The immediate benefit from his conversion was political. He won the churchmen, who alone could read and write, over to his side. By showing favor to the Church, he got religious scholars and scribes to work for his interests, which were nothing less than the establishment of a workable state.
Settling himself at Rouen overlooking the Seine, Rollo kept his bargain with Charles the Simple; there were no further Viking raids upriver into Charles’s realm. Though he handed out parcels of land to his followers, he kept power tightly centralized in his own hands - belying an old tale his Vikings loved to tell about their first entry into Normandy: how when an officer of Charles the Simple shouted across a stream at the advancing Viking band, asking the name of their leader. The cry came back, “We know no masters. All of us are equals.”
Power was firmly arranged in a pyramid, with Rollo unchallenged at the top. In times of emergency, he supplied Charles with men-at-arms, and Viking men-at-arms were vicious fighters. Each year at harvest time, those same men-at-arms supplied a percentage of the land’s yield to Rollo, just as they supplied military service at his bidding.
Normandy as founded by Rollo was to become in only a few generations the most powerful state that Europe had seen since the fall of Rome 500 years before and the model of the medieval fiefdom.
As Rollo and his fellow Vikings put down roots in Normandy, they inevitably loosened their ties with their Scandinavian homeland. The Old Norse language was quick to go. The first wave of invaders had come over with few if any women; when the men settled down, they took French wives and concubines. The children grew up speaking their mothers’ tongue. Only a generation later, when Rollo’s son Duke William Longsword wanted his own son to learn the ancestral language, no one in Rouen could teach it. He had to send the boy almost a hundred miles away to Bayeux, which had the most recent arrivals from Scandinavia and, therefore, some speakers of Old Norse.
Rollo sired an extraordinary family. He was succeeded through six generations by descendants who shared his qualities of sharp wit, practicality, leadership, and administrative skill. In 1066, it was a sixth-generation direct descendant of Rollo’s, Duke William of Normandy, who achieved the greatest feat of arms in many an age - the conquest of all England, a strongly Viking England, in one blow.
As in France, the Viking presence in England had evolved through an endless series of raids, incursions, and devastations into invasions on a grand scale. Under the weight of the Viking assault, the petty kingdoms of East Anglia, Mercia, and Northumbria collapsed one by one, their strength drained, their royal lineages extinguished. By 880, only one Anglo-Saxon kingdom survived, Wessex in the southwest. And even that might have succumbed had it not been for the firm hand and cool head of the young King Alfred, who ruled there. He was the only English monarch to receive the epithet “the Great,” and he deserved it.
Alfred dealt with the Vikings on two levels - one political, the other military. It was obvious that the Vikings had overrun the lands to the north and east, and Alfred was enough of a pragmatist to accept that fact and seek to make it work for him. He drew up a treaty, which he signed with the Danish leader Guthrum, acknowledging the Viking claim to the conquered lands. Alfred, as the sole remaining Anglo-Saxon monarch of any stature, was signifying his people’s intent to live in peace, if possible, with the invaders. And he hoped to encourage them to work the land instead of incessantly trying to destroy it - and him.
But Alfred also knew that treaties gain force and acceptance only from the strength that backs them up. And so he set out to make Wessex impregnable. First, he revamped the levy system for fighting men. “The King,” says the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, “divided his levies into two sections, so that there was always half at home and half on active service.” Under the new arrangement, men could be on their farms with their families half the time - and hence were less inclined to desert.
Next he built a series of fortified enclosures into which the peasants could drive their cattle and take refuge when Viking invaders appeared. Soon the Vikings were appearing less frequently in Wessex, for on the banks of the River Lea Alfred placed two forts that impeded an invader’s passage down the river.
Finally, and most important, Alfred was the only ruler in all Europe to deal the Vikings a blow with their own mightiest weapon - the warship. Sometime in the 890s, he ordered the building of a fleet. Alfred’s ships were “almost twice as long” as the Viking ships, relates the Chronicle. “Some had sixty oars, some more.” They were designed by the King himself, not on the Danish model, but, says the Chronicle, “as it seemed to the king they might be most serviceable.”
