. In 1018, having made his preparations and formed an alliance with Eugenius the Bald, King of the Cymri of Strathclyde, Malcolm crossed the Firth of Forth and marched through Bernicia as far as the Tweed. The men of Northumbria were already disheartened by the appearance of a comet which for thirty nights had been hanging, ominous, in the midnight sky; and too truly were their forebodings justified. At Carham, a place on the southern bank of the Tweed, a little above Coldstream, almost within sight of the future battlefield of Flodden, the two armies met in fight. “Then were the whole people” (says Symeon of Durham) “from Tees to Tweed on one side, and there was an infinite multitude of Scots on the other.” Malcolm’s victory on this occasion was far more decisive than his defeat had been twelve years earlier. “Almost the whole English force with its leaders perished.” To Aldhun, the aged Bishop of Durham, the tidings of this defeat—all the more bitter because sustained at a place which for three centuries had formed part of the patrimony of St. Cuthbert—came as an actual death-stroke. “Me miserable!” said he, “that I should have lived so long, to behold this lamentable slaughter of St. Cuthbert’s men. Now, O Confessor! beloved of the Lord, if I have ever done aught pleasing in thy sight, repay me, I pray thee, by not suffering me any longer to survive thy people.” His prayer was granted. After a few days he died: the first but not the last Bishop of Durham to have his life made burdensome by the incursions of the Scots.