by Will Durant
By my faith, I will not leave ye lordless. I have a young bastard who will grow, please God, and of whose good qualities I have great hope. Take him, I pray you, for lord. That he was not born in wedlock matters little to you; he will be none the less able in battle … or to render justice. I make him my heir, and I hold him seized, from this present, of the whole duchy of Normandy.62
Robert died en route; for a time nobles ruled for his son; but soon William began to issue orders in the first person. A rebellion tried to unseat him, but he put it down with dignified ferocity. He was a man of craft and courage and farseeing plans, a god to his friends, a devil to his foes. He bore with good humor many quips about his birth, and signed himself, now and then, Gulielmus Nothus— William the Bastard; but when he besieged Alençon, and the besieged hung hides over their walls in allusion to his grandfather’s trade, he cut off the hands and feet, and gouged out the eyes, of his prisoners, and shot these members from his catapults into the town. Normandy admired his brutality and iron rule, and prospered. William moderated the exploitation of the peasantry by the nobles, and appeased these with fiefs; he dominated and presided over the clergy, and appeased them with gifts. He attended devoutly to his religious duties, and shamed his father by unprecedented marital fidelity. He fell in love with the beautiful Matilda, daughter of Baldwin, Count of Flanders; he was not disconcerted by her two children and her living but separated husband; she sent William away with insults, saying that she “would rather be a veiled nun than marry a bastard”;63 he persevered, won her, and married her despite the denunciations of the clergy. He deposed Bishop Malger and Abbot Lanfranc for condemning the marriage, and burned down part of the abbey of Bee in his rage. Lanfranc persuaded Pope Nicholas II to validate the union; and William, in atonement, built at Caen the famous Norman Abbaye aux Hommes. By this marriage William allied himself with the Count of Flanders; in 1048 he had already signed an entente with the king of France. Having so guarded and garnished his flanks, he proceeded, at the age of thirty-nine, to conquer England.
CHAPTER XX
The Rise of the North
566–1066
I. ENGLAND: 577–1066
1. Alfred and the Danes: 577–1016
AFTER the battle of Deorham (577) the Anglo-Saxon-Jute conquest of England met with only minor resistance; and soon the invaders divided the country. The Jutes organized a kingdom in Kent; the Angles formed three kingdoms—Mercia, Northumberland, and East Anglia; the Saxons another three in Wessex, Essex, and Sussex—i.e., West, East, and South Saxony. These seven little kingdoms, and others smaller still, provided the “history of England” until King Egbert of Wessex, by arms or subtlety, united most of them under his rule (829).
But even before this new Angle-land was molded by the Saxon king, those Danish invasions had begun which were to rack the island from sea to sea, and threaten its nascent Christianity with a wild and letterless paganism. “In the year 787,” says the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, “came three ships to the West Saxon shores … and they slew folk. These were the first ships of Danish men that sought land of Engle folk.” In 793 another Danish expedition raided Northumberland, sacked the famous monastery of Lindisfarne, and murdered its monks. In 794 the Danes entered the Wear and pillaged Wear-mouth and Jarrow, where the learned Bede had labored half a century before. In 838 the raids attacked East Anglia and Kent; in 839 a pirate fleet of 350 vessels moored in the Thames, while their crews pillaged Canterbury and London. In 867 Northumberland was conquered by a force of Danes and Swedes; thousands of “English” men were slain, monasteries were sacked, libraries were scattered or destroyed. York and its neighborhood, whose school had given Alcuin to Charlemagne, were reduced to destitution and ignorance. By 871 most of England north of the Thames was subject to the invaders. In that year a Danish army under Guthrum marched southward to attack Reading, the Wessex capital; Ethelred the king and his young brother Alfred met the Danes at Ashdown and won; but in a second engagement at Merton Ethelred was mortally wounded, and the English fled.
