CNUT OR CANUTE OF ENGLAND, ALSO KING OF DENMARK.
By JOHN RICHARD GREEN.
[Date of birth uncertain, died 1035 or 1036. He succeeded to the command of the Danish invaders of England on the death of his father Svein, and on the death of Eadmund Ironsides, the Saxon king, he became the acknowledged King of England in 1017. His exercise of power was marked by great qualities of justice, ability, and devotion to the interests of his acquired kingdom; and his name has been transmitted in history as a worthy successor of the Great Alfred.]
The first of our foreign masters was the Dane. The countries of Scandinavia which had so long been the mere starting points of the pirate bands who had ravaged England and Ireland had now settled down into comparative order. It was the aim of Svein to unite them in a great Scandinavian Empire, of which England should be the head; and this project, interrupted for a time by his death, was resumed with yet greater vigor by his son Cnut. Fear of the Dane was still great in the land, and Cnut had no sooner appeared off the English coast than Wessex, Mercia, and Northumberland joined in owning him for their lord, and in discarding again the rule of Æthelred, who had returned on the death of Svein. When Æthelred’s death in 1016 raised his son Eadmund Ironside to the throne, the loyalty of London enabled him to struggle bravely for a few months against the Danes; but a decisive victory at Assandun and the death of his rival left Cnut master of the realm. Conqueror as he was, the Dane was no foreigner in the sense that the Norman was a foreigner after him. His language differed little from the English tongue. He brought in no new system of tenure or government. Cnut ruled, in fact, not as a foreign conqueror but as a native king. The good-will and tranquillity of England were necessary for the success of his larger schemes in the north, where the arms of his English subjects aided him in later years in uniting Denmark and Norway beneath his sway.
Dismissing, therefore, his Danish “host,” and retaining only a trained body of household troops or hus-carls to serve in sudden emergencies, Cnut boldly relied for support within his realm on the justice and good government he secured it. His aim during twenty years seems to have been to obliterate from men’s minds the foreign character of his rule, and the bloodshed in which it had begun. The change in himself was as startling as the change in his policy. When he first appears in England, it is as the mere northman, passionate, revengeful, uniting the guile of the savage with his thirst for blood. His first acts of government were a series of murders. Eadric of Mercia, whose aid had given him the crown, was felled by an axe-blow at the king’s signal; a murder removed Eadwig, the brother of Eadmund Ironside, while the children of Eadmund were hunted even into Hungary by his ruthless hate. But from a savage such as this Cnut rose suddenly into a wise and temperate king. Stranger as he was, he fell back on “Eadgar’s law,” on the old constitution of the realm, and owned no difference between conqueror and conquered, between Dane and Englishman. By the creation of four earldoms—those of Mercia, Northumberland, Wessex, and East Anglia—he recognized provincial independence, but he drew closer than of old the ties which bound the rulers of these great dependencies to the Crown. He even identified himself with the patriotism which had withstood the stranger. The Church had been the center of national resistance to the Dane, but Cnut sought above all its friendship. He paid homage to the cause for which Ælfheah had died, by his translation of the archbishop’s body to Canterbury. He atoned for his father’s ravages by costly gifts to the religious houses. He protected English pilgrims against the robber-lords of the Alps. His love for monks broke out in the song which he composed as he listened to their chant at Ely: “Merrily sang the monks in Ely when Cnut King rowed by” across the vast fen-waters that surrounded their abbey. “Row, boatmen, near the land, and hear we these monks sing.”
Cnut’s letter from Rome to his English subjects marks the grandeur of his character and the noble conception he had formed of kingship. “I have vowed to God to lead a right life in all things,” wrote the king, “to rule justly and piously my realms and subjects, and to administer just judgment to all. If heretofore I have done aught beyond what was just, through headiness or negligence of youth, I am ready with God’s help to amend it utterly.” No royal officer, either for fear of the king or for favor of any, is to consent to injustice, none is to do wrong to rich or poor “as they would value my friendship and their own well-being.” He especially denounces unfair exactions: “I have no need that money be heaped together for me by unjust demands.” “I have sent this letter before me,” Cnut ends, “that all the people of my realm may rejoice in my well-doing; for, as you yourselves know, never have I spared nor will I spare to spend myself and my toil in what is needful and good for my people.”
Cnut’s greatest gift to his people was that of peace. With him began the long internal tranquillity which was from this time to be the special note of our national history. During two hundred years, with the one terrible interval of the Norman Conquest, and the disturbance under Stephen, England alone among the kingdoms of Europe enjoyed unbroken repose. The wars of her kings lay far from her shores, in France or Normandy, or, as with Cnut, in the more distant lands of the north. The stern justice of their government secured order within. The absence of internal discontent under Cnut—perhaps, too, the exhaustion of the kingdom after the terrible Danish inroads—is proved by its quiet during his periods of absence. Everything witnesses to the growing wealth and prosperity of the country. A great part of English soil was, indeed, still utterly uncultivated.
Wide reaches of land were covered with wood, thicket and scrub, or consisted of heaths and moor. In both the east and the west there were vast tracts of marsh land; fens nearly one hundred miles long severed East Anglia from the midland counties; sites like that of Glastonbury or Athelney were almost inaccessible. The beaver still haunted marshy hollows such as those which lay about Beverley, the London craftsmen chased the wild boar and the wild ox in the woods of Hampstead, while wolves prowled round the homesteads of the north. But peace, and the industry it encouraged, were telling on this waste; stag and wolf were retreating before the face of man, the farmer’s axe was ringing in the forest, and villages were springing up in the clearings. The growth of commerce was seen in the rich trading-ports of the eastern coast. The main trade lay probably in skins and ropes and ship-masts; and, above all, in the iron and steel that the Scandinavian lands so long supplied to Britain. But Dane and Norwegian were traders over a yet wider field than the northern seas; their barks entered the Mediterranean, while the overland route through Russia brought the wares of Constantinople and the East. “What do you bring to us?” the merchant is asked in an old English dialogue. “I bring skins, silks, costly gems, and gold,” he answers, “besides various garments, pigment, wine, oil, and ivory, with brass and copper and tin, silver and gold, and such like.” Men from the Rhineland and from Normandy, too, moored their vessels along the Thames, on whose rude wharves were piled a strange medley of goods—pepper and spices from the far East, crates of gloves and gray cloths (it may be from the Lombard looms), sacks of wool, iron-work from Liége, butts of French wine and vinegar, and with them the rural products of the country itself—cheese, butter, lard, and eggs, with live swine and fowls.
Cnut’s one aim was to win the love of his people, and all tradition shows how wonderful was his success. But the greatness of his rule hung solely on the greatness of his temper, and at his death the empire he had built up at once fell to pieces.
WILLIAM THE CONQUEROR.
By JOHN RICHARD GREEN.
[The illegitimate son of Robert, surnamed Le Diable, duke of Normandy, and his father’s successor, born 1027; died, 1087. Claiming right of inheritance under a pretended bequest of Edward the Confessor, the Saxon king of England, he levied a great army of adventurers from all Europe, and in the great battle of Senlac, or, as it is sometimes known, Hastings, he defeated the Saxons and their King Harold, who had been elected by the voice of the Wittenegamotte, or Great Council of England, on October 14, 1066. Harold was slain, and the Norman conqueror was crowned. William’s transcendent abilities as a ruler, though stained by cruelty and rapacity, made his reign the greatest epoch in early English history.]