No More Learning

The experiment nevertheless was a
very risky one, and a year later proved quite ineffective to stop a fresh
force of vikings landing in Devon, which ultimately was only bought
CH. XV.


## p. 382 (#428) ############################################

382
Svein of Denmark. Thorkil the Tall
off with a promise of £24,000 after a triumphant march from Teignton
and Exmouth through Somerset and Wiltshire to Southampton Water.
Instead of fighting this force Pallig actually joined it with all the ships
he could lay hold of, a piece of treachery which enraged Aethelred to
such a degree that he lost control of himself and planned a general
massacre of the Danes in his service and even of their families. This
utterly barbarous and unwise piece of retaliation was carried out on St
Brice's day 1002 to the shame of all chivalrous Englishmen, and among
the victims was not only Pallig and his son but his wife Gunnhild,
Svein's sister, whom Aethelred was holding as a hostage.
The tragedy of Gunnhild's death marks the turning point in
Aethelred's reign; for it naturally bred in Svein a desire for vengeance
which was only to be satisfied after ten long years of warfare ending in
the conquest of England. Of this struggle the Chronicle gives a minute
account, but often in such hysterical tones that it is difficult to make
out what really happened. Nor can space be given here to unravel its
meaning. The bare outlines however are somewhat as follows. In 1003
Svein burnt Exeter, Wilton and Salisbury. In 1004 he sacked Norwich
and Thetford, and had some hard tussles with Ulfkytel, the chief Danish
jarl in East Anglia. In 1006 he ravaged East Kent, and next spring
.
after wintering in the Isle of Wight plundered right and left through
Hampshire and Berkshire. Aethelred meantime had apparently done
nothing but hide in Shropshire in the company of a west-country
magnate, one Eadric, nicknamed “Streona” or “the Grasper,” an evil
councillor of whom the Chronicle can hardly speak with patience. As
ever Aethelred's one idea was to offer the enemy a ransom.
He accord
ingly patched up a truce, and persuaded Svein to take his forces back to
Denmark in return for a tribute of £36,000. At the same time he
placed Eadric in possession of the great estates formerly possessed by
Aelfhere in the Severn valley, and made him duke of Western Mercia.
After this there seems to have been a lull for two years, in which some
efforts were made to organise a large naval force for the defence of the
country by requiring ships to be furnished from every 300 hides of land;
but when this feet assembled at Sandwich in 1009, the quarrels between
its leaders, Brihtric, a brother of Eadric, and Wulfnoth the Child, a
powerful Sussex magnate, completely wrecked its utility. In 1010 the
Danish fleets were back again, this time led not by Svein in person but by
one of his great men, Thorkil the Tall, a famous jarl from Jómsborg. He
attacked Ulfkytel, and having defeated him at Ringmere near Thetford
harried all the south-east Midlands, penetrating westwards as far as
Oxfordshire, and burning in turn Cambridge, Bedford and Northampton.
These inland districts, which had not before suffered from the raiders,
seem to have been utterly dazed. No leaders could be found to captain
the local levies and no shire would help another. The inhabitants
simply clamoured for peace on any terms, and so in 1011 a witan


## p. 383 (#429) ############################################

Flight of Aethelred. Death of Svein
383
advised Aethelred to offer a still larger ransom, this time no less than
£48,000. It proved difficult, however, to raise so great a tribute. The
disappointed vikings therefore went on ravaging, and a little later
betook themselves to Kent, where they sacked Canterbury, owing to
treachery on the part of the abbot of St Augustine's, and captured the
Archbishop, Aelfheah (Alphege). For some months they held the primate
to ransom, only to murder him in a drunken riot at Greenwich early in
1012. When at last the tribute was got together, the Danish forces
broke up and some went back to Denmark; but Thorkil himself with
a fleet of forty-five ships remained in England and took service with
Aethelred. The plan of setting a thief to catch a thief was evidently to
be tried again; but it met with no more success than in the case of
Pallig, for the news, that Thorkil was obtaining power in England,
immediately brought his overlord Svein upon the scene, bent upon con-
quering the whole country and outshining his lieutenant.
The plan of attack in 1013 was quite different to the methods hitherto
adopted. Instead of raiding Wessex or East Anglia, Svein directed his
fleet to the Humber, evidently counting on a friendly reception from the
men of the Danelaw. Nor was he disappointed. As soon as he landed
with his son Knut at Gainsborough on the Trent, Uhtred, a son of
Waltheof of Bamborough, who had distinguished himself against the Scots
and become jarl of the Yorkshire Danes, offered him his allegiance, and
shortly afterwards all the men of the Five Boroughs submitted and gave him
hostages
. A good base being thus secured, where he could leave his ships
in his son's guardianship, he next marched through Leicestershire across
the Watling Street into Eadric's dukedom and so south to Oxford and
Winchester. Both these boroughs submitted as soon as he appeared,
and it was not till he turned eastwards to London, where Aethelred lay
with Thorkil, that we hear of any resistance. There was a fight, it would
seem, for the possession of London Bridge in which Svein's men were
unsuccessful. Checked for the moment in the east, and uncertain how best
to deal with Thorkil, Svein next proceeded to Bath to secure control of
Western Wessex. A hundred and forty years before this district had been
the scene of Alfred's heroic defence, but its old spirit had long departed.
In a few days it submitted, after which we are told “all the people held
Svein for full king. " These sweeping desertions made Aethelred realise
that England as a whole was resolved not to fight for him, and that
Thorkil's forces were hardly likely for long to save him from Svein's
vengeance. He accordingly took ship and sought a refuge in Normandy
at the court of Duke Richard the Good, the brother of his second wife
Emma, whom he had married eleven years before on the very eve of the
fateful massacre of 1002.
Svein's triumph, complete as it seemed, was destined to be only
momentary. He retired to his base on the Trent to keep the Yule-tide
feast with his son Knut, and had the satisfaction of receiving hostages
CH. XV.


