CHAPTER IV

ENGLAND UNDER ATHELSTAN AND THE SIX BOY-KINGS

Athelstan, the son of Edward the Elder, succeeded that king. He reigned only fifteen
years; but he remembered the glory of his grandfather, the great Alfred, and governed
England well. He reduced the turbulent people of Wales, and obliged them to pay him a
tribute in money, and in cattle, and to send him their best hawks and hounds. He was
victorious over the Cornish men, who were not yet quite under the Saxon government.
He restored such of the old laws as were good, and had fallen into disuse; made some
wise new laws, and took care of the poor and weak. A strong alliance, made against him
by Anlaf a Danish prince, Constantine King of the Scots, and the people of North Wales,
he broke and defeated in one great battle, long famous for the vast numbers slain in it.
After that, he had a quiet reign; the lords and ladies about him had leisure to become
polite and agreeable; and foreign princes were glad (as they have sometimes been since)
to come to England on visits to the English court.
When Athelstan died, at forty-seven years old, his brother Edmund, who was only
eighteen, became king. He was the first of six boy-kings, as you will presently know.
They called him the Magnificent, because he showed a taste for improvement and
refinement. But he was beset by the Danes, and had a short and troubled reign, which
came to a troubled end. One night, when he was feasting in his hall, and had eaten much
and drunk deep, he saw, among the company, a noted robber named Leof, who had been
banished from England. Made very angry by the boldness of this man, the King turned
to his cup-bearer, and said, ‘There is a robber sitting at the table yonder, who, for his
crimes, is an outlaw in the land—a hunted wolf, whose life any man may take, at any
time. Command that robber to depart!’ ‘I will not depart!’ said Leof. ‘No?’ cried the
King. ‘No, by the Lord!’ said Leof. Upon that the King rose from his seat, and, making
passionately at the robber, and seizing him by his long hair, tried to throw him down.
But the robber had a dagger underneath his cloak, and, in the scuffle, stabbed the King
to death. That done, he set his back against the wall, and fought so desperately, that
although he was soon cut to pieces by the King’s armed men, and the wall and pavement
were splashed with his blood, yet it was not before he had killed and wounded many of
them. You may imagine what rough lives the kings of those times led, when one of them
could struggle, half drunk, with a public robber in his own dining-hall, and be stabbed
in presence of the company who ate and drank with him.

