“Then all the witan, lay and clerical, resolved that they would send for King Ethelred, and they said that no lord should be dearer to them than their natural born lord, if only he would govern more righteously than he had done aforetime. Then the king sent hither his son Edward with his messengers, and bade greeting to all his people, and said that he would be to them a gracious lord and would amend all the things of which they complained, and that everything which they had done or said against him should be forgiven, on condition that they would all firmly and loyally adhere to him. Thus was full friendship made fast between them with word and pledge on either side; and they pronounced every Danish king outlawed from England for ever. Then came King Ethelred in spring-tide home to his own people, and gladly was he received by all of them.”

It was an easy matter for the witan to declare every Danish king an outlaw; to expel the young and vigorous Canute from the kingdom was a very different affair. At this time the Dane’s strongest position was in Lincolnshire, his naval base of operations being still doubtless the estuary of the Humber. The men of Lindsey had resorted to him at Gainsborough, and had undertaken to supply him with horses and to go forth together with him and harry. But now when Ethelred with “a full fyrd” appeared in Lincolnshire, Canute who was not ready for fight, stole away to his ships and sailed forth from the Humber, leaving “the poor folk whom he had deceived” to their king’s vengeance. Ethelred then “harried and burned and slew every man who could be got at”. Evidently the long years of war had thoroughly brutalised both the combatants. Canute, enraged probably by the proceedings of the witan, sailed round to Sandwich, and there landed the luckless hostages who had been delivered to his father by the northern shires in 1013. He chopped off their hands and noses and then, apparently, let them return to their homes. This savage mutilation is the greatest piece of barbarity that stands recorded against him. Meanwhile the portion of the fleet which Thurkill commanded lay at Greenwich, and from thence, though professing to support the cause of Ethelred, ravaged the country as much as they pleased. Thus for the unhappy peasants there was little to choose between Thurkill and Canute.

In the following year, 1015, there was a great meeting of the witan at Oxford, and here Edric, of whose treasons we have lately heard but little, distinguished himself by a characteristic piece of villainy. There were two thegns, probably brothers, named Sigeferth and Morcar, men with large estates and holding highest rank in the Five, or as they were now called, the Seven Boroughs (York and Chester were perhaps the two new additions to the old group). These men Edric, when he met them at the witenagemot, invited into his chamber and there he treacherously slew them. According to the somewhat doubtful story of William of Malmesbury, he had first made their henchmen drunk, and then when they, too late, sought to avenge their lords, Edric’s followers overpowered them, chased them into the church of St. Frideswide and slew them there. The king was evidently consenting to the death of these men, and purposed to bestow their broad lands on their murderer. But now came a strange overturn. Sigeferth’s widow had been by royal order conveyed to Malmesbury, probably with the intention of immuring her in the convent. Thither also, after a short interval, went the king’s son, the Etheling Edmund Ironside, whom we now hear of for the first time, but who was to be the protagonist in the next two years’ combat. He wooed the widow of Sigeferth; he perhaps promised to take vengeance on her husband’s murderers; he married her, contrary to the king’s command, and then early in September he marched to the Seven Boroughs, presented himself as the avenger of the murdered thegns and the heir of one of them, made himself master of all their domains and received the submission of their people.

The king was now lying at Cosham,197 stricken with mortal sickness, and could exercise little influence on the course of events. The hopes of the nation must have all rested on Edmund, who certainly showed in these two years courage and activity, though he may have inherited some of his father’s incapacity for reading the characters of men. Thus, notwithstanding the breach between them, which he should have known to be deadly, he accepted the offered help of Edric Streona who repaired to his standard in the north, only to exercise his usual paralysing influence on the army, and then deserted to Canute, inducing the crews of the forty ships at Greenwich to follow his example.

England was now, in 1016, divided in a fashion not seen before. All Wessex was submissive to Canute and gave him horses and hostages, while the district of the Seven Boroughs and probably the whole of Northumbria went with Edmund, heir by marriage of the influence of Sigeferth. He summoned the Mercian fyrd to his standard, but the men replied, curiously enough, that “it did not please them to go forth, unless the king were with them, and they had the support of the burgesses of London”. Apparently the Etheling Edmund was more than half suspected of being a rebel against his father, and in the strange confusion of the strife the approval of the brave citizens of London was the only irrefragable sign and seal of rightful lordship. With some difficulty the sick king was brought from London, where he then abode, to the northern fyrd, but being alarmed by rumours of a conspiracy against his life, he quitted the camp and returned to London. “Thus the summoning of the fyrd availed nothing more than it had ever done before.”

