Chapter 7

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they would; so the Danes had no other choice than to attempt the capture of the town. On the morning of the 26th came the first attack, and it was directed against the tower on the right bank of the Seine defending the northern bridge. All day the furious battle raged; sling-stones and arrows beat upon its walls; burning pitch and boiling oil was poured upon the assailants. But the defence prevailed and at nightfall the vikings withdrew, having lost many men and with nothing achieved. During the night the Parisians, building desperately, added a storey to the tower's defences. The second day's fight was no less furious than the first; the vikings brought a battering-ram and a heavy catapult into play, and attempted to undermine the tower's foundations and to fire its wooden walls; but, once more, they were beaten off with heavy loss.
       By the end of the second day the Danes had learnt their lesson and for a while abandoned these disastrous shock-tactics. Their next move was to entrench themselves within a camp that they constructed around the abbey of St. Germain l'Auxerrois, and here they remained for some weeks, harrying the country far and wide in collecting provisions for the winter, while they also occupied themselves in preparing new and more formidable engines of war. On the 31st of January they advanced again to the attack, menacing the tower with one division of their forces and directing two others against the bridge itself. For three days the battle raged. The vikings tried every possible stratagem; they attempted to fill up the fosse round the tower with straw, branches, slaughtered animals, and even with the dead bodies of their prisoners; on the last day of the fight they filled three of their ships with inflammable material, and, setting fire to them, let them drift against the bridge; but the vessels burnt themselves out harmlessly against the bastions. For the third time the Danes were forced to withdraw leaving the defence unshaken.
       On the 6th of February came suddenly the winter floods, and the swollen Seine itself swept away the southern wooden bridge, cutting off the tower on the left Seine bank from the island-city. The disaster must have been foreseen, for only twelve defenders were posted in the tower when it thus fell an easy prey to the vikings. But with the destruction of the bridge, the river-route was at last open to the Danes, and, so long as a small force remained to invest Paris, the greater part of the viking host was at liberty to pass up-stream, keeping in to the south bank of the Seine, and to plunder the inland country right up to the Loire. The principal attacks, however, were




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directed eastwards; both Chartres and Le Mans were threatened by the Danes at this time, and Évreux fell to them.
       Joscelin now sent messengers to Charles, who was in Italy, and to Henry of Saxony, with urgent requests for help. Henry did indeed come to the aid of the Parisians towards the end of February, but his Germans suffered severely during their hard winter-march, and after one abortive attack on the Danish camp they withdrew without bringing any appreciable relief to the inhabitants of the beleaguered town.
       As a safeguard against further attacks from the Eastern Franks, the Danes moved their camp to St. Germain-des-Prés on the left bank of the Seine, and now it seemed that all hope of saving the town was extinguished. But already Sigfred himself was tiring of the investment of Paris and consented to be bought off by the paltry bribe of 60 pounds of silver. He could not, however, persuade the majority of his countrymen to accompany him, though he incited them to another fruitless attack on the stone bridge to prove to them the difficulty of taking Paris by direct assault; in the end he sailed off down the river with his own personal following in the second week of April. But soon after his departure the Parisians were dismayed by what seemed to be the worst and cruellest misfortune that had as yet befallen them, for Joscelin, their beloved bishop and the mainspring of a glorious defence, fell sick and died. Now, in truth, was their position desperate; their leader was gone, disease was taking a heavy toll of their numbers, and there was scarcely sufficient room on their little island for the burying of all their dead. But there still remained that man of courage, Odo, and he, seeing their terrible plight, secretly left the town at the beginning of June to plead with the Frankish grandees for immediate help, to plead, if necessary, with Charles the Fat himself, for the emperor was by this time back from Italy. His mission was successful; he returned with an escort that fought a way for him back into the town, and he was able to promise the speedy arrival of the emperor's troops. By the middle of August Charles with a mighty host was moving against the Danes.
       At Quierzy the emperor was joined by Duke Henry, but Henry shortly afterwards lost his life in a rash reconnoitring movement, and Charles, much discomfited by this event, delayed his own advance. The Danes, however, were alive to the gravity of the position and determined upon one last and formidable attack on Paris; with their full strength they flung themselves upon the defences and a last and terrible battle was




