Millennium

by Holland, Tom

  And this was the man whom Ethelred, by giving orders for the massacre of St Brice’s Day, had thought to intimidate. Perhaps, against a foe of a different order, his murderous calculation might have paid off; but the Danish king was not just any foe. Among the victims of the pogrom, it was said, had been one of Forkbeard’s own sisters, the Lady Gunnhild, but the murder of even the least of his subjects would have been sufficient to sanction a blood feud. The onslaught unleashed against Ethelred the following year duly aimed to pile humiliation upon humiliation. Symbols of the authority of the House of Wessex were ruthlessly targeted. At Exeter, where King Athelstan had enshrined his dynasty’s spear of power, only the courage of a quick- thinking monk enabled the priceless relic to be rescued from the Danish firestorm. At Wilton, site of the richest and most splendid nunnery in Wessex, where numerous members of the royal family lay buried - pre-eminent among them Ethelred’s own half-sister, Edith, recently proclaimed a saint - all the lands around the holy enclosure were systematically torched.

  For the Danish captains, no doubt, it must have been a gloriously satisfying experience to burn and loot, and menace an enemy’s women, just as their ancestors had always done: a reassurance that the old ways still endured. Forkbeard, however, even as he dispatched his war bands to plunder England, had his eyes fixed on a more novel order of things. No less than his father and Trygvasson had been, he was keenly alert to the many advantages that might be reaped by a Christian king. Concerned to show that he took the role seriously, he had duly founded the odd town, installed the odd bishop, even struck the odd coin. When it came to more gruelling responsibilities, however, such as forging a state capable of fleecing his subjects efficiently and of providing him with regular taxes, his enthusiasm had tended to flag. As well it might have done. It was easier by far to menace England, and outsource the whole tedious business to Ethelred. Which is precisely what Forkbeard did.

  And with such merciless and brutal efficiency that the English king found his own strategy, that of using his wealth to sow discord among his foes, turned back fatally against him. As year followed year, and still the Danes returned, each time with forces bigger, better equipped and more devastating than before, so the bonds of loyalty to Ethelred within England began at last to fray. All the formidable powers of the West Saxon monarchy, built up by generations of the Cerdicingas before him, appeared increasingly to the English to be serving, not their own interests, but those of their oppressors. It was as though Ethelred himself — the heir of Alfred, of Athelstan, of Edgar – had become merely a thrall-like servant of the interests of the Danish king. As royal agents continued with remorseless efficiency their business of levying taxes to fund their master’s strategy, and the mints continued to churn, so it struck many among the English that what they were being obliged to pay for was nothing less than their own ruin.

  Then at last, in 1012, there was a seeming success. Just as Olaf Trygvasson, almost twenty years before, had been won over to Ethelred’s side, so now was another celebrated Viking captain, Thorkell, together with forty-five of his ships, persuaded to enter the service of the English king: a hint, perhaps, of dawn. Yet this brief moment of hope was in truth to prove a portent of the very opposite, an onset of the blackest night — for the news, when it was brought to Forkbeard in Denmark, stirred him into preparing something more than merely another raid. As with Trygvasson, so with Ethelred: the Danish king had been playing a lengthy game. England, drained as she was of her lifeblood, now appeared ripe for decapitation. In 1013, Forkbeard landed south of York, where Danish settlement had always been at its densest, and received the immediate submission of the region’s immigrant communities. Nor did it take long for the exhausted and battle-scarred English aristocracy to bow to the inevitable as well. Across England, terms duly began to be arranged; hostages handed over; homage offered up to Forkbeard. By the end of the year, even Ethelred was buckling. Boxed up in London, his last stronghold, he ordered the Lady Emma and their children to board a ship and embark across the wintry seas for exile, while he himself set sail to spend a miserable Christmas skulking off the Wessex coast. Then, disdaining to play the part of a Viking any longer, he too crossed the Channel. His destination: the court of his brother-in-law, the Duke of Normandy. This final humiliation set the seal on all the others.