Alfred mounted the throne of West Saxony at the age of twenty-two (871). Asser describes him as then illiteratus, which could mean either illiterate or Latinless.1 He was apparently epileptic, and suffered a seizure at his wedding feast; but he is pictured as a vigorous hunter, handsome and graceful, and surpassing his brothers in wisdom and martial skill. A month after his accession he led his little army against the Danes at Wilton, and was so badly defeated that to save his throne he had to buy peace from the foe; but in 878 he won a decisive victory at Ethandun (Edington). Half the Danish host crossed the Channel to raid weakened France; the rest, by the Peace of Wedmore, agreed to confine themselves to northeastern England in what came to be called the Danelaw.
Alfred, says the not quite reliable Asser, led his army into East Anglia “for the sake of plunder,” conquered the land, and—perhaps to unify England against the Danes—made himself king of East Anglia and Mercia as well as of Wessex. Then, like a lesser Charlemagne, he turned to the work of restoration and government. He reorganized the army, built a navy, established a common law for his three kingdoms, reformed the administration of justice, provided legal protection for the poor, built or rebuilt cities and towns, and erected “royal halls and chambers with stone and wood” for his growing governmental staff.2 An eighth of his revenue was devoted to relief of the poor; another eighth to education. At Reading, his capital, he established a palace school, and gave abundantly to the educational and religious work of churches and monasteries. He recalled sadly how in his boyhood “the churches stood filled with treasures and books … before they had all been ravaged and burned” by the Danes; now “so clean was learning decayed among English folk that very few there were … that could understand their rituals in English, or translate aught out of Latin.”3 He sent abroad for scholars—for Bishop Asser from Wales, for Erigena from France, and for many others—to come and instruct his people and himself. He mourned that he had had so little time for reading, and he now gave himself like a monk to pious and learned studies. He still found reading difficult; but “night and day he commanded men to read to him.” Recognizing, almost before any other European, the rising importance of the vernacular tongues, he arranged to have certain basic books rendered into English; and he himself laboriously translated Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy, Gregory’s Pastoral Care, Orosius’ Universal History, and Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of England. Again like Charlemagne, he gathered the songs of his people, taught them to his children, and joined the minstrels of his court in singing them.
In 894 a fresh invasion of Danes reached Kent; the Danes of the Danelaw sent them reinforcements; and the Welsh—Celtic patriots still unconquered by the Anglo-Saxons—signed an alliance with the Danes. Alfred’s son Edward fell upon the pirate camp and destroyed it, and Alfred’s new navy dispersed the Danish fleet (899). Two years later the King died, having lived only fifty-two years, and reigned for twenty-eight. We cannot compare him with a giant like Charlemagne, for the area of his enterprise was small; but in his moral qualities—his piety, unassuming rectitude, temperance, patience, courtesy, devotion to his people, anxiety to further education—he offered to the English nation a model and stimulus that it gratefully received and soon forgot. Voltaire admired him perhaps immoderately: “I do not think that there ever was in the world a man more worthy of the regard of posterity than Alfred the Great.”4
Toward the end of the tenth century the Scandinavian attack on England was resumed. In 991 a force of Norwegian Vikings under Olaf Tryggvesson raided the English coast, plundered Ipswich, and defeated the English at Maldon. Unable to resist further, the English under King Ethelred (978–1013, called the Redeless—counselless—because he refused the advice of his nobles) bought off the Danes with successive gifts of 10,000, 16,000, 24,000, 36,000, and 48,000 pounds of silver, which were raised by the first general taxes levied in England—the shameful and ruinous Danegeld. Ethelred, seeking foreign aid, negotiated an alliance with
Normandy, and married Emma, daughter of the Norman Duke Richard I; from that union would spring much history. Believing or pretending that the Danes of England were plotting to kill him and the nation’s Witenagemot or parliament, Ethelred secretly ordered a general massacre of the Danes everywhere in the island (1002). We do not know how thoroughly the order was carried out; probably all male Danes of arms-bearing age in England were slaughtered, and some women; among these was the sister of King Sweyn of Denmark. Swearing revenge, Sweyn invaded England in 1003, and again in 1013, this time with all his forces. Ethelred’s nobles deserted him, he fled to Normandy, and Sweyn was master and king of England. When Sweyn died (1014) Ethelred renewed the struggle; the nobles again deserted him, and made their peace with Sweyn’s son Cnut (1015). Ethelred died in besieged London; his son Edmund “Ironside” fought bravely, but was overwhelmed by Cnut at Assandun (1016). Cnut was now accepted by all England as its king, and the Danish Conquest was complete.
