The next year Cnut came back to England as his real home and abiding-place, the seat of his Anglo-Scandinavian Empire. At Easter a Witenagemót was held at Cirencester, at which took place the last recorded instance of |Witenagemót at Cirencester. April, 1020.| severity on Cnut’s part towards any Englishman. An |Æthelweard banished.| Ealdorman Æthelweard—which, among all the bearers of that name, we can only guess—was banished.[887] But it must have been at this same Gemót that an appointment was made which showed how thoroughly at home the stranger King had made himself in his new country. The last banishment of an Englishman by the Danish conqueror was accompanied by the exaltation of another Englishman to a place in the realm second only to kingship. |Godwine appointed Earl of the West-Saxons. [1020–1052.]| It was now that Godwine received a title and office which no man had borne before him, but which, saving the few months of his banishment, he bore for the thirty-two remaining years of his life, the title and office of Earl of the West-Saxons.[888] Cnut, it will be remembered, in his fourfold division of the kingdom, while he appointed Earls over Northumberland, Mercia, and East-Anglia, kept Wessex under his own immediate government. He was now already King of two kingdoms, and he had no doubt by this time began to meditate a further extension |Nature and import of the office.| of his dominion in the North. He found, it would seem, that the King of all England and all Denmark needed a tried helper in the administration of his most cherished possession, and a representative when his presence was needed in other parts of his dominions. Wessex then, the ancient hearth and home of English kingship, now for the first time received an immediate ruler of a rank inferior to that of King. Godwine became the first, and his son Harold was the second and last, of the Earls of the West-Saxons. To reduce the ancient kingdom to an earldom was not, as has been sometimes imagined, any badge of the insolence of a conqueror; the act was in no way analogous to the change of Northumberland from a kingdom to an earldom under Eadred. The case is simply that the King of all England and all Denmark, King in a special manner of the old West-Saxon realm, found the need of a special counsellor, and in absence of a viceroy, even in this his chosen and immediate dominion. No man of the kindred or nation of the conqueror, but Godwine, the native Englishman, was found worthy of this new and exalted post. Through the whole remainder of the reign of Cnut, the great Earl of the West-Saxons ruled in uninterrupted honour and influence. The wealth which he acquired, mainly, it may be supposed, by royal grant, was enormous. His possessions extended into nearly every shire of the south and centre of England. Whether the son of the churl or the great-nephew of the traitor, he was now, three years after the completion of the Danish Conquest, beyond all doubt the first subject in the realm.
The year of Cnut’s return and of Godwine’s great promotion beheld the King engaged in a remarkable solemnity on the spot which had witnessed his last battle, his only distinct victory, in his great struggle with English Eadmund. On the hill of Assandun, Cnut, in partnership with Thurkill, at once as Earl of the district and as his chief comrade in the battle, had reared a church, which was consecrated, in the presence of the King and the Earl, by Wulfstan, Archbishop of York, and several other bishops. That the ceremony was performed by the Northern Metropolitan was probably owing to a vacancy in the see of Canterbury. Lyfing, who had crowned Cnut, died in the course of the year, and was succeeded by Æthelnoth the Good,[889] who had baptized or confirmed him.[890] The ceremony at Assandun doubtless took place between these two events. In Essex, a region rich in woods, but poor in good building stone, timber was largely used both in ecclesiastical and in domestic buildings for ages after this time. Cnut however employed the rarer material, and the fact that his church was built of stone and lime was looked on as something worthy of distinct record.[891] The stone church of Assandun was something remarkable in Essex, exactly as the wooden church of Glastonbury[892] was something remarkable in Somerset. But the building was small and mean, at least as compared with the stately pile which the next conqueror of England reared in memory of his victory. The foundation of Cnut and Thurkill, for a single priest,[893] was poor and scanty, compared with the lordly Abbey of Saint Martin of the Place of Battle.[894] But the minster of Battle simply spoke of the subjugation of a land by a foreign conqueror; the minster of Assandun told a nobler tale. It was reared as the hallowing of his victory, as the atonement for his earlier crimes, by a prince who, conqueror as he was, had learned to love the land which he had conquered, to feel himself one with its people, and to reign after the pattern of its noblest princes. The Abbot of Battle and his monks were strangers, brought from a foreign land to fatten on the |First appearance of Stigand, [Priest of Assandun, 1020; Bishop of Elmham, 1044; of Winchester, 1047; Archbishop of Canterbury, 1052].| spoils of England.[895] The single priest of Assandun lived to show himself one of the stoutest of Englishmen. Stigand, the first priest of Cnut’s new minster, now the friend and chaplain of the Danish conqueror, in after years displaced a Norman intruder on the throne of Augustine, and was himself hurled therefrom at the bidding of a Norman King.[896]
