The Vikings (51 page)

Adam died in 1060, well within living memory of the Saga Age, but in its own way his description of life among the Icelandic settlers is as much an idealization as the dramatizations of the Family Sagas in the thirteenth century. A harsher and more disturbed picture of life in post-conversion Icelandic society emerges from the pages of the sagas collectively known as the
Sturlunga Saga
, after a leading family whose fortunes are among those described in them. After 100 years or so of relative stability, in about the middle of the twelfth century Icelandic society entered a period of violent chaos. The Sturlung Age, as it was known, was characterized by a power struggle of a particularly vicious kind. In the
Sturlunga Saga
we meet chieftains who have their enemies tortured, maimed, castrated and blinded; who kill the old as readily as the able-bodied; and priests who abuse their calling and openly take mistresses. This helpless spiral into barbarism may have been encouraged by the half-hearted abandonment of one set of cultural mores and values, and the imperfect and unconvinced adoption of another and very different set that led, over time, to a state of confused moral disorientation from which it proved too hard to recover.
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In 1263 the exhausted combatants handed over control of the country to the crown of Norway. Almost seven centuries would pass before Iceland regained its independence.

16

St Brice, St Alphege and the wolf

Despite the propensity of Athelstan of Wessex to describe himself as ‘king of all Britain’ from about 930 onwards, it was not until his brother Edred succeeded in driving Erik Bloodaxe from York and ending the Viking kingdom there in 954 that there was real substance to the Wessex claim. Edred died the following year and was succeeded by his nephew Eadwig, crowned at the age of fourteen in a ceremony at Kingston-upon-Thames at which Dunstan, abbot of Glastonbury, had to rebuke the boy for drunken and lascivious behaviour. Two years later, in 957, his fourteen-year-old brother Edgar, possibly encouraged by Archbishop Oda of Canterbury, rose against him. A brief period of power-sharing ensued, but with Eadwig’s death in 959 England once again had a king recognized throughout the country. Following a coronation delayed until 973, Edgar travelled to Chester to receive the submission of six kings, including leaders of the Scots and the Welsh. His reign coincided with a lull in Viking raids that permitted him to attend to various reforms that earned him the approval of the
Rule of St Benedict
, which said that ‘he ruled everything so prosperously that those who had lived in former times . . . wondered very greatly’.
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As we have noted earlier, the evidence of his law codes is that he accepted the existence of separate legal communities within the kingdom and made no attempt to impose his authority ‘among the Danes’. The Icelandic Lawspeaker Thorgeir had been adamant that a community divided by law could not survive. Time would tell whose political instincts were right, his or those of King Edgar and his advisers.

Edgar died two years after his coronation and was succeeded by his son Edward. The House of Wessex remained plagued by succession problems, however, and Edward reigned for only three years before he was murdered at Corfe in 978, allegedly on the instructions of his stepmother Aelfthryth, Edgar’s third wife and widow, to clear the way for the succession of her ten-year-old son Ethelred. This clutch of short reigns by short-lived kings had been favoured, since the time of Edgar, by a diminution of Viking activity in England that owed much to Harald Bluetooth’s domestic preoccupations with the unification and Christianization of Denmark. Sporadic raiding on England resumed in the 980s. England was known to be a wealthy country, and once the defeat of Byrhtnoth at Maldon in 991 had persuaded the Danish royal house that the English were too weak to defend themselves or their wealth the raids increased in frequency, with ever-larger forces demanding ever-larger sums of money in return for what turned out to be ever-shorter respites from attack.

