United States or Brunei ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Vain, incapable, profligate kings, the tools of such prelates as Odo and Dunstan, were no match for such wild heroes as Thorkill the tall, or Olaf Trygvasson, or Swend Forkbeard. The Danes had gradually colonized, not only their own Danelagh and Northumbria, but great part of Wessex.
They were a changed folk since first they settled in that Danelagh; since first in the days of King Beorhtric, "in the year 787, three ships of Northmen came from Haeretha land, and the King's reeve rode to the place, and would have driven them up to the King's town, for he knew not what men they were: but they slew him there and then"; and after the Saxons and Angles began to find out to their bitter bale what men they were, those fierce Vikings out of the dark northeast.
In 893 a large fleet steered for the Andredsweald, while the sea-king Hasting entered the Thames. Alfred held both at bay through the year till the men of the Danelagh rose at their comrades' call. Wessex stood again front to front with the Northmen. But the King's measures had made the realm strong enough to set aside its old policy of defence for one of vigorous attack.
Brice's eve, A. D. 1002, murdered them all with tortures, man, woman, and child. It may be that they only did to the children as the fathers had done to them: but the deed was "worse than a crime; it was a mistake." The Danes of the Danelagh and of Northumbria, their brothers of Denmark and Norway, the Orkneys and the east coast of Ireland, remained unharmed.
But there may be a period in the history of a lowland race when they, too, become historic for a while. There was such a period for the men of the Eastern Counties; for they proved it by their deeds. When the men of Wessex, the once conquering race of Britain, fell at Hastings once and for all, and struck no second blow, then the men of the Danelagh disdained to yield to the Norman invader.
That of Tosti Godwinsson against his own nephews? That of Harold Godwinsson, the usurper? That of the tanner's grandson against any man? Ah that he had been in England! Ah that he had been where he might have been, where he ought to have been but for his own folly, high in power in his native land, perhaps a great earl; perhaps commander of all the armies of the Danelagh.
And therefore the Danelagh men, who feared not mortal sword, or axe, feared witches, ghosts, Pucks, Will-o'-the-Wisps, werewolves, spirits of the wells and of the trees, and all dark, capricious, and harmful beings whom their fancy conjured up out of the wild, wet, and unwholesome marshes, or the dark wolf-haunted woods. For that fair land, like all things on earth, had its darker aspect.
Few of us knew then how little able Cnut was to fight the mighty Ironside, but we thought him strong in body as in name. Else had that plan never been thought of. They say that Edric Streone advised Cnut to take the old Danelagh and Northumbria and leave Eadmund the rest of the kingdom, the survivor to succeed to all the land. Maybe he did.
Green calls "Danelagh," after a long and bitter contest, of which Alfred was the greatest hero. In surveying his conquests we are reminded of the long contest which Charlemagne had with the Saxons. Next to Charlemagne, Alfred was the greatest prince who reigned in Europe after the dissolution of the Roman Empire, until the Norman Conquest.
In like manner their kindred tribes, who had poured into Saxon England to ravage and lay desolate, had no sooner obtained from Alfred the Great permanent homes, than they became perhaps the most powerful, and in a short time not the least patriotic, part of the Anglo-Saxon population . At the time our story opens, these Northmen, under the common name of Danes, were peaceably settled in no less than fifteen counties in England; their nobles abounded in towns and cities beyond the boundaries of those counties which bore the distinct appellation of Danelagh.
Word Of The Day