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fought. But the Parisians fought with the knowledge that help was at hand, and once again the indomitable courage of the garrison prevailed. The vikings were beaten off. And then Charles advanced; he flung the Danes back on to the south bank of the river, sent reinforcements into the town, and moved a part of his army across the Seine to invest the Danish camp. Finally, in October, he established his main body in an entrenched position at the foot of Montmartre.
       And now, after all this bravery on the part of the Parisians, this proper show of force on the part of the emperor, once more was enacted the dismal folly of the Elsloo debacle. Charles failed to strike a decisive and crushing blow; instead he opened negotiations with the vikings, and in the end granted the Danes a free passage up the Seine and the right to take up winter-quarters in rebellious Burgundy. Afterwards, in the spring, he was to pay them 700 pounds of silver on the condition that they would then finally leave his country. In the beginning of November a treaty to this effect was concluded, and he thereby accorded to the Danes all that the wretched Parisians had fought so hard to withhold from them.
       But Odo and the brave people of the town would not be cheated in this shameful fashion without some vigorous protest. They indignantly disregarded the treaty, and of their own accord refused the vikings permission to sail past Paris. They could not, of course, succeed in holding them back for long, but they forced the Danes to drag all their ships for some distance over dry land in order to reach the Seine above the town.
       And as for Charles, when he departed, he heard that Sigfred was back plundering on the lower Seine, and that Soissons in the east and Bayeux in the west had fallen to his vikings.
       In the beginning of 888 Charles the Fat was deposed, an event that spelt the final dismemberment of the empire of Charles the Great. The West Franks thereupon elected as their king the hero of the siege, Odo, Marquess of Neustria. He was, indeed, the one man likely to make a brave attempt to rid his country of the pirates who were now ravaging at their will on the Marne and Aisne in Burgundy, and at first it seemed that he would justify the high hopes that were entertained of him. In June of this year he surprised a force of the Danes at Montfaucon in the Argonne between Verdun and the Aisne, and, though he was outnumbered and he himself wounded in the battle, the impetuous charge of his men put the vikings to flight. The Danes, however, returned         




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to Meaux, which had previously fallen to their countrymen, and, subsequently, threatened Paris; but Odo with his army covered the town and there was no attack. Nevertheless in May of 889 they approached Paris to claim the bribe promised them by the deposed emperor, and when they attempted, in defiance of their oath, to go back up-stream for further plundering, their progress was at once barred by Odo and the Parisians. There was skirmishing, and a battle in which the vikings came off worse, but the end was that Odo, like Charles before him, found himself compelled to purchase their withdrawal downstream. This was the last time that a viking fleet visited the island-city, and it was a fleet that must indeed have learnt to stand in awe of the dauntless population of the little town that was destined to become the capital of France.
       After the retreat from Paris one section of the great viking force sailed to the mouth of the Vire in the Cotentin and, in 889 or 890, captured St. Lô. (1) But on attempting to move further south, this party of the Danes was heavily defeated and it subsequently made off to Conflans at the junction of the Oise and the Seine. These Northmen afterwards plundered on the Oise, where they were vigorously opposed by Odo, and also on the Scheldt; for a while they ravaged on this last-named river unchecked, but in 891 they met with defeat at the hands of Arnulf, Carloman's son and king of the East Franks, at Dyle near Louvain; and in 892, in the time of a severe famine, the whole force, now only 250 ships strong, sailed off to England, landing at the mouth of the Lymne in east Kent.
       Until 882 the vikings of the famous Angers exploit had remained in the Loire country, but in that year Hastein and his fleet left Brittany and sailed off to the Somme, where they remained for many years. After the siege of Paris, however, when the Franks were pressing the vikings hard, Hastein found his tenure in Picardy insecure, and about the same time as the battle near Louvain his vikings were defeated by a Frankish army collected by King