Part 17

But the joy of victory was only of short duration. William, who had sworn in his anger to lay all Northumberland waste, knew how to avert by persuasion, cunning, and bribery, the danger that threatened him from Denmark. The Danish fleet went home in the spring; and William retook York, and extended his dominion in Northumberland; where his progress was marked by slaughter, incendiarism, and rapine. The unfortunate inhabitants fled to the forests and morasses; their last place of refuge was the marshes near the Wash. Moved by the cries of complaint which continually reached him from England, the Danish king Svend again sent a number of vessels, which appeared in the Humber in the year 1074. But these were not able to render any effectual assistance. Waltheof, whom William, in order to conciliate the Northumbrians, had appointed Jarl in his father’s earldom, fell under the axe of the executioner on suspicion of being concerned in this naval expedition; and fresh devastations promoted William’s dominion over Northumberland, which was so terribly harassed that large districts were left without houses or human inhabitants.

The forests of the north of England now became the last refuge of numberless outlaws, who would not submit to the ferocious conqueror, preferring a free and merry life in the green woods; where they united together, and defied William’s powerful armies and severe laws. They had secret connections among the people, who saw in them the last defenders of their ancient freedom. Among the leaders of these outlaws, who, long after William’s time, continued to wander about in the English forests, but who were most numerous in the north of England, we meet with Scandinavian names, such as Sweyn, and Sihtrik; and in the legends and songs which have preserved the remembrance of them, are found Scandinavian traits of character, such as the story of William of Cloudesley, who shot the apple from his son’s head. It is the identical legend related in our old Sagas of the Scandinavian hero, Palnatoke.

The last gleam of any well-founded hope of deliverance shone upon the successors of the Anglo-Saxons and Danish-Norwegians in the north of England, when, in the year 1085, the Danish king Canute, afterwards called the Saint, assembled a powerful fleet in the Liimfjord, in order to release England from the Conqueror’s yoke, and if possible to seat himself on the throne. Sixty Norwegian vessels had joined Canute’s fleet. William, on his side, made great preparations in order to resist the expected attack. Danegelt was again collected for the defence of the kingdom against the Danes. The inhabitants of Scandinavian descent in the north of England were compelled to alter their dress, and to cut off their long beards, that the Danes might not thereby recognise their kinsmen. The coasts were occupied by soldiers, who erected strong defences; whilst William at the same time endeavoured, by means of secret envoys and bribery, to sow disunion in the Danish fleet. Canute’s progress was impeded by unfortunate circumstances; the fleet separated, and a mutiny broke out, which ended in the murder of Canute at Odensee, in the year 1086. No further attempt was made by Denmark to conquer England; for the expedition said to have been prepared by King Erik Lam in the year 1138 was, at all events, a very poor and unsuccessful one. Thus the Northmen in England, being no longer able to obtain support from Denmark or Norway, were forced to submit to the Norman dominion.

Nevertheless, in spite of the terrible devastations by which William coerced the north of England, “the half-Saxon half-Danish population of these districts” (says the French historian, Thierry) “long continued to preserve their old feeling of independence and their ancient indomitable pride. The Norman kings who succeeded the Conqueror dwelt with perfect safety in the southern districts, but did not venture north of the Humber without some fear; and a chronicler, who lived at the close of the twelfth century, assures us that they never visited that part of the kingdom without being accompanied by a strong army.”

Although no very great number of Northmen, or men of Scandinavian extraction, could have remained in Normandy after William’s conquest of England, and after the Norman expeditions into Italy, yet even these few, as we have before stated, were subsequently able to impart to the popular spirit in Normandy a peculiar Scandinavian colouring. The Norman knights distinguished themselves from the effeminate, dreaming, and excitable knights of the south of France, not only by a greater inclination for adventures and a bolder martial spirit, but also by a genuine Scandinavian sedateness and an all-subduing perseverance. The old Scandinavian feeling of freedom revealed itself, even in the middle ages, in the cities of Normandy, which were long the seats of a democratic spirit and of republican movements. According to William the Conqueror’s own statement, the ancient Normans, and, above all, their Scandinavian forefathers, were, in a high degree, quarrelsome and litigious; and, even to this day, Normandy is remarkable, above all other provinces of France, for the great number of law-suits which annually take place in it. Frenchmen themselves have remarked that their most skilful and persevering seamen are to be found among the inhabitants of Dieppe, and that the most celebrated admirals of France have been natives of Normandy.