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Then succeeded the boy-king Edred, who was weak and sickly in body, but of a strong
mind. And his armies fought the Northmen, the Danes, and Norwegians, or the Sea-
Kings, as they were called, and beat them for the time. And, in nine years, Edred died,
and passed away.
Then came the boy-king Edwy, fifteen years of age; but the real king, who had the real
power, was a monk named Dunstan—a clever priest, a little mad, and not a little proud
and cruel.
Dunstan was then Abbot of Glastonbury Abbey, whither the body of King Edmund the
Magnificent was carried, to be buried. While yet a boy, he had got out of his bed one
night (being then in a fever), and walked about Glastonbury Church when it was under
repair; and, because he did not tumble off some scaffolds that were there, and break his
neck, it was reported that he had been shown over the building by an angel. He had also
made a harp that was said to play of itself—which it very likely did, as Æolian Harps,
which are played by the wind, and are understood now, always do. For these wonders
he had been once denounced by his enemies, who were jealous of his favour with the
late King Athelstan, as a magician; and he had been waylaid, bound hand and foot, and
thrown into a marsh. But he got out again, somehow, to cause a great deal of trouble yet.
The priests of those days were, generally, the only scholars. They were learned in many
things. Having to make their own convents and monasteries on uncultivated grounds
that were granted to them by the Crown, it was necessary that they should be good
farmers and good gardeners, or their lands would have been too poor to support them.
For the decoration of the chapels where they prayed, and for the comfort of the
refectories where they ate and drank, it was necessary that there should be good
carpenters, good smiths, good painters, among them. For their greater safety in sickness
and accident, living alone by themselves in solitary places, it was necessary that they
should study the virtues of plants and herbs, and should know how to dress cuts, burns,
scalds, and bruises, and how to set broken limbs. Accordingly, they taught themselves,
and one another, a great variety of useful arts; and became skilful in agriculture,
medicine, surgery, and handicraft. And when they wanted the aid of any little piece of
machinery, which would be simple enough now, but was marvellous then, to impose a
trick upon the poor peasants, they knew very well how to make it; and did make it many
a time and often, I have no doubt.
Dunstan, Abbot of Glastonbury Abbey, was one of the most sagacious of these monks.
He was an ingenious smith, and worked at a forge in a little cell. This cell was made too
short to admit of his lying at full length when he went to sleep—as if that did any good
to anybody!—and he used to tell the most extraordinary lies about demons and spirits,
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who, he said, came there to persecute him. For instance, he related that one day when
he was at work, the devil looked in at the little window, and tried to tempt him to lead a
life of idle pleasure; whereupon, having his pincers in the fire, red hot, he seized the
devil by the nose, and put him to such pain, that his bellowings were heard for miles and
miles. Some people are inclined to think this nonsense a part of Dunstan’s madness (for
his head never quite recovered the fever), but I think not. I observe that it induced the
ignorant people to consider him a holy man, and that it made him very powerful. Which
was exactly what he always wanted.
On the day of the coronation of the handsome boy-king Edwy, it was remarked by Odo,
Archbishop of Canterbury (who was a Dane by birth), that the King quietly left the
coronation feast, while all the company were there. Odo, much displeased, sent his
friend Dunstan to seek him. Dunstan finding him in the company of his beautiful young
wife Elgiva, and her mother Ethelgiva, a good and virtuous lady, not only grossly abused
them, but dragged the young King back into the feasting-hall by force. Some, again,
think Dunstan did this because the young King’s fair wife was his own cousin, and the
monks objected to people marrying their own cousins; but I believe he did it, because
he was an imperious, audacious, ill-conditioned priest, who, having loved a young lady
himself before he became a sour monk, hated all love now, and everything belonging to
it.
The young King was quite old enough to feel this insult. Dunstan had been Treasurer in
the last reign, and he soon charged Dunstan with having taken some of the last king’s
money. The Glastonbury Abbot fled to Belgium (very narrowly escaping some pursuers
who were sent to put out his eyes, as you will wish they had, when you read what
follows), and his abbey was given to priests who were married; whom he always, both
before and afterwards, opposed. But he quickly conspired with his friend, Odo the Dane,
to set up the King’s young brother, Edgar, as his rival for the throne; and, not content
with this revenge, he caused the beautiful queen Elgiva, though a lovely girl of only
seventeen or eighteen, to be stolen from one of the Royal Palaces, branded in the cheek
with a red-hot iron, and sold into slavery in Ireland. But the Irish people pitied and
befriended her; and they said, ‘Let us restore the girl-queen to the boy-king, and make
the young lovers happy!’ and they cured her of her cruel wound, and sent her home as
beautiful as before. But the villain Dunstan, and that other villain, Odo, caused her to be
waylaid at Gloucester as she was joyfully hurrying to join her husband, and to be hacked
and hewn with swords, and to be barbarously maimed and lamed, and left to die. When
Edwy the Fair (his people called him so, because he was so young and handsome) heard
of her dreadful fate, he died of a broken heart; and so the pitiful story of the poor young