The consecration on Assandun might pass as the formal act of reconciliation between the Danish King and his |Later years of Cnut. 1020–1035.| English subjects. From that day the internal history of England, for the remaining fifteen years of the reign of Cnut, becomes a blank. We now hear only of the King’s wars abroad, of his acts of piety at home, of several instances in which his hand was heavy upon his own countrymen; but, after the outlawry of Æthelweard, we find no record of the death or banishment of a single |Danes make way for Englishmen.| Englishman. In fact these years form a time of the gradual substitution of Englishmen for Danes in the highest offices, while no doubt Danes of lower degree were, like their sovereign, fast changing themselves into Englishmen. Nearly all the Danish holders of earldoms whom we find at the beginning of Cnut’s reign vanish |Thurkill banished from England. November, 1021.| one by one. Of the outlawry of the two greatest of their number we find distinct accounts. The year after the ceremony at Assandun, Thurkill, the co-founder with the King, who, in the account of their joint work, appears almost as the King’s peer, was driven into banishment.[897] With him his English wife Eadgyth had to leave her country; if she was the daughter of Æthelred, and the widow of either Ulfcytel or Eadric,[898] we are almost driven to infer that the marriage was contracted after the consecration on Assandun, that the connexion with the ancient royal family awakened Cnut’s jealousy, and was in fact the cause of Thurkill’s banishment. One cannot help feeling a certain interest in the fate of one who had so long played an important and, on the whole, not a dishonourable, part in English history. The savage pirate gradually changed into the civilized warrior; if at one time he was the enemy, he was at another the defender, of England. The heathen who had striven to save a Christian martyr from his persecutors had developed the good seed within him till he grew into a founder and restorer of Christian churches. With the banishment which I have just recorded the history of Thurkill, as far as England is concerned, comes to an end. But his banishment was merely local; he was held to be dangerous in England, and he was therefore removed from the country, but his removal was little more than an honourable ostracism. He kept, or soon won back, his sovereign’s favour; there is no evidence that he ever came back to England; but two years later he was formally |Thurkill made Viceroy of Denmark. 1023.| reconciled to Cnut; he was established as his viceroy in Denmark, seemingly as guardian to one of the King’s sons who was meant to succeed him in that kingdom.[899] The only sign of suspicion shown on Cnut’s part was his bringing back the son of Thurkill with him to England, |Eric banished. 1023?| evidently as a hostage. Eric also, the Danish Earl of the Northumbrians, was banished a few years later than Thurkill, on what occasion, and at what exact time, is |Hakon banished. 1029.| unknown.[900] Somewhat later again we find the banishment of Eric’s son Hakon, “the doughty Earl.” Hakon was doubly the King’s nephew, as the son of his sister and as the husband of his niece Gunhild, the daughter of another sister and of Wyrtgeorn King of the Wends.[901] We have no details, but we are told that Cnut feared to be deprived by him of his life or kingdom.[902] Hakon seems however not to have been formally outlawed, but to have been merely sent away to fill the post which his father had held as viceroy in Norway.[903] This fact, coupled with Thurkill’s similar viceroyalty in Denmark, shows that Cnut could trust men in other countries whom he thought |His death. 1030.| dangerous in England. The year after his removal from England Hakon died at sea, or, according to another account, was killed in Orkney.[904] His widow seems to have stayed in England; she married another Danish |1046.| Earl, Harold,[905] and was herself, in her second widowhood, banished from England when England had again a native |Ulf put to death. After 1025.| King.[906] Cnut’s brother-in-law Ulf came to a worse end still; that he died by the command of Cnut there is no reason to doubt, but we have no certain information as to the circumstances. According to our Danish historian it was a perfectly righteous execution, while the romantic tale of the Norwegian saga represents it as a singularly |The banished Danish chiefs succeeded by Englishmen.| base and cold-blooded assassination.[907] The point of importance for us is that these eminent Danes had no successors of their own nation in their English offices. There remained plenty of Danish Thegns and some Danish Earls; but in the later years of Cnut the highest places were all filled by Englishmen. Ranig retained the subordinate earldom of the Magesætas; Thored was Staller, and, at least in Harthacnut’s reign, he held the earldom of the Middle-Angles.