The Forge of Christendom

⁴¹ 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”⁴² – 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.”⁴³ 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.”⁴⁴ 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,”⁴⁵ 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.⁴⁶ 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.⁴⁷ 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,”⁴⁸ 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.”⁴⁹Yet 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 welclass="underline" 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.”⁵⁰ 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.Yet for Ethelred himself there remained one final step to be taken. Charged as he was by God with the defence of the English people, and aware, as he surely must have been, of the awful significance of the dawning of the new millennium, how could he not have dreaded what else, aside from wheat, might be flourishing in the rich soil of his kingdom? “He who sows the good seed is the Son of Man.” So Christ had explained to His disciples. “The field is the world, and the good seed means the sons of the kingdom; the weeds are the sons of the evil one, and the enemy who sowed them is the devil; the harvest is the close of the age, and the reapers are angels. Just as the weeds are gathered and burned with fire, so will it be at the close of the age.”⁵¹ And now, it seemed, the close of the age was at hand; so it was time to gather the weeds and consign them all to the flames. Though Trygvasson and his men were gone, there were other Northmen, Danes, living openly in the towns of England, merchants drawn there in huge numbers by the peerless wealth of the kingdom, and living peaceably enough, it was true – but Northmen nevertheless. Who, then, could tell what atrocities they might be plotting? Who tell what succour they might provide a Viking invader? And so it was, as Ethelred’s self-justification put it, “that a decree was sent out by me with the counsel of my leading men and magnates, to the effect that all the Danes who had sprung up in the island, sprouting like weeds among the wheat, were to be destroyed by a most just extermination – and this decree was to be put into effect even as far as death.”⁵²The massacre took place on 13 November: St. Brice’s Day. It was, if the bald descriptions of contemporaries are to be trusted, awesomely comprehensive. Ethelred was evidently as efficient at organising a pogrom as he was at stinging his subjects for taxes. Considerations of Christian charity appear not to have moderated the ruthlessness with which the operation was carried out. In one particularly chilling episode, in Oxford, the Danes were incinerated as they huddled together for protection inside a church. Far from serving as a reassurance to the English that their kingdom was being secured against the coming of Antichrist, such an act of desecration led many to dread the opposite. “But of that day and hour no one knows.”⁵³ These were the familiar words deployed by Wulfstan, London’s bishop, and Ethelred’s most brilliant counsellor, as he sought to reassure his flock that the end time was still to arrive; yet even he could not conceal from his listeners what the surest portent of Antichrist was to be. The casting down of God’s temple, of God’s house: such was to be the sign.And now the stones of a church lay smoking in the heart of England, greasy with human ashes, a veritable charnel-house. If truly a sign, then it was a threatening one indeed.