Of the two sons left by Edgar, one, Edward, son of “Ethelfled the Duck,” was about thirteen years old, and the other, Elfrida’s son, Ethelred, was but seven at the death of their father. This being so, it is surprising that there should have been any debate as to which son should succeed to the vacant throne. Possibly the kinsfolk of Elfrida, a powerful clan, may have raised doubts as to the regularity of Edgar’s marriage to Ethelfled, or they may have insisted on the superior position of the child Ethelred as the son of a queen, for Elfrida, first of all royal consorts since Judith, wife of Ethelwulf, had been permitted to bear that envied name.186 The debate was, however, decided, apparently by the united influence of the two archbishops, Dunstan and Oswald, in favour of Edward, upon whose head the crown of England was placed by the kindly hands of the Archbishop of Canterbury.

The politics of the short reign of Edward, which lasted barely four years, are as obscure and difficult to trace as the cause of its premature close. It is clear, however, that immediately on the death of Edgar there was a certain reaction against that king’s monastic policy. It was in Mercia that this reaction was most powerful, and the leader in the movement was the ealdorman Elfhere, “enemy of the monks,” as the Chronicle calls him; “most wicked of consuls,” as he is styled by the classically minded Henry of Huntingdon. There was a certain Oslac, earl of Northumbria, who was driven into banishment by Elfhere, and from the way in which his name is mentioned we are led to conjecture that he was a partisan of the monks.

Thus sings the monk of Winchester. He of Peterborough, after also deviating into verse, adds in quiet prose: “In this year (975) there were great disturbances throughout England; and Elfhere the ealdorman ordered the demolition of many monasteries which king Edgar had erewhile ordered the holy bishop Ethelwold to establish. And at the same time the great earl Oslac was banished from England.”

There are hints, especially in the life of St. Oswald of York, that Elfhere’s anti-monastic policy was connected with a certain amount of spoliation of the abbey lands, which were probably in some measure distributed among his followers. On the other hand, we hear that Ethelwin, Ealdorman of East Anglia, son of “half-king” Athelstan and brother-in-law of Elfrida, zealously opposed Elfhere’s policy and championed the cause of the monks. A yet more strenuous defender of the order was his brother, Alfwold, who slew a certain man accused by him of fraudulently obtaining some of the abbey lands of Peterborough. Desiring to obtain absolution for the deed he went to Winchester to beg it of bishop Ethelwold. In his penitence and remorse, Alfwold in his hostel unloosed his shoes and went, humble and barefooted, to meet the great bishop. But Ethelwold, knowing in whose cause he had stricken the blow, would have none of such needless humiliation. He went forth clad in full vestments, with holy water, cross and thurible to meet “the general and defender of the Church”. Prayers were offered, the acolytes replaced the shoes on the feet of the Church’s champion, and the rest of the day was spent in rejoicings. “Thus did the pious chieftain of the East Angles defend all the possessions of the monasteries with great honour, wherefore he was called the Friend of God.”

Concerning the actual cause of the struggle we are very imperfectly informed. The East Anglian chiefs were joined by Brihtnoth, ealdorman of Essex, brother-in-law of “the half-king,” and for some time it seemed as if the dispute would have to be settled by force of arms. Happily this was averted, and in three meetings of the witan, held probably in three successive years, 977, 978 and 979 (the last after the death of Edward), it was perhaps arranged that the two parties should compromise on the basis of uti possidetis, the monasteries in East Anglia and Essex not being disturbed, but those in Mercia not being restored to the monks, at any rate during the lifetime of Elfhere.

At the first of these Witenagemots, which was held at Kirtlington, in Oxfordshire, Sideman, the aged Bishop of Crediton, who had been the young King Edward’s teacher and guide, suddenly expired. At the second, which was held in an upper chamber at Calne, in Wiltshire, the floor suddenly gave way and “all the chief witan of the English race” were precipitated into the room below. Some were killed and many suffered grievous bodily harm. Apparently almost the only one who escaped quite unhurt was the Archbishop Dunstan, “who stood up upon a beam”. Naturally, so remarkable an escape brightened the halo which shone round the archbishop’s name. In later legends the accident was magnified into a kind of heavenly judgment between the monks and their opponents; while some modern historians, remembering Dunstan’s great mechanical skill, have seen in it a cunning device for ridding himself of his enemies. Happily we are not constrained to adopt either hypothesis, and the last suggestion is certainly inadmissible. It would probably tax the ingenuity of the ablest engineer of modern times to contrive such an apparent accident so as to kill part of the assembly. Miracle and fraud may therefore both disappear from the discussion. The event, which undoubtedly happened, is only one of several indications of the unsoundness of Anglo-Saxon building. There seems reason to suspect that in the tenth century the political and the domestic architecture of England were both equally insecure, and that the apparent glory of the reign of Edgar the Peaceful rested on many rotten timbers which made easy the collapse of the kingdom under Ethelred the Unready. Perhaps, also, we may conjecture that the deaths of so many of England’s chief men and wisest counsellors left the field open for meaner, weaker, more treacherous statesmen.