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wife and husband ends! Ah! Better to be two cottagers in these better times, than king
and queen of England in those bad days, though never so fair!
Then came the boy-king, Edgar, called the Peaceful, fifteen years old. Dunstan, being
still the real king, drove all married priests out of the monasteries and abbeys, and
replaced them by solitary monks like himself, of the rigid order called the Benedictines.
He made himself Archbishop of Canterbury, for his greater glory; and exercised such
power over the neighbouring British princes, and so collected them about the King, that
once, when the King held his court at Chester, and went on the river Dee to visit the
monastery of St. John, the eight oars of his boat were pulled (as the people used to
delight in relating in stories and songs) by eight crowned kings, and steered by the King
of England. As Edgar was very obedient to Dunstan and the monks, they took great
pains to represent him as the best of kings. But he was really profligate, debauched, and
vicious. He once forcibly carried off a young lady from the convent at Wilton; and
Dunstan, pretending to be very much shocked, condemned him not to wear his crown
upon his head for seven years—no great punishment, I dare say, as it can hardly have
been a more comfortable ornament to wear, than a stewpan without a handle. His
marriage with his second wife, Elfrida, is one of the worst events of his reign. Hearing
of the beauty of this lady, he despatched his favourite courtier, Athelwold, to her father’s
castle in Devonshire, to see if she were really as charming as fame reported. Now, she
was so exceedingly beautiful that Athelwold fell in love with her himself, and married
her; but he told the King that she was only rich—not handsome. The King, suspecting
the truth when they came home, resolved to pay the newly-married couple a visit; and,
suddenly, told Athelwold to prepare for his immediate coming. Athelwold, terrified,
confessed to his young wife what he had said and done, and implored her to disguise
her beauty by some ugly dress or silly manner, that he might be safe from the King’s
anger. She promised that she would; but she was a proud woman, who would far rather
have been a queen than the wife of a courtier. She dressed herself in her best dress, and
adorned herself with her richest jewels; and when the King came, presently, he
discovered the cheat. So, he caused his false friend, Athelwold, to be murdered in a
wood, and married his widow, this bad Elfrida. Six or seven years afterwards, he died;
and was buried, as if he had been all that the monks said he was, in the abbey of
Glastonbury, which he—or Dunstan for him—had much enriched.
England, in one part of this reign, was so troubled by wolves, which, driven out of the
open country, hid themselves in the mountains of Wales when they were not attacking
travellers and animals, that the tribute payable by the Welsh people was forgiven them,
on condition of their producing, every year, three hundred wolves’ heads. And the

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Welshmen were so sharp upon the wolves, to save their money, that in four years there
was not a wolf left.
Then came the boy-king, Edward, called the Martyr, from the manner of his death.
Elfrida had a son, named Ethelred, for whom she claimed the throne; but Dunstan did
not choose to favour him, and he made Edward king. The boy was hunting, one day,
down in Dorsetshire, when he rode near to Corfe Castle, where Elfrida and Ethelred
lived. Wishing to see them kindly, he rode away from his attendants and galloped to the
castle gate, where he arrived at twilight, and blew his hunting-horn. ‘You are welcome,
dear King,’ said Elfrida, coming out, with her brightest smiles. ‘Pray you dismount and
enter.’ ‘Not so, dear madam,’ said the King. ‘My company will miss me, and fear that I
have met with some harm. Please you to give me a cup of wine, that I may drink here,
in the saddle, to you and to my little brother, and so ride away with the good speed I
have made in riding here.’ Elfrida, going in to bring the wine, whispered to an armed
servant, one of her attendants, who stole out of the darkening gateway, and crept round
behind the King’s horse. As the King raised the cup to his lips, saying, ‘Health!’ to the
wicked woman who was smiling on him, and to his innocent brother whose hand she
held in hers, and who was only ten years old, this armed man made a spring and stabbed
him in the back. He dropped the cup and spurred his horse away; but, soon fainting with
loss of blood, dropped from the saddle, and, in his fall, entangled one of his feet in the
stirrup. The frightened horse dashed on; trailing his rider’s curls upon the ground;
dragging his smooth young face through ruts, and stones, and briers, and fallen leaves,
and mud; until the hunters, tracking the animal’s course by the King’s blood, caught his
bridle, and released the disfigured body.
Then came the sixth and last of the boy-kings, Ethelred, whom Elfrida, when he cried
out at the sight of his murdered brother riding away from the castle gate, unmercifully
beat with a torch which she snatched from one of the attendants. The people so disliked
this boy, on account of his cruel mother and the murder she had done to promote him,
that Dunstan would not have had him for king, but would have made Edgitha, the
daughter of the dead King Edgar, and of the lady whom he stole out of the convent at
Wilton, Queen of England, if she would have consented. But she knew the stories of the
youthful kings too well, and would not be persuaded from the convent where she lived
in peace; so, Dunstan put Ethelred on the throne, having no one else to put there, and
gave him the nickname of The Unready—knowing that he wanted resolution and
firmness.
At first, Elfrida possessed great influence over the young King, but, as he grew older
and came of age, her influence declined. The infamous woman, not having it in her

