8: Jarl Eric and Svein
<< 7: Reign of Olaf Tryggveson || 9: King Olaf the Thick-Set's Viking Days >>
Jarl Eric, splendent with this victory, not to speak of that over the
Jomsburgers with his father long ago, was now made Governor of Norway:
Governor or quasi-sovereign, with his brother, Jarl. Svein, as
partner, who, however, took but little hand in governing;—and, under
the patronage of Svein Double-Beard and the then Swedish king (Olaf
his name, Sigrid the Proud, his mother's), administered it, they say,
with skill and prudence for above fourteen years. Tryggveson's death
is understood and laboriously computed to have happened in the year
1000; but there is no exact chronology in these things, but a
continual uncertain guessing after such; so that one eye in History as
regards them is as if put out;—neither indeed have I yet had the luck
to find any decipherable and intelligible map of Norway: so that the
other eye of History is much blinded withal, and her path through
those wild regions and epochs is an extremely dim and chaotic one. An
evil that much demands remedying, and especially wants some first
attempt at remedying, by inquirers into English History; the whole
period from Egbert, the first Saxon King of England, on to Edward the
Confessor, the last, being everywhere completely interwoven with that
of their mysterious, continually invasive "Danes," as they call them,
and inextricably unintelligible till these also get to be a little
understood, and cease to be utterly dark, hideous, and mythical to us
as they now are.
King Olaf Tryggveson is the first Norseman who is expressly mentioned
to have been in England by our English History books, new or old; and
of him it is merely said that he had an interview with King Ethelred
II. at Andover, of a pacific and friendly nature,—though it is
absurdly added that the noble Olaf was converted to Christianity by
that extremely stupid Royal Person. Greater contrast in an interview
than in this at Andover, between heroic Olaf Tryggveson and Ethelred
the forever Unready, was not perhaps seen in the terrestrial Planet
that day. Olaf or "Olaus," or "Anlaf," as they name him, did "engage
on oath to Ethelred not to invade England any more," and kept his
promise, they farther say. Essentially a truth, as we already know,
though the circumstances were all different; and the promise was to a
devout High Priest, not to a crowned Blockhead and cowardly
Do-nothing. One other "Olaus" I find mentioned in our Books, two or
three centuries before, at a time when there existed no such
individual; not to speak of several Anlafs, who sometimes seem to mean
Olaf and still oftener to mean nobody possible. Which occasions not a
little obscurity in our early History, says the learned Selden. A
thing remediable, too, in which, if any Englishman of due genius (or
even capacity for standing labor), who understood the Icelandic and
Anglo-Saxon languages, would engage in it, he might do a great deal of
good, and bring the matter into a comparatively lucid state. Vain
aspirations,—or perhaps not altogether vain.
At the time of Olaf Tryggveson's death, and indeed long before, King
Svein Double-Beard had always for chief enterprise the Conquest of
England, and followed it by fits with extreme violence and impetus;
often advancing largely towards a successful conclusion; but never,
for thirteen years yet, getting it concluded. He possessed long since
all England north of Watling Street. That is to say, Northumberland,
East Anglia (naturally full of Danish settlers by this time), were
fixedly his; Mercia, his oftener than not; Wessex itself, with all the
coasts, he was free to visit, and to burn and rob in at discretion.
There or elsewhere, Ethelred the Unready had no battle in him
whatever; and, for a forty years after the beginning of his reign,
England excelled in anarchic stupidity, murderous devastation, utter
misery, platitude, and sluggish contemptibility, all the countries one
has read of. Apparently a very opulent country, too; a ready skill in
such arts and fine arts as there were; Svein's very ships, they say,
had their gold dragons, top-mast pennons, and other metallic splendors
generally wrought for them in England. "Unexampled prosperity" in the
manufacture way not unknown there, it would seem! But co-existing
with such spiritual bankruptcy as was also unexampled, one would hope.