[908] But Godwine and Leofric held the first rank in southern and in central England, and, on the banishment of Eric, the government of Northumberland went back to the family of its ancient Earls.[909] It is most remarkable, in tracing the signatures to the charters, to trace how the Danish names gradually disappear, and are succeeded by English names.[910] The Danes who remain seem to have been all in quite secondary rank. No doubt Cnut had largely rewarded his followers with grants of land, and we can well believe that some of these new Danish thegns often behaved with great insolence to their English neighbours.[911] But the general principle of Cnut’s government is not affected by any local wrongs of this kind. Cnut, from the very beginning, admitted Englishmen to high office; still, in the earlier years of his reign he appears mainly as a foreign conqueror surrounded by those whose arms had won his crown for him. He gradually changes into a prince, English in all but actual birth, who could afford to dispense with the dangerous support of the chieftains of his own nation, who could venture to throw himself on the loyalty of those whom he had subdued, and to surround himself with the natural leaders of those whom he had learned to look on as his own people.
This gradual change in the disposition of Cnut makes him one of the most remarkable, and, to an Englishman, one of the most interesting, characters in history. There is no other instance—unless Rolf in Normandy be admitted as a forerunner on a smaller scale—of a barbarian conqueror, entering a country simply as a ruthless pirate, plundering, burning, mutilating, slaughtering, without remorse, and then, as soon as he is firmly seated on the throne of the invaded land, changing into a beneficent ruler and lawgiver, and winning for himself a place side by side with the best and greatest of its native sovereigns. Cnut never became a perfect prince like Ælfred. An insatiable ambition possessed him throughout life, and occasional acts of both craft and violence disfigure the whole of his career. No man could charge him with that amiable weakness through which Eadmund lent so ready an ear to protestations of repentance and promises of amendment even from the lips of Eadric. Cnut, on the other hand, always found some means, by death, by banishment, by distant promotion, of getting rid of any one who had once awakened his suspicions. Reasons of state were as powerful with him, and led him into as many unscrupulous actions, as any more civilized despot of later times. But Englishmen were not disposed to canvass the justice of wars in which they won fame and plunder, while no enemy ever set foot on their own shores. They were as little disposed to canvass the justice of banishments and executions, when, for many years, it was invariably a Dane, never an Englishman, who was |Cnut’s position typical of that of the Danes in England.| the victim. The law by which the Dane settled in England presently became an Englishman received its highest carrying out in the person of the illustrious Danish King. As far as England and Englishmen were concerned, Cnut might seem to have acted on the principle of the Greek poet, that unrighteousness might be fittingly done in order to win a crown, but that righteousness should be done in all other times and places.[912] The throne of Cnut, established by wasting wars, by unrighteous executions, perhaps even by treacherous assassinations, was, when once established, emphatically the throne of righteousness and peace. As an English King, he fairly ranks beside |Cnut’s letter from Rome. 1027.| the noblest of his predecessors. His best epitaph is his famous letter to his people on his Roman pilgrimage.[913] Such a pilgrimage was an ordinary devotional observance according to the creed of those times. But in the eyes of Cnut it was clearly much more than a mere perfunctory ceremony. The sight of the holy places stirred him to good resolves in matters both public and private, and, as a patriotic King, he employed his meeting with the Pope, the Emperor, and the Burgundian King, to win from all of them favours which were profitable to the people of his various realms. No man could have written in the style in which Cnut writes to all classes of his English subjects, unless he were fully convinced that he possessed and deserved the love of his people. The tone of the letter is that of an absent father writing to his children. In all simplicity and confidence, he tells them the events of his journey; he tells them with what honours he had been received, and with what presents he had been loaded, by the two chiefs of Christendom, and what privileges for his subjects, both English and Danish, he had obtained at their hands. He confesses the errors of his youth, and promises reformation of anything which may still be amiss. All grievances shall be redressed; no extortions shall be allowed; King Cnut needs no money raised by injustice. These are surely no mere formal or hypocritical professions; every word plainly comes from the heart. England had more than led captive her conqueror; she had changed him into her King and father.