If such was the influence of the Normans in France, were not the Danes and Norwegians, who had been settled for centuries in England, in a still better position to fix a lasting stamp upon the life and character of the people; more particularly as the Danish-Norwegian elements continued, long after the Norman conquest, to exercise a very considerable influence in England? We may truly assert that the Scandinavian spirit is still clearly to be discerned, not merely in separate districts, but throughout England. The love of the English for bold adventures, especially at sea, their unshaken calmness in the greatest dangers, their apparent coolness during the most violent emotions, and their proud feeling of freedom, are surely not to be ascribed exclusively to the Normans. These qualities must, in a great degree, be attributed to the English, as the descendants of those Danish and Norwegian warriors who sought dangers on unknown seas; who looked death steadily in the face, come in whatever shape it might; who gloried in the feeling that their countenances should not betray the passions which fermented in their breasts; and who prized liberty far more than life.

It deserves at least to be mentioned, as affording a remarkable analogy to Normandy, that England’s most celebrated and successful admiral, Nelson, bore a genuine Scandinavian name (Nielsen, with the characteristic Scandinavian termination of _son_, or _sön_). He was, besides, a native of one of the districts early colonized by the Danes, having been born in the town of Burnham-thorpe, in Norfolk, or East Anglia. In fact, the perceptible difference of character still actually found between the people in old Saxon South England and in the more northern old Danish districts, is very remarkable. The southern Englishman is softer and more compliant. The northern Englishman is of a firmness of character, bordering on the hard and severe, and possesses an unusually strong feeling of freedom. The Yorkshireman is well known in England as a hasty and touchy, but determined and independent, character. Great political movements have therefore not only found reception and encouragement among the population of the north of England; but this population, from the interest it takes in the progress of public affairs, and from its love of freedom, has played a leading part in the great internal revolutions which mark the recent political history of England. Public men regard it as a great honour to represent the northern districts of England in Parliament (for instance, the West Riding of Yorkshire), merely from the intelligent political character of the voters; and it is certainly through the adherence of the lovers of freedom in the north, that Cobden has been able to struggle so successfully for the promotion of free trade, for financial reform, and for similar liberal measures. That this spirit of liberty in the north of England is chiefly derived from the old Scandinavian colonists is by no means merely the partial assertion of a Dane. The celebrated English writer, Sir E. Bulwer Lytton, who, in his “Harold,” has successfully begun to awaken the attention of his countrymen to a juster view of the Danish conquest, says in a note appended to that work: “It might be easy to show, were this the place, that though the Anglo-Saxons never lost their love of liberty, yet that the victories which gradually regained liberty from the gripe of the Anglo-Norman kings were achieved by the Anglo-Norman aristocracy. And even to this day, the few rare descendants of that race (whatever their political faction) will generally exhibit that impatience of despotic influence, and that disdain of corruption, which characterize the homely bonders of Norway, in whom we may still recognise the sturdy likeness of our fathers; while it is also remarkable that the modern inhabitants of those portions of the kingdom originally peopled by the Danes, are, irrespectively of mere party divisions, noted for their intolerance of all oppression, and their resolute independence of character; to wit, Yorkshire, Norfolk, Cumberland, and large districts in the Scottish lowlands.”

It would be impossible to deny that the Danes and Norwegians settled in England before the arrival of the Normans not only essentially contributed to the preservation of popular liberty—which, through the weakness and effeminacy of the Anglo-Saxons, was threatened with destruction—but that they also laid the foundation of its further development, and powerfully contributed to its complete establishment. We need, therefore, be no longer surprised that memorials of the Danes are mixed up with England’s freest and most liberal institutions; and that to the present day, for instance, the place whence the candidates for a seat in Parliament address the electors, bears, throughout England, the pure Danish name “_husting_.”

SECTION XIV.

General View.—Anglo-Saxon and Danish-Norman England.—Sympathies for Denmark.—The Dane in England.

The various kinds of Danish and Danish-Norwegian memorials which I have alluded to, such as names of places, coins, and peculiarities of language (not to mention contemporary letters-patent and laws), afford so many incontrovertible proofs that the Danish influence in England was neither of short duration, nor, on the whole, of a transient nature. Future and more successful investigations and comparisons, more particularly in England itself, will undoubtedly much extend the circle of known Danish memorials existing there. So much, however, is already placed beyond all doubt, that in no country out of the present homes of the Scandinavian race have its colonists left such various, such considerable, and such clear traces of their existence, as the Danes, especially, have left in England. The Scandinavian spirit has not ruled with so much power in any other, still less in any greater, European kingdom; nor been able to retain so powerful a dominion for such a length of time.

