A.D. 979–1016.] MASSACRE OF THE DANES. 71 former state. A tax was raised throughout the country by the name of the Dane-geld, to satisfy these rapacious visitors, and winter quarters and maintenance were assigned to several detachments of them which delayed their departure till the spring. The ancient Danish settlers on the north and northeast of the Thames were by this time, we have seen, scarcely distinguishable from their Anglo-Saxon neighbours. They married, and were buried together; they attended the same church, and spoke the same language. Nevertheless, it is possible that they were more leniently treated by the new swarms of their countrymen, and that their resistance to them was not so decided as if they had been of an altogether different stock. The rage of the Anglo-Saxons took the form of a massacre such as is rarely met in history, and in spite of the exaggerations surrounding the details, we cannot doubt the horror of the event. say On the thirteenth of November, 1002, we are told that everywhere in town and village, farm and castle-the prepared Saxons rose upon the unprepared Danes, and put them to death. Old and young, mother and bride, boy and girl, 'all were doomed to death; and some have gone so far as to that there was not one Dane left alive. In some places where the pirates had created more than usual hostility, it is likely the outraged Saxons slew all of them they could reach. In many cases, too, the foreign mercenary whom the king himself had placed in the Anglo-Saxon cottage to ensure the fidelity of his subjects, and who had used his opportunity to oppress and insult the proprietors of the house, may have fallen a victim to the revenge of the father or husband; but it is utterly impossible that so scattered and so ignorant a race as the Anglo-Saxons should have had the secresy and combination necessary for so great an act; and we are reduced to believe that an outbreak of popular fury, which undoubtedly occurred in various localities, took the form, in the ballads of both the populations, of a wholesale slaughter; and that St. Brice, on whose festival the event took place, became a cry of proud recollection to the Saxons, and of vengeance to the Danes. § 15. The revenge came very soon. The Baltic coast sent forth its warriors in greater numbers than before. Ethelred was deceived by his flatterers, and forsaken by his chiefs. When efforts were made and a fleet collected, quarrels broke out among the leaders; the ships were deserted, and wrecked upon the shore. A large army of the enemy besieged Canterbury. Alphege, the archbishop, resisted to the last; but treachery opened the gates, and the inhabitants were sold as slaves. A party of the triumphant Danes were celebrating their success, and ordered the prelate to be brought before them. "We must have ransom," they cried. "Gold, bishop! gold!" But Alphege said he had no wealth of his own, and would rather die than allow his flock to impoverish itself by purchasing his release. The drunken revellers cast the relics of their feast at the old man's head, and massacred him amid shouts of derision. They only extinguished one feeble life, but gave a martyr to the Saxon Church, before whose shrine their descendants in the next generation were kneeling in deepest veneration. The prey was now thought to be too valuable to be left to the hands of subordinate chieftains, and Sweyn, the King of Denmark, embarked with a royal army, and attempted the conquest of the kingdom. When the men of the Danelagh saw the ancient standard of their race, and reflected at the same time on the powerlessness of their nominal sovereign, they professed their allegiance to the invader, and deserted Ethelred's cause. Sweyn left his son Canute in charge of the ships and shore, and marched triumphantly through the land. Everywhere the Danish element in the population united itself to his fortunes-a clear proof that the massacre of 1002 was not so universal as we are told; and at last the Saxon king, who was equally unready to fight or die, fled with his wife, Emma, to her brother's A.D. 1016.] ACCESSION OF CANUTE. 73 dukedom of Normandy, and Sweyn was accepted as undisputed monarch of the land from the Solway to the Channel. § 16. Yet when the first fear of the Danish invasion was passed, the old Saxon affection for the line of Woden returned. Emissaries were sent over to invite Ethelred to return, on condition of better government for the future; and as Sweyn's death had removed the greatest difficulty in the way of his restoration, the Unready came back to contest the prize with Canute, whom the Danes had nominated to the crown. Fortunately the national cause was entrusted to a stronger champion, when the death of Ethelred opened the way for his illegitimate son Edmund, a man whose strength was so great that he is known by the homely name of Ironside, and whose courage and conduct were equal to his