The same spirit which breathes in Cnut’s letter breathes also in the opening of his laws.[914] The precept to fear God and honour the King here takes a more personal and affectionate form. First above all things are men one God ever to love and worship, and one Christendom with one mind to hold, and Cnut King to love with right truthfulness.[915] The laws themselves deal with the usual subjects, the reformation of manners, the administration of justice, the strict discharge of all ecclesiastical duties and the strict payment of all ecclesiastical dues. The feasts of the two new national saints, Eadward the King and Dunstan the Primate, are again ordered to be kept, and the observance of the former is again made to rest in a marked way on the authority of the Witan.[916] The observance of the Lord’s day is also strongly insisted on; on that day there is to be no marketing, no hunting; even the holding of folkmotes is forbidden, except in cases of absolute necessity.[917] All heathen superstition is to be forsaken,[918] and the slave-trade is again denounced.[919] The whole fabric of English society is strictly preserved. The King legislates only with the consent of his Witan.[920] The old assemblies, the old tribunals, the old magistrates, keep all their rights and powers. The Bishop and the Ealdorman[921] still fill their place as joint presidents of the Scirgemót, and joint expounders of the laws, ecclesiastical and secular.[922] The King, as well as all inferior lords,[923] is to enjoy all that is due to him; the royal rights, differing somewhat in the West-Saxon and the Danish portions of the kingdom, are to be carefully preserved, and neither extended nor diminished in either country.[924] No distinction, except the old local one, is made between Danes and Englishmen. The local rights and customs of the Danish and English portions of the kingdom are to be strictly observed.[925] But this is only what we have already seen in the legislation of Eadgar.[926] The Danes spoken of in Cnut’s laws, as in Eadgar’s, are the long-settled Danish inhabitants of Northumberland and the other countries of the Denalagu; no kind of preference is made in favour of Cnut’s own Danish followers; we cannot doubt that a Dane who held lands in Wessex had to submit to English law, just as a West-Saxon who held lands in Northumberland must, under Eadgar no less than under Cnut, have had to submit to Danish law. On one point the legislation of the great Dane is distinctly more rational and liberal than the legislation of our own day. Trespasses on the King’s forests are strictly forbidden; but the natural right of every man to hunt on his own land is emphatically asserted.[927] And as Cnut’s theory was, so was his practice. No King was more active in what was then held to be the first duty of kingship, that of constantly going through every portion of his realm to see with his own eyes whether the laws which he enacted were duly put in force.[928] In short, after Cnut’s power was once fully established, we hear no complaint against his government |Personal traditions of Cnut.| from any trustworthy English source.[929] His hold upon the popular affection is shown by the number of personal anecdotes of which he is the hero. The man who is said, in the traditions of other lands, to have ordered the cold-blooded murder of his brother-in-law, and that in a church at the holy season of Christmas,[930] appears in English tradition as a prince whose main characteristic is devotion mingled with good humour.[931] In the best known tale of all, he rebukes the impious flattery of his courtiers, and hangs his crown on the image of the crucified Saviour.[932] He bursts into song as he hears the chant of the monks of Ely,[933] and rejoices to keep the festivals of the Church among them. He bountifully rewards the sturdy peasant who proves the thickness of the ice over which the royal sledge has to pass.[934] One tale alone sets him before us in a somewhat different light. He mocks at the supposed sanctity of Eadgyth the daughter of Eadgar; he will not believe in the holiness of any child of a father so given up to lust and tyranny. It is needless to add that the offended saint brings the blasphemer to a better mind by summary means.[935] This tale is worth noting, as it illustrates the twofold conception of the character of Eadgar which was afloat. Cnut is represented as accepting the Eadgar of the minstrels, not the Eadgar of the monks, nor yet the Eadgar of history, who is somewhat different from either. But even in this tale Cnut is described as showing something of the spirit which breathes in his Roman letter. The King who loathed the supposed tyranny of Eadgar could hardly have been conscious of any tyranny of his own.