The Chronicle calls them swifter than the Viking longships, which is unlikely. But they were higher and more difficult for the enemy to board, and, as vessels to defend the coast, they were also probably heavier and steadier, with flat, barge-like bottoms that drew even less water than the Viking ships. In any event, they seem to have been remarkably effective. In one 896 skirmish, noted the Chronicle, Alfred’s ships caught six Viking vessels stranded at low tide in a southern port. Alfred’s men overcame four of the ships and killed most of the crewmen. Two vessels managed to get away. But during the year, relates the Chronicle, twenty Viking vessels, “men and all, perished along the south coast.”
Before he died in 899, Alfred alone in England had managed to stalemate the Vikings in combat. But more noteworthy, perhaps, the treaty he had signed in 886 with the Danish leader Guthrum appears to have had some of the calming effect Alfred desired. Instead of regarding the lands to the north as alien territory, the Vikings began to think of them as their own, to settle them, to meld with the Anglo-Saxon inhabitants, and to enrich them with the culture of their native Denmark.
This Viking sector of England comprised about 25,000 square miles and was bounded in the south by a line running diagonally northwest from just beyond London to Chester on the Irish Sea and in the north by a line running from the mouth of the River Tees to the North Channel of the Irish Sea. So Danish did it become that it was known as the Danelaw since the laws and customs of Denmark applied there.
How many Danes crossed the North Sea to settle as farmers and traders in the Danelaw is a question much debated by scholars. Some think that they formed only a thin layer of military aristocrats, who ousted English landlords from their property but did not otherwise occupy the land in any numbers. Other scholars believe that there was a massive migration from Denmark throughout the ninth and tenth centuries. They have two good reasons for thinking so. The most convincing is the fact that instead of losing their language, as did the Vikings who began to speak French in Normandy, the Danes had a powerful influence on the English language: Linguistically, they led rather than followed the local culture.
There are hundreds of place names in England ending in the suffix “by,” from the Old Norse meaning farm or village: Derby, Grimsby, Whitby, and so on. Even more pervasive are the thousands of Norse-derived words in the everyday English vocabulary. The modern Danish philologist Otto Jespersen once noted “an Englishman cannot thrive or be ill or die without Scandinavian words; they are to the language what bread and eggs are to the daily fare.” The list goes on and on: take, call, window, husband, sky, anger, low, scant, loose, ugly, wrong, happy. In the opinion of numerous scholars, so many and such fundamental words could not have been brought in by an army; they had to have come on the tongues of Danish mothers and children - and, of course, farmers, merchants, and craftsmen.
In addition to their language, the Danes brought laws and the means for enforcing them. In Scandinavia, they had kept the laws by oral tradition; they committed them to writing. A code for the year 997 in the Danelaw provides for courts consisting of twelve leading men - called thanes - to take an oath on sacred relics that they would neither accuse the innocent nor shield the guilty. “Let the judgment stand on which the thanes are agreed,” says the code; “if they differ let that stand which eight of them have pronounced.” Here is the first assertion in English l
aw of majority rule and the first provision for trial by jury.
Whether they came as an army or as a migration, the Vikings did not massacre or drive out the native population. The two peoples lived side by side and sooner or later began consorting together - although not without some blue-nosed English expressions of indignation. A contemporary chronicler, John of Wallingford, complained sourly that the Danes were always combing their hair, changing their underwear and taking baths on Saturday “in order to overcome the chastity of the English women and procure the daughters of noblemen as their mistresses.”
But while the Danes and the English may have learned to live together more or less in peace, the Danelaw did not become a truly stable and efficient state on the Norman model. The Danish settlers never managed to throw up a leader of Rollo’s stature who was equal to the task of unifying the country and enforcing their democratically conceived laws. Instead, the Danes consumed much of their energy in waging petty feuds among themselves or in beating off incursions from their ambitious Viking cousins in Norway and elsewhere. And as the years wore on, some Danish chieftains again cast covetous eyes on the south and resumed their raiding across the border from the Danelaw.
