The Vikings (52 page)

Anonymity and unmarked graves are the characteristics of a genocide, which may explain why only two victims of the massacre are known by name, both of them aristocrats. One was Pallig, the Danish earl who had taken Ethelred’s money in 1001 and then deserted him to join his fellow Danes. The other was his wife Gunnhild, a Christian and a sister of Sven Forkbeard, who had offered herself as a voluntary hostage to the English. Whether St Brice’s really was a full-scale massacre involving a great many unrecorded deaths or, as seems more likely, a localized ‘day of terror’, with a handful of high-profile victims including a known traitor, that was intended largely to frighten Anglo-Danes away from any thought of collaborating with the invaders, it had no deterrent effect on the Danes in Denmark. In 1003 Sven returned at the head of an army that destroyed Exeter and the following year burnt Norwich. William of Jumièges tells us that a group of young men who had escaped made their way from London to Denmark to inform Sven Forkbeard of the murders of members of his family. This has sometimes been proposed as the provocation behind Sven’s return, but while the idea has strong narrative appeal it overlooks the equally compelling financial and political attractions of mounting a major assault on the country. The raiding that had softened up the south of the kingdom over the preceding years, the vast and debilitating payments demanded, the Danes’ evident disdain for an enemy unable to defend itself, and the encouragement of the repetitive ease of victory against a thoroughly demoralized population, all these must have combined to make it clear to Sven that finally, after 200 years of pinching, hairpulling, punching, kicking and worse from Viking bands of various sizes, the English were ready to be taken.

There was a severe famine in 1005 and the Danes sailed back to Denmark, only to return the following summer. They recorded more triumphs against the levies of Wessex and Mercia, rested briefly at a safe base on the Isle of Wight and marched on through Reading, putting to flight an English force at East Kennet. At the conclusion of the campaign the inhabitants of Winchester were subjected to the humiliating spectacle of Danes marching past the gates of the city on their 50-mile trek back to the sea, burdened in their progress only by the amount of booty they had taken.

In 1007 another danegeld was offered, 36,000 pounds this time. In 1008 Ethelred ordered a massive programme of ship-building, but with the new fleet assembled at Sandwich and ready for action all its potential was dissipated by quarrelling and accusations of treachery among his military commanders. A Sussex alderman named Wulfnoth defected, taking twenty ships with him, and went off raiding and harrying along the south coast like any Viking. Eighty ships that set off to arrest the renegade took a terrible battering in a storm and those that survived were burnt by Wulfnoth. The remainder of Ethelred’s ‘great fleet’ headed for London, ‘thus inconsiderately allowing the effort of the whole nation to come to naught, so that the threat to the Danes, upon which the whole of England had set its hopes, turned out to be no more potent than this’.
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A ubiquitous demoralization had taken hold of the English. The
Anglo-Saxon Chronicle
resorts to cataloguing their woes, as though the act of numbering and listing might calm its agitation. Ethelred and his councillors had resigned themselves to offering the Vikings yet another danegeld in 1011, and the chronicler notes: ‘By this time they had overrun (i) East Anglia, (ii) Essex, (iii) Middlesex, (iv) Oxfordshire, (v) Cambridgeshire, (vi) Herefordshire, (vii) Buckinghamshire, (viii) Bedfordshire, (ix) half of Huntingdonshire, and to the south of the Thames all Kent and Sussex, and the district around Hastings, and Surrey, and Berkshire, and Hampshire, and a great part of Wiltshire.’
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‘In the end,’ we learn, ‘there was no leader who was willing to raise levies, but each fled as quickly as he could; nor even in the end would one shire help another.’
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England was reverting to a chaotic parody of the structure of several kingdoms that had obtained at the very outset of the insular Viking Age. One late incident in particular strikes a brutal echo of the anti-Christian violence that had been a keynote of the Viking raids in the late eighth and early ninth centuries. Early in August 1009 the people of Canterbury had been threatened by what the chronicler calls an ‘immense army’ under a Jutland earl, Thorkel the Tall. On that occasion they had bought themselves off with the payment of a local danegeld of 3,000 pounds. Two years later Thorkel’s army returned and were admitted to the city by Abbot Ælfmær of St Augustine’s. Bishop Godwine of Rochester was captured, as was an abbess named Leofrun and the Archbishop himself, Ælfeah or Alphege, the man who had sponsored Olaf Tryggvason’s confirmation at Andover in 994. Ælfmær was permitted to escape, Alphege was taken back to the ships.