In the same year (978) Edward’s short reign came to a bloody end. The circumstances of his death are somewhat obscure, though there can be no doubt that he was foully murdered on March 18 at Corfe in Dorsetshire. We have no contemporary evidence directly connecting his step-mother with the crime, but this silence, as all chroniclers for the next thirty years would be somewhat in fear of Elfrida and her son, cannot be counted strong evidence in her favour. On the other hand, there is some evidence that Corfe, the scene of the murder, was the place where Elfrida was at the time dwelling with her boy, and all the later historians speak unhesitatingly as to the quarter from which the blow came, though, unfortunately (as we so often find to be the case), the further removed they are from the date of the event, the more they profess to know about its details. Thus the biographer of St. Oswald, who wrote about thirty years after the murder, tells us that a conspiracy was formed against the king by Ethelred’s thegns, and carried into effect when the young king, “desiring the consolation of fraternal love,” paid an evening visit to the house where his brother was residing with the queen. The partisans of Ethelred gathered round Edward, who was alone and unguarded. The butler came forward “ready to serve in his lowly office”; one of the thegns seized the king’s right hand as if to kiss it; another grasped his left hand and inflicted on him a mortal wound. The king called out in a loud voice: “What are you doing, breaking my hand,” and then fell dead from his horse, which was also mortally wounded by the conspirators. “No chant was raised; no proper rites of burial performed; the renowned king of the whole country lay covered with a cheap garment, awaiting the resurrection day. After the lapse of a twelvemonth, the glorious duke Elfhere [of Mercia] came to Wareham, found the body lying there naked but incorrupt, and transferred it to Shaftesbury, where it received honourable burial.” This account looks a little more like a political conspiracy and less like a mere private assassination than the story told in the twelfth century by William of Malmesbury, according to which the kingly boy returning from the chase, tired and thirsty, called at his step-mother’s abode, asked for wine, and while drinking the stirrup-cup was treacherously stabbed by one of Elfrida’s henchmen; fell from his horse, and with one foot in the stirrup was dragged along by the frightened steed, a long track through the forest being marked by the blood of the dying king. This, which is in some respects the more romantic version of the story, is that which has found its way into the received text of English history. The feelings of the people concerning this tragedy may be gathered from the ballad which was embodied in the Chronicle.

Here we can perceive, deep in the heart of the writer, a smouldering fire of indignation against some persons highly placed and beyond the reach of man’s revenge, by whom the deed of wickedness was wrought. The misery which fell upon the nation in the long and dreary reign of Elfrida’s son is heaven’s answer to the cry of the innocent blood. Without the Church’s sanction, without any strict warrant for the epithet, the instinct of the people gave to the victim of Corfe the name which he has ever since borne in history, “Edward the Martyr”.

The new king, Ethelred, a boy of ten years old, was crowned at Kingston-on-Thames a fortnight after Easter, the two archbishops and ten bishops taking part in the ceremony. Dunstan addressed to him, as he had done to his father before him, a sermon on the duties of his kingship, and is said, but on somewhat doubtful authority, to have uttered at the same time foreboding words as to the calamities coming upon the kingdom, in punishment for the crime which had given Ethelred the crown. It seems clear that he withdrew more and more from a share in the civil, perhaps even in the ecclesiastical, government of the realm, and spent the ten years of life which yet remained to him chiefly in religious retirement; in preaching to the crowd of unlearned persons, lay and clerical, male and female, who gathered round him “to be fortified day and night with the heavenly salt”; in practising those mechanical arts which he had loved from boyhood; and in sitting on a bench in the scriptorium correcting some of the manuscripts which formed part of the treasure of Canterbury.