The junction of Edmund’s forces with those of Uhtred, earl of Northumbria, might seem to promise more effectual resistance to the foreigner. Practically, however, it resulted in nothing more than a series of harryings in Shropshire, Staffordshire and Cheshire, from which Uhtred was suddenly recalled by the tidings that Canute had marched northwards and was already nearing York. Uhtred abandoned his harrying and hastened to meet the enemy, but in presence of Canute’s superior force was obliged to submit, acknowledge the Dane as his king, and give hostages. The submission availed him naught. After this surrender he and another powerful Northumbrian named Thurcytel were put to death by Canute. This crime also was attributed to the malign influence of Edric Streona. The struggle now centred round London. There was the sick king; thither his son Edmund went to meet him. Thither was Canute sailing with his ships, but ere he arrived, an enemy stronger than he had found entrance. On April 23, 1016, King Ethelred died, and this dreariest of all English reigns came to an end. Old as Ethelred seems to us by reason of the evils which he had so long inflicted on his country, he was still only in the forty-ninth year of his age.

“After the death of Ethelred, all the witan that were in London and the citizens chose Edmund for king, and he boldly defended his kingdom while his time was,” which was only for seven months. Canute, who was obstinately set on the conquest of London, made a canal on the south side of the Thames and passed his ships through it, so as to bring them into the main stream above the strongly defended bridge. After two battles in Somerset and Wilts the English king came to the help of the citizens and defeated the Danes at Brentford. His army, however, was somewhat lacking in discipline, for “many English folk were drowned in the river through their own carelessness, pushing on beyond the main body of the fyrd in the hope of taking booty”. In the battles which followed on the Orwell, in Mercia, in the island of Sheppey, Edmund was generally victorious; but all such success was counterbalanced by the disastrous return of Edric to the English army and by Edmund’s acceptance of his help. “Never was worse counsel adopted than that.” The last and greatest of the long series of battles was fought at Assandune, in the flats of Essex between the Thames and the estuary of the Crouch. Here, after a long and fierce encounter, victory fell to the Danes, it is said through the treachery of Edric, who was the first to take flight and who spread panic through the English ranks by displaying a severed head, which, he shouted, was the head of Edmund Ironside. In this battle fell the old traitor Elfric and a very different man, the brave East Anglian Ulfcytel, besides many other thegns. There, in fact, fell the flower of the English manhood.

It seemed clear that neither of the opposing forces could utterly crush the other. By the mediation of Edric a meeting was arranged between the two kings at Olney, an island in the Severn not far from Gloucester. A payment, we are not told of what amount, was made to the Danish army, and the kingdom was divided between the combatants, Wessex to Edmund, Mercia and Northumbria to Canute. London, faithfully following the house of Cerdic, was included in the peace, and the now reconciled Danish mariners were allowed to take up their winter quarters in the city by the Thames. A peculiar relation, somewhat embellished by the fancy of later historians, seems to have been established between the two young partners in the kingdom. Brotherhood in arms was perhaps sworn to between them; it is alleged that the survivor of the twain was assured of the inheritance of his partner. Whatever may have been the precise nature of the tie, it was soon dissolved. On November 30, 1016, Edmund Ironside “fared forth,” and was buried by the side of his grandfather, Edgar, at Glastonbury. He was only about twenty-three years of age. A death so opportune for the purposes of Canute and his followers naturally arouses suspicion. Later historians had no hesitation in making Edric the murderer. There is also something in the after-life of Canute which looks like remorse for some great crime committed against his brother-king. On the other hand it is but justice to say that there is no hint of foul play in any contemporary authority; and the death of the young king may perhaps be accounted for by the fearful labours and anxieties of his last two years of warring and reigning.

The period which we have lately traversed is one of those dreary times which a patriotic historian would gladly blot out from the annals of England, and one is half inclined to resent the exceptional fulness of detail with which it is treated in the Saxon Chronicle. Yet it is a time which the student of our social history cannot afford to overlook. If the thirty years’ war in the seventeenth century left deep scars on the face of Germany, which were still visible after the lapse of two hundred years, we must surely believe that the wounds inflicted by the incessant ravages and harryings of the Danes for more than thirty years were also deep and long lasting. The utter demoralisation of king and people, the apparent rottenness of the body politic, as manifested in the course of the struggle, abate much of our first feeling of patriotic regret for the Norman conquest, suggesting as they do the reflection that these Saxons, if left to themselves, would never have made a strong and stable nation. Much as we condemn the conduct of Ethelred, we may be inclined to conjecture that all the mischief was not wrought in his reign. We should perhaps do wisely in mistrusting a good deal that is told us about the glory and the greatness of the reign of Edgar. After all, it was in that king’s days that traitors such as Elfric and Edric were growing up into maturity. Had Edgar left the country a really strong, well-organised state, it could hardly have gone down so speedily before the assaults of the sea-rovers. Probably the new and nobler life breathed into the Saxon people by the great Alfred lasted during the reigns of Edward and Athelstan and not much longer.