CHAPTER IV.

FEUDALISM AND THE MONARCHY.

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of the Northmen.

THE fierceness of the Northman's onset had hidden the Absorption real character of his attack. To the men who first fronted the pirates it seemed as though the story of the world had gone back to the days when the German barbarians first broke in upon the civilized world. It was so above all in Britain. All that tradition told of the Englishmen's own attack on the island was seen in the Northmen's attack on it. Boats of marauders from the northern seas again swarmed off the British coast; church and town were again the special object of attack; the invaders again settled on the conquered soil; heathendom again proved stronger than the faith of Christ. But the issues of the two attacks showed the mighty difference between them. When the English ceased from their onset upon Roman Britain Roman Britain had disappeared, and a new people of conquerors stood alone on the conquered land. The Northern storm on the other hand left land, people, government unchanged. England remained a country of Englishmen. The conquerors sank into the mass of the conquered, and Woden yielded without a struggle to Christ. The strife between Briton and Englishman was in fact a strife between men of different races, while the strife between Northman and Englishman was a strife between men whose race was the same. The followers of Hengest or of Ida were men

Monarchy.

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CHAP. IV. utterly alien from the life of Britain, strange to its arts, its Feudalism culture, its wealth, as they were strange to the social and the degradation which Rome had brought on its province. But the Northman was little more than an Englishman bringing back to an England which had drifted far from its origin the barbaric life of its earliest forefathers. Nowhere throughout Europe was the fight so fierce, because nowhere else were the fighters men of one blood and one speech. But just for this reason the union of the combatants was nowhere so peaceful or so complete. The victory of the house of Alfred only hastened a process of fusion which was already going on. From the first moment of his settlement in the Danelagh the Northman had been passing into an Englishman. The settlers were few; they were scattered among a large population; in tongue, in manner, in institutions there was little to distinguish them from the men among whom they dwelt. Moreover their national temper helped on the process of assimilation. Even in France, where difference of language and difference of custom seemed to interpose an impassable barrier between the Northman settled in Normandy and his neighbours, he was fast becoming a Frenchman. In England, where no such barriers existed, the assimilation was even quicker. The two peoples soon became confounded. In a few years a Northman in blood was Archbishop of Canterbury and another Northman in blood was Archbishop

The three Northern Kingdoms.

of York.

The fusion might have been delayed if not wholly averted by continued descents from the Scandinavian homeland. But with Eadred's reign the long attack which the Northman had directed against western Christendom came, for a while at least, to an end. On the world which it assailed its results had been immense. It had utterly changed the face of the west. The empire of Ecgberht, the empire of Charles the Great, had been alike dashed to pieces. But break and change as it might, Christendom had held the Northmen at bay. The Scandinavian power which had

and the

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grown up on the western seas had disappeared like a dream. CHAP. IV. In Ireland the Northman's rule had dwindled to the hold- Feudalism ing of a few coast towns. In France his settlements had Monarchy. shrunk to the one settlement of Normandy. In Englaud every Northman was a subject of the English King. Even the Empire of the Seas had passed from the Sea-Kings' hands. It was an English and not a Scandinavian fleet that for fifty years to come held mastery in the English and the Irish Channels. With Eadred's victory in fact the struggle seemed to have reached its close. Stray pirate boats still hung off headland and coast; stray vikings still shoved out in spring-tide to gather booty. But for nearly half-a-century to come no great pirate fleet made its way to the west, or landed on the shores of Britain. The energies of the Northmen were in fact absorbed through these years in the political changes of Scandinavia itself. The old isolation of fiord from fiord and dale from dale was breaking down. The little commonwealths which had held so jealously aloof from each other were being drawn. together whether they would or no. In each of the three regions of the north great kingdoms were growing up. In Sweden King Eric made himself lord of the petty states about him. In Denmark King Gorm built up in the same way a monarchy of the Danes. Norway, though it lingered long, followed at last in the same track. Legend told how one of its many rulers, Harald of Westfold, sent his men to bring him Gytha of Hordaland, a girl he had chosen for wife, and how Gytha sent his men back again with taunts at his petty realm. The taunts went home, and Harald vowed never to clip or comb his hair till he had made all Norway his own. So every springtide came war and hosting, harrying and burning, till a great fight at Hafursfiord settled the matter, and Harald "Ugly-Head" as men called him while the strife lasted was free to shear his locks again and became Harald "Fair-Hair." The Northmen loved no master, and a great multitude fled out of the country, some pushing as far as Iceland and colonizing it, some swarming

CHAP. IV. to the Orkneys and Hebrides till Harald harried them out Feudalism again and the sea-kings sailed southward to join Guthrum's and the host in the Rhine country or follow Rolf to his fights on Monarchy. the Seine. But little by little the land settled down into order, and the three Scandinavian realms gathered strength. for new efforts which were to leave their mark on our after history.

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England and its

King.

But of the new danger which threatened it in this union of the north England knew little. The storm seemed to have drifted utterly away; and the land passed from a hundred years of ceaseless conflict into a time of peace. Here as elsewhere the Northman had failed in his purpose of conquest; but here as elsewhere he had done a mighty work. In shattering the empire of Charles the Great he had given birth to the nations of modern Europe. In his long strife with Englishmen he had created an English people. The national union which had been brought about for a moment by the sword of Ecgberht was a union of sheer force which broke down at the first blow of the searobbers. The black boats of the Northmen were so many wedges that split up the fabric of the roughly-built realm. But the very agency which destroyed the new England was destined to bring it back again, and to breathe into it a life that made its union real. The peoples who had so long looked on each other as enemies found themselves fronted by a common foe. They were thrown together by a common danger and the need of a common defence. Their common faith grew into a national bond as religion struggled hand in hand with England itself against the heathen of the north. They recognized a common king as a common struggle changed Ælfred and his sons from mere leaders of West Saxons into leaders of all Englishmen in their fight with the stranger. And when the work which Alfred set his house to do was done, when the yoke of the Northman was lifted from the last of his conquests, Engle and Saxon, Northumbrian and Mercian, spent with the battle for a common freedom and a common country,

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knew themselves in the hour of their deliverance as an CHAP. IV. English people. The new people found its centre in the King. The) Monarchy. heightening of the royal power was a direct outcome 954of the war. The dying out of other royal stocks left the house of Cerdic the one line of hereditary kingship. But it was the war with the Northmen that raised Ælfred and his sons from tribal leaders into national kings. The long series of triumphs which wrested the land from the stranger begot a new and universal loyalty; while the wider dominion which their success bequeathed removed the kings further and further from their people, lifted them higher and higher above the nobles, and clothed them more and more with a mysterious dignity. Above all the religious character of the war against the Northmen gave a religious character to the sovereigns who waged it. The king, if he was no longer sacred as the son of Woden, became yet more sacred as "the Lord's Anointed." By the very fact of his consecration he was pledged to a religious rule, to justice, mercy, and good government; but his "hallowing" invested him also with. a power drawn not from the will of man or the assent of his subjects but from the will of God, and treason against him became the worst of crimes. Every reign lifted the sovereign higher in the social scale. The bishop, once ranked equal with him in value of life, sank to the level of the ealdorman. The ealdorman himself, once the hereditary ruler of a smaller state, became a mere delegate of the national king, with an authority curtailed in every shire by that of the royal shire-reeves, officers despatched to levy the royal revenues and to administer the royal justice. Among the later nobility of the thegns personal service with such a lord was held not to degrade but to ennoble. “Dishthegn" and "bower-thegn," "house-thegn" and "horse-thegn" found themselves great officers of state; and the developement of politics, the wider extension of home and foreign affairs were already transforming these royal officers into a