  Peace – if of a brutal kind – had been brought to England at last. But it was not to endure. In February 1014, at the very height of his triumph, Forkbeard died. The English earls and bishops, already repenting of their submission to a barbarian, at once invited Ethelred to return; ‘for they said that no sovereign was dearer to them than their natural lord – if only he would govern them better than he had previously done’. Evidently, the line of Cerdic still retained something of its mystique; but it was too late now for Ethelred to burnish it. Prostrated by illness, his only consistent policy upon his return was to haunt his sickbed; in 1016, at last, he slipped into the grave. His subjects barely noticed. Already, the battle for the rule of England had moved on to a younger generation. Even before Ethelred’s death, his eldest surviving son, Edmund, a warrior of such charismatic fortitude that he would come to be hailed as ‘Ironside’, had laid claim to the throne. But he was not alone in his ambition: for Forkbeard too had left a son.

  ‘Only a boy, you ship-batterer, when you launched your boat, no king was younger than you,’ wrote one praise-singer of the precociously terrifying Canute. Already, even before landing in England to press his right to the kingdom, the young prince had shown himself practised in the grimmer arts of Viking lordship, mutilating the hostages left in his care by Forkbeard and then sending them back to their relatives, the great lords in their high-beamed halls, to serve as a gruesome warning of the folly of resistance. Sure enough, in the stumps where once the hostages’ hands had been, and in their noseless faces, and in the cropped remains of their ears, the English had indeed been granted fair warning of the horrors soon to come. Ironsided Edmund may have been – but Canute was forged of ice. All the summer of 1016, the two men fought each other; until ultimately, with the pair of them brought to a bloody standstill, there seemed no possible resolution to the conflict, save to divide the kingdom in two. A month after the treaty had been signed, however, Edmund died: the last king of purely English stock ever to sit on the country’s throne. Naturally, men suspected murder — as well they might have done.

  Canute had gambled much on his attempt to win his prize — and now it was payback time. Many warriors had followed him across the northern seas, ‘men of metal, menacing with golden face’ – and their captain, just like any other, needed to be a scatterer of treasure, or nothing at all. In Canute, the larcenous instincts that had long propelled generations of Northmen across the seas were set to attain their apotheosis – for he had his sword at the throat of an entire kingdom. Already, over the course of the unfortunate Ethelred’s reign, ton upon ton of silver had been delivered into the hands of the Danes. Now, with all the honed apparatus of English governance directly in his own hands, there was nothing to stop Canute from imposing a truly swingeing tax. Which was what he duly did: at a rate, in effect, of 100 per cent. It took his agents months to screw out; but by the end of 1018, the kingdom’s entire income for that year had vanished into his treasure chests.

  Perhaps, then, many among the English must have wondered, this was how the world was to end: with a tax demand. Even the man who was now Archbishop of York, the brilliant and devoutly orthodox Wulfstan, openly warned that the Danes might prove the shock troops of Antichrist. Already, summoning the English to prepare themselves for the Day of Judgement, he had advocated barefoot displays of penance, the singing of psalms and public prayer; and in 10H, during the dark days that followed Forkbeard’s conquest of the kingdom, he had flatly declared the end time imminent. ‘For nothing has prospered now for a long while either at home or abroad, but there has been military devastation and hunger, burning and bloodshed.’ F.ven pagans, however, as they observed the state o
f the world, might on occasion fall to pondering what its fracturing portended. One did not have to be a Christian to be conscious of Christian dates. Was it merely coincidence, for instance, that Thorgeir, summoning the Icelanders to decide whether they should abandon their ancient gods, had chosen to do so in the year 1000? What prospect, if the end were indeed approaching, that any of the heathen gods, even Odin himself, could hope to keep it at bay? Despite the triumph of the Danes in the killing fields of England, many Northmen, suspended between their new faith and their ancient beliefs, were not immune to the anxieties of Wulfstan. ‘Kin’, wrote one of them, in dread of the end days, ‘will break the bonds of kin’:

  A harsh world it will be, whoredom rampant,

  An axe-age, a sword-age, shields shattered,

  A wind-age, a wolf-age before man’s age tumbles down.[]

  The very sentiments of the archbishop—and composed, it may well be, by a man who had heard him utter them. Yet the end of the world sung by the poet was one illumined not by the light of Christ, but by the fiery extinction of the ancient gods, ‘fire flaring up against fire’. No immortality, according to such a vision, awaited those who followed Odin: for he, like the sun itself, was fated to be devoured by a monstrous wolf, while all around him ‘the brilliant stars are dashed down from the skies’. His death, like the death of all those whom the pagans had foolishly worshipped as deathless, was a certainty. Such was ‘Ragnarok’ – the Doom of the Gods.