## p. 384 (#430) ############################################

384
Restoration of Aethelred. Invasion of Knut
from the Londoners, but died suddenly in February 1014, before he could
be crowned King of England. His death threw the whole Scandinavian
world into confusion. The fleet at Gainsborough chose the youthful Knut,
though only eighteen, to be king; but he was not Svein's eldest son, and
Denmark passed to his brother Harold, while the Norwegians favoured
the claims of Olaf the Stout, a cousin of Olaf Tryggvason's, who had been
fighting in England with Thorkil, to rule those parts of Norway which
had acknowledged Svein's supremacy. In these circumstances it is not
surprising to hear that Aethelred was called back to England, and that
the jarls who stood round Knut advised a return of the fleet to Scan-
dinavia to enable each man to look after his home interests. Knut there-
fore sailed away from the Humber, and for a year was occupied in Denmark
making terms with his brother.
Meantime a new force arose in England in Edmund, Aethelred's eldest
son by his first marriage. Aethelred on his return gave his confidence
again to Eadric, and on his advice took steps to punish the men of the Five
Boroughs for offering their allegiance to Svein. In pursuit of this object he
put to death Sigeferth and Morkere, two of the leading magnates north of
the Welland, and added their estates to Eadric's territories. . This was just
one of those outrages which gained Aethelred the title of the “Redeless”
or the “Badly counselled. ” All additions to the Grasper's power were
bitterly resented, and by none more than by Edmund, the heir to the
throne. To check Eadric became the fixed purpose of the young prince.
He accordingly seized and married Sigeferth's widow, and then marched
to the Five Boroughs as the avenger of the lady's wrongs and made him-
self master of all the lands which Eadric had coveted. This stroke was so
popular in the Danelaw, that Edmund at once became a power in the land,
but only at the cost of earning the undying hatred of Eadric. What this
would entail was seen a few months later when Knut once more appeared
in the Channel with a large fleet partly furnished by his brother. This
picked force, “which contained neither thrall nor freedman," landed at
Wareham without opposition from Aethelred, who was lying ill near
Portsmouth, and ravaged at will through Dorset and Somerset. To meet
it Edmund and Eadric both gathered forces; but when they came face to
face with the enemy in Wiltshire, Eadric promptly went over to Knut.
Edmund therefore had to retire over the Thames without fighting, and
the whole of Wessex submitted. In the spring of 1016 much the same
happened in Mercia. Knut and Eadric came leagued together into
Warwickshire, and Edmund in despair was forced to abandon the defence
of Middle Anglia. The most he could do was to appeal for assistance to
Uhtred, who had his own grievances against Eadric. This caused a
momentary diversion; for Uhtred marched through Cheshire to attack
Eadric in Staffordshire and Shropshire. But Knut meantime overran
the valley of the Ouse, then went unchecked all up the east side of
England to the Humber, and eventually appeared before York. When


## p. 385 (#431) ############################################

Edmund Ironside. Battle of Ashington
385
Uhtred heard of this rapid advance, he turned back from Mercia to repeat
the submission which he had formerly made to Svein. Knut, however,
instigated by Eadric, connived at his murder by some private enemies,
and appointed his own brother-in-law Eric, who had been ruler of part of
Norway, to be jarl of Yorkshire in his place. By April the position of
affairs was almost the same as it had been before Svein's death. Thanks
to Eadric's treachery, all England save East Anglia and the districts im-
mediately round London were in the hands of the invaders. It would
seem also that Thorkil had gone over to his countrymen, and so Edmund
and Ulfkytel were the only important leaders with whom Knut had
still to reckon. It was at this critical juncture that Aethelred died,
and Englishmen had to decide whether they would abandon the struggle
or choose Edmund as their king in the hope that he might prove a second
Alfred and retrieve the national fortunes even at the eleventh hour.
The Londoners to their credit decided for Edmund; and soon the
courage of many parts of England began to revive, for Edmund at once
shewed his countrymen that he meant to take the offensive. For this pur-
pose he realised that he could not do better than begin where Alfred had
set the example. He therefore hurried down to Somerset, leaving London
to stand a siege at the hands of the feet which Knut had brought round
from Southampton to Greenwich. His appearance in the west soon
brought men to his standard, and in a week or two he was strong enough
to advance eastwards to Sherston, near Malmesbury, and attack Thorkil
and Eadric, who had been detached by Knut to intercept him. The fight
proved indecisive, but Edmund must have had the advantage, as the Danes
retreated on London, and left him free to march into the Chiltern country
and raise larger forces. With these he relieved London and, after forcing
a passage over the Thames at Brentford, had the satisfaction of seeing
the Danish fleet retire to the Orwell in search of supplies. Their land-
forces meanwhile went into Kent; but again Edmund followed, and having
defeated them at Otford drove them into Sheppey and thence into Essex.
This series of successes seemed to shew that the luck was turning and led
Eadric to pretend at any rate that he wished to change sides. Unluckily
Edmund believed him, and allowed him to join his army with a body of
men from Herefordshire. The two then moved together into Essex and
threw their forces on the Danes at Ashington, near Shoebury. By this
time Edmund had far the larger and more confident army, and should have
,
won again; but in the middle of the fight Eadric played the traitor once
more and gave Knut a hard-won victory, the list of the slain including
the gallant old Ulfkytel of East Anglia and many of the leading men of
Eastern Mercia. So costly a defeat forced Edmund once more to fall back
westwards. He was, however, by no means beaten, and Knut was by this
time convinced that he had better come to terms with him. A meeting
was accordingly proposed between the two young kings. This took place
under Eadric's auspices at Olney in Gloucestershire, and there it was
C. MED. H. VOL. III. CH. XV.
25


## p. 386 (#432) ############################################

386
Accession of Knut
a
arranged that the realm should be divided, Edmund taking his ancestral
inheritance of Wessex, while Knut obtained all Mercia and the Danelaw,
on the condition that he forwent all vengeance on the Londoners and
gave them his peace. Knut's object in consenting to this treaty was, no
doubt, to obtain a breathing space and allow time for reinforcements
to reach him from Scandinavia. It might, however, quite well have opened
the way for Edmund to play over again the part of Edward the Elder,
now that he had restored the prestige of his house, and won for him-
self the name of “Ironside” by his audacity and doggedness in an almost
desperate situation. Englishmen at any rate now had a rallying point
and a leader. Fate, however, willed it otherwise. Only a few weeks after
the treaty Edmund died at Oxford unexpectedly, if not by foul play,
when still only twenty-two. His loss at once destroyed the reviving
.
spirit of the West Saxons. They might perhaps have turned to Eadwig,
Edmund's brother, the sole surviving male of Aethelred's first family, but
their dread of the Danes was too great, and so Knut was hailed King of
all England early in 1017 without further opposition.
Knut ruled England for eighteen years (1017-1035). Through his
mother half a Pole, he was at his accession about twenty-two years old,
and already had two sons by an English wife called Aelfgifu of North-
ampton. His first act, however, was to repudiate this lady and take to
wife Emma of Normandy, Aethelred's widow, who was thirteen years his
senior. This stroke of policy freed him from all fear of the young Alfred
and Edward, her children by Aethelred, who were left at Rouen to be
educated as Frenchmen under the charge of their uncle Duke Richard.
To his new subjects Knut must have seemed the typical viking raider.
He proved, however, altogether different as a king to what men expected.
From the very outset he put off the barbarian and did his utmost to make
his subjects forget that he was their conqueror. He had of course to take
some steps of a drastic kind to secure himself against possible risings and
treachery, but, when once his power was fully established, he developed
into a most humane and conciliatory ruler, and gave England peace and
justice such as it had not enjoyed since the death of Edgar. King at
first only of England, in 1018 he acquired Denmark as well by the death
of his brother, and ultimately a considerable Scandinavian empire, but he
ever considered England his first care and made it his chief residence.
A rapid recovery of prosperity therefore followed his accession, and
Englishmen had little cause to regret the change of dynasty.
Knut's first task, after sending Edmund's infant sons out of the realm
and hunting down their uncle Eadwig, was to appoint a trusty band of
dukes, or "earls” as they now come to be called, using the Danish term,
to help him in controlling the various provinces of the kingdom. Full
details for all England are not available, but the lists of witnesses to his
land-books, coupled with entries in the Chronicles, shew that his scheme
was somewhat as follows : south of the Thames he kept the bulk of