In the year 986, however, Dunstan was roused from his meditations by the extraordinary conduct of young Ethelred, who “on account of certain dissensions besieged Rochester, and being unable to take it, invaded and laid waste the patrimony of St. Andrew”. Some light is thrown on this remarkable entry by a document187 issued twelve years later, in which Ethelred laments that his youthful simplicity was imposed upon by a certain Ethelsin, an enemy of God and man, and that by his advice he violently abstracted from the church of Rochester a rural property at Bromley, which he now restores. Dunstan, we are told, warned the king of the punishment which waited on such crimes, and eventually induced him by a ransom of 100 pounds of silver to raise the siege of Rochester. Hereupon he prophesied that “such a king who preferred money to God, silver to the apostle, the gratification of his avarice to the earnestly expressed desire of his spiritual father, would draw down on himself and on his kingdom such calamities as the English nation had never yet experienced. But he himself, as he had been told by the mouth of the Lord, should not live to see this righteous retribution.” And so it proved. Two years later, on May 19, 988, Dunstan expired, probably in the sixty-fourth year of his age.

That Dunstan was a great saint and a great statesman cannot be doubted. No small man could have produced the impression which he produced on his own and on later generations. But what were his own actual achievements in Church and State it is not easy to discover through the veil of turgid obscurity woven by his biographers, who are more intent on recording childish miracles than on painting for us a truthful and vivid portraiture of the great archbishop. Doubtless the alleged miracles of the saint were not all the accumulation of later ages. Partly on account of his mechanical skill and partly from the peculiarities of his own temperament, a certain thaumaturgic atmosphere seems to have surrounded Dunstan even in his lifetime. With this we can now dispense; but while we closely study his life, some of the old misconceptions as to his character fall away. He was evidently not the grim and crafty ecclesiastic whom in our childish days we used to fancy him. On the contrary, with all his enthusiasm for monkhood, his influence was in fact a moderating one on the party of monastic reform. Far from being of a cruel nature, he seems, from such indications as are furnished us, to have been a man of genial and lovable disposition. He is now generally regarded as a great administrator, and a man of wide and statesmanlike views; though, as was before remarked, strict proof of this has hardly yet been adduced. But he seems also to have been through life a man of nervous, perhaps even of hysterical, temperament, renowned and envied for his power of shedding copious floods of tears; a man who saw visions and dreamed dreams; and, above all, a man who believed himself to be engaged in a perpetual personal encounter with the Prince of Darkness, who was to him as real and familiar a presence as the ealdorman of Mercia or the canonici of Glastonbury.

Before entering on that dreary period of Danish desolation which now lies before us it will be well to say something as to certain events which had been happening in France, Denmark and Norway, and which were about to exercise an enormous influence on the next stages of development of the English nation. The dukes of Normandy, the French kings of the race of Capet, the Angevin ancestors of our Plantagenet monarchs, all date their origin, or at least their greatness, from the tenth century, from the period between the death of Alfred and the accession of Ethelred. It is necessary also to take note of the immediate ancestors of the Danish kings who were about to make themselves actual sovereigns of England.

The Scandinavian invasions, which tended indirectly towards the consolidation of England, wrought powerfully towards the disintegration of the Frankish empire. The ignominious treaty which the last emperor of the direct line of Charlemagne, his great grandson Charles the Fat, made with the Danes to induce them to desist from the siege of Paris, and which had to be paid for by a large ransom, was one of the causes which led to his deposition from the imperial throne (887). A younger branch of the Carolingian house continued for just a century longer to wear the title of Kings of Francia, but their personal domain became gradually restricted to a little tract of territory surrounding the city of Laon, and they were ever more overshadowed by the greatness of the family of Robert, rightly called the Strong, who, though himself a Saxon alien of somewhat obscure origin, had shown conspicuous valour in the Danish wars, and whose two sons, Odo and Robert, both crowned as Kings of France, were the heroes of the mighty siege of Paris. For thirty-three years (923–56) Hugh the Great, son of this second Robert and grandson of the first, was far the most powerful man in France: Duke of Francia, Burgundy and Aquitaine, Count of Paris and Orleans, Lay Abbot of St. Martin of Tours. But though a kingmaker, son and nephew of kings, he always refused to be king himself. His son, Hugh Capet, more ambitious or less scrupulous, in 987 pushed aside the last powerless descendant of Charlemagne, and ascended that glorious throne which was uninterruptedly occupied by his descendants, Valois, Plantagenet, Bourbon, till the awful day of August, 1792, when the Swiss Guards fell fighting in front of the Tuilleries.

