The Forge of Christendom (30 page)

Yet still it did not arrive. No matter that Ethelred was only a child; no matter that his mother – whether justly or not – stood under suspicion of murder; no matter that he was only the second king, after his half-brother, to inherit the rule of a united England, rather than to have to fight for it: the kingdom did not fall to pieces. Indeed, that Edward’s murder was seen as peculiarly shocking was evidence of just how habituated his contemporaries had become to the rule of law; for the young king, it has credibly been suggested, was “the first man of high blood to have perished as a result of civil strife among the English for more than fifty years.”
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Ethelred’s advisers did all they could to
ensure that he would also be the last. Rivalries were consciously dampened. The Lady Aelfrida, who had returned to court purring with triumph, was sufficiently gracious in her victory to ensure that prominent partisans of the murdered king were granted their fair share of the available public offices. Nor even, a year into Ethelred’s reign, did she object to the dredging up of her stepson’s corpse, and its reinterment with full royal honours. In no time at all, visitors to the tomb were reporting spectacular miracles and hailing Edward a martyr: potent testimony to the hold that a king from the House of Cerdic, even one who in life had certainly been no saint, could exert on the English. Hardly surprising, then, that Ethelred should have survived the years of his childhood unchallenged, for he had been left the very last of his famous line.

Yet ultimately, as was evident from the wretched end of the Carolingians, the pretensions of even the most glorious dynasty were nothing if not raised on solid foundations. Prestige had to be earned as well as inherited, a maxim that the West Saxon kings had always adhered to with a hard-headed literalness. The most precious legacy that Edgar had bequeathed to his successors was not the aura of sanctity with which he had sought to endow himself at Bath, but rather a measure enacted in the same year of 973, one so ambitious that it had provided him with a licence, literally, to coin in his kingdom’s cash. A single currency for a single people: such had been the philosophy of Edgar. Foreign coins, obsolete coins, coins lacking the requisite purity of silver: all had been pronounced illegal tender. Here, at a time when anything up to twenty different currencies might be in circulation within a single county of France, was a truly imperious reform. A lucrative one as well: for not only was the kingdom transformed into a single market, but it was made easier to soak. No wonder that Ethelred should have persisted with the reform. Regularly, from the year of his coronation onwards, he would order all the silver pennies in the kingdom to be recalled, restamped and then – after he had taken a cut – reissued. The penalty for forgery was ratcheted up from mutilation to death. Estates were obsessively quantified, audited and
assessed for tax. Here was intrusiveness of a degree fit to be admired in Constantinople or Córdoba. Certainly, nothing remotely comparable to it existed anywhere else in the Christian West. England might not have been a far-spreading empire, nor the seat of an anointed Caesar; but its rulers certainly had cash to burn.

Yet just as the merchant who travelled from market to market with silver in his saddlebags was taking a risk, so too was Ethelred. Even as the towns founded by Alfred grew and prospered, even as the aristocracy lavished gold and incense and silks on great churches and on themselves, and even as the treasure chests of the king continued to fill to overflowing, still there lurked a nagging question in the back of many people’s minds: what if the
Wicingas
, the “sea-robbers,” were to return? Of Northmen in England, certainly, there was no lack. The terrible assaults of the previous century, which had seen entire kingdoms appropriated by Viking warlords and parcelled out among their followers, had left the eastern counties densely planted with settlers. Several generations on, and the descendants of these immigrants might still affect a distinctive look: the men, for instance, had a taste for eye-liner, and for shaving the backs of their heads. Most scandalous, to pious English eyes, was their habit of taking a bath every Saturday: a mark of effeminacy held all the more surprising in a people so notorious for their bestial savagery. Nevertheless, there were many natives, jealous of the success with women for which the Northmen had become famed, who were not above adopting some of their more dandyish habits themselves; and integration, with Englishmen and Scandinavians pooling make-up and hair-styling tips, had long been gathering pace. It helped that the immigrants, as a consequence of the treaties forced on their forefathers by Alfred and his successors, were Christian; it helped as well that their language, their laws and their customs were similar to those of the English. Not, to be sure, that Ethelred could afford entirely to lower his guard: for in Northumbria especially, where much of the aristocracy was Scandinavian, treachery was a constant rumour. Yet in general, the West Saxon authorities could rest content in the presumption that
the king’s peace benefited immigrants no less than natives. So long as it held firm, the Scandinavians in England appeared unlikely to prove an enemy within.