## p. 387 (#433) ############################################

Knut's domestic policy
387
the country in his own hands, leaving, however, an Englishman called
Aethelweard in charge of part of Western Wessex. In East Anglia and
Yorkshire he relied on Scandinavians, giving the former to Thorkil
the Tall and the latter, as already noted, to his Norse brother-in-law
Eric, said to be the most chivalrous of the vikings. In Bernicia he left
the native line of high-reeves of Bamborough undisturbed, and even put
his confidence eventually in the murdered Uhtred's son Ealdred. In
Western Mercia he could hardly do otherwise at first than recognise Eadric;
but it was impossible to trust such a dangerous turncoat, and so it is not
surprising to find that within a year Knut charged him with treachery
and allowed Earl Eric to put him to death. In his place Knut set up
as Earl of Mercia another Englishman called Leofwine, whose family had
great possessions round Lichfield and Coventry, but he apparently did not
give him Fadric's great estates in Gloucestershire or along the middle
Severn, for shortly afterwards both Worcestershire and Herefordshire
appear as separate earldoms. Over these he set Scandinavians, the former
district going to his nephew Hákon, the son of Eric, and the latter to
Eglaf, son of Thorgils Sprakaleg, whose elder brother Ulf was married to
Estrith, Knut's half-sister. What was done in the case of the London
districts and the Five Boroughs is not recorded. The names of the above
earls, however, sufficiently indicate Knut's general idea, which was to employ
English magnates as far as he could, but simultaneously to give sufficient
rewards to his more important kinsmen, whether Danish or Norse, so that
they in their turn might be able to reward their military followers.
As a result a very considerable sprinkling of new Scandinavian families
settled in different parts of England, but at the same time there was
no systematic forfeiture of lands, and in particular very little ousting of
English peasantry to make way for fresh Scandinavian freedmen.
Having once begun a conciliatory policy, Knut adhered to it steadily.
In 1018 he held a great gemot at Oxford in which he declared his
intention of governing in accordance with the law of Edgar, and the
same year he paid off the bulk of his Scandinavian forces and sent them
back to Denmark, retaining only forty ships in his service, whose crews
afterwards came to form a kind of royal body-guard, known as the hus-
carls. The next year he was abroad, securing his hold on Denmark, but
signalised his return in 1020 by two acts which shewed still further his
trust in his English subjects. The first was the appointment of a Sussex
magnate called Godwin to be Earl of Wessex, and the second the issue
of a remarkable proclamation declaring that he meant in future to carry
on his government in strict conformity with the wishes of the English
bishops. Here in fact we have the keynote of his internal policy for the
rest of his life. Like Edgar he became a devout son of the Church, a
liberal ecclesiastical benefactor and a patron of the monastic or reforming
party. More and more he allowed himself to be guided by ecclesiastical
advisers, men like Aethelnoth, whom he made Archbishop of Canterbury,
a
a
CH, XV.
25--2


## p. 388 (#434) ############################################

388
Knut's foreign policy. Harold Harefoot
a
а
and Lyfing, whom he promoted to be abbot of Tavistock and, later, bishop
of Crediton. The most notable of his works of piety are perhaps the
rebuilding of the minster of Bury St Edmunds, and its conversion from
a college of canons into a house of monks; the foundation of the monastery
of St Benet at Holme in Norfolk; and the presentation of the port of
Sandwich and other gifts to Canterbury to atone for the murder of Arch-
bishop Aelfheah. There were few minsters in fact which Knut did not
enrich, for he wished to pose as the great Christian king and civiliser of
his people, and he firmly believed that the Church was the only instrument
which could effect his purpose.
Meantime across the North Sea, Knut was gradually extending his
influence. In 1022 we hear of an expedition to Witland in Esthonia,
and a little later, of demands on Olaf the Stout that he should hold Norway
as Knut’s vassal and pay a tribute. This led to an alliance between Olaf
and Anund Jacob, the King of Sweden, who together in 1026 invaded the
Danish realm, taking advantage of a dispute which had arisen between
Knut and his brother-in-law Ulf. The danger brought Knut over to
Denmark. He found the allied kings ravaging Scania, but so damaged
their feets in a fight at the mouth of the Helge River that they had to
give up their enterprise. He next had Ulf put to death, whether justly or
in a fit of passion it is difficult to say, and then in 1028, after a pilgrimage
to Rome to witness the coronation of the Emperor Conrad II, invaded
Norway with a considerable force including an English contingent. The
result was that Olaf was driven out, his constant efforts since 1015 to
christianise his subjects having rendered him unpopular. From this time
onwards Knut could call himself King of England, Denmark, Scania,
Witland, and Norway. Olaf, however, returned in 1030, but only to be
defeated and slain at Stiklestad, near Throndhjem, after which Knut placed
his eldest son Svein in charge of Norway under the guardianship of his
mother Aelfgifu of Northampton. The remainder of Knut's reign need
not detain us. The king lived constantly in England and busied himself
energetically with legislation designed to reinforce Edgar's laws and stamp
out any remains of heathenism which still lurked in the country. It
would seem too that he received some kind of homage from Malcolm II
of Scotland, who in 1018 had driven the Bernician earls out of Lothian
by a decisive victory at Carham. Knut's interference, however, did not
really retrieve that disaster or prevent the River Tweed becoming hence-
forth the permanent northern limit of England.
Knut died at Shaftesbury in 1035, when still under forty, and was
buried in the old minster at Winchester. At once his newly formed
empire fell to pieces. He had apparently intended that England and
Denmark should remain united under Harthacnut, his son by Emma of
Normandy, even if Svein, his son by Aelfgifu, obtained Norway. But
the choice of Harthacnut, who was at the moment his representative in
Denmark, did not commend itself either to the corps of hus-carls or the
a