Well they might, for southern England was growing weak and vulnerable. Throughout the realm made safe by Alfred the Great a century before, the fabric of government was rapidly unraveling. In 978, one of the most worthless kings in all of English history acceded to the throne. He was Ethelred, aptly nicknamed “the Unready,” who inherited the crown at the unripe age of twelve and for the rest of his life was benighted with personal indecision and poor counselors. In that sorry state, as the tenth century drew to a close, all England - not only Ethelred’s realm, but also the partially materialized Danelaw - was to face a formidable threat from the Vikings across the North Sea.
In Scandinavia, two leaders of note were securing their own realms - the Norwegian Olaf Tryggvason, descended from Harald Fairhair and in his own right a formidable warrior who went into battle resplendent in a scarlet cloak, and the Dane Sweyn Forkbeard. Both now turned their might abroad - not as freebooters but as kings bent on conquest.
The first attacks of the new Viking wave came in 991, when Norway’s Olaf sailed to southern England with a fleet of ninety-three ships. In quick succession, Olaf’s warriors ravaged the ports of Folkestone and Sandwich. Next, they landed within thirty miles of London, near the town of Maldon, on an island with a causeway leading to the mainland. There, an English leader named Byrhtnoth valiantly attempted to halt the Vikings. But he and his men were overwhelmed - and the whole of southeastern England lay open to the invaders.
The unready Ethelred’s unwise response to this threat was to try to buy Olaf off with a payment of 10,000 pounds of silver coins, brooches, arm rings, torques, and ingots wrung from Ethelred’s unhappy subjects, together with food and drink for the lusty Viking army.
That expedient was the first of many that succeeded only in enraging Ethelred’s Anglo-Saxon subjects. This time, the payment brought them relief from the Viking harassment - but only for three years. In 994, the Norwegian Olaf was back, this time allied with the Danish Sweyn Forkbeard. The two kings, after collecting 16,000 pounds of silver, returned to Scandinavia - but not for long. Sweyn was soon to return and embark on a campaign that would take him the length and breadth of England and occupy him for more than a decade.
He began in the southeast corner of Wessex. For the year 999, the Chronicle recounts how “the host again came round into the Thames.” This time, at long last, Ethelred gathered his courage and attempted to fight the invaders. What is more, he chose to make a stand. “The King with his counselors,” relates the Chronicle, “decided to advance against them with both naval and land forces.” Unfortunately for the feckless Ethelred, nothing went right. Delay followed delay, and neither the ships nor the soldiers ever saw combat. “So in the end,” notes the Chronicle, “these preparations were a complete failure. They effected nothing except the oppression of the people and the waste of money.” The Chronicle for 999 ends on that unhappy note, without recording the tribute exacted by the Danes, but it must have been great.
In 1001, the Danes returned again. After another year’s harassment Ethelred yielded once more, this time paying Sweyn 24,000 pounds of silver. Then Ethelred spitefully gave orders for “all the Danish people who were in the land to be slain on Saint Brice’s Day,” November 13. Here was a mindless atrocity, for there was considerable commerce between the English and the Danes, and numbers of Danes had settled peacefully in the south. How many were rounded up and butchered is not known. But the mass murders infuriated the Danish King Sweyn and for more reasons than one. Among those killed was his sister Gunnhild.
Sweyn had the means to retaliate, for he had been assembling a powerful force. Four military camps were scattered about the perimeter of Denmark, all of them on navigable waters leading to the sea. They were carefully planned compounds, each with a number of boat-shaped barracks built of wood for sixty to seventy-five men, presumably warship crews, and each camp with a stout defensive palisade around the perimeter. All told, the camps could quarter at least 4,000 warriors at a time. It was from these camps that Sweyn now launched a series of attacks on England with which the misbegotten Ethelred was quite unable to cope.
Though the English king mustered a warship from every 300 hides of his realm (a hide was a geographical unit representing about 120 arable acres), he could not control his fleet. In 1009, in a battle off Sandwich, the Vikings burned eighty of his vessels. Another twenty defected to the enemy, and Ethelred, said the Chronicle simply, “went home” - meaning that he deserted his forces and fled to his nearest redoubt.