In ecclesiastical matters Cnut mainly, though not exclusively, favoured the monks. His ecclesiastical appointments, |1020.| especially that of good Archbishop Æthelnoth;[936] who had baptized or confirmed him, do him high honour. |His ecclesiastical foundations.| He was also, after the custom of the age, a liberal benefactor to various ecclesiastical foundations. According to one account, not Assandun only, but all his battle-fields were marked by commemorative churches.[937] But as Assandun was Cnut’s only undoubted victory on English soil, and as men do not usually commemorate their defeats, we may conclude that, in England at least, Assandun was his only foundation of that kind. That church, as we have seen, was a secular foundation, seemingly for one priest only. A more splendid object of Cnut’s munificence throws an interesting light on the workings of his mind. The special object of his reverence was Eadmund, the sainted King of the East-Angles, a King martyred by heathen Danes, a saint who was the marked object of his father’s hatred, and by whose vengeance his father was held to have come to his untimely end.[938] The Christian Dane, King of all England, was eager to wipe away the stain from his house and nation. He made provision for the restoration of all the holy places which had in any way suffered during his own or his father’s wars.[939] But the first rank among them was given to the great foundation which boasted of the resting-place of the royal martyr. |Saint Eadmund’s Bury rebuilt and the foundation changed. 1020–1032.| The minster of Saint Eadmund was rebuilt, and, in conformity with the fashionable notions of reformation, its secular canons had to make way for an Abbot and monks. Some of the new inmates came from Saint Benet at Holm,[940] another foundation which was enriched by Cnut’s bounty.[941] One hardly knows whether Cnut most avoided or incurred suspicion by his special devotion to the resting-place of |Cnut’s visit to Glastonbury. 1032.| another Eadmund. He visited Glastonbury in company with Archbishop Æthelnoth, once a monk of that house. There, in the building which tradition points to as the first Christian temple raised in these islands, the building which history recognizes as the one famous holy place of the conquered Briton which lived unhurt through the storm of English Conquest, in the “wooden basilica” hallowed by the memory of so many real and legendary saints, did the Danish King confirm every gift and privilege which his English predecessors had granted to the great Celtic sanctuary.[942] A hundred and fifty years after the visit of Cnut, the wooden basilica, which had beheld so many revolutions, gave way to the more powerful influence of a change of taste and feeling, and on its site arose one of the most exquisite specimens of the latest Romanesque art, now in its state of desolation forming one of the loveliest of monastic ruins.[943] At some distance to the east of this primæval sanctuary stood the larger minster of stone reared by Saint Dunstan. In Cnut’s days it was doubtless still deemed a wonder of art, though it was doomed before the end of the century to give way to the vaster conceptions of the Norman architects. The invention and translation of the legendary Arthur were as yet distant events, and the new tomb of King Eadmund Ironside still kept the place of honour before the high altar.[944] There the conqueror knelt and prayed, and covered the tomb of his murdered brother with a splendid robe on which the gorgeous plumage of the peacock was reproduced |Translation of Saint Ælfheah. June, 1023.| by the skilful needles of English embroideresses.[945] Equal honours were paid by Cnut to another victim of the late wars, in his devotion to whom he was expiating the crimes of his nation, though not his own or those of his father’s house. The body of the martyred Ælfheah was translated from Saint Paul’s minster in London to his own metropolitan church, in the presence, and with the personal help, of the King and of all the chief men of the realm, lay and clerical. The ceremony was further adorned with the presence of the Lady Emma and her |His gifts to Winchester, Ely, and Ramsey.| “kingly bairn” Harthacnut.[946] That the two monasteries of the royal city of Winchester came in for their share of royal bounty it is almost needless to mention. But towards them the devotion of Emma, who claimed the city as her morning-gift, seems to have been more fervent than that of her husband.[947] Cnut’s personal tastes seem to have led him to the great religious houses of the fen country, where the dead of Maldon and Assandun reposed in the choirs of Ely and Ramsey.[948] Nowhere was his memory more fondly cherished than in the great minster which boasted of the tomb of Brihtnoth. There he was not so much a formal benefactor as a personal friend. But he was held in no less honour at Ramsey, the resting-place of Æthelweard. There he built a second church,[949] and designed the foundation of a society of nuns, which he did not bring to perfection. The local historian of the house rewards his bounty with a splendid panegyric, which however is fully borne out by his recorded acts.