The Danes, and their successors the Normans, did not content themselves with the temporary overthrow of the Anglo-Saxon dominion; they annihilated it for ever. In this the Danes may be said to have been more active than the Normans. They not only gradually settled themselves under their own laws and their own chiefs, in half of England, but spread themselves over the whole of it. In the time of Alfred the Great, they once held all England in subjection; and at an early period obtained places amongst the highest ecclesiastical and secular aristocracy of the country. In the tenth century, the Anglo-Saxon king Edgar favoured the Danes so much, that during his reign the Danish power had an opportunity to consolidate and extend itself. Even the Anglo-Saxon royal family became mixed with Danish blood. Among the Anglo-Saxons, both high and low, weakness and proneness to vice went on continually increasing; whilst the Danish dominion, prepared by two centuries of independent Viking expeditions, and by the subsequent settlements of the Northmen, established itself completely, as soon as the sea kings and wandering Vikings were succeeded by Danish monarchs with considerable fleets at their command.

All England yielded to the conqueror Canute, and under his wise, powerful, and just administration, enjoyed that tranquillity and happiness of which it had long felt the want. The Anglo-Saxons and Danes now became more amalgamated. But Canute’s sons wanted their father’s ability and strength of purpose. The old dissensions and quarrels broke out afresh; whilst violent internal disturbances in the newly Christianized Scandinavian North, where the Viking spirit became extinguished, deprived the Danes in England of the succour necessary in their contests with the natives. The Danish power in England fell, but left the population completely mixed and saturated with Danish elements. The Anglo-Saxon royal race, as it was called, was now half Danish. The higher clergy and nobility were connected by the closest ties of relationship with the Danes and their chiefs, in whose hands several of the most important fiefs remained. The Danes had acquired considerable influence in many of the largest cities; and in about half of England the majority of the population was of Danish extraction, and possessed Danish laws and other Danish characteristics. The Danes who, naturally enough, could not forget that they had been absolute masters in that conquered land, obeyed unwillingly a king of another race, though they had not the power to place one of their own race upon the throne. The unmixed Saxon population, on the other hand, could not endure that the royal sceptre should continue to be borne, in the once independent country of their forefathers, by foreign conquerors from Denmark, whose power, besides, seemed at that time on the wane. Inward dissensions increased; the kings were too feeble to maintain efficiently their difficult position; and the power falling more and more out of the hands of the degenerate Anglo-Saxons, passed over to the stronger Danes and their Norman kinsmen.

With an unmixed population, England would have been able to maintain herself united and powerful in the hour of danger, and when threatened by foreign conquerors. But split and divided as she now was among different races contending for the mastery, real unanimity was impossible; and, in case of a powerful attack from without, dissolution was inevitable. Through the Danish expeditions, the Danish colonizations, and finally through the fall of the Danish supremacy, it became practicable for William of Normandy to conquer England with an army of only 60,000 men. Had not those events prepared the way, it would be inconceivable that with such a force a foreign conqueror should have been able to subdue a country so extensive, so well peopled, and so favoured by nature; still less that he should have succeeded in retaining such a conquest for any length of time. William won the battle of Hastings, which decided the fate of England, only because Harald Godvinsön’s Anglo-Saxon army entered the field weakened and exhausted by the sanguinary battle of Stamford Bridge. This was fought against the Norwegian king, Harald Haardraade, and the discontented Scandinavians in the north of England, who wanted to re-establish a king of their own race on the English throne.

The Danish-Norwegian settlements, and the Danish dominion in England, by subduing for a time the political power of the Anglo-Saxons, had not only prepared the way for the first victory of the Normans, but also for the future progress and establishment of the Norman power in England, and especially for the ultimate triumph of the Norman popular spirit over the remains of the ancient Saxon nationality. The Danes, by expelling the Anglo-Saxons from the northern and eastern parts of England, as well as by mixing with them in the south, had by degrees undermined their national independence and their popular characteristics, and had thus prepared an entrance for the Scandinavian spirit, which was so nearly allied to the Norman, into a great, if not the greater, portion of the English population. The bold and chivalrous spirit of the Norman aristocracy, their love of daring adventures, and their lofty feeling of freedom, completely agreed with the characteristics of the Scandinavians settled in England at an earlier period. The Normans found among the Scandinavian population of England, and particularly the Danish portion of it, several of those free institutions already in full force which they themselves, with much advantage to liberty, afterwards extended to the whole country.