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power to do any more evil, then retired from court, and, according, to the fashion of the
time, built churches and monasteries, to expiate her guilt. As if a church, with a steeple
reaching to the very stars, would have been any sign of true repentance for the blood of
the poor boy, whose murdered form was trailed at his horse’s heels! As if she could have
buried her wickedness beneath the senseless stones of the whole world, piled up one
upon another, for the monks to live in!
About the ninth or tenth year of this reign, Dunstan died. He was growing old then, but
was as stern and artful as ever. Two circumstances that happened in connexion with him,
in this reign of Ethelred, made a great noise. Once, he was present at a meeting of the
Church, when the question was discussed whether priests should have permission to
marry; and, as he sat with his head hung down, apparently thinking about it, a voice
seemed to come out of a crucifix in the room, and warn the meeting to be of his opinion.
This was some juggling of Dunstan’s, and was probably his own voice disguised. But
he played off a worse juggle than that, soon afterwards; for, another meeting being held
on the same subject, and he and his supporters being seated on one side of a great room,
and their opponents on the other, he rose and said, ‘To Christ himself, as judge, do I
commit this cause!’ Immediately on these words being spoken, the floor where the
opposite party sat gave way, and some were killed and many wounded. You may be
pretty sure that it had been weakened under Dunstan’s direction, and that it fell at
Dunstan’s signal. His part of the floor did not go down. No, no. He was too good a
workman for that.
When he died, the monks settled that he was a Saint, and called him Saint Dunstan ever
afterwards. They might just as well have settled that he was a coach-horse, and could
just as easily have called him one.
Ethelred the Unready was glad enough, I dare say, to be rid of this holy saint; but, left
to himself, he was a poor weak king, and his reign was a reign of defeat and shame. The
restless Danes, led by Sweyn, a son of the King of Denmark who had quarrelled with
his father and had been banished from home, again came into England, and, year after
year, attacked and despoiled large towns. To coax these sea-kings away, the weak
Ethelred paid them money; but, the more money he paid, the more money the Danes
wanted. At first, he gave them ten thousand pounds; on their next invasion, sixteen
thousand pounds; on their next invasion, four and twenty thousand pounds: to pay which
large sums, the unfortunate English people were heavily taxed. But, as the Danes still
came back and wanted more, he thought it would be a good plan to marry into some
powerful foreign family that would help him with soldiers. So, in the year one thousand

