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"Nay, bend not your bows. We be but poor brethren of Saint Francis, who have come hither for your good." "For our goods, you mean. We want no begging friars or like cattle." "But I have a special message for thee, Kynewulf, well named; and for thee, Forkbeard; and for thee, Nick." "Ah! Whom have we got here?" "An old friend under a new guise.
Now, Sweyn Forkbeard was a very cautious man in the affairs of war, and he well knew that he was himself no match for so powerful a warrior as Olaf the Glorious. But he remembered that he was not alone in his desire to humble the monarch of the Norselands.
Some would have led the old man away; but he thrust them off fiercely. "Hoi! come wolf! Hoi! come kite! Hoi! come erne from off the fen! You followed us, and we fed you well, when Swend Forkbeard brought us over the sea. Follow us now, and we will feed you better still, with the mongrel Frenchers who scoff at the tongue of their forefathers, and would rob their nearest kinsman of land and lass.
Sweyn Forkbeard had fared no better than Olaf had done. He had made a bold attempt to burn the town, but, like Olaf, he had been driven back to his ships with great slaughter. On that same day the two defeated chiefs sailed away in wrath and sorrow, and with the loss of seven ships and two thousand men.
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.
Ethelred believed that he had now rid his kingdom of all danger from the vikings. But he did not reckon with King Sweyn Forkbeard. Tempted by the great sums of money that had been extorted from the English, Sweyn returned again and again, and at last succeeded in expelling Ethelred from the land.
King Sweyn Forkbeard of Denmark had by this time regained full possession of his kingdom, and was contemplating an invasion of England which should be more complete and decisive than the attempt which he had made in company with the viking whom he had known as Ole the Esthonian.
Olaf did not expect that war would follow. But he knew that King Sweyn Forkbeard was his bitterest enemy, and that there was danger in passing so near to Denmark, and he thought it well to have a large number of battleships in his train in case of need. He arrived off the Wendish coast without being in any way molested, and he anchored his fleet in the great bay of Stetten haven.
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.
Even as Thyra had taunted Olaf Triggvison concerning her possessions in Wendland, so had Sigrid taunted Sweyn Forkbeard concerning her hatred of King Olaf of Norway. She could never forget how Olaf had smitten her in the face with his glove, and from the earliest days of her marriage with King Sweyn she had constantly and earnestly urged him to wage war against Olaf Triggvison.
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