2. Anglo-Saxon Civilization: 1066
The Conquest was only political; Anglo-Saxon institutions, speech, and ways had in six centuries sunk such roots that to this day neither the government nor the character nor the language of the English can be understood without them. In the newsless intervals between war and war, crime and crime, there had been a reorganization of tillage and trade, a resurrection of literature, a slow formation of order and law.
History gives no ground for the delusion that Anglo-Saxon England was a paradise of free peasants living in democratic village communities. The leaders of the Anglo-Saxon hosts appropriated the land; by the seventh century a few families owned two thirds of the soil of England;5 by the eleventh century most towns were included in the property of a thane (noble), a bishop, or the king. During the Danish invasions many peasants exchanged ownership for protection; by 1000 the bulk of them paid rent in produce or labor to some lord.6 There were tun-moots or town meetings, and folk-moots or hundred-moots that served as assemblies and courts for a shire; but only landowners were allowed to attend these gatherings; and after the eighth century they declined in authority and frequency, and were largely replaced by the manorial courts of the lords. The government of England lay essentially in the national Witenagemot (“meeting of the wise”)—a relatively small assemblage of thanes, bishops, and the leading ministers of the Crown. Without the consent of this incipient Parliament no English king could be chosen or sustained, or add a rood to the personal estates from which he derived his regular revenues; without it he could not legislate or tax or judge or wage war or make peace.7 The only resource of the monarchy against this aristocracy lay in an informal alliance of throne and Church. The English state before and after the Norman Conquest depended upon the clergy for public education, social order, national unity, even for political administration. St. Dunstan, Abbot of Glastonbury, became chief counselor under kings Edmund (940-6) and Edred (946-55). He defended the middle and lower classes against the nobles, boldly criticized monarchs and princes, was exiled by King Edwig (955-9), was recalled by Edgar (959-75), and secured the crown for Edward the Martyr (975-8). He built St. Peter’s Church at Glastonbury, encouraged education and art, died (988) as Archbishop of Canterbury, and was revered as England’s greatest saint before Thomas à Becket.
In this centrifugal government national law developed slowly, and the old Germanic law, modified in phrase and circumstance, sufficed. Compurgation, wergild, and ordeal survived, but trial by combat was unknown. The wergild varied instructively in Anglian law: the fine or composition-money for killing a king was 30,000 thrimsas ($13,000); a bishop, 15,000; a thane or a priest, 2,000; a ceorl or free peasant, 266. By Saxon law a man paid one or two shillings for inflicting a wound an inch long, thirty shillings for slicing off an ear; it should be added, however, that a shilling could buy a sheep. By the laws of Ethelbert an adulterer was obliged to pay the husband a fine and buy him another wife.8 Any person who resisted a court order was declared an “out-law”; his goods were forfeited to the king, and anyone might kill him with impunity. In some cases wergild was not admitted, and severe punishments were inflicted: enslavement, flogging, castration, amputation—of hands, feet, upper lip, nose, or ear—and death by hanging, beheading, burning, stoning, drowning, or precipitation into an abyss.9
The economy, like the law, was primitive, and far less developed than in Roman Britain. Much work had been done in clearance and drainage, but England in the ninth century was still half forest, heath, or fen; and wild beasts—bears, boars, wolves—still lurked in the woods. The farms were tilled mostly by bondmen or slaves. Men might fall into slavery through debt or crime; wives and children could be sold into slavery by husbands or fathers in need; and all the children of a slave, even if begotten by freemen, were slaves The owner might kill his slave at will. He might make a female slave pregnant, and then sell her. The slave could not enter a suit at court. If a stranger slew him, the modest wergild went to his master. If he fled and was caught he might be flogged to death.10 The main commerce of Bristol was in slaves. Nearly all the population was rural; towns were hamlets, and cities were towns.* London, Exeter, York, Chester, Bristol, Gloucester, Oxford, Norwich, Worcester, Winchester were small, but grew rapidly after Alfred’s time. When Bishop Mellitus came to preach in London in 601 he found only “a scanty and heathen population”11 in what had been a metropolis in Roman days. In the eighth century the city grew again as a strategic point commanding the Thames; under Canute it became the national capital.