It was true, of course, that the sway of the House of Wessex did not extend to all the Northmen who had emigrated to the British Isles. In Ireland, following their favoured policy of putting down roots beside an estuary, Viking pirates had founded a particularly flourishing stronghold by the “Dubh Linn,” or “Black Pool,” near the mouth of the River Liffey: so flourishing, indeed, that the settlement had ended up boasting the largest slave market of anywhere in western Europe. Unsurprisingly, it was the Irish themselves who provided the Dubliners with their richest source of exports; even so, all those who took to the ocean or lived by its shores had to reckon themselves potential targets. On one notorious occasion, the wife of a Frankish viscount, no less, had been kidnapped and held captive for three years; only the intervention of the Count of Rouen himself had served finally to set her free.

By the 980s, the English too, particularly in the west of the country, were suffering a steep rise in the number of raids being launched against their coastline. The experience of being bundled on to a slaver’s longboat was a predictably unpleasant one: indeed, an ordeal to be wished only on one’s very worst enemy. “He was subjected to insults and urinated upon, and then, stripped naked, forced by the Vikings to perform the sexual service of a wife”:
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so gloated one Norman poet, contemplating the fate of a rival, an Irishman, who had been abducted by pirates. Gang-rape – “the practice of foul sin upon a single woman, one after another, like dogs that care not about filth”
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– was common. No wonder that churchmen in England should regularly have compared the Devil himself to a slaver, one “who leads his prisoners as captives to the hellish city, in devilish thralldom.”
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Yet even as they raised their voices in pious protest, and even as Ethelred dispatched ships on patrol into the Irish Sea, the truth was that the slave trade could provide profit as well as loss. The supply chain that linked the Vikings to the fabulous wealth
of al-Andalus had opened up opportunity for English merchants too. Just like the Dubliners, they even had a ready supply of Celts on their doorstep – the “
Weallas
,” or Welsh, whose very name had long been synonymous with “slaves” – and a booming port, ideally located for the export of human cattle. “You could see and sigh over rows of wretches bound together with ropes,” it was said of Bristol, “young people of both sexes whose beautiful appearance and youthful innocence might move barbarians to pity, daily exposed to prostitution, daily offered for sale.”
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An exaggeration, of course: for barbarians tended not to be moved to pity by the spectacle, nor the merchants of Bristol either. Indeed, by the Millennium, the port was coming to rival Dublin itself as the entrepôt of the western seas, with a record of trading slaves to the Caliphate and beyond, to Africa, that betokened a brilliant commercial future.

Nevertheless, as the new millennium drew ever nearer, it would have taken a perversely cheery sense of optimism to see in the gathering upsurge of Viking raids a boost to the prospects of anywhere in England. An alarming realisation was dawning over Ethelred: that there were simply too many pirates infesting English waters for them all to have originated in Ireland. So immense was the treasure piled up in his kingdom, it appeared, that its glint was showing even beyond the grey expanse of the mist-filled northern seas, in Scandinavia. How telling it was, for instance, that the most feared of all the Viking captains should have been a man “skilled in divination,”
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whose talent for throwing the bones of birds and reading in them the pattern of what might otherwise have remained hidden had won for him the sinister nickname of “
Craccaben
” – “Crowbone.” Olaf Trygvasson was a Norwegian, a man of the “North Way,” a realm so far distant from all that made for Christian order that even its women, it was said, grew beards, “and sorcerers and enchanters and other satellites of Antichrist” swarmed everywhere.
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Whether as a consequence of necromantic skills or not, Trygvasson certainly had a nose for loot; and sure enough, like a raven tracking the perfume of carrion, he had ended up haunting the English sea lanes.

By 991, such was the glamour and prestige of Trygvasson’s name that there were no fewer than ninety-two other ships sailing alongside his own, ravaging the coasts of Kent and Essex, plundering and burning almost unopposed. Then, in August, while camped near Maldon, north of the Thames estuary, Trygvasson and his fellow freebooters were finally pinned down by the English; challenged to cross from the island where their ships were moored, the Vikings did so, only to find themselves in danger of being wiped out.
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Savagely, they fought their corner until at last, with a bloody and desperate effort, they succeeded in putting the Essex men to flight. Left behind as a corpse on the field of battle was the English commander, Britnoth, a white-haired and valiant earl, who had stood with all his bodyguards together unyielding amid the slaughter, arrow-feathered, axe-hewn, refusing to bow.

His was a heroic end, to be sure; but although Britnoth himself had scorned to “buy off the onslaught of spears with tribute-money,”
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his defeat had left Ethelred with little alternative, if Kent and Essex were to be spared further ruin. Ten thousand pounds’ worth of taxes were duly levied, “Dane-geld,” as it came to be known; and yet even as this prodigious sum was handed over, everyone knew that it would serve only as a palliative. Trygvasson’s appetites had been fed, not satiated; and sure enough, in 994, he was back for more. First he led an assault on London; then, after that had been beaten back, he stole horses for his men, and cut a deep swath across the Wessex heartlands. An open challenge to Ethelred, in short, and a calculated insult too. All drew their breath, and waited to see what the King of England would do.