[950] Nor was his bounty confined to England, or even to his own |Cnut plants English Bishops in Denmark.| dominions. In his native Denmark he showed himself a diligent nursing-father to the infant Church, largely providing it with bishops and other ecclesiastics from |His gifts to foreign churches, &c.| England.[951] On his Roman pilgrimage, the poor and the churches of every land through which he passed shared his bountiful alms. It is also said that, by the counsel of Archbishop Æthelnoth, he gave gifts to many foreign churches. One special object of his favour was the church of Chartres, then flourishing under its famous Bishop Fulbert.[952] Emma too, the foreign Lady, was not backward in her gifts to churches, both English and foreign. She gave to the metropolitan church of Canterbury an arm of the Apostle Bartholomew, bought of an Archbishop of Beneventum whom the fame of the wealth of England had led hither to dispose of his holy treasure.[953] She had also a great share in rebuilding the famous minster of Saint Hilary at Poitiers, where a large portion of her work still remains.[954]
Such then was Cnut’s internal government of England. The conqueror had indeed changed into a home-born King. At no earlier time had the land ever enjoyed so long a term of such unmixed prosperity. We have now to behold the great King in his relations to foreign lands. And, if a series of ambitious wars and aggressions forms a less pleasing picture than a tale of peaceful and beneficent government, we shall at least see England raised to a higher position in the general system of Christendom than she held at any earlier, perhaps at any later time.
Cnut had come into England as a conqueror and destroyer; but his reign, as far as the internal state of England |Unparalleled internal peace during the reign of Cnut.| is concerned, was a time of perfect peace.[955] No invasion from beyond sea, no revolt, no civil war, is recorded during the eighteen years of his government. A single Scottish inroad and victory of which we shall presently hear was wiped out by the more complete submission of the northern vassal of England. Within England itself we read of no district being ravaged either by rebels or by royal command; we read of no city undergoing, or even being threatened with, military chastisement. This is more than can be said of the reign either of Eadgar the Peaceful or of Eadward the Saint. No doubt the whole nation was weary of warfare; after a struggle of thirty-six years, England would have been glad of a season of repose, even under a far worse government than that of Cnut. But a period of seventeen years in which we cannot see that a sword was drawn within the borders of England was something altogether unparalleled in those warlike ages, something which speaks volumes in favour of the King who bestowed such a blessing on our land. It is true that the old enemies of England were now the fellow-subjects of Englishmen, and that the first attempt of her new enemies came to nought without a blow being struck. Danish invasions ceased when Denmark and England had the same King, and the first Norman invasion, as we shall presently see, ignominiously failed. But a great deal is proved by the absence of any recorded attempt on the part of any Englishman to get rid of the foreign King. No one thought of taking advantage of Cnut’s frequent absences from England in the way in which men did take advantage of the similar absences of William the Norman. It is quite impossible that England and all Cnut’s other kingdoms should have been kept down against their will by the King’s |The Housecarls or Thingmen.| Housecarls. It is now that we first hear of this famous force, the name of which will be often heard during the following reigns, even after the Norman Conquest. Hitherto England had possessed nothing that could be called a standing army. When a war had to be waged, the King or Ealdorman called on his personal followers, attached to him by the ancient tie of the comitatus, and on the general levy, the fyrd or militia, either of the whole kingdom or of some particular part of it. But no English King or Ealdorman had hitherto kept a standing military force in his pay. But Cnut now organized a regular paid force, kept constantly under arms, and ready to march at a moment’s notice.[956] These were the famous Thingmen, the Housecarls, of whom we hear so much under Cnut and under his successors. This permanent body of soldiers in the King’s personal service seems to have had its origin in the crews of the forty Danish ships which were kept by Cnut when he sent back the greater part of his fleet in the second year of his reign. In his time the force consisted of three thousand, or at most of six thousand, men, gathered from all nations. For the power and fame of Cnut drew volunteers to his |A revival of the Comitatus.