## p. 389 (#435) ############################################

Harthacnut. Accession of Edward the Confessor 389
a
Mercians or the men of Yorkshire or East Anglia. Godwin, the Earl of
Wessex, now the most important man in England, alone championed
his cause strongly. Nor were the men of Norway willing to bow to Svein.
Knut's arrangements, therefore, fell to the ground except in Denmark, and
the upshot was that the English witan at Oxford, led by Leofric, the son
of Earl Leofwine, who had now become Earl of Mercia, declared for
Harold Harefoot, the younger son of Aelfgifu of Northampton, who was
in England ; while the Norwegians set up Magnus the son of their old
national champion Olaf the Stout, and recovered their independence. This
settlement of the succession persisted, so far as it affected England, for
five years, despite Harold's worthlessness and the strong opposition of
Queen Emma and Archbishop Aethelnoth. For Harthacnut remained in
Denmark, fully occupied in beating off attacks from Magnus, and Godwin
with his partisans, disappointed at his non-appearance in England, deserted
his cause. There is nothing, however, to record concerning Harold's reign
(1035–1040) except a number of acts of cruelty, the most notable being
the murder of Alfred, Queen Emma's eldest son by her first husband King
Aethelred, who with his younger brother Edward had been living peace-
ably in Normandy during the seventeen years of Knut's rule. This young
prince landed in England in 1035 with a small following, perhaps to make
a bid for the throne, but was seized by Godwin at Guildford and then
handed over to Harold, who had him blinded with such barbarity that he
died. For this act Godwin got nearly all the blame. Meantime Queen
Emma took refuge at Bruges with the Count of Flanders, and it was only in
the autumn of 1039 that she at last succeeded in stirring up her son Hartha-
cnut to collect a fleet of some 60 ships for an attack on his half-brother.
Before he could reach England, Harold died, whereupon Harthacnut was
offered the crown peaceably. He landed at Sandwich in June 1040, but
soon shewed himself a bloodthirsty tyrant. He began by imposing a
heavy tribute on his new subjects to pay the crews of his fleet. This led
shortly afterwards to the harrying of Worcestershire for impeding the
king's hus-carls in the collection of the tax. A little later he slew Eadulf,
the Earl of Northumberland, by treachery and gave his earldom to Siward,
the Earl of Yorkshire. He also took to selling vacant bishoprics. Luckily
his reign lasted less than two years, terminating with his sudden death in
June 1042 at a wedding banquet "as he stood at his drink. ”
Once more the English magnates had an opportunity of selecting a king,
uninfluenced by pressure from an invading army. The choice lay between
a Danish or an English succession. If the Danish line was to be main-
tained, the most promising heir was Knut's nephew Svein, the son of his
sister Estrith and the murdered Ulf, whom Harthacnut had left as viceroy
in Denmark to contend with Magnus; but if the English line was to be
restored, the only possible candidate was Edward, the surviving son of
Emma and Aethelred, whom Harthacnut had allowed to return to England.
As Earl Godwin was married to Gytha, Ulf's sister, and had been concerned
CH. XV.


## p. 390 (#436) ############################################

390
Edward's character
a
in the death of Edward's brother, Alfred, only a few years before, the
West Saxon leader might well have given his support to Svein. He did
not however do so, for Svein at the moment was making no headway in
Denmark. Accordingly after a short period of indecision, Edward was
chosen king by the voice of all the folk of England, and crowned nine
months later on Easter Day 1043.
The restoration of Aethelred's line in the person of Edward, known
to later generations as Edward the Confessor, freed England from one
set of foreign influences, only to introduce another; for Edward, in
spite of his direct male descent from Alfred, was half a Norman in
blood and almost wholly a Norman in training. When, in 1041, he
returned to England, after an exile of more than a quarter of a century,
he was already approaching his fortieth year; and he was a man whose
habits and ways of thinking had long been fixed. By all who knew him
he was accounted a mild-mannered, conscientious person and a confirmed
bachelor. He loved hunting, but not fighting. In France a great deal
of his life had been spent at Jumièges and other monasteries under the
influence of Norman ecclesiastics; and among these surroundings he had
acquired a taste for a comparatively cultured life and a tendency to lean
on clerics for guidance. He probably thought in French and disliked
speaking English, and he was at little pains to conceal the fact that he
found the manners of his countrymen uncongenial and their ideas
boorish and behind the times. When the English magnates decided to
accept him as their king, they probably thought that they had gauged
his character and reckoned that with his ignorance of English ways he
would be unable to direct affairs, and that all real power would conse-
quently slip by degrees into their hands. Such a forecast, however, was
not realised quite in the way the magnates expected. For Edward was
no sooner seated on the throne than he began to fill his court with
sundry Normans, Flemings and Bretons, who looked for honours and
careers in England, and were by no means prepared to play the part of
mere courtiers. Their numbers, too, year by year increased, and Edward
never hesitated to shew that he preferred their cleverer and more polished
society to the ruder ways of English and Danes, however high-born or
wealthy. Just at first, of course, he had to rely for support on the
native nobles and churchmen, who had favoured his accession, and espe-
cially on Earl Godwin, who was by far the most powerful territorial
magnate in southern England, and who had been chiefly responsible,
with Bishop Lyfing of Crediton, for making him king. Edward, how-
ever, was astute enough to perceive that Godwin's predominance was
much resented in the Midlands and in the North, and that in every dis-
trict the great landowners were exceedingly bitter in their jealousies and
rivalries, and might easily be pitted one against the other in such a
manner that the king might, after all, more or less get his own way if he
played his cards skilfully.
We find Edward accordingly before long
a
>


## p. 391 (#437) ############################################

Predominance of Godwin of Wessex
391
turning for support to Earl Leofric of Mercia and Earl Siward of
Northumbria, whenever he felt himself too much in the grip of Earl
Godwin.
At the same time he went to work systematically to contrive
openings for placing his foreign friends in positions of influence. Being
a man without much energy Edward planned no sudden coup d'état, nor
did he achieve any dramatic success in asserting himself; but he did
enough, by persistently adhering to the same tactics, to make his reign
a period of continual struggle between rival aspirants for ascendancy in his
counsels, and he managed so to manipulate events that a French-speaking
element in a few years gained a firm foothold in the ranks of the nobility
and in the Church, and gradually acquired considerable territorial in-
fluence in many parts of central and southern England. It is, of course,
easy to arraign this policy as unpatriotic; and, as it ultimately led to
the conquest of England by the Normans, Edward has sometimes been
denounced as the most worthless of the old English kings. The intro-
duction from abroad of more civilised manners and ideas was in itself,
however, no bad thing, and Edward ought rather to be praised for it.
It must be remembered, too, that at the outset of his reign England had
clearly fallen behind the Continent in many ways, and required to be re-
awakened. It seems, then, rather beside the mark to charge Edward
with want of patriotism because he attempted to supply new educative
influences in the only way open to him, and altogether inaccurate to
picture him, as has sometimes been done, as a saintly nonentity entirely
at the beck and call of foreign ecclesiastics, and without any policy of
The truer picture seems to be that he was neither unpatriotic
nor over-saintly, in spite of the grotesque stories handed down about him
by monkish biographers of the next generation; he was rather a well-
intentioned man of mediocre talent, thrust late in life and unexpectedly
into an extremely difficult position, and unfortunately not strong enough
to play the king's part with credit to himself or advantage to his
subjects.
It is not surprising, then, to find that nothing was done in his long
reign of twenty-three-and-a-half years (1042–1066) to weld England
together into a more compact state or to retard the growth of feudalising
tendencies, and that when he died, leaving no direct heir, the quarrelsome
magnates, who had tried unceasingly to overshadow him during his lifetime,
held hopelessly divergent views about replacing him.
The outstanding feature of Edward's reign during his earlier years is
undoubtedly the constant growth of Godwin's territorial power, and the
persistency with which the earl sought to aggrandise himself and his
family, not only in his own province of Wessex, but also in Mercia and
East Anglia. Godwin's first great success was obtained in 1045, when
he induced Edward, in spite of his known preference for celibacy, to marry
his daughter Edith and endow her with important estates in many parts of
his own.
CH. XV.