Thus the conquest of England by Danish Normans, undoubtedly prepared, or, more properly speaking, was the indispensable and necessary foundation of the subsequent French-Norman conquest; and it may therefore be justly called the first act of that great historical drama, “The Norman Conquest,” of which William of Normandy’s conquest is only the concluding act.

But many will undoubtedly ask, was the Norman conquest, on the whole, beneficial to England? Would it not have been better had the Anglo-Saxon nationality been permitted to develope itself, instead of being arrested by such violent devastations and by such bloodshed as the Danish-Norman expeditions occasioned? And is it not a proof of the nobleness of the Anglo-Saxon nationality, that it has since prevailed so preponderantly in England?

On this point let us hear a learned and impartial Englishman. The latest and most celebrated Anglo-Saxon historian, Mr. Kemble, says, in his preface to the before-mentioned Collection of Anglo-Saxon Diplomas:—“With the close of the fourth volume of this work we arrive at the reign of Harald, and the Norman conquest of England; an event which our contemporary forefathers could only regard as deplorable, but which we must look back upon with gratitude and pride, as the remote origin of our own peculiar character and power. It is hardly possible to compare the signatures to the charters contained respectively in this and in the previous volumes, without seeing how widely a foreign element had become predominant. The Scandinavians of Ingwar, Guðorm, Swegen, and Cnut, successively prepared the way for the descendants of other Scandinavians under William; and the Saxon national character, like the national dynasty, was too weak to offer a successful resistance. Defeated, yet still holding a portion of its domain with unabated perseverance, yielding somewhat in one place, to break out with unshaken obstinacy at another, it accommodated itself partially to the peculiar habits of each successive invader; till, after the closing scene of the great drama commenced at Hastings, it ceased to exist as a national character, and the beaten, ruined, and demoralized Anglo-Saxon, found himself launched in a new career of honour, and rising into all the might and dignity of an Englishman. Let us reflect that defeats upon the Thames and Avon were probably necessary preliminaries to victories upon the Sutlej.”

The weakness and degeneracy of the Anglo-Saxon national character contained the seeds of its decay. It has long since been agreed that, in an historical view, we ought not to complain that the degenerate, though highly-civilized, Romans in Britain were compelled to make way for the rude Anglo-Saxons, since the latter brought with them the germ of a new and higher development. In like manner we can hardly regret that the degenerate, but to a certain degree civilized, Anglo-Saxons, were in turn expelled by the more powerful, but ruder Danes; since these also were to prepare, and lay the foundation of a new and more flourishing state of society. Under the reign of Ethelred the Second, the supremacy of the Anglo-Saxons had already passed away. As a people, they sank entirely, and left only a part of their civilization and of their institutions to their successors in dominion, the Danes and Normans. The transition took place amidst the same shocks and the same bloodshed which still mark every important and radical revolution in the history of nations. The Danish-Norman, or perhaps more properly, the Scandinavian national character, usurped the place of the Anglo-Saxon. It was certainly built upon the foundation laid by the Anglo-Saxons, but it must be observed that it has made greater progress in all respects. To it especially is owing the development in England of a maritime skill before unknown, of a bold and manly spirit of enterprise, and of a political liberty, which, by preserving a balance between the freedom of the nobles and of the rest of the people, has long ensured to England a powerful and comparatively peaceful and fortunate existence.

The Englishman is justly proud of his native land, of its internal freedom, and external greatness. But when he extols his country in respect only of its being “Anglo-Saxon,” or praises the merits of the Anglo-Saxons and Norman-French, whilst he unconditionally condemns the Danish expeditions and settlements, as having been merely devastating and destructive, he commits both an historical error and an evident injustice. The Anglo-Saxons performed their share in the civilization of England, and the Norman-French did still more; but it ought not to be forgotten—and least of all by Englishmen, who are so nearly related to the Danes—that the latter also very essentially contributed to win freedom and greatness for England, and that this freedom, and this greatness, are in no slight degree sealed with Danish blood. From at least the Danish-Normanic conquest (about the year 1000), the Danish-Normanic, or Scandinavian, national character has been the prevailing and leading one in England’s history, and so it certainly continues to be at the present day.