A History of the Vikings
Chapter 8
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themselves on friendly terms with the great warrior and redoubtable strategist, the man who had broken the power of the Danes. (1)
Edward had not been in the full sense of the word the conqueror of the Danelaw. He had not interfered with the land-tenure of the colonists nor with the Danish laws and customs obtaining in the colony; all he had done was to establish himself as the undisputed overlord of the Danelaw and so cripple the military power of the colonists that his own English subjects need no longer live in fear of attack from them. But the winning of this overlordship was in itself a very remarkable achievement, being nothing less than the humiliation and subjection of a young and vigorous colony only fifty years established.
One of the reasons for this downfall of the Danelaw was clearly that the Danes themselves, however anxious they might be for colonial expansion, were utterly lacking in the political experience that is necessary for the founding of a stable colony in a hostile land. Except when such a man as Halfdan led and governed them, the rank and file were at heart nothing but small and unambitious farmers with a taste for an occasional plundering expedition. There was, in plain fact, but little corporate feeling in the Danelaw, and submission to an English overlord was regarded with indifference provided that the ownership of the land was not disputed. Even the jarls, with their boroughs and their armies, shared this apathy and had no proper perception of the co-operation that was required of them when a resolute and sustained attack was directed against the Danelaw. And in addition to this lack of cohesion, the jarls further contributed to the inherent weakness of the colony because their independence was a part of that still greater failing of these chieftains, a viking restlessness. For when fortune turned against them, they were tempted to slip away with their personal following and, as buccaneers once more, to seek a home and riches elsewhere. It happened at this very time when Edward and Æthelfleda began their campaign against the Danelaw that Charles the Simple gave the land of Normandy to Rollo and thus provided a safe and attractive home across the Channel where vikings were allowed to live in peace. It is likely, then, that the numbers of the Danes in the English Danelaw were seriously depleted by the
1. The very famous entry in the Chronicle (s. a. 923) describing this submission reads: 'And the king of the Scots, and all the people of the Scots, chose him (Edward) as father and lord; and so did Ragnvald, and the sons of Eadulf (the English earls of Bamborough), and all those who dwell in Northumbria, whether English, or Danish, or Northmen (Norwegians), or others, and also the king of the Strathclyde Welsh, and all the Strathclyde Welsh.'
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departure of many of the more adventurous vikings to the new Danelaw on the Continent. Thus the Chronicle records that Thurkytel, the jarl of Bedford, after his submission to Edward in 917, sailed off two years later to Francia together with such men as would follow him.
In the Northumbrian Danelaw there was, however, a special source of weakness, for within the short period of Edward's reign the autonomy of the colonists had been threatened by the rapid development of a rival colony of foreigners around and among them. These newcomers were their fellow-vikings, Norwegians and others, partly Norse and partly Danish, from the Irish viking colonies, and Norse-descended folk from the western Scottish isles and Man. Some had come directly from Norway to the Yorkshire coast in the Whitby district, but the majority had arrived from the west and had begun in the early tenth century to settle on both sides of the Solway Firth, in the no man's land of the Cumberland coast, and in the western part of Deira around Morecambe Bay and along the north Lancashire littoral. They came gradually, not in one angry invasion, and as land-takers they were peaceable folk; but the absence of resistance to their settlement encouraged them to push steadily inland and it was not long before they were securely established in the dales of the Lake District and in part of western Yorkshire, particularly in the Craven region, and also in the western dales of the North Riding and even in the Cleveland Hills. (1) Even so, they probably had no serious intention of ousting the original settlers from their heritage; but upon their sudden rise to political importance it was inevitable that there should be a disastrous clash of interests within the Danelaw and consequent disturbances that effectively prevented the colony from offering a stout and single-fronted opposition to Edward and his English.
The cause of the trouble was the quarrel between the related royal houses of Dublin and York whose sons, all of the stock of
1. On the Norsemen of northwest England see W. G. Collingwood, Lake District History (Ch. III), Kendal, 1925, and Publ. Tolson Museum, Huddersfield, Handbook 2 (ed. 1929); E. Ekwall, Scandinavians and Celts in Northwest England, Lund; A. H. Smith, Placenames of the North Riding of Yorkshire, Cambridge, 1928. These vikings, though of much importance both for history and archaeology, obtain little notice in the written records and their chief claim upon the reader's attention is that they are the subject of Mr. W. G. Collingwood's lovely and memorable romance Thorstein of the Mere. This story, which opens with the submission of the vikings to Edward at Bakewell, provides a fascinating and illuminating introduction to the study of viking Northumbria which no one interested should miss.
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Ragnar Lodbrok, believed that Dublin and Northumbria should properly be ruled by a single prince of their line. In these jealousies and wars of their kings the settlers, new and old alike, took little interest at first, but the danger of the royal rivalries for the common welfare lay in the fact that the sympathies of the heathen Norsemen and Irish Danes now dwelling in England were clearly with the Dublin claimants, so that in the event of the triumph of one of the Dublin princes over his cousin at York the whole complexion of the Danelaw would be altered and would henceforth have a westward orientation gravely to the disadvantage of the original settlers. This is what had actually happened in 918 when a roving viking of the Dublin house, Ragnvald (pp. 248, 283), came over from Ireland and seized the throne of York. The result was that exactly at the time when the Northumbrian Danelaw should have been rallying its full strength in readiness for the coming struggle with Edward the unhappy province was thrown into chaos by the attempt to impose heathen Irish-Norwegian government upon the Christian Danes of Deira; small wonder, then, that at the approach of the English, Ragnvald, who had not been able to consolidate his victories, and the Danes who dreaded the losing of their lands and the tyranny of the Norsemen, alike agreed to end the anarchy in Northumbria by accepting the king of England as their overlord.