## p. 392 (#438) ############################################

392
Edward's foreign advisers
England. As the king's father-in-law, Godwin thus acquired precedence
over the other earls. His ambition, however, was by no means satisfied
with this advancement, and we next find him working for the advance-
ment of his sons. Again Edward proved compliant, and Godwin secured
in quick succession an earldom in the Severn valley for his eldest son
Svein, who had hitherto been content with a subordinate earldom under
his father in Somerset and Dorset, another in East Anglia for his second
son Harold, and a third in the Midlands for his nephew Beorn. By what
means sufficient lands were at the king's disposal to make these promo-
tions possible we do not know. Presumably Edward must have got into
his hands most of the estates which Knut had formerly bestowed on his
Danish jarls, Eglaf, Hákon and Thorkil the Tall. Some evidence also
exists that considerable property was surrendered at this time under
pressure by Emma, the queen mother, and also some by the king him-
self; for later, Harold is found in possession of at least twenty manors
in Essex and Hertfordshire which have all the characteristics of crown
land, while the king is returned as owning hardly any property in those
counties.
Meantime Edward was active, as occasion offered, in introducing his
own particular friends into lay and ecclesiastical posts, to act as checks
on Godwin's increasing power. The leading clerical examples were Robert,
Abbot of Jumièges, one of his closest friends in Normandy, whom he
made bishop of London in 1044, and another Norman called Ulf, who
became bishop of the wide-spreading diocese of Dorchester. These
ecclesiastical appointments passed unresented, as they were set off by
others which went to Godwin's party, such as the coadjutorship of
Canterbury to Siward, Abbot of Abingdon (who died in October 1048),
and the bishopric of Winchester to Stigand, a wealthy landowner in
Norfolk and Suffolk, who had been an important king's chaplain in Knut's
day and was high in favour with Queen Emma. Less satisfactory to
Godwin was the promotion of the king's nephew Ralf to a position of
influence. This young Frenchman, who was the son of Goda, Edward's
sister, by her marriage with Drogo of Mantes, Count of the Vexin, was
given an earldom in Herefordshire which acted as a counterpoise to
Svein's earldom; and at the same time two Breton lords, Robert the
son of Wimarc and Ralf of Guader near Rennes, were endowed with con-
siderable fiefs in Essex and East Anglia to act as checks on Harold. To
distinguish him from Ralf of Mantes this second Ralf is usually styled
Ralf the Staller, from the important quasi-military office of constable
in the royal household, which Edward also bestowed on him.
Godwin must have realised from these measures that his hold over
Edward was precarious, and soon afterwards it was almost destroyed
owing to the misdeeds of his son Svein, who first offended the Church by
abducting the abbess of Leominster, and then alienated the nobles by
murdering his cousin Earl Beorn. Godwin with great stupidity con-


## p. 393 (#439) ############################################

Godwin and his sons driven into exile
393
a
doned these outrages, but his attempts to shield his son so damaged his
influence, even in his own earldom of Wessex, that Edward plucked up
courage in 1050, when Eadsige of Canterbury died, to set aside Godwin's
kinsman, the elected Aelfric, and promote Robert of Jumièges to be
primate of the English Church. Nor could Godwin obtain the bishopric
of London, thus vacated, for his friend Spearhafoc of Abingdon, as
Robert of Jumièges maintained that his elevation was forbidden by
the Pope, and backed the king in appointing another Norman cleric,
named William, in his stead.
A definite breach thus arose between Edward and his father-in-law,
leading, a year later, to a serious crisis. This developed out of a visit
which Eustace, the Count of Boulogne, paid to Edward in 1051. Eustace
had recently married the king's sister. Goda, the widowed mother
of the Earl of Hereford, and he seems to have come to England on an
ordinary family visit or perhaps to look after his wife's English lands.
His stay with his brother-in-law at the English court went off quietly
enough, but on his return journey his retinue provoked a riot at Dover
which resulted in some of the count's men being killed, as well as some
of the townsmen. Count Eustace regarded this broil as the fault of the
.
burghers, and immediately demanded reparation for the insult; where-
upon Edward called upon Godwin in his capacity of earl of the district
to punish the men of Dover. Godwin, however, refused. This gave
.
Edward an opportunity of asserting his authority; he accordingly
summoned Godwin to appear before a court at Gloucester to defend his
action. At the same time Robert of Jumièges advised Edward to rake
up against Godwin the old charge that fifteen years before he had been
accessory to, if not the prime mover in, the death of Alfred, the king's
brother. Godwin, suspecting that the plan was to involve him in a
blood-feud, replied by summoning a large force of his own thegns to
a rendezvous at Berkeley within easy reach of Gloucester, and by calling
upon
his sons Svein and Harold also to come with their forces to his
help. As a set-off to the attack of the Kentish men on the French
count, he also preferred charges against Ralf of Hereford, alleging that
Ralf's French followers had been guilty of many acts of cruelty and
oppression towards Englishmen, and further, that, following the French
fashion, he had erected a private castle in his earldom, which was a
danger to English liberties, such a building being quite unexampled
on English soil, where the only fortifications hitherto built were the
national boroughs maintained in the king's name for defence against
the Danes.
When it became known that Godwin had appealed to arms, Earl
Leofric of Mercia and Earl Siward of Northumbria also gathered their
forces and came south to the support of the king. The upshot was that
Godwin found himself outmatched and, fearing defeat, agreed to disband
his forces; whereupon the king summoned another witan to meet at
CH. XV.