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and two, he courted and married Emma, the sister of Richard Duke of Normandy; a lady
who was called the Flower of Normandy.
And now, a terrible deed was done in England, the like of which was never done on
English ground before or since. On the thirteenth of November, in pursuance of secret
instructions sent by the King over the whole country, the inhabitants of every town and
city armed, and murdered all the Danes who were their neighbours.
Young and old, babies and soldiers, men and women, every Dane was killed. No doubt
there were among them many ferocious men who had done the English great wrong,
and whose pride and insolence, in swaggering in the houses of the English and insulting
their wives and daughters, had become unbearable; but no doubt there were also among
them many peaceful Christian Danes who had married English women and become like
English men. They were all slain, even to Gunhilda, the sister of the King of Denmark,
married to an English lord; who was first obliged to see the murder of her husband and
her child, and then was killed herself.
When the King of the sea-kings heard of this deed of blood, he swore that he would
have a great revenge. He raised an army, and a mightier fleet of ships than ever yet had
sailed to England; and in all his army there was not a slave or an old man, but every
soldier was a free man, and the son of a free man, and in the prime of life, and sworn to
be revenged upon the English nation, for the massacre of that dread thirteenth of
November, when his countrymen and countrywomen, and the little children whom they
loved, were killed with fire and sword. And so, the sea-kings came to England in many
great ships, each bearing the flag of its own commander. Golden eagles, ravens, dragons,
dolphins, beasts of prey, threatened England from the prows of those ships, as they came
onward through the water; and were reflected in the shining shields that hung upon their
sides. The ship that bore the standard of the King of the sea-kings was carved and
painted like a mighty serpent; and the King in his anger prayed that the Gods in whom
he trusted might all desert him, if his serpent did not strike its fangs into England’s heart.
And indeed it did. For, the great army landing from the great fleet, near Exeter, went
forward, laying England waste, and striking their lances in the earth as they advanced,
or throwing them into rivers, in token of their making all the island theirs. In
remembrance of the black November night when the Danes were murdered,
wheresoever the invaders came, they made the Saxons prepare and spread for them great
feasts; and when they had eaten those feasts, and had drunk a curse to England with wild
rejoicings, they drew their swords, and killed their Saxon entertainers, and marched on.
For six long years they carried on this war: burning the crops, farmhouses, barns, mills,
granaries; killing the labourers in the fields; preventing the seed from being sown in the
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ground; causing famine and starvation; leaving only heaps of ruin and smoking ashes,
where they had found rich towns. To crown this misery, English officers and men
deserted, and even the favourites of Ethelred the Unready, becoming traitors, seized
many of the English ships, turned pirates against their own country, and aided by a storm
occasioned the loss of nearly the whole English navy.
There was but one man of note, at this miserable pass, who was true to his country and
the feeble King. He was a priest, and a brave one. For twenty days, the Archbishop of
Canterbury defended that city against its Danish besiegers; and when a traitor in the
town threw the gates open and admitted them, he said, in chains, ‘I will not buy my life
with money that must be extorted from the suffering people. Do with me what you
please!’ Again and again, he steadily refused to purchase his release with gold wrung
from the poor.
At last, the Danes being tired of this, and being assembled at a drunken merry-making,
had him brought into the feasting-hall.
‘Now, bishop,’ they said, ‘we want gold!’
He looked round on the crowd of angry faces; from the shaggy beards close to him, to
the shaggy beards against the walls, where men were mounted on tables and forms to
see him over the heads of others: and he knew that his time was come.
‘I have no gold,’ he said.
‘Get it, bishop!’ they all thundered.
‘That, I have often told you I will not,’ said he.
They gathered closer round him, threatening, but he stood unmoved. Then, one man
struck him; then, another; then a cursing soldier picked up from a heap in a corner of
the hall, where fragments had been rudely thrown at dinner, a great ox-bone, and cast it
at his face, from which the blood came spurting forth; then, others ran to the same heap,
and knocked him down with other bones, and bruised and battered him; until one soldier
whom he had baptised (willing, as I hope for the sake of that soldier’s soul, to shorten
the sufferings of the good man) struck him dead with his battle-axe.
If Ethelred had had the heart to emulate the courage of this noble archbishop, he might
have done something yet. But he paid the Danes forty-eight thousand pounds, instead,
and gained so little by the cowardly act, that Sweyn soon afterwards came over to
subdue all England. So broken was the attachment of the English people, by this time,
to their incapable King and their forlorn country which could not protect them, that they

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welcomed Sweyn on all sides, as a deliverer. London faithfully stood out, as long as the
King was within its walls; but, when he sneaked away, it also welcomed the Dane. Then,
all was over; and the King took refuge abroad with the Duke of Normandy, who had
already given shelter to the King’s wife, once the Flower of that country, and to her
children.
Still, the English people, in spite of their sad sufferings, could not quite forget the great
King Alfred and the Saxon race. When Sweyn died suddenly, in little more than a month
after he had been proclaimed King of England, they generously sent to Ethelred, to say
that they would have him for their King again, ‘if he would only govern them better
than he had governed them before.’ The Unready, instead of coming himself, sent
Edward, one of his sons, to make promises for him. At last, he followed, and the English
declared him King. The Danes declared Canute, the son of Sweyn, King. Thus, direful
war began again, and lasted for three years, when the Unready died. And I know of
nothing better that he did, in all his reign of eight and thirty years.
Was Canute to be King now? Not over the Saxons, they said; they must have Edmund,
one of the sons of the Unready, who was surnamed Ironside, because of his strength and
stature. Edmund and Canute thereupon fell to, and fought five battles—O unhappy
England, what a fighting-ground it was!—and then Ironside, who was a big man,
proposed to Canute, who was a little man, that they two should fight it out in single
combat. If Canute had been the big man, he would probably have said yes, but, being
the little man, he decidedly said no. However, he declared that he was willing to divide
the kingdom—to take all that lay north of Watling Street, as the old Roman military road
from Dover to Chester was called, and to give Ironside all that lay south of it. Most men
being weary of so much bloodshed, this was done. But Canute soon became sole King
of England; for Ironside died suddenly within two months. Some think that he was
killed, and killed by Canute’s orders. No one knows.

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