  And Canute, certainly, wanted no part of it: for it was hardly his ambition to play the part of either Odin or Antichrist. Though he might be avaricious and brutal, he was not unthinkingly so. For all the ruthlessness with which he had extorted treasure from the English to pay off his followers, he had no wish for his reign to continue as a wolf-age. So it was that in 1018, even as his tax collectors were bleeding England white, he allowed himself to be persuaded by Wulfstan into swearing that he would uphold all the laws of Edgar and Ethelred: that he would rule, in short, as the heir of the Cerdicingas. Living evidence of this, crowned and no less imperious than she had ever been, could already be found at his side: none other than the still-nubile Emma, Ethelred’s widow, and now once again England’s queen. The taking to bed of a rival’s woman was very much in the finest tradition of Viking manhood; and yet Emma was far too significant a prize to rank as merely a sexual trophy. Canute’s marriage to her had been no show of scorn -- indeed, just the opposite. Norman Emma may have been, with a Dane for a mother, and most likely fluent in Danish herself- but it was as a living embodiment of the West Saxon monarchy, of all its traditions and pedigree, that she had her truest value. Better than anyone, she offered an imprimatur of class.

  And it was class, in the final equation, not rings of gold, nor dragon- prowed ships, nor the florid praises of poets, that Canute most hankered after. If it was as a Viking warlord that he had conquered England, and transformed all the northern seas into his private lake, then it was as the model of a Christian king that he aimed to rule. So it was, even as he persisted in his empire-building, that he began to pose, in a familiar process of metamorphosis, as a prince of peace. A terrorist who had waded through blood, he permitted Archbishop Wulfstan to write laws in his name that proclaimed the virtues of humility and self-restraint: ‘For the mightier or of higher rank a man is, so the deeper must he atone for wrong-doing, both to God and to men.’ A disinheritor of the oldest royal line in Christendom, he became a regular visitor to the nunnery at Wilton, riding there with Emma, dismounting respectfully outside the precincts, praying among the tombs of the women of the House of Wessex. A Northman from the margins of the civilised world, he took time from all his labours and his wars to go on pilgrimage to the capital of the Christian faith, and there, amid the ancient and fabulous splendours of Rome, to kneel before the tomb of St Peter, and ‘diligently to seek his special favour before God’.

  For to be sure, as Canute himself publicly acknowledged, there was much that needed forgiving – ‘whether through the intemperance of my youth or through negligence’. But he was not in Rome merely to pray. The streets, when Canute arrived there in March 1027, were teeming with the elite of imperial society. Three years earlier, the Emperor Henry II had died, the last of the line of Saxon kings; and now, desperate for the legitimacy that only a pope could grant, his elected heir, Conrad II, a Frankish lord from the Rhineland, was camped out in the city. Here was an unbeatable opportunity for Canute to play the international statesman – and he seized it with relish. Whether hobnobbing with Conrad himself, or taking Mass with Abbot Odilo of Cluny, or negotiating with the Holy Father, he revelled with an unabashed glee in his presence on such a stage.

  The starriest role of all was granted him on Easter Day, when the new emperor, to the acclamation of princes and bishops drawn from across Christendom, was crowned in St Peter’s – and Canute was by his side. The occasion was, so it appears, a thoroughly overwrought one. Two archbishops, disputing which of them should lead Conrad into the cathedral, almost fell to blows, while Conrad himself, it is reported, overcome by the significance of the moment, burst suddenly into tears. Yet if there was anyone present in St Peter’s that day justified in feeling emotional, then surely it was Canute. The glory, after all, was not merely his own, but God’s as well. It was barely a decade previously that Henry II had dispatched his imperial regalia to Cluny, as an expression of his hope that the faith of Christ would expand to the limits of the earth; and now, stood by the side of his successor, in the city of the Caesars, was the great-grandson of a pagan warlord.