## p. 394 (#440) ############################################

394
Return of Godwin. Flight of the foreigners
London, which boldly decreed outlawry for Godwin and all his sons.
In these circumstances the earl thought it safest to take refuge with his
friend Baldwin of Lille, the Count of Flanders, and wait for time to
break
up the king's party. He accordingly sailed for Bruges, taking his
sons Svein and Tostig with him, the latter of whom had married Bald-
win's daughter, while his sons Harold and Leofwine rode for Bristol and
took ship to Ireland.
The direction of affairs in southern England after Godwin's departure
seems to have fallen largely into the hands of the king's foreign friends.
Greedy to obtain a share of Godwin's lands and honours, fresh troops of
Normans and Bretons soon came flocking to England, and the king's
wife Edith was deprived of her estates and sent in disgrace to the nunnery
of Wherwell. Earl Leofric, however, was by no means backward in
pushing his own interests, and used the crisis to consolidate his position
in Mercia by obtaining a grant of Beorn's estates for himself, while his
son Aelfgar stepped into Harold's shoes as Earl of East Anglia. As for
Svein's estates, in Somerset, Dorset, Devon and the Severn valley, they
seem to have passed to a new earl, Odda, whose patrimony lay chiefly in
the neighbourhood of Pershore and Deerhurst.
The fall of Godwin's house was thus for the moment pretty complete.
His exile, however, lasted but a short time, as a reaction set in when the
English thegns realised that Normans and Bretons were the chief gainers
by Godwin's absence; and it quickly gathered strength when the news
went round that a yet more powerful foreigner than any who had hitherto
come was to visit Edward's court. This was Edward's kinsman William,
the young Duke of Normandy. This prince made little secret of the
fact that he regarded himself as a possible claimant to the English
throne, should Edward die childless, and those who knew what the
Normans were now doing in southern Italy naturally regarded him as
coming to England to spy out the nakedness of the land, and shook their
heads over his advent. His visit, as a matter of fact, was quite unevent-
ful; but Edward had none the less blundered, so that in 1052 Godwin
found himself in a position to return and claim back his lost possessions.
Landing at Southwark, without having met with any effective opposition
in the Thames from the king's ships under Earl Ralf and Earl Odda,
he found the Londoners actively on his side as were also the prelates of
English birth, led by Stigand, who aimed at obtaining the archbishopric
of Canterbury. Neither Leofric nor Siward would now help Edward,
and without them he could offer practically little resistance. The result
was a panic among his foreign followers, many of whom, headed by
Robert the Archbishop and Ulf of Dorchester, fled from London to a
castle in Essex', which Robert the son of Wimarc was then building, and
* Mr Round thinks this castle was at Clavering (Victoria County History of
Essex, p. 345); but Nayland, the centre of a group of manors lying athwart the


## p. 395 (#441) ############################################

Death of Godwin. War with Scotland
395
thence by way of the Naze to the Continent. Others fled westward into
Herefordshire, hoping to find security in another castle, which Osbern
Pentecost, one of Earl Ralf's men, was erecting on the Welsh border,
probably at Ewyas. These hurried fights made it clear to everyone
that Edward's attempt at independence had failed. A fresh witan ac-
cordingly was assembled, which formally outlawed many of the foreigners
and restored Godwin and his family to their former possessions. Edith
also came back to court from Wherwell, while Stigand obtained the see
of Canterbury in the place of the fugitive Robert and proceeded to hold
it in plurality with Winchester, not to mention many other preferments,
such as canonries, all over his province.
For the rest of his life Edward was never able to shake himself free
from the domination of the house of Godwin. The great earl, it is true,
did not himself long enjoy his restoration to power. He died in 1053,
quite suddenly, while attending a banquet at Winchester. His honours
and estates thereupon passed to his second son Harold, his ill-fated eldest
son Svein having died a few months earlier at Constantinople while
making a pilgrimage to Jerusalem to atone for his crimes.
The character of the reign changes sensibly after Godwin's death.
The king still continued fitfully to play the magnates off against each
other, reappointing Aelfgar, for example, to the earldom of East Anglia
after Harold's transfer to Wessex. But Edward was fast becoming elderly;
and as his energy declined, he centred his attention more and more on
sport and church matters to the neglect of politics. Harold, on the
other hand, though full of ambition and energy, being little over thirty,
was more cautious and better liked than his father, and was always
careful to keep on terms with Earl Leofric and the Mercians. There
was for a time, therefore, a quiet interval, the only incident of note in
1054 being a Northumbrian expedition beyond the Forth undertaken
by Earl Siward in the interests of his Scotch grandson Malcolm Can-
This young prince on the paternal side was great-grandson of
Malcolm II, the victor of Carham, and was being kept out of his patri-
mony by Macbeth, the famous Mormaer (or Earl) of Moray immortalised
by Shakespeare. Some years before Macbeth had slain Malcolm's father,
Duncan I, and then usurped the crown. For a number of years Malcolm
had lived in Siward's household, becoming quite a Northumbrian in
speech and education, but by 1054 he was grown up and eager to regain
his crown.
The expedition was well managed by Earl Siward, who
obtained a notable victory at Dunsinane near Perth, but it was not till
three years later that Macbeth was killed and Malcolm III (1057-1093)
finally set upon the throne. Siward's intervention beyond the Tweed
was of great moment for Scotland, as Malcolm's restoration inevitably
Stour which all belonged to Robert, and adjoining Stoke the burying place of the
East Anglian ducal house, seems quite as likely to be the site, being much nearer to
the Naze.
more.
CH. XV.


## p. 396 (#442) ############################################

396
Rivalry of Earl Harold and Earl Aelfgar
brought a great access of power to the Anglo-Danish element in the
kingdom, and transferred the centre of the realm from the Keltic districts
beyond the Forth to the English-speaking province of Lothian. And
this in its turn was of great importance to England ; for it turned the
ambitions of the Scotch kings more definitely southwards, and led them
to covet the Tees for their frontier instead of the Tweed.
Siward died in 1055, the year following the fight at Dunsinane. As
he had lost his eldest son in that battle and as his younger son Wal-
theof was still a child, a difficulty arose as to the succession to the
Northumbrian earldom. The natural course would have been to select
some member of the house of Bamborough for the office, or at any rate
some Anglo-Dane possessing territorial influence north of the Humber.
Harold, however, considered the appointment an opportunity too good
to be lost for extending the influence of his own family. He therefore
advised Edward to appoint his brother Tostig to the earldom, in spite
of the obvious risk of placing a West Saxon over the Northerners.
Edward acquiesced in this plan, partly because he had a real liking for
Tostig, and partly because he hoped to pit the brothers against each
other and so free himself to some extent from Harold's tutelage. Beyond
the Humber Tostig's elevation was accepted at first with sullen indiffer-
ence, but further south it led at once to trouble, being much resented
by Earl Aelfgar, who regarded it as a menace to the Mercian house.
Aelfgar's opposition went so far that Harold was able to represent his
conduct as treasonable, and in the upshot obtained the consent of a
witan to his outlawry. Thereupon Aelfgar, as Harold had done in
similar circumstances, withdrew to Ireland, where he soon recruited a
fleet manned by adventurous Irish and Danes, and then, eager for revenge,
offered his services to the Welsh for an attack on those who had driven
him out of England.
The ally to whom Earl Aelfgar turned was Gruffydd (Griffith) ap
Llywelyn, prince of North Wales, a remarkable man, who had ascended the
throne of Gwynedd in 1039 and gradually extended his sway over
Deheubarth and the rest of the Welsh principalities. His power had long
been a menace to the men of Herefordshire: in 1052 he had led a raid
a
against Earl Ralf and defeated his forces near Leominster. Having just
compassed the death of a dangerous South Welsh rival, Gruffydd was
now ready to attack again and was delighted to join forces with Aelfgar.
The pair accordingly marched upon Hereford in the autumn of 1055,
and having driven off Ralf's levies, who were mounted, we are told, in the
French fashion, sacked the borough, and burnt the newly-built minster,
at the same time killing several of the canons. The alarm caused in the
Severn valley by this exploit was so great that Earl Harold himself had
to hurry to the west with assistance. He was unable, however, to punish
the invaders, and had to patch up a peace at Billingsley in Archenfield,
by which Aelfgar regained his position as Earl of East Anglia.
а


