Since to England came the Dane.
There is a persistently repeated story that a cruel parody of the Roman decimation was inflicted on these unfortunates. By that old custom lots were cast, and every tenth man so selected was handed over to the executioner. Now nine out of ten were slain and only the tenth survived, nor was even he certain of life; for after the massacre it seemed to the tyrant’s agents that too many still survived and the sword devoured anew. As for the unhappy Etheling himself, he was taken round by sea to the Isle of Ely and there imprisoned. An order having been received for his blinding, he was held down by four men while the cruel deed was done. He seems to have survived for some weeks or months, and moved about, a saddening figure, among the once cheery monks of Ely; but ere long he died, either from the shock of the operation, or, as one author hints, from insufficiency of food. It seems clear that these cruelties were not perpetrated by Godwine himself, who judiciously disappeared as soon as he had left the slenderly guarded prince at his supper table at Guildford; but neither the judgment of his contemporaries nor that of posterity, with one eminent exception,[211] has acquitted the great Earl of Wessex of complicity in the crime.
The abortive expedition of Alfred, and the defection of Earl Godwine, left the dowager-queen in a precarious position. Moreover, the hearts of Englishmen had begun to turn away from Harthacnut who, as they thought, tarried too long in Denmark, and towards Harold, who was, after all, the son of a Saxon mother (whether gentle or base born), and who, notwithstanding the cruelty and craft which he had shown in the affair of the Etheling Alfred, had qualities of physical strength and fleetness which gained for him a sort of rude popularity with his subjects. Thus it came to pass that in 1037 “Queen Emma was driven out of the country,” as the chronicler laments, “without any tenderness of heart, against the raging winter”. She went to the court of the hospitable Baldwin, her nephew by marriage, who assigned to her a dwelling in the city of Bruges and a princely maintenance. Of this, however, she took only a small part, sufficient for her absolute needs, and gratefully refused the rest, saying that she could do without it. So says the Flemish priest, who doubtlessly met her about this time, and who, in gratitude for favours received, composed the Encomium Emmæ, on which, in the absence of better sources, we have to rely for many details of her history.
The election of Harold as king of the whole of England, which now took place, did not pass without some opposition, especially from the archbishop of Canterbury, Ethelnoth. When ordered to perform the ceremony of consecration, he flatly refused, declaring that at Canute’s command he had vowed to recognise only Emma’s son as his lawful successor. He would not presume to keep, in defiance of the king, the crown and sceptre, which had been committed to his charge, but, laying them on the altar he left them to Harold to deal with as he would, only declaring that none of his suffragan bishops should presume, on pain of excommunication, to crown this king or to grant him episcopal benediction. How the dispute ended Emma’s partisan does not inform us. Probably Harold, like Napoleon, crowned himself; but we are told that the refusal of the episcopal benediction so rankled in the young king’s breast that he relapsed into something like paganism. When others in Christian fashion were silently gliding into church for Divine worship, he (the swift-footed hunter) would be surrounding the woods with his dogs and cheering them on to the chase, or sometimes indulging in less innocent occupations. Clearly, here was a monarch who had little love for the Church, and whose character may therefore have been painted a little too darkly by ecclesiastical chroniclers.
After making an ineffectual appeal for help to Edward, her surviving son by Ethelred, Emma at last succeeded in inducing Harthacnut to leave his beloved Denmark and attempt the invasion of England. He arrived at Bruges, probably towards the end of 1039, with sixty-two ships, and having no doubt made other large preparations for a hostile expedition, but none of these were needed. Harold Harefoot died on March 17, 1040, and was buried at Westminster. On his death a deputation was sent to Bruges to invite Harthacnut to assume the crown, “and men deemed that they did well in doing so”. Sore, says the encomiast, was the lamentation of the widows and orphans of Bruges, who deemed that by the departure of the Lady Emma they were losing their best friend; but she of course accompanied her son.
Too soon the men of both nations found that they had not done so well as they supposed, in inviting the lad from Denmark to reign over them. The crews of his ships were clamouring for money, and to appease them the new king laid upon his subjects a heavier Danegeld than had been exacted all through the reigns of Canute and Harold. Then the Danegeld had been for sixteen ships, at the rate of eight marks for each rower; now Harthacnut claimed the same rate of pay for his whole fleet of sixty-two ships. It was indeed “a stern geld,” and the attempt to levy it caused violent popular commotions. A terrible hurricane had blown the previous year, probably injuring the harvest, and the high price of corn resulting therefrom caused the gafol to be felt the more bitterly. “Thus all men that had before yearned after Harthacnut became unfriendly to him. He devised no kingly deed during all his reign, and he caused the dead body of Harold to be taken up and shot into the marsh.” Worse than this, he took a cruel revenge on the whole of Worcestershire for the murder of two of his house-carls whom he had sent to exact the “stern geld” from the citizens of Worcester. An insurrection had broken out; the house-carls had taken refuge in a turret of the minster, but had been discovered, dragged forth and slain. Hereupon, the enraged king ordered Godwine, Leofric and all the great earls, to assemble their forces; and sent them, six months after the murder, with orders to harry both city and shire. The inhabitants, forewarned, took refuge on an island in the Severn, and made so vigorous a defence that their lives were of necessity spared; but the minster was burnt, the country was laid waste and the house-carls of the king, with the followers of the earls, returned laden with booty to their homes.
Now at last, during the short reign of Harthacnut, a brighter day dawned for the banished son of Ethelred. Edward was invited over from Normandy and was “sworn in as king”; that is, probably, associated in some way with Harthacnut as ruler of the land, and recognised as his destined successor in the event of his early death, which seems to have been considered not improbable. The only other event recorded of the reign of Harthacnut, “the king who devised nothing kingly,” is his complicity in the murder of Eadwulf,[212] earl of Bernicia, who had possibly made himself conspicuous as one of Harold’s partisans. He seems to have been invited to court that he might be formally reconciled to the new king, but on his way he was murdered by his nephew, Siward the Strong, who was already earl of Deira, and now, receiving as the reward of his crime his victim’s earldom of Bernicia, ruled once again as the kings of Northumbria had ruled aforetime, over the whole wide region from Humber to Tweed.
Harthacnut’s end was worthy of his life. On a day of June, 1042, a great feast was given by a Danish nobleman, Osgod Clapa, in honour of the marriage of his daughter. To this banquet the king was, of course, invited, and “as he stood at his drink he suddenly fell to the ground and was seized with dreadful convulsions. Those who were near took him up, but he never after spake a word. He died on the 8th of June, and all the people accepted Edward as their king, as was his right.” Harthacnut died in the twenty-fifth year of his age, having not quite completed the second year of his reign. Like the old Saxon kings, and like Canute his father, he was buried in the Old Minster at Winchester.
CHAPTER XXIV.
LEGISLATION OF THE LATER KINGS.
In the period which followed the Norman Conquest “the laws of good King Edward” was a phrase often on the lips of Englishmen; yet it was but a phrase, for Edward the Confessor, on the threshold of whose reign we are now standing, added, as far as can be ascertained, no laws to the Anglo-Saxon collection. Danish Canute, on the other hand, holds an honourable place in our legal history; for his Dooms, which fill one hundred pages in Liebermann’s volume, show somewhat of the instinct of a codifier as well as a genuine desire to deal equal justice to the Danish and the English inhabitants of the land.