| banner from all parts of Northern Europe. The force was in fact a revival of the earliest form of the comitatus, only more thoroughly and permanently organized. The immediate followers, the hearth company, of earlier Kings and Ealdormen had been attached to them by a special tie, and were bound to bear to them a special fidelity in the day of battle.[957] The Housecarls or Thingmen of Cnut were a force of this kind, larger in number, kept more constantly under arms, and subjected to a more regular discipline than had hitherto been usual. Receiving regular pay, and reinforced by volunteers of all kinds and of all nations, they doubtless gradually departed a good deal from the higher type of the comitatus, and came nearer to the level of ordinary mercenaries. So far as the force consisted of foreigners, they were mercenaries in the strictest sense; so far as it consisted of Englishmen, they were mercenaries in no other sense than that in which all paid soldiers are mercenaries. The housecarls were in fact a standing army, and a standing army was an institution which later Kings and great Earls, English as well as Danish, found it to be their interest to continue. Under Cnut they formed a kind of military guild with |The military laws of Cnut.| the King at their head. A set of most elaborate articles of war determined the minutest points of their duty.[958] Fitting punishments were decreed for all offences great and small, punishments to be awarded by tribunals formed among the members of the guild. But all the provisions of the code relate wholly to the internal discipline of the force and to the relations of its members to one another. Of the position in which they stood to the community at large we hear absolutely nothing. And it should be remembered that all our details come from Danish writers and those not contemporary. Our English authorities tell us nothing directly about the matter. |The institution continued by later Kings.| From them we could at most have inferred that some institution of the sort arose about this time; we never read of housecarls before the reign of Cnut, while we often read of them afterwards. That a body of soldiers, many of them foreigners, were guilty of occasional acts of wrong and insolence, we may take for granted even without direct evidence. That under a bad King they might sometimes be sent on oppressive errands we shall presently see on the best of evidence. But that under the great Cnut they were the instruments of any general system of oppression, that they held the nation in unwilling submission to a yoke which it was anxious to throw off, is proved by no evidence whatever. And when England was again ruled by Kings of her own blood, the housecarls became simply a national standing army, and an army of which England might well be proud. The name of the housecarls of King Harold became a name of fear in the most warlike regions of the North,[959] and it was this brave and faithful force which was ever foremost in fight and nearest to the royal person alike in the hour of victory and in the hour of overthrow.
We have still to speak of Cnut’s relations with lands beyond the bounds of England. This subject starts several important points in the history of foreign lands; but, as far as English history is concerned, most of them may be passed by in a few words. Within our own island, we hear little of Wales, and out of it, Cnut’s wars with the other Scandinavian powers and his relations to the Empire, though highly important, have hardly any bearing on English history. The case is different with his dealings both with Scotland and with Normandy, both of which, the latter especially, call for a somewhat fuller examination.
Cnut, as King of all England, alike by formal election and by the power of the sword, of course assumed the same Imperial claims and Imperial style which had been borne by the Kings who had gone before him. As King of all England, he was also Emperor of all Britain, Lord |Relations with Wales.| of all Kings and all nations within his own island. Of his relations with his Welsh vassals we are driven to pick up what accounts we can from their own scanty annals. Early in Cnut’s reign, on what provocation we know not, |Eglaf plunders Saint David’s. 1022?| the exploit of Eadric Streona[960] was repeated. Wales was invaded by Eglaf, a Danish Earl in Cnut’s service, probably the same who had joined in Thurkill’s invasion of England, and who, according to some accounts, was brother of that more famous chief.[961] He ravaged the land of Dyfed and destroyed Saint David’s.[962] This is our sole |1035?| fact, except that in one of the last years of Cnut’s reign, a Welsh prince, Caradoc son of Rhydderch, was slain by the English.[963] Our own Chroniclers do not look on these matters as worthy of any mention. With Scotland the case is somewhat different, especially as the affairs of that kingdom are closely mixed up with those of the great |Affairs of Northumberland and Scotland.| earldom of Northumberland. We have seen that, on the fourfold division of England, the great Northern government was entrusted to the Dane Eric, who seems however |Earldom of Eric;| not to have disturbed the actual English possessors.