The Norman dukes, who also in this tenth century climbed up into all but regal state, bore an important part in this revolution. The hitherto received story of the settlement of the Northmen under their leader Rolf or Rollo in the fair province to which they gave their name has been subjected of late to much adverse criticism,188 and has been so seriously shaken that hardly anything but the bare fact survives indubitable, that there was such a settlement in the early part of the tenth century; that either in 911 or, as is rather more probable, in 921, Rolf “commended” himself to the French king Charles the Simple; and that he became his “man” in return for the cession of a large district on the Lower Seine. This transaction resembled in some respects the arrangement made a generation before, between Alfred and Guthrum. It was the surrender of part of the kingdom to ensure the safety of the remainder, the change of a pertinacious enemy into a fairly faithful friend. The cession of Normandy to Rolf was, however, in some ways a more signal success than Alfred’s cession of East Anglia to Guthrum. Though the Frankish historians persisted for generations in calling Rolf’s people pirates, the new-comers soon assimilated all and more than all the civilisation of their Frankish neighbours; and Norman literature, Norman chivalry, Norman architecture became the envy of Europe.

On Rolf’s death or abdication in 927 his son, William Longsword, became duke and reigned for fifteen years. He was a man of keen and polished intellect, with many noble, even with some holy, aspirations, but with a strange duality in his nature, perhaps the result of the mingled strain of Viking and Romanised Frank that was in his blood, for his mother is said to have been a Frankish lady of noble birth. A conflict had begun between two sections of his subjects, between the men of Rouen and its neighbourhood, who were fast becoming Frenchmen, and the men of the district round Bayeux, who remained obstinate Danes; and in this conflict William veered first to one side, then to the other. Moreover in the confused welter of French politics he played an eminently inconsistent and unwise part, showing that amidst the intriguing, grasping but adroit counts of Northern Gaul he never felt himself completely at home, but was uneasily conscious that he was still looked upon by them as dux piratarum. He would fain have been faithful to the royal line, to which his father owed his legalised position in the country; and in 936 he heartily co-operated with Hugh the Great in bringing back Athelstan’s nephew, Louis IV. d’Outremer, from his English exile and crowning him king; but, changeable as a weather-cock, he was almost as often found among the enemies of Louis IV. as in the ranks of his friends. Unfaithfulness begat unfaithfulness; the man who had been on each side in every quarrel made himself enemies all round, and in 942, having been treacherously invited to a conference on an island in the Somme, he was there foully murdered by a band of noble conspirators, among whom we regret to find Arnulf of Flanders, grandson of our own Alfred, first and foremost.

On the death of William Longsword, his little son Richard, though not born in lawful wedlock—this was almost the rule in the Norman line—was unanimously accepted as his successor. The boy, only ten years old, was soon plunged into a whirlpool of troubles, from which even his father’s old and faithful counsellors could hardly have extricated him, had he not himself shown that cool, patient, self-sustained courage which earned for him his historical surname, “the Fearless”. Though the Norman historians may have somewhat embroidered the romantic history of his captivity and escape, there can be little doubt that two dangerous neighbours, King Louis IV. and Count Hugh the Great, coveted the orphan boy’s inheritance; nor that, but for the loyalty of the Norman warriors to the son of their dead chieftain, and the astute management of two or three of his father’s old friends, they would have succeeded in making it their own. Soon after the death of William Longsword King Louis came to Rouen, ostensibly as the friend and protector of the little duke. He seems, however, to have practically taken the government of the country into his own hands, while the boy Richard, who was transferred to the court of Laon “that he might be there educated as beseemed a Christian prince,” found the school of knighthood every day becoming more like a prison. However, Richard’s faithful guardian, Osmund, succeeded in smuggling him out of the castle, according to the legend, “in a truss of hay”. The Normans, tired of the financial exactions of the ministers of Louis, rose in open revolt and gathered round their just recovered prince; the invasion of Louis with a formidable army was neutralised by that of Harold, a chieftain from Scandinavia, who, in 945, on the urgent appeal of Richard came to the help of his brother-Northmen. A battle followed, the battle of the Dive, in which Louis was utterly defeated, and he was soon after taken prisoner. Thus were the tables now turned, Louis who was of late the jailer being now the captive; nor did he regain his liberty till he had surrendered the rock fortress of Laon, almost his last remaining possession, to the omnivorous Count Hugh the Great, and had—so say the Norman writers—formally released Duke Richard from all ties of feudal dependence. Whether this be literally true or not, there is no doubt that Richard “commended” himself to the count of Paris. Thus even before Hugh Capet became King of France, the duke of Normandy was already his most powerful vassal. This fact, coupled with the steady and effectual help which Richard gave to the younger Hugh in his patient upward progress to the throne, deserves to be remembered when in later ages we have to deal with the relations, more often hostile than friendly, between the Norman-English vassal and the French lord paramount.