With a cruel precision the Vikings’ demand for money had been rising incrementally by half each time, from the 16,000 paid in 994 through the 24,000 in 1002 to the 36,000 of 1007. A few months later, following the raid in Canterbury, they were camped in idle and arrogant triumph in Greenwich, just outside London, and awaiting a payment of 48,000 pounds. An additional 3,000 demanded as a personal ransom for the release of this most important of prisoners was almost enough to observe the symmetry of previous demands. The main payment had been handed over in April. The subsidiary demand had still not been met. According to Thietmar of Merseburg this was at the express command of Alphege himself, on the grounds of the ‘dire poverty’ of the see.
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On the evening of Sunday 19 April, bored and angry with their prisoner for his intransigence, and drunk on imported wine, Thorkel’s men turned on Alphege and made him their after-dinner entertainment, pelting him with bones, stones, blocks of wood and the skulls of cattle.
King Hrolf and his Champions
, one of the Icelanders’
fornaldarsögur
, or sagas set in mythical times, offers a fictional example of the attack as a form of rough humour,
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and Cnut’s own retainers were bound by a law that punished ‘persistent audacity’ among then by ostracizing the offender at mealtimes, when he might be ‘pelted with bones at any man’s pleasure’.
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The attack on Alphege was savage and sustained. Finally, as an act of mercy it seems, someone struck him on the head with the back of an axe, and the spiritual head of the Christian Church in England was dead. To the English it must have seemed as though every dreadful millennial prophecy of the end of the world was about to come true.

 

Sven Forkbeard left Denmark for England with his conquest fleet in the summer of 1013 and went ashore at Gainsborough, in Lindsey. The people of Lindsey and of the Five Boroughs hailed him as king, and soon afterwards he received the submission of ‘all the Danes to the north of Watling Street’. It marked a reversion to something like the state of affairs after the invasion of the Great Heathen Army, and was for Ethelred a bitter confirmation of his doubts about the loyalties of his Anglo-Danish subjects. Sven then headed south. Oxford surrendered, as did Winchester, seat of the ancient capital of the royal house of Wessex. The west country capitulated, and by the time Sven turned north again ‘the whole nation accepted him as their undisputed king’.
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In the year of the St Brice’s Day Massacre, Ethelred had arranged a diplomatic marriage between himself and Emma, daughter of Richard I of Normandy and of the Countess Gunnor, and sister to the ruling Duke Richard II, who had succeeded his father in 996.
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As a tactic it turned out to be as little successful as Christian baptism, danegeld payments, giant fleets or ethnic cleansing, for when Sven resumed his large-scale raiding in England in 1003 he had done so with the collusion of Duke Richard, whose reward for his involvement was that familiar Viking unit of wealth, a share of the booty.
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This was in continuing and flagrant disregard of the 991 treaty that had promised a peace ‘that should remain ever unshaken’.
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But at such a time, perhaps only a flagrant regard of the treaty would have been worthy of note. With the arrival of Sven’s conquest fleet Emma and her children fled for safety to her brother Richard’s court in Normandy. Shortly afterwards they were joined there by Ethelred, a melancholy benefit of his marriage and not at all the one he had been looking for.

Then, on 2 February 1014, a matter of months after achieving the goal for which he had more or less consciously striven for over twenty years, Sven died. The Danes and Anglo-Danes chose his son Cnut to succeed him; but the reaction of the English was well-caught in the report of Sven’s death in the
Anglo-Saxon Chronicle
as ‘the happy event’.
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In one last throw of the dice a group of English leaders invited Ethelred to return. He accepted and was duly restored to the throne. Cnut remained in Gainsborough until late April. The people of Lindsey agreed to provide him with horses and join him in his struggle with Ethelred, but for once Ethelred and the English army caught their opponents by surprise. Many of Cnut’s supporters were killed and Cnut himself driven out to sea. Passing Sandwich on his way back to Denmark he put ashore the hostages who had been given to his father, having first cut off their ears, noses and hands.