## p. 397 (#443) ############################################

The Succession problem. War with the Welsh
397
a
Two years later, in 1057, Leofric, the old Earl of Mercia, died, and
also Earl Ralf. Aelfgar thereupon succeeded to Mercia, but only on
the understanding that East Anglia should pass to Harold's brother
Gyrth, that sundry Mercian districts near London, such as Hertfordshire
and Buckinghamshire, should be formed into a new earldom for Leofwine,
another of bis brothers, and that Herefordshire should fall to Harold
himself. As Somerset and Dorset had been reunited to Wessex upon
Odda's death in 1056, these territorial rearrangements meant that the
sons of Godwin held the earldoms throughout England with the excep-
tion of the curtailed earldom of Mercia, and men began to speculate
whether even this exception would be long' maintained. The central
earldom still formed a good-sized jurisdiction, stretching across the
northern Midlands from the Welsh borders to the North Sea, but few
could doubt that Harold was aiming at its dismemberment, so that
whenever Edward should die there might be no power left in England
sufficiently strong to compete with him, if he decided to be a candidate
for the throne. This ultimate object, it is true, was not yet avowed ;
but the thorny question of the succession was beginning to be discussed,
as Edward was well over fifty and his only near kinsman was the baby
grandson of Edmund Ironside, known to history as Edgar the Aetheling.
According to the accepted traditions of the English this child would for
many years be far too young to be elected king, and, further, he had no
support in the country; for his father had been exiled by Knut in infancy,
and having spent almost his whole life in Hungary, had never acquired
any territorial position in England. As events turned out, no con-
venient opportunity for dismembering Mercia occurred ; for Aelfgar, to
protect his family's interests, gave his daughter Ealdgyth to Gruffydd in
marriage, and so could count on the support of sturdy Welsh allies.
Harold, therefore, left him unmolested till his death in 1062, when the
Mercian earldom passed to his son Edwin.
Meanwhile King Gruffydd, presuming on his Mercian connexion, kept
on harassing Harold's Herefordshire lands. As a counter-blow, early in
1063 Harold made a raid into North Wales and attacked Rhuddlan,
hoping to find Gruffydd unprepared. The Welsh king got away by sea,
but was not fated to enjoy his good fortune much longer; for Harold
was determined to crush him, and so deprive the young Edwin of the
outside support that his father had relied on. To this end Harold sum-
moned Tostig to join him with a Northumbrian levy, and then both
brothers pushed into Wales beyond Rhuddlan and chased the Welsh
prince from one hill fortress to another. In this extremity Gruffydd was
deserted not only by the Mercians but also by his own men, and was
shortly afterwards assassinated. His fall, accompanied as it was by the
restoration of considerable tracts along the marches to English rule,
brought Harold undoubted prestige; but it must not be supposed that
the Welsh were in any sense conquered. Their unity was once more
a
CH. XV.


## p. 398 (#444) ############################################

398
Captivity of Harold. Northumbrian Revolt
broken up. Within their own borders, however, various Welsh chieftains
remained as independent as ever.
During the course of the next year an untoward mishap befell
Harold. For some reason or other he had occasion to take a sea trip
in the Channel, and, as he was sailing from his paternal seat at Bosham
in Sussex towards Dover, a storm caught him and drove his ship ashore
on the coast of Ponthieu in France. Guy, the count of the district,
when he heard of the wreck, gave orders for Harold's arrest, and being
a vassal of William, the Duke of Normandy, handed him over to his
overlord at Rouen as a captive.
Harold thus became an unwilling
guest at the Norman court. As such he accompanied the duke on a
campaign into Brittany, but though he was outwardly treated with
honour, he was informed that he would not be allowed to return to
England unless he would become the duke's man and take an oath to
assist William in the future, should he make a claim to the English
throne on Edward's death. Seeing no other way of regaining his liberty,
Harold had perforce to take the oath demanded of him, whereupon he
was permitted to sail for England. On his return he made as little as
possible of the misadventure, and no doubt regarded the oath extracted
from him by force as of no validity; but he had none the less placed
himself in a very false position, considering his own aspirations to be
Edward's successor.
Harold came back to find a very disturbed state of affairs in the
north of England. For nine years his brother Tostig had been Earl of
Northumbria, but he had ruled harshly and had especially provoked
discontent by treacherously causing the deaths of Gamel, son of Orm,
and Ulf, son of Dolfin, two members of the old Bamborough house,
and appropriating their estates. The result was that the kinsmen of the
murdered men started an intrigue with the young Edwin of Mercia, and
in 1065 broke into open insurrection. A little later they seized York and
declared Tostig outlawed. They then elected Morkere, Edwin's younger
brother, to be earl in Tostig's place, and putting him at the head of the
Northumbrian forces, advanced into Mercia, where they were joined by
Earl Edwin and his thegns and also by a body of Welshmen. Marching
further south, the combined armies overran in succession Northampton-
shire and Oxfordshire, until at last they were met by Harold in the
Thames valley. All this time Tostig had remained well out of the way,
hunting in Clarendon forest in Edward's company. Harold intervened,
it appears, with insufficient forces to risk a battle, and being reduced to
negotiate had to accept the conditions demanded by Edwin and his
Yorkshire allies.
As a result Morkere was officially recognised by King Edward as
earl north of the Humber, whereupon Tostig retired in high dudgeon to
Flanders to seek assistance from his father-in-law, Count Baldwin V
(1036–1067). As part of the resettlement the youthful Waltheof, the
a


## p. 399 (#445) ############################################

Fall of Tostig. Death of Edward
399
son of Earl Siward, was made Earl of Northamptonshire and Hunting-
donshire, as some compensation for the fact that his hereditary claims
to Northumberland were a second time ignored. Harold's share in these
transactions has sometimes been represented as an act of justice to the
Northerners, done at the expense of his family's interests without any real
necessity. Be that as it may, Tostig never forgave him for not rendering
more effective support, and from this time forward became his bitterest
enemy. It certainly looks as if Harold was thinking more of his own
interests than Tostig's, and saw in Tostig's fall an opportunity of making
the house of Mercia more friendly to himself in the future and less in-
clined to oppose him, should he make a bid for the crown. For now it
was hardly concealed that Harold and his friends, in the event of the
king's death, would seek to set aside the direct line of the house of
Alfred and would propose that the house of Godwin should be put in
its place. If, however, this was to be effected by general consent, with-
out an appeal to force, it could only be by the action of the national
assembly, in which Edwin and Morkere and their supporters would have
a very influential vote. Harold, therefore, had very good reasons for
making terms with them, as it clearly would be more advantageous to
him to win the crown by consent than by force.
Questions as to Harold's motives are, however, a problem so complex
as to defy our best efforts to unravel them, and all that can be said with
certainty is that events were soon to shew that, in abandoning Tostig's
cause and favouring the Mercian aspirations, he had taken the most
prudent course. For in the winter following Tostig's fall Edward became
seriously ill while superintending the building of the new abbey at West-
minster, which he had recently founded. And here, in his manor house
on the banks of the Thames, he died on 6 January 1066, leaving the
succession an open question. To his own contemporaries he was never
the saintly person that later historians have depicted, but just a pious
and often misguided ruler, who had attempted to bring the English into
closer connexion with their continental neighbours than was desirable,
and had rather wilfully undermined the insularity of his dominions
without knowing how to bring them peace and security. It was only by
later generations, who venerated him as the last of the line of Cerdic and
Alfred, that he came to be honoured as a saint, and it was only in 1161
that the bull was issued by Pope Alexander III which conferred on him
the title of “ Confessor " which has become so familiar.
In tracing the political developments under Aethelred, Knut and
Edward, little has been said about the economic or social side of English
life; but it must not be thought that the period of ninety years from 975 to
1065 was a period devoid of social developments, or that materials are
lacking for forming an estimate of the amount and character of the
changes which were going on. On the contrary, did space permit, much
might be said on such topics as the distribution of wealth and territorial
CH. XV.


## p. 400 (#446) ############################################

400
Economic conditions under Edward
power, the density of the population in different districts, the ranks and
grades of society, the methods of tillage and industry, and the condition
of the urban centres. . Information as to some of these, if not very clear,
is comparatively ample; for in addition to the laws and charters and a
fair amount of literary evidence, we can use as the groundwork for our
picture the very detailed description of England in 1065, which is
preserved in the Domesday Survey. Primarily of course this Norman
survey is concerned with the condition of the country twenty years later;
but the local jurors, who furnished the returns, were also required to
state how matters had stood “on the day when King Edward was alive
and dead," and there is no reason to doubt the general accuracy of their
answers, even though some allowance has to be made for their recollection
of the earlier period being somewhat blurred.
The most important feature which stands out in all the sources alike
is that there was just as little uniformity in England at the end of the
Anglo-Saxon period in social and economic matters as in political con-
ditions. In spite of the fact that the country had been nominally a single
kingdom for over a century, each province in 1065 still retained its own
traditions and customs in social matters, and there were not only
fundamental differences between the English and Danish districts, but
also between the valley of the Thames and the valley of the Severn,
between Kent and Wessex, between Wessex and Mercia and between the
northern and the southern Danelaw. Any attempt, therefore, to give a
picture of a typical village or a typical estate would be misleading, for
everywhere there were startling variations (even within the limits of a
single shire there were frequently several types of organisation) not to
speak of differences in nomenclature and differences in land measures and
monetary units. There are however some generalisations which can be
accepted confidently, and to these we must chiefly confine ourselves.
The first most obvious economic feature is that the density of the popu-
lation decreased as one passed from east to west. In 1065 Lincolnshire,
Norfolk and Suffolk were by far the most thickly populated shires. Were
the population of these three counties left out of account, we should be
leaving out of account not much less than one-sixth of the whole English
nation. The least thickly populated districts south of the Humber and the
Ribble were apparently Shropshire, Staffordshire and Cornwall, but men
were also sparse in Devon and in all parts of the Severn valley. Another clear
feature is that the land was much more valuable in the east than in the west,
partly of course because of geological differences and the variation of soils,
but largely because the denser population of the east facilitated a more in-
tensive working of the land and the maintenance of a far greater head of
cattle and sheep. Yet another great contrast between the east and the
1 There is no evidence as to the districts north of the Humber. The Vale of York
may have been well populated, but there cannot have been any large number of
inhabitants in the great moorland areas.


## p. 401 (#447) ############################################

Contrast between East and West
401
>
west, of critical economic importance, arose from the fact that the east
was the home of liberty. In the Danish districts the peasantry, whether
English or Danish by descent, were far less exploited in the interests of
the upper classes than in the English districts. To begin with, there were
far fewer actual slaves or “theows” in these parts than elsewhere. In East
Anglia the slaves formed only 4 per cent. of the population, whereas in
the Midlands they formed 14 to 15 per cent. , on the Welsh border 17 per
cent. and in Cornwall 21 per cent. But this is not the whole story. In
the Danish districts considerable sections of the inferior cultivating classes
rendered far lighter dues for their holdings, and performed far fewer
services for their lords than in the Midlands or in Wessex. One reason
for this was that the overlordship of the soil was far more divided and
broken up in the Danelaw than in the south and west. In the Chiltern
districts, in Kent and in Wessex generally, it was fairly common for a
village to have only one lord; but in the Danelaw, as often as not, four
or five lords were concurrently interested in even quite small villages, and
it is not impossible to point to instances in which a village was shared
between as many as nine or ten. At the same time, in the Danelaw the
tie between a lord and his men was far looser as regards a large section
of the peasantry than in Mercia or Wessex, for considerable numbers of
the classes described in the Domesday Survey as “liberi homines" and
“sochemanni” still had the right of choosing their lords and, from time
to time, of transferring their allegiance from one lord to another. As
the phrase runs in the Domesday Survey, “they could recede from their
lord without his license and go with their land where they would. ” The
natural consequence followed that it was difficult for the lord, whose
patronage they did acknowledge, to get any burdensome rents or services
out of them.
Let us now turn to consider what is known about the ranks of
English society outside the Danelaw in the earlier years of the eleventh
century. One has to admit that this is an obscure subject, but some
direct light is thrown on it by the Rectitudines Singularum Personarum.
This Anglo-Saxon tract is unfortunately undated, and nothing is known
of its origin; but it seems to be a memorandum drawn up by the land-
agent of a monastic or episcopal estate, comprising in all probability
several villages, in order to keep a record of the services due from the
various grades of tenants who were under his management. It is thought
to have been put together about 1025, and along with it is found a
second tract, which sets forth the duties of the land-agent, calling him
at time a gerefa or reeve and at another a scyrman. The
occurrence of this second term has led some commentators to think that
the writer of the tracts might have been a shire-reeve, but scyrman
carries no such implication, being used indifferently of any official person.
The author of the Rectitudines begins his treatise by describing the
services of the thegn. By that term he clearly did not mean a king's
one
c. MED. H. VOL.