It was in 920 that the Norwegians and Danes submitted to Edward and for five years afterwards the country was at peace; then in 925 this great king died, having reigned twenty-six years. He was succeeded by his son, the magnificent young prince Æthelstan whose destiny it was to crown the achievement of his father and his grandfather by new and stirring successes of the English arms. His first act, however, was to confirm the existing peace between England and the Danelaw, and this he did by meeting the king of York, now Ragnvald's relative Sigtryg Gale who had been king of Dublin before he went to York, at Tamworth and arranging a marriage between this prince, now become a Christian, and his own sister. But Sigtryg died in the following year (926) and Æthelstan immediately marched into Northumbria, expelled the Dublin king Godfred who had come over from Ireland to take the vacant throne, forbade the succession of Sigtryg's son Olaf Cuaran, and himself seized the realm. This actual annexation of the Yorkshire Danelaw seems to have had far-reaching results, for in a peace made at Emmet in Holderness the Welsh kings, the Bamborough prince, and Constantine III, king of the Scots, renewed their pledges of friendship as the subject-allies of the king of England.
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But seven years later, in 933, this peace had been broken and Æthelstan was marching northward to fight the kings of Scotland and Strathclyde. The cause of the outbreak of hostilities was, it seems, that the aged Constantine, who no doubt preferred that there should be an independent Scandinavian kingdom of Northumbria between his own realm and that of this most formidable English king, had rashly espoused the cause of Olaf Cuaran, son of Sigtryg Gale and now regarded by vikings and Scots alike as rightful heir to the throne of York. Æthelstan's campaign was successful in that he spread the terror of the English arms far and wide in Strathclyde Wales and Alban; but he was not able to crush his opponents, and in 937 he learnt that the northern nations were uniting in their preparations for a decisive conflict with the Saxons and counted upon the aid of a large army of Northumbrian and Irish vikings.
The cause of the war that now broke out was still the affair of the succession at York, and the hostilities opened with an over-sea raid by Olaf Cuaran and a party of Scots and vikings upon Northumbria by way of the Humber mouth. The campaign opened brilliantly for the rebels as the Anglophile earls set over the province by Æthelstan were defeated, and this was at once followed by a sympathetic rising of the Welsh, both of North Wales and of Strathclyde. It was, in truth, a formidable combination that now confronted the English king, an alliance showing plainly that North Britain, Celtic, Danish, and Norwegian, pagan and Christian, was determined to stay Æthelstan's growing power and to break free from his overlordship.
But the king, Edward's son and Alfred's grandson, was not the man to allow his authority to be challenged with impunity. Accompanied by his half-brother Edmund, then a boy, and having in his train 300 vikings under the Icelander Egil Skallagrimsson and his brother Thorolf, he marched northward and invited the great allied force commanded by Constantine and Olaf to meet him in battle at Brunanburh, a place that is now generally thought to be Birrenswark, a flat-topped hill in Annandale, nine miles north of the Solway Firth in Dumfriesshire. (1)
The Celtic and viking armies arrived at the scene of the combat
1. For the site of Brunanburh, see Neilson, Scottish Historical Review, VII (1909), p. 37, and R. L. Bremner, The Norsemen in Alban, Glasgow, 1923, p. 127. The reader should note that there are some serious chronological difficulties in the way of identifying the battle of Vinheid in Egilssaga with Brunanburh.
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first and established themselves in an old Roman camp north of the hill upon which the battle was to take place, and the English, coming later, collected their army in a second camp on the south side of the hill. There were many delays and many useless diplomatic exchanges before the armies were fully mustered, and the contest opened unexpectedly with a fight between the impatient Celts and, on the English side, the Northumbrians and Icelanders, wherein the Icelandic leaders, or so at least Egilssaga tells, gained a splendid victory, even though the Northumbrian commander shamefully fled from the field. But the battle proper came on the following day and then the complete forces of both sides were paraded. It was fought long and hard, and ended in an amazing and overwhelming victory for the English; Olaf and the beaten remnant of the Irish vikings escaped to their ships and sailed off to Dublin, while Constantine, the hoary-headed traitor, 'fled to his North again'. (1) Æthelstan's enemies were completely cowed, and the English king henceforth could justly style himself, as he did on his coins and in his charters, Rex totius Britanniæ.
He had become, indeed, one of the great kings of northwestern Europe, and he was held in high honour by the princes abroad. The Carolingian king, Charles the Simple, by marrying Æthelstan's sister Edgiva, became his brother-in-law, and Louis d'Outremer, the son of this marriage and a future king of France, was reared at the court of the English king; the Capetian Hugh the Great married Eadhilda, another sister, and Otto the Saxon, the future Roman emperor, wedded Edgitha, a third sister. But such powerful connexions on the Continent do not represent the entire scope of Æthelstan's relations with foreign powers, and it may be that his fostering of Haakon, (2) one of the sons of Harald Fairhair, and Harald's acceptance of a sword from Æthelstan, are, in spite of the embroideries of the Heimskringla version of the story, merely tokens of an English foreign policy that aimed at a friendship with the rising state of Norway. There was, indeed, a most unexpected result to this exchange of civilities, for when Eric Bloodaxe, Harald's heir and successor, was on a viking cruise in the west, ?Æthelstan, remembering his friendship with Eric's illustrious father, sent for him, and offered
1. From Tennyson's translation of the ballad of Brunanburh, the famous poem that is inserted in the Saxon Chronicle, s. a. 937.
2. It is not, of course, certain that the Æthelstan who fostered Haakon in England was the great king and indeed there are chronological difficulties in the way of this identification. The Dane Guthrum, baptized after the Treaty of Chippenham, received the name of Æthelstan and it may have been to him that the young Norwegian prince was sent.
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