bodily force. He challenged Canute to decide the quarrel by single combat; but who could have any chance against a man that could perform such feats as Edmund, who could cleave trees asunder with his sword, and tire down a horse on foot? Canute declined the invitation to fight, but suggested a division of the kingdom, as had been practised before; and his proposal was accepted amid the rejoicing shouts of both the armies. But before the terms of the agreement could be fully carried out, the iron-sided warrior died, and Canute was installed in the undivided kingdom, as if he had been the natural heir § 17. Affecting a moderation he did not possess, Canute endeavoured to soothe the alarm of the nation by promises of mercy and justice. His acts, however, soon belied his words. He put all the relations of the late royal family to death, or forced them into banishment. Two princes, the sons of Edmund Ironside, he sent to the King of Sweden, with a request that he would deliver him from such dangerous opponents. The Swede was more pitiful than the Dane, and sent them to the distant Court of Hungary, to keep them out of Canute's power. Edward and Alfred, the sons of Ethelred and Emma, were protected by her brother Richard, at Rouen, and were likely in a few years to be personally dangerous; but Canute took the surest means of disarming their mother's enmity, for he made her an offer of his hand; and when Emma felt herself again a queen of England, and mother of a prince who might hope to succeed his father, she turned bitterly against her sons by Ethelred, and made them feel that they had no country beyond the territories of their uncle. They grew up accordingly more Norman than English, and Emma's unnatural harshness was in this way the not very remote cause, as we shall see, of the Norman conquest. Prosperity had the same softening effect on the character of Canute which labour and suffering had had on that of Alfred. The rude Dane forgot to be bloody in the midst of an obedient people, and made himself popular in a way very unusual with kings-by writing songs and ballads, which spread into hall and cottage. One of his verses is still preserved, and as it is said to have been a favourite among the English peasantry, we may conclude that Canute had paid them the additional compliment of adopting their language as the vehicle of his poem. He was rowed by some of his attendants on the river Renne in the neighbourhood of the great cathedral of Ely, and as the psalmody of the monks reached his ear, he sang: Merie singen the munches binnen E-ly, Roweth, cnihtes, near the land, And here we these munches soeng. In more modern spelling we can judge of the royal poet : Merrily sang the monks of Ely, And the monks' singing let us hear. His popularity, however, is better shown by the less authentic story of his rebuke to his admirers, who told him there was A.D. 1016-1039.] CANUTE'S POPULARITY. 75 no limit to his power. He placed his chair within the reach of high-water, and ordered the advancing tide to retire. When the waves came on, he turned to his sycophants, and exposed their flatteries and meanness. This anecdote is never omitted in a life of Canute; and in spite of the exceeding improbability of a middle-aged gentleman exposing himself to be drenched by the increasing water for the mere purpose of conveying a lesson which nobody required, it has become a fact of the most indubitable kind, and on a slab recently inserted in the wall of a house near the shore at Southampton, the words appear:-"Here Canute reprimanded his courtiers." + The firmness of his power was shown within a very few years. He left his new acquisition in 1019, and remained a whole year in Denmark, carrying on a successful war with Sweden and Norway. The latter of these he subdued and annexed to the Danish crown; and after a long interval of repose at home and honours abroad, he completed his character of a Christian king by a pilgrimage to Rome. Here he was received with extraordinary respect by the pontiff and several potentates, including the German Cæsar, who happened to be in the city at the time. They gave him vases of silver, and other marks of consideration; but he obtained. more valuable proofs of the papal and imperial friendship in a promise that his clergy should no longer be oppressed by Romish exactions, nor pilgrims insulted and robbed in their passage through the states of the emperor. Delighted with all he heard and saw, the Dane came back to England more zealous in support of the Church than ever, and presented to the shrine of Coventry the arm-bones of Saint Augustine, J which he had bought at Pavia for a thousand talents of silver and a thousand talents of gold. If the talent of gold represented eleven hundred pounds sterling, and a talent of silver seventy-five, this relic of the Bishop of Hippo, who died in 430, cost probably three or four years' amount of the whole |