Read Lupus (Wulfstan), Archbishop of York's amazing Sermon on the
subject,(8) addressed to contemporary audiences; setting forth such a
state of things,—sons selling their fathers, mothers, and sisters as
Slaves to the Danish robber; themselves living in debauchery,
blusterous gluttony, and depravity; the details of which are well-nigh
incredible, though clearly stated as things generally known,—the
humor of these poor wretches sunk to a state of what we may call
greasy desperation, "Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die." The
manner in which they treated their own English nuns, if young,
good-looking, and captive to the Danes; buying them on a kind of
brutish or subter-brutish "Greatest Happiness Principle" (for the
moment), and by a Joint-Stock arrangement, far transcends all human
speech or imagination, and awakens in one the momentary red-hot
thought, The Danes have served you right, ye accursed! The so-called
soldiers, one finds, made not the least fight anywhere; could make
none, led and guided as they were, and the "Generals" often enough
traitors, always ignorant, and blockheads, were in the habit, when
expressly commanded to fight, of taking physic, and declaring that
nature was incapable of castor-oil and battle both at once. This
ought to be explained a little to the modern English and their
War-Secretaries, who undertake the conduct of armies. The undeniable
fact is, defeat on defeat was the constant fate of the English; during
these forty years not one battle in which they were not beaten. No
gleam of victory or real resistance till the noble Edmund Ironside
(whom it is always strange to me how such an Ethelred could produce
for son) made his appearance and ran his brief course, like a great
and far-seen meteor, soon extinguished without result. No remedy for
England in that base time, but yearly asking the victorious,
plundering, burning and murdering Danes, "How much money will you take
to go away?" Thirty thousand pounds sterling in silver, which the annual
Danegelt soon rose to, continued to be about the average yearly sum,
though generally on the increasing hand; in the last year I think it
had risen to seventy-two thousand pounds sterling in silver, raised yearly by a
tax (Income-tax of its kind, rudely levied), the worst of all
remedies, good for the day only. Nay, there was one remedy still
worse, which the miserable Ethelred once tried: that of massacring
"all the Danes settled in England" (practically, of a few thousands or
hundreds of them), by treachery and a kind of Sicilian Vespers. Which
issued, as such things usually do, in terrible monition to you not to
try the like again! Issued, namely, in redoubled fury on the Danish
part; new fiercer invasion by Svein's Jarl Thorkel; then by Svein
himself; which latter drove the miserable Ethelred, with wife and
family, into Normandy, to wife's brother, the then Duke there; and
ended that miserable struggle by Svein's becoming King of England
himself. Of this disgraceful massacre, which it would appear has been
immensely exaggerated in the English books, we can happily give the
exact date (A.D. 1002); and also of Svein's victorious accession (A.D.
1013),(9)—pretty much the only benefit one gets out of contemplating
such a set of objects.
King Svein's first act was to levy a terribly increased Income-Tax for
the payment of his army. Svein was levying it with a stronghanded
diligence, but had not yet done levying it, when, at Gainsborough one
night, he suddenly died; smitten dead, once used to be said, by St.
Edmund, whilom murdered King of the East Angles; who could not bear to
see his shrine and monastery of St. Edmundsbury plundered by the
Tyrant's tax-collectors, as they were on the point of being. In all
ways impossible, however,—Edmund's own death did not occur till two
years after Svein's. Svein's death, by whatever cause, befell 1014;
his fleet, then lying in the Humber; and only Knut,(10) his eldest son
(hardly yet eighteen, count some), in charge of it; who, on short
counsel, and arrangement about this questionable kingdom of his,
lifted anchor; made for Sandwich, a safer station at the moment; "cut
off the feet and noses" (one shudders, and hopes not, there being some
discrepancy about it!) of his numerous hostages that had been
delivered to King Svein; set them ashore;—and made for Denmark, his
natural storehouse and stronghold, as the hopefulest first thing he
could do.
Knut soon returned from Denmark, with increase of force sufficient for
the English problem; which latter he now ended in a victorious, and
essentially, for himself and chaotic England, beneficent manner.
Became widely known by and by, there and elsewhere, as Knut the Great;
and is thought by judges of our day to have really merited that title.
A most nimble, sharp-striking, clear-thinking, prudent and effective
man, who regulated this dismembered and distracted England in its
Church matters, in its State matters, like a real King. Had a
Standing Army (House Carles), who were well paid, well drilled and
disciplined, capable of instantly quenching insurrection or breakage
of the peace; and piously endeavored (with a signal earnestness, and
even devoutness, if we look well) to do justice to all men, and to
make all men rest satisfied with justice. In a word, he successfully
strapped up, by every true method and regulation, this miserable,
dislocated, and dissevered mass of bleeding Anarchy into something
worthy to be called an England again;—only that he died too soon, and
a second "Conqueror" of us, still weightier of structure, and under
improved auspices, became possible, and was needed here! To
appearance, Knut himself was capable of being a Charlemagne of England
and the North (as has been already said or quoted), had he only lived
twice as long as he did. But his whole sum of years seems not to have
exceeded forty. His father Svein of the Forkbeard is reckoned to have
been fifty to sixty when St. Edmund finished him at Gainsborough. We
now return to Norway, ashamed of this long circuit which has been a
truancy more or less.
__________
(8) This sermon was printed by Hearne; and is given also by
Langebek in his excellent Collection, Rerum Danicarum Scriptores
Medii AEri. Hafniae. 1772-1834.
(9) Kennet, i. 67; Rapin, i. 119, 121 (from the Saxon Chronicle
both).
(10) Knut born A.D. 988 according to Munch's calculation (ii.
126).
<< 7: Reign of Olaf Tryggveson || 9: King Olaf the Thick-Set's Viking Days >>