It was at this juncture, in the brief hiatus of legal kingship that followed, and with the horrific martyrdom of his brother archbishop, Alphege, still vivid in the memory, that Wulfstan, archbishop of York, composed a sermon for the edification of his fellow-countrymen which, punning on his name, became known as ‘The Sermon of the Wolf to the English’. The opening lines of it identify 1014 unequivocally as the year ‘when the Danes persecuted them [the English] the most’, and proceed straight to the point:
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Beloved men, realize what is true: this world is in haste and the end approaches; and therefore in the world things go from bad to worse, and so it must of necessity deteriorate greatly on account of the people’s sins before the coming of Antichrist, and indeed it will then be dreadful and terrible far and wide throughout the world.

Wulfstan shared with Alcuin two centuries before him the almost heroically masochistic conviction that all the troubles that had befallen the English were of their own making. In so far as they mattered at all, the Vikings were important only as the instruments of God’s punishment. In his sermon he even tried to shame his Christian audience by contrasting the degree of religious observance unfavourably with that of the worshippers of Heathen gods. Though much of his rhetoric was generalized he made several points that had a quite specific reference to the prevailing crisis. He lamented the decline in respect for God and the law that had taken place since the days of King Edgar, naming in the litany of woes the increase in stealing, killing, sedition, pestilence and ‘wavering loyalties among men everywhere’. Traitors were to be found in both Church and state. He railed against the continuing sale of Christian slaves to foreign markets, and abominated in particular the practice of men banding together to buy a female slave for their sexual gratification before selling her on. He articulated the horror of the conservative at a world that was not merely changing but turning upside down, lamenting along the way the humiliations and dreadful demoralizations visited on the English by the conquering armies of the Vikings:

Though any slave runs away from his master and, deserting Christianity, becomes a viking, and after that it comes about that a conflict takes place between thegn and slave, if the slave slays the thegn, no wergild is paid to any of his kindred; but if the thegn slays the slave whom he owned before, he shall pay the price of a thegn. Very base laws and shameful tributes are common among us, through God’s anger, let him understand it who can; and many misfortunes befall this people again and again . . . The English have been for a long time now completely defeated and too greatly disheartened through God’s anger; and the pirates so strong with God’s consent that often in battle one puts to flight ten, and sometimes less, sometimes more, all because of our sins. And often ten or a dozen, one after another, insult disgracefully the thegn’s wife, and sometimes his daughter or near kins-woman, whilst he looks on, who considered himself brave and mighty and stout enough before that happened. And often a slave binds very fast the thegn who previously was his master and makes him into a slave through God’s anger. Often two seamen, or maybe three, drive the droves of Christian men from sea to sea, out through this people, huddled together, as a public shame to us all, if we could seriously and rightly feel any shame. But all the insult which we often suffer we repay with honouring those who insult us; we pay them continually and they humiliate us daily; they ravage and they burn, plunder and rob and carry on board.
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He condemned opportunist apostates who had abandoned their Christian faith, and a time so out of joint that men were more ashamed of committing good deeds than bad, since the former only excited derision. Above and beyond the eloquence of his despair, what gives his sermon its peculiar interest is a paragraph close to the end, which is an almost literal translation of the Latin of one of Alcuin’s letters written after the sack of Lindisfarne in 793:
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There was a historian in the times of the Britons, called Gildas, who wrote about their misdeeds, how with their sins they angered God so excessively that finally he allowed the army of the English to conquer their land and to destroy the host of the Britons entirely. And that came about, according to what he said, through robbery by the powerful, and through the coveting of ill-gotten gains, through the lawlessness of the people and through unjust judgements, through the sloth of the bishops and the wicked cowardice of God’s messengers, who mumbled through their jaws where they should have cried aloud.
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