The counter-move, when it did come, proved a good deal less than glorious. No attempt was made to confront Trygvasson. Instead, Ethelred opted to put the screws on his hapless subjects once again. The sum raised this time was £16,000. The English, already the most heavily taxed people in Christendom, were predictably driven to much cursing by this initiative; and while the king himself, as the Lord’s anointed, remained immune to direct criticism, the same was not true of his advisers. Whispered under people’s breath, a punning title began to be applied to Ethelred: “
unræd
,” “the ill-advised.”
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Yet this
was uncharitable. A measure of bafflement in the royal counsels was only to be expected. Ethelred was adrift in uncharted waters. There was not another ruler anywhere in the Christian West, after all, who could boast of administering a more efficient government, or of governing a more prosperous people, or of raking in more cash for himself; and yet, bizarrely, rather than strengthening the kingdom, these same achievements appeared to be setting it only to totter. The more Ethelred found England’s wealth a source of vulnerability, the more, in his perplexity and desperation, he sought to turn it back to his advantage. So it was, groping his way to a possible solution, that he settled upon a two-pronged response: he would keep as firm a grip upon the royal mints as he possibly could, fortifying them, even transferring them, wherever feasible, to remote and primordially ancient hill-forts; simultaneously, he would try to spend his way out of trouble.

Derided it might have been; but as a policy, this was in fact very much in the grand tradition of measures adopted by harassed kings. The payment made to Trygvasson had come with a number of familiar strings attached. Like Rollo, he had been obliged to become a Christian; to cease his plundering; to ally himself with the very lord whom he had previously been assailing. Not, however, that it was any part of Ethelred’s intentions to see a new Normandy established on English soil. Far from it. The presence of Viking ships in Norman ports, and of English slaves and loot in Norman markets, had not gone un remarked across the Channel. Indeed, such was the bad blood between the lords of England and Normandy that the Pope himself had been obliged to intervene, and remind the Count of Rouen of his Christian duty not to fraternise with pirates. Richard had duly apologised, signed a treaty – and continued precisely as before. Menacing evidence, it must have struck Ethelred, that even a baptised Northman could never wholly be de-fanged. Plunder, it appeared, would always be his truest god. No matter that Olaf Trygvasson, at his baptism, had become Ethelred’s godson; clearly, it was out of the question for him to be permitted to put down roots in England.

Fortunately, Trygvasson himself agreed. His ambitions were set higher than Rollo’s. Already the toast of excitable poets across the entire Viking world, and rolling in English silver, he had become fired with the zeal of a true convert as well: convinced that Providence had personally chosen him to become King of the North Way, and bring his countrymen to the faith of Christ. It was an intoxicating notion – and one that had first come to him, it would later be claimed, as the result of a fortuitous encounter with a prophetic hermit. Far likelier, however, it was Ethelred, enthroned amid the wealth and magnificence proper to his exalted rank, who had first whispered in Trygvasson’s ear that he too might aspire to wear the crown of a Christian king. Certainly, as the Norwegian captain headed off for his homeland, stopping occasionally along the way to loot and murder in the name of the Prince of Peace, he did so with his godfather’s fervent blessing. Well might Ethelred have breathed a sigh of relief. His triumph had been a considerable one. Compared with Trygvasson and his war bands, the Vikings left behind in English waters were a nuisance, little more. Fields might still be burned, manors plundered and captives stolen; but Ethelred, in the approach to the Millennium, was starting to throw his own weight around on a far more swaggering scale. In the year 1000, he led one expedition in person, northwards into Scotland, ravaging with the best of them, while a second was dispatched to Normandy, there to launch a raid on the Vikings and give the pirates a taste of their own medicine. Two years later, and Ethelred appeared a sufficiently intimidating figure to persuade the Count of Rouen himself to come to heel, and patch up a second treaty. “And then in the spring the Lady, Richard’s daughter, came to this land.”
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So an Englishman reported the arrival in Wessex of Emma, Richard II’s sister, a woman of formidable intelligence, talent and ambition, and fully worthy of a king. Sent by her brother to set the seal on his new alliance, she was married to Ethelred that very spring. Seated beside her royal husband, Emma appeared to the English a living reassurance that the worst was over: that the wheat field of Ethelred’s kingdom had been secured at last
against the trampling of foreign feet, and bloody flames, and blight, and storms, and ruin.