History of England 1-6

So Swein Forkbeard sailed with his son, Canute, in a great fleet. They came in splendour, their ships ornamented with gold and silver, their shields brightly burnished; when the sun shone on them, the eyes of the spectators were dazzled. Admiration, and dread, were mingled. All the people of the Danelaw submitted to him, and Ethelred fled to the protection of the walls of London before taking refuge in Normandy. He came back to England, on the death of Swein, but the young Canute proved too much for him and his sons. On their prone bodies Canute climbed to the throne in 1016. With the death of Ethelred and of the son who succeeded him, Edmund Ironside, the long lineage of the early English kings came to an end. The descendants of Alfred, the sons of Woden, had ruled the country for 145 years. Not one of them was ever proclaimed to be a tyrant.

The first acts of King Canute were bloody indeed. He slaughtered the leading nobles of England, together with their children, so that his own sons could retain their dominion. When he took hostages, he often mutilated them before releasing them. He was as cunning as he was cruel; power often uses piety for its own deep purposes and, after his conversion to Christianity, he gave unstintingly to churches. When he entered the great monasteries, according to a chronicler, his eyes were fixed on the ground and he overflowed with ‘a true river of tears’. The tears were not idle ones. He needed the English Church as a way of maintaining his spiritual authority as a legitimate king. He also strengthened an already strong position by marrying Ethelred’s widow, Emma from Normandy. But he had acquired a country that had suffered almost continual warfare and raiding for more than thirty years, and the universal call was for peace at any price. The price was vast. Canute exacted more than £82,000 from the shires of England in order to pay off his army.

Then he began to set his kingdom in order. He divided the country into four military districts, and scattered his chosen men – his housecarls – over the shires in place of the English thegns. The English were once more a subject race. Canute was now a great emperor in his own right. He claimed to be the overlord of Scotland, of Ireland and of Wales. One of the Scottish nobles who paid homage to him was Maelbeath, better known to posterity as Macbeth. Canute was also lord of Denmark and of Norway, thus forming a Scandinavian empire of which England was a part. He married his daughter to the German emperor, whose coronation he had attended in Rome. He was known as Canute the Great, but he knew where his greatness ended. The setting for the story of the king failing to command the waves was the bank of the tidal Thames at Westminster, where his palace was situated. He died in the winter of 1035, and it is believed that his bones still lie buried somewhere within Winchester Cathedral.

The reigns of Canute’s two sons, Harold Harefoot and Harthacanute, were short and inglorious, reinforcing the perception that the sons of a powerful father are often weak and insecure. Harthacanute was half a Canute. He and his brother serve only as a prelude to the longer rule of Edward, known as ‘the Confessor’. The new sovereign was the son of Ethelred and Emma; he was therefore part English and part Norman. He was related to King Egbert of Wessex, grandfather of Alfred, but he was also a Viking; the Normans had once been Viking settlers.

In any case his real sympathies lay with the duchy of Normandy, in which he had lived for twenty-eight years. He arrived in London with a Norman escort, thus marking the true beginning of the Norman invasion. Within a few years of his coronation on Easter Day 1043, three Norman clerics were given English bishoprics, and Edward also planted a number of foreign magnates on English soil; they followed their native tradition and built castles rather than halls. The new king granted the Sussex ports to Fe´camp Abbey, situated on the coast of Normandy, and gave the merchants of Rouen their own London port at Dowgate. The first act of the eleventh-century drama had begun. The invasion of 1066 was the end of a long process.

The earls of England, however, the powerful magnates who controlled the shires, were instinctively hostile to the Norman interlopers. Among their number were Godwin, earl of Wessex, and Leofric, earl of Mercia; Godwin was married to a Danish noblewoman, while Leofric had been connected by marriage to the wife of Canute. The Danes and the English were close to becoming one people. It is a pertinent fact that the Danes fought alongside the English at the battle of Hastings.