We have already met Ethelred in Chapter 13 as he struggled to deal with the armies that Olaf Tryggvason and Sven Forkbeard brought to England in the 990s, including the agreement with Olaf never again to return with hostile intent. Olaf may have been neutralized by baptism and his ambitions in Norway, but for the next three years the
Anglo-Saxon Chronicle
continues to record the doings of a Viking army that killed and burnt in Cornwall and Devon, razing Ordwulf’s abbey church at Tavistock, and in Wales killing the bishop of St David’s. Sven’s name was known to the English chroniclers of these atrocities and the fact that he is not mentioned suggests that he was not involved in the raiding. In 998 the army was in Dorset and carried on more or less as it pleased. It spent the winter on the Isle of Wight and in 999 sailed east again, into the Thames and up the Medway to Rochester. Most of west Kent was laid waste and everywhere, in that bleak refrain that echoes wearily through the Viking years of the
Chronicle
, ‘the Danes had possession of the place of slaughter’.

It was on the basis of his activities and decisions during these years that a thirteenth-century reader of the
Chronicle
, punning on the literal meaning of his name, ‘Noble counsel’, dubbed King Ethelred ‘Unraed’, or ‘No counsel’, later corrupted to ‘Unready’. His loyalty to alderman Ælfric of Hampshire shows that he was indeed a poor judge of character. Earlier we saw how, in 991, the year of Maldon and the first danegeld of 10,000 pounds, Ælfric, by warning the enemy, had sabotaged a plan to muster a fleet in London strong enough to trap the Viking army at sea, and for good measure fled the night before battle was to be joined, with the result that a planned annihilation of the Viking fleet resulted in the destruction of a single ship and the slaughter of its crew.
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If this betrayal was common knowledge we can only wonder at the fact that he was not severely dealt with by Ethelred. And yet he was not.

Amid all this wretchedness, the revival of monastic life in England that had started with Oda and continued under Dunstan at Glastonbury went on, but even here Ælfric was part of the problem and not the solution. At one point in his career he received a letter from Pope John censuring him for his theft of property and estates from the abbey at Glastonbury, and warning him that if he persisted he would be ‘delivered for ever with Judas the betrayer to the eternal flame’.
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In 1003 the
Chronicle
sighs that Ælfric was ‘up to his old tricks’ again: rather than face a Viking force fresh from the destruction of Exeter the alderman claimed to be ill, pretended to vomit and left his men in the lurch.
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Yet we have the
Chronicle
’s word for it that Ælfric was one of those ‘in whom the king had most trust’.

Ethelred’s fears and frustrations mounted. Levies that were mustered to resist the Vikings mysteriously evaporated just as battle was about to begin:

Then the king with his councillors decided to advance against them with both naval and land levies; but when the ships were ready there was delay from day to day, which was very galling for the unhappy sailors manning the vessels. Time after time the more urgent a thing was, the greater was the delay from one hour to the next, and all the while they were allowing the strength of their enemies to increase; and as they kept retreating from the sea, so the enemy followed close on their heels.
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In 1000 Ethelred marched north to Cumberland ‘and laid waste very nearly the whole of it’. The
Chronicle
offers no reason for this. Given the record of his armies against the Vikings, it is tempting to suggest that Ethelred went there largely in order to vent his frustration on the hapless landscape. Presumably he wanted to prevent the Vikings using the region as a base for any attempt to revive the kingdom of York. The anxiety and sense of impending hopelessness at the divided and warring realm must have been symbolized for Ethelred and the English with the news that, in the year 1000, ‘the enemy fleet had sailed away to Richard’s realm in the summer’, this despite the fact that Ethelred had a peace treaty with the Norman duke, brokered for him in 991 by Pope John XV, which especially enjoined Richard to receive ‘none of the king’s men, or of his enemies’.
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The following year they were back again, penetrating England through the Exe, killing and burning as before. Pallig, a Danish earl who had entered into an agreement with Ethelred, offering support in exchange for gifts of ‘manors, gold and silver’, simply reneged on the agreement when the time came and joined forces with his fellow-countrymen. Again the English levies were mustered, ‘but as soon as they met, the English levies gave ground and the enemy inflicted great slaughter on them’.
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There is a reference in the poem the
Battle of Maldon
to someone referred to only as the ‘hostage’ from Northumbria fighting on the English side, and the presence of a man from the northern Danelaw in an army led by an Essex alderman may perhaps have been an attempt to insure against betrayal by holding an important hostage from an area thought to be sympathetically inclined towards the invaders.
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The English, 130 years after the partitions enforced by the Great Heathen Army, remained deeply unsure where the loyalties of the Scandinavian settlers in the east and north of the country lay: over the generations, had they become acculturized to an English way of being and seeing? Or had they retained a strong ‘tribal’ sense of Scandinavia as their homeland that was leading them instinctively to support each fresh band of invaders that arrived from across the water? The atmosphere of fear and paranoia at Ethelred’s court reached an unsustainable intensity in 1002. In that year the king ‘and his councillors’ decided again to attempt to buy off the attackers, and alderman Leofsige was sent to meet the fleet with an offer of 24,000 pounds and maintenance. The
Chronicle
then reports that the king received a warning that the Danes proposed to ‘deprive him of his life by treachery and all his councillors after him, and then seize his kingdom’.
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Roger of Wendover adds the detail that Ethelred’s informant was a man named Huna, one of the king’s leading military commanders. Huna, ‘beholding the insolence of the Danes, who after the establishment of peace had grown strong throughout the whole of England, presuming to violate and insult the wives and daughters of the nobles of the kingdom, came in much distress to the king and made his doleful complaint before him’.
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Roger seems to hint here that Huna may have been the instigator of what followed, the attempted genocide of Danes in England. From the fact that it took place on 13 November, the campaign became known as the St Brice’s Day Massacre.