[964] He most likely kept a superiority over them till his own banishment,[965] after which it is clear that the family of the |of Eadwulf Cutel.| former Earls remained in possession. The reigning Earl, Eadwulf, the son of the elder Waltheof and brother of Uhtred, is spoken of as a timid and cowardly man, who, according to one account, now surrendered Lothian to King Malcolm for fear that he might avenge the victories won over him by his brother.[966] But if any cession was made to the Scots at this time, it was most likely |Battle of Carham. 1018.| extorted by Malcolm by force of arms. For the second year of Cnut was marked by a Scottish invasion and a Scottish victory of unusual importance.[967] King Malcolm entered England, accompanied by Eogan or Eugenius, seemingly an Under-king of Strathclyde. A great battle took place at Carham on the Tweed, not far from the scene of the more famous fight of Flodden, in which the Scots gained a decisive victory over the whole force of the Bernician earldom. The slaughter, as usual, fell most heavily upon the English nobility. Bishop Ealdhun is said to have fallen sick on hearing the news, and to have died in a few days. His great work was all but done. The height of Durham was now crowned by a church, stately doubtless after the standard of those times, of which only a single tower lacked completion.[968] It was doubtless owing to the confusion which followed the Scottish inroad that three years passed between the death of Ealdhun and the succession of the next Bishop Eadmund.[969] According to one theory, which I shall discuss elsewhere,[970] the annexation of Lothian to the Scottish kingdom was the result of this battle. It is equally strange that a prince like Cnut should have consented to the cession of any part of his dominions, and that he should have allowed a Scottish victory to pass unrevenged. But we do not, in our English authorities, find any mention of Scottish |Affairs of Cumberland.| affairs till a much later stage of his reign. According to the Scottish account, Duncan, the grandson of Malcolm through his daughter Beatrice, who now held the under-kingdom of Cumberland or Strathclyde, refused, though often summoned, to do homage to Cnut.[971] His refusal was cloked under a show of feudal loyalty; his homage was due only to the lawful King of the English; he would do no kind of service to a Danish usurper. Cnut, after his return from his Roman pilgrimage, marched against his refractory vassal, with the intention of incorporating |Submission of Duncan.| his dominions with the English kingdom. Certain Bishops and other chief men stepped in to preserve peace, and a compromise was brought about. Duncan withdrew his claim to independence; Cnut relinquished his design of complete incorporation; the Under-king of Cumberland was again to hold his kingdom on the old terms of vassalage. Such is the Scottish story, which characteristically puts Cumberland in the foreground, and leaves out all mention both of Scotland proper and of Lothian. It may very likely be true in what it asserts; it is eminently false in what it conceals. For there is no doubt that Cnut’s dealings with his northern neighbours were by no means confined to Cumberland, but touched Scotland itself quite as nearly. It is just conceivable that both Duncan and his grandfather Malcolm refused homage to Cnut on the ground that the Dane was an usurper of the English kingdom. If so, they were perhaps brought to reason at an earlier time than would appear from our own Chronicles only. According to a French historian, an expedition of Cnut against the Scots was hindered, and peace was restored, by the intercession of the Lady Emma and her brother Duke Richard. According to a Norwegian saga, two Scottish Kings, probably Malcolm and Duncan, submitted to |Submission of Scotland. 1031.| Cnut in the early years of his reign. However all this may be, it is certain, on the highest of all authorities, that the whole kingdom of Scotland did in the end submit to his claims. Cnut, like William after him, was not minded to give up any right of the crown which he had won. The more famous ceremony of Abernethy forty |[1073.]| years later was now forestalled. As the younger Malcolm then became the man of the Norman, so now the elder Malcolm became the man of the Dane.[972] Cnut, after his return from Rome—in the very year of his return, according to those who give the later date to that event—marched into Scotland, meeting, it would seem, with no |Malcolm, Jehmarc, and Macbeth do homage to Cnut. 1031.| opposition. Malcolm now, if not before, rendered the long-delayed homage, and he was joined in his submission by two other Scottish chiefs, the lords of Argyle and of Moray, on both of whom our Chronicles bestow the title of King. With the otherwise obscure Jehmarc is coupled a name which holds no small place in history, but which is far more famous in romance. Along with the homage of the elder Malcolm King Cnut received also the homage of Macbeth.