At the period which we have reached in English history, the date of the death of Dunstan (988), Richard the Fearless was a middle-aged man of fifty-five years. He had been reigning for forty-five years, and was the father of a numerous progeny—not born in wedlock—by a Danish woman named Gunnor, whom he married after the death of his lawful wife Emma, sister of Hugh Capet. His marriage with Emma was childless. In the year 996 he died and was succeeded by his son Richard the Good.

The origin of the house, which in after ages bore the name of Plantagenet and which held in the tenth century the countship of Anjou, is hidden in clouds of legend; but the legend itself does not dare to say that their forebears were always noble, nor to assign to them, as to so many of their princely contemporaries, a descent from the great Emperor Charles. The legendary ancestor of the Counts of Anjou is a certain Tortulf or Tertullus, a Breton forester to whom a doubtful Carolingian king, probably Charles the Bald, is said to have assigned a woodland district known as the Blackbird’s Nest (Nid de Merle), on condition of repelling the Danish attacks on the valley of the Loire. The special interest attaching to the history of the Angevin counts, in addition to the fact that they were the ancestors of so many of our English sovereigns, lies in the tenacity of purpose with which they pursued their policy of aggrandisement, gradually converting their little marchland on the east of Brittany, a small and precarious possession, into an extensive and powerful state in one of the fairest regions of France. With their Breton neighbours on the west, with Maine and Normandy on the north, they were frequently at war, but their most bitter and enduring conflicts were with the Counts of Blois on the east, and it was at their expense that the most important of the Angevin conquests was effected. This is a fact which it will be well to bear in mind when we find Henry of Anjou and Stephen of Blois, heirs of a feud which had already lasted in France for two centuries, contending on English soil for the crown of England.

The history of Denmark during the first century and a half of the Viking raids is involved in great obscurity; but about the time when Edward the Elder was reigning in England we emerge into clearer light, and find a king named Gorm the Old reigning over a united Denmark, with, however, some obligations of vassalage towards the German king, Henry the Saxon. On his death or abdication towards the middle of the tenth century began the long and prosperous reign of Harold Blaatand (Blue-Tooth), which lasted for about fifty years and was the great period of consolidation for the Danish kingdom. In 977 Harold, in conjunction with two Norwegian allies, made an expedition to Norway by which he obtained possession of a considerable part of that country and acquired a sort of feudal supremacy over the whole. In his relations with the German emperors Harold was less fortunate. He was apparently compelled to submit to Otto I., and as one of the conditions of peace, he and his son Sweyn were forced to receive Christian baptism. The conversion of the son at any rate was not sincere, and dissensions broke out between him and his father. The old king was defeated and fled the country. He was restored for a short time, again attacked by Sweyn, and died of his wounds received in battle.

Thus, in the fourteenth year of Ethelred’s reign, the throne of Denmark was occupied by the stern pagan Swegen or Sweyn. No tenderness will he show to Christian churches or monasteries in any land that he may invade; and any king or people that shall do him wrong may expect to receive terrible retribution.

The early, doubtless in large measure legendary, history of Norway, as told in the Heimskringla Saga, is full of romantic interest, but is beside our present purpose. The great unifier of the Norwegian kingdom was Harold Fair-hair, whose long reign ended before the middle of the tenth century. In the eleventh year of his age he found himself lord of a small kingdom between Lake Wener and the Dovrefield Mountains. When he came to manhood he wooed the fair Gytha for his wife, but the damsel declared that she would marry no man who did not rule the whole of Norway, as Gorm ruled all Denmark and Eric the whole of Sweden. Hereupon Harold, having vowed not to cut his hair till he had accomplished the prescribed task, began a series of expeditions northwards, which did in the course of years make him master of the whole of what we now call Norway. He married Gytha, but she was only one of many wives and concubines by whom he begat countless children, whose wars and alliances, whose rivalries and reconciliations, fill Norwegian history in the tenth century as English history in the fifteenth is filled by the broils of the Plantagenets. This is that Harold who sent the infant Hakon to be educated at the court of Athelstan; and Hakon, as has been said, having been educated by his great foster-father in the Christian religion and trained in all arts that became a Saxon Etheling, went back to his fatherland, reigned there after his father’s death as Hakon the Good, and vainly endeavoured to Christianise his people. Another Harold and another Hakon followed in quick succession, sometimes owning, sometimes rejecting, the over-lordship of Denmark. At the period which we have now reached, the rising star is that of Olaf Tryggvason, great-grandson of Fair-hair, not yet king of Norway but a great and popular Viking, whose name will be heard with terror in Essex and in Kent, in Sussex and in Hampshire.