The documentary evidence for the massacre is slight. To the rumour of a Danish plan to kill him and take over his kingdom, the
Anglo-Saxon Chronicle
adds only that ‘the king ordered to be slain all the Danish men who were in England - this was done on St Brice’s Day’.
¹¹
A retrospective reference occurs in a charter concerning St Frideswide’s Abbey in Oxford.
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In a striking inversion of the roles historically assumed in such encounters a terrified group of Danish ‘Vikings’ in flight for their lives from a violent mob of armed English ‘Christians’ had sought refuge in a Christian church. The Christian mob violated the sanctuary and set the church on fire. Those inside burnt to death. In 1004 an unrepentant Ethelred ordered that the church be repaired:

For it is fully agreed that to all dwelling in this country it will be well known that, since a decree was sent out by me with the counsel of my leading men and magnates, to the effect that all the Danes who had sprung up in this island, sprouting like cockle among the wheat, were to be destroyed by a most just extermination, and this decree was to be put into effect even as far as death, those Danes who dwelt in the aforementioned town, striving to escape death, entered this sanctuary of Christ, having broken by force the doors and bolts, and resolved to make a refuge and defence for themselves therein against the people of the town and the suburbs; but when all the people in pursuit strove, forced by necessity, to drive them out, and could not, they set fire to the planks and burnt, as it seems, this church with its ornaments and books.

To complain, as the king does, that in their search for sanctuary the Danes had broken the bolts on the church doors is an indication of the degree of hatred that lay behind Ethelred’s order, as is the claim that those who set fire to the church did so only because they were ‘forced by necessity’. A legacy of this hatred are the patches of what was alleged to be the skin of excoriated Danes that were still to be found in the late nineteenth century on the doors of churches at Hadstock and Copford in Essex, on the north door of Worcester Cathedral and the door of a chamber in the south transept of Westminster Abbey. Only one has been positively identified as human skin, though we might think one is enough.
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Those on the other side of the history of this relationship, like the Norman William of Jumièges, described horrors of a Hieronymous Bosch-like intensity, with Danish women buried to the waist only so that their breasts could be savaged by dogs, and Danish children who had their brains beaten out against door-posts. William insisted that Ethelred had ordered the massacre for no good reason at all, but was only a man ‘transported by a sudden fury’. The twelfth-century cleric Henry of Huntingdon was also horrified:

I have heard in my youth some very old persons give an account of this flagrant outrage. They said that the king sent with secrecy into every town letters, according to which the English suddenly rose on the Danes, everywhere on the same day and at the same hour, and either put them to the sword, or, seizing them unawares, burnt them on the spot.
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