  Meanwhile, far away across the northern ocean, in lands unknown to Constantine or Charlemagne, below the lava fields of Iceland and besides the fjords of Greenland, the children of pagans were raising churches and calling themselves Christian. Much had changed in the world, and doubtless much would continue to change - for the one- thousandth anniversary of Christ’s Resurrection was only a few years off. And yet, despite the widespread mood of trepidation, and despite all the convulsions, and the bloodshed, and the suffering of the previous decades, perhaps it was becoming legitimate, even in the shadow of the Millennium, to look to the future, not with foreboding, but with hope. To believe that the clouds were lifting. To believe that anything might be possible.

  5

  APOCALYPSE POSTPONED

  The Mahdi Blues

  At the end of time, so St Paul had taught, Antichrist was destined to appear in Jerusalem, seated upon the mount where Solomon in ancient times had built his temple, ‘proclaiming himself to be God’. Yet it was the sublime character of Scripture that its meaning, even when to the unlearned it appeared precise, could be interpreted by the wise on many levels. Much had happened since the apostle had delivered his prophecy. The Temple of the Jews had long since been overthrown and destroyed utterly—even as churches had spread across the world. How, then, was the ‘temple’ in which Antichrist would take his seat best to be understood? ‘Does it mean the ruins of the Temple built by King Solomon, or might it actually mean a Christian place of worship?’ It was this question, put by St Augustine many centuries before the Millennium, that had haunted Wulfstan in the wake of the St Brice’s Day massacre, and led him to see, in the rubble of a desecrated church, a possible proof of Antichrist’s imminence. Certainly, whether it was to be on the Temple Mount or within the shell of a Christian shrine, ruins seemed the only fitting backdrop to the throne of the Son of Perdition.

  Over time, Wulfetan’s anxieties had begun to fade. The sufferings of the English had not proved fatal; and Canute, far from pillaging churches, as his ancestors had done, grew famous instead for refurbishing them. Travelling to Rome, he had ostentatiously deposited whole cloakloads of silver on the altars of abbeys; ‘and indeed whatever altar he passed, be it ever so small, he would give it gifts, and bestow sweet kisses upon it’. Nor was the mania for sponsoring churches by any means confined to kings. In France and Italy especially, wherever a pilgrim such as Canute travelled, he was likely to pass carts w
eighed down with timber and columns plundered from ancient ruins, and to discover, in village after village, walls of white stone rising up above the shacks. A new church, almost as much as a castle brooding on its hill, was an emphatic marker of the grasping new order of things: for a wealthy castellan, by funding a place of worship, and privatising what had previously been held in common, was effectively branding the worshippers that it served as his property.

  Yet the peasants too, robbed of their freedoms and coerced into villages as they invariably had been, had their own stake in seeing a church established in their midst. No demand was more vigorously pressed by enthusiasts for the Peace of God than that the upstart lords and their swaggering, bullying knights accept the inviolability of consecrated ground. To cross into the cimiterium, the area surrounding a church where the dead were buried and the living gathered in peace, whether to hold a market, or to hear a law suit, or to celebrate a wedding, was thunderously forbidden to any man bearing arms. Invisible the ramparts of a churchyard might be – and yet every knight who swore an oath of peace was obliged to accept that they rose no less impregnabiy than those of a donjon. Seen as such, the village church was not the complement of the castle, but rather its mirror image: twin citadels both, one serving to guard the powerful, and the other to shelter the weak; one the lair of warlords and the other a stronghold of God. No wonder, then, that there were many who found in the unprecedented surge of building activity a mark, not of oppression, but of renewal, of promise, of hope. ‘For it was as if the whole world were shaking itself free, shrugging off the burden of the past, and cladding itself everywhere in a white mantle of churches.” Such was the judgement of Rudolf Glaber, seated in that mightiest of all bastions of holiness, the abbey of Cluny. As a man who had no doubt that demons stalked the earth – and indeed had seen one, blubbcry-lipped and hunchbacked, menacing him in his bed—his exultancy came as no surprise. For to behold Christendom clad in a mantle of churches was to know it transformed into one immense cimiterium – to know it fortified against Antichrist.