The Danes anchored their ships in Sandwich on August 1 of that year, went ashore, and looted Ethelred’s kingdom far and wide, collecting 36,000 pounds of silver. By the following summer, the Danes were everywhere. “When the enemy was in the east, then our levies were mustering in the west, and when they were in the south, then our levies were in the north,” says the 1010 Chronicle ruefully. “In the end, there was no leader who was willing to raise levies, but each fled as quickly as he could.”
That same year, Norwegian Vikings, under yet another Olaf, this one surnamed Haraldsson, sailed up the Thames and tore down London Bridge with grappling hooks, inspiring the rhyme that is sung in nurseries to this day. A year later, in the autumn of 1011, the Danish Vikings of King Sweyn reached Canterbury and seized, among other prisoners, the elderly archbishop. They pelted him with stones and the severed heads of cattle before crushing his skull with an axe.
Throughout this decade that had been so tumultuous for the south of England, the Danelaw had been exempt from Sweyn’s attacks. But in the summer of 1013, he drew it into the fray. Advancing to York and Northumbria, he secured allies from among the Danish chieftains there, and then turned south to deliver a final crushing assault. In quick succession, Oxford, Winchester, Bath, and London fell. Ethelred fled for his life to Normandy, and Sweyn installed himself as king of all England.
Only five weeks later, the conquering Sweyn was dead at the age of fifty-five, whether of sickness or of an accident the records do not say. In Denmark, he left an heir - his son Cnut - who, though only eighteen years old, was equal to the task of carrying on where his father had left off.
In 1015, Cnut sailed from Scandinavia with 200 ships to claim his father’s legacy. He first crushed the straggling remains of Ethelred’s army and then routed another force raised by Ethelred’s son Edmund. Cnut next levied the highest single Danegeld in history - 82,000 pounds of silver from throughout the realm, of which 10,000 came from London alone. Then, instead of making off with the loot, he used it to pay off his troops and demobilize much of his army.
Some of the Vikings went home to Scandinavia, but many others settled down in the new realm they had conquered - chief among them Cnut, who ruled as king.
A saga says of Cnut that his nose, “which was long, narrow and slightly bent, somewhat
marred his good looks.” And he had a full share of wild Viking blood in his veins; in a fit of rage over a chess game, according to legend, he ordered a minion to kill his faithful friend and brother-in-law, Earl Ulf. Nevertheless, he was in most respects a temperate, farseeing, realistic monarch. When his courtiers, bedazzled by his triumphs, told him he could make the tides stand still, he sat on his throne by the seaside, with the waves washing around him, to show them that he was human.
This Danish Viking gave England its first peace in a quarter century. Since Christianity was the religion of a majority of his subjects, he submitted to baptism. He restored monasteries and consecrated churches. And in a written code of law, the first to apply to all England, he proclaimed Christianity the faith of the land and required the populace to support the Church with silver and crops.
The secular portions of Cnut’s law spelled out, among other things, what may have been Western Europe’s first written inheritance tax. A certain percentage of the estate of an earl went on his death to the king; lower-ranking nobles paid proportionately less. Other taxes were raised annually to defend the realm and pay for professional soldiers and seamen; some 3,000 pounds, for example, was collected annually to pay the wages of the seamen on Cnut’s warships. These taxes were no doubt an annoyance, like taxes everywhere, but still they offered a merciful release from the extortionate Danegelds of yore.
When he died quietly in his bed in 1035 at the age of thirty-nine or forty, Cnut left an England united and prosperous, and content to be under Viking rule. It seemed that the Norsemen’s conquest was complete.
But Cnut’s sons proved not to be of their father’s stature. They fought constantly among themselves - like the Vikings of the past - and succeeded only in losing the crown of England to a son of Ethelred’s, Edward the Confessor. He, in turn, refusing out of excessive piety to sleep with his wife, produced no heirs at all. He thus guaranteed a scramble for succession, which led in 1066 to the Norman invasion that spelled the doom of the Viking era in England.
The Vikings Page 6