Industry usually worked for a local market; weaving and embroidery, however, were more advanced, and exported their products to the Continent. Transport was difficult and dangerous; foreign commerce was slight. The use of cattle as a medium of exchange survived till the eighth century, but in that century several kings issued a silver coinage of shillings and pounds. In tenth-century England four shillings could buy a cow, six an ox.12 Wages were commensurately low. The poor lived in wooden thatched huts on a vegetarian diet; wheat bread and meat were for the well-to-do, or a Sunday feast. The rich adorned their rude castles with figured hangings, warmed themselves with furs, made their garments gay with embroidery, and brightened their persons with gems.
Manners and morals were not as prim or refined as in some later periods of English history. We hear much about rudeness, coarseness, brutality, lying, treachery, theft, and other hardy perennials; the buccaneering Normans of 1066, including some bastards, professed to be amazed at the low moral and cultural level of their victims. The moist climate persuaded the Anglo-Saxons to heavy eating and hard drinking, and the “ale feast” was their notion—like ours—of a convention or a holiday. St. Boniface, with picturesque exaggeration, described the eighth-century English, “both Christians and pagans, as refusing to have legitimate wives, and continuing to live in lechery and adultery after the manner of neighing horses and braying asses”;13 and in 756 he wote to King Ethelbald:
Your contempt for lawful matrimony, were it for chastity’s sake, would be laudable; but since you wallow in luxury, and even in adultery with nuns, it is disgraceful and damnable…. We have heard that almost all the nobles of Mercia follow your example, desert their lawful wives, and live in guilty intercourse with adulteresses and nuns…. Give heed to this: if the nation of the Angles,… despising lawful matrimony, gives free indulgence to adultery, a race ignoble and scorning God must necessarily issue from such unions, and will destroy the country by their abandoned manners.14
In the earlier centuries of Anglo-Saxon rule the husband could divorce his wife at will, and remarry. The Synod of Hertford (673) denounced this custom, and gradually the influence of the Church promoted the stability of unions. Women were held in high honor, though this did not preclude their occasional enslavement. They received little book education, but found this no handicap in attracting and influencing men. Kings patiently wooed proud women, and consulted their wives on public policy.15 Alfred’s daughter Ethelfled, as regent and queen, gave Mercia for a generation effective and conscient
ious government. She built cities, planned military campaigns, and captured Derby, Leicester, and York from the Danes. “From the difficulties experienced in her first labor,” says William of Malmesbury, “she ever afterward refused the embraces of her husband, protesting that it was unbecoming the daughter of a king to give way to a delight which, after a time, produced such unpleasant consequences.”16 It was in this period (c. 1040) that there lived in Mercia, as wife of its ruling Earl Leofric, the lady Godgifa, who, as Godiva, played an attractive role in legend, and earned a statue in Coventry.*
Education, like everything else, suffered from the Anglo-Saxon Conquest, and slowly recovered after the conversion of the conquerors. Benedict Biscop opened a monastic school at Wearmouth about 660; Bede was one of its graduates. Archbishop Egbert established at York (735) a cathedral school and library that became the chief seat of secondary education in England. These and other schools made England in the second half of the eighth century the leader of European learning north of the Alps.
The fine devotion of the monastic educators shines out in the greatest scholar of his time, the Venerable Bede (673-735). He summed up his life with modest brevity:
