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The Comic History of England. Gilbert Abbott À Beckett
Читать онлайн.Название The Comic History of England
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isbn 4057664592378
Автор произведения Gilbert Abbott À Beckett
Жанр Документальная литература
Издательство Bookwire
* Others think this royal spoon was not fiddle headed, but
that he was the earliest specimen of the king's pattern, of
his enemy. Emma, who was called the "Flower of Normandy,"
consented to transplant herself to England, and became the
acknowledged daisy of the British Court.
Young Sweyn had now become king of Denmark, and had made friends with Olave, king of Norway, the son of old Olave, a deceased pirate, who had made his fortune by sweeping the very profitable crossing from his own country to England. These two scamps ravaged the southern coast in 994, and Ethelred, the unready king, was obliged to buy them off with ready money. In the year 1001, they made another demand of £24,000, which left the sovereign not a single dump, except those into which he naturally fell at the draining of his treasury.
Ethelred, who, if he was unready for everything else, appears to have been always ready for a quarrel, had contrived to fall out with Richard the Second, Duke of Normandy, and he was on the point of taking up arms, when he laid his hand at the feet of Emma.
We would willingly take an enormous dip of ink, and letting it fall on our paper, blot out for ever from our annals the Danish massacre, which occurred at about the period to which our history has arrived. Unfortunately, however, were we to overturn an entire inkstand, we should only add to the blackness of the page, which tells us that the Danes were savagely murdered at a time when they were living as fellow-subjects among the people.
It was on the feast of St. Brice, soon after his marriage with Emma, that the order to commit this sanguinary act was given by Ethelred. It is true that the Danish mercenaries had given great provocation by their insolence. They had, according to the old chroniclers, * sunk into such effeminacy that they washed themselves once a week and combed their heads still more frequently. We cannot perhaps accuse the chroniclers of being over nice in their objections to the Danish habits of cleanliness, but we really are at a loss to see the effeminacy of taking a bath every seven days, and preventing the hair from becoming in appearance little better than a quantity of hay in a state of unraked roughness. It was on the 15th of November, 1002, which happened to be one of their weekly washing days, that the Danes were surprised and treated in the barbarous manner we have alluded to. The Lady Gunhilda, the sister of Sweyn, and the wife of an English earl of Danish extraction, was one of the victims of the massacre, and died fighting to the last with that truly feminine weapon, the tongue, predicting that her death would be followed by the downfall of the English nation. This act of ferocity naturally exasperated Sweyn, who resolved on invading England, and he prepared a considerable fleet, the vessels belonging to which appear to have been got up much in the same style as the civic barges on the Thames, for they were gaily gilded, and had all sorts of emblematical devices painted over them. Sweyn himself arrived in the Great Dragon, a boat made in the inconvenient form of that disagreeable animal. Had the patron saint of England been at hand to do his duty at that early period, the great dragon would have been speedily overcome, but it is a familiar observation, that people of this-sort are never to be found when they are really wanted.
* Wallingford, p. 547.
The invaders landed at Exeter, which was governed by a Norman baron, a favourite of the queen; but, as frequently happens in the course of events as well as on the race-course, the favourite proved deceptive when the enemy took the field, and resigned the place to pillage. The Danish foe marched into Wiltshire, and in every town they passed through they ordered the best of everything for dinner, when, after eating to excess of all the delicacies of the season, they had the indelicacy to settle their hosts when the bill was brought to them for settlement. To prevent even the possibility of old scores being kept against them, which they might one day be called upon to pay off, they burned down the houses, thus making a bonfire of all the property, including account books, papers, and wooden tallies that the establishment might contain. The entertainers or land-lords had no sooner presented a bill; than it was met by a savage endorsement on their own backs; and, though drawing and accepting may be regarded as a very customary, commercial transaction, still, when the drawer draws a huge sword the acceptor is likely to get by far the worst of it.
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An Anglo-Saxon army was, however, organised at last, to oppose the Danes; but Alfric the Mercian—an old traitor, who had on a former occasion played the knave against the king—was put at the head of it. Ethelred had punished the first treachery of the father by putting out the eyes of the son; but this castigation of the "wrong boy," the young one instead of the old one, had not proved effectual. His majesty must have been as blind as he had rendered the innocent youth, to have again entrusted Alfric with command; and the consequences were soon felt, for the old impostor pretended to be taken suddenly ill, just as his men were going into battle. He called them off at the most important moment; and instead of stopping at home by himself, putting his feet in warm water, and laying up while the battle was being fought under directions which he could just as easily have given from his own room, he shouted for help from the whole army; and by sending some for salts, others for senna, a cohort here for a pill, and a legion there for a leech, he managed to keep the whole of the forces occupied in running about for him.
Sweyn in the meantime got clear off with all his booty, and by the time that Alfric announced himself to be a little better, and able to go out, the enemy had vanished altogether from the neighbourhood.
An appetite for conquest was not however the only appetite which the Danes indulged, for their voracity in eating was such that they created a panic wherever they showed themselves. They ravaged Norfolk, and having reduced it to its last dumpling, they fell upon Yarmouth, whose bloaters they speedily exhausted, when they tried Cambridge, having probably been attracted thither by the fame of its sausages. Subsequently they advanced upon Huntingdonshire and Lincolnshire, where they continued as long as they could find a bone to pick with the inhabitants. They then crossed the Baltic (a.d. 1004), having been obliged to quit England on account of there being literally nothing to eat; so that a joint occupation with the natives had become utterly impossible. Those only, who from its being the land of their birth, felt that they must always have a stake in the country, could possibly have mustered the resolution to remain in it. The vengeance of Sweyn being unsatisfied, he returned in the year 1006, when he carried fire and sword into every part, and it has been said with much felicity of expression, that amidst so much sacking the inhabitants had scarcely a bed to lie down upon.
Unable to offer him any effectual check, the Great Council tried what could be done with ready money, and £36,000 was the price demanded to pay out this formidable "man in possession" from the harassed and exhausted country. The sum was collected by an income-tax of about twenty shillings in the pound, or even more, if it could be got out of the people by either threats or violence. Such as had paid the Danes directly to save their homes from destruction were obliged to pay over again, like a railway traveller who loses his ticket; and the natives seem to have got into a special train of evils, in which every engine of persecution was used against them.
In 1008 new burdens were thrown upon the people, who for every nine nides of land were bound to find a man armed with a helmet and breastplate. This would seem no very difficult matter, considering that two or three such men are found annually at the Lord Mayor's show; but in former times they had something more difficult to do than walk in a procession. Though two