Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 8.djvu/302

Rh 288 ENGLAND [HISTORY. Reign and cha racter of Cnut. His do minions. Rela tions with Scotland moment, over the head and with the consent of his elder brother Jithelstan. 1 A series of battles followed, in which Eadmund had decidedly the upper hand, till the last fight at Assandiin, that is, Ashington in Essex, was lost by the treason of Eadric. The kingdom was divided ; Ead mund took the south with a formal supremacy ; Cnut took the north. The division was hardly made when Eadmund died mysteriously, by the practice of Eadric, as men deemed. And now another and final election gave Cnut the crown of the whole realm. The personal character of Cnut, his gradual change from a barbarian conqueror into a king who stood beside /Elfred in the memory of his people, makes him one of the most interesting studies in our whole history. But we have here to deal mainly with the political results of his accession. England was now brought more closely than ever into relations with other parts of the world. But those relations took a shape which was altogether new and unexpected. Cnut was a conqueror, and his establishment in England was a conquest, so far as that a foreign king made his way to the English crown at the sword s point. And, when he had worn the &amp;lt;rown, he did not scruple to secure it by the death or banishment of such Englishmen as he thought dangerous to him, either on account of their connexion with the former rDyal house or on any other ground. But, when he had once made himself safe on the throne, there was nothing more of the conqueror about him. England was neither oppressed nor degraded under his rule. His government, his laws, were framed after the pattsrn of those of the ancient kings. He sent home his Danish army, keeping only a body of chosen guards, the famous housecarls. These were the first standing army known in England, a body of picked men, Danes, English men, or brave men from any quarter. Cnut gradually displaced the Danes whom lie had at first placed in high offices, and gave them English successors. He raised an Englishman, the renowned Godwine, to a place second only to kingship, with the new title of Earl of the West-Saxons. In her foreign relations, England, under her Danish king, was in no sense a dependency of Denmark. England was the centre, Winchester was the imperial city, of a northern empire, which rivalled those of the East and the West. Cnut, it must be remembered, was chosen to the crown of England first of all, while still very young. To that crown he added the crown of Denmark, on the death or deposition of his brother Harold. He won Norway, which had revolted against his father, from its king Olaf ; and he seems to have established his power over part of Sweden and other parts of the Baltic lands. But all these were acquisitions made bj 7 one who was already &quot; King of all England ; &quot; 2 they were largely won by English valour, and the complaint in Denmark and elsewhere was that Cnut made his northern kingdoms subordinate to England, and preferred Englishmen rather than natives to high offices in them. At home, after the first years of his reign, his rule was one of perfect peace. In 1018 a Scottish victory at Carham secured all Lothian to the Scottish king. This was the carrying out of the work which had been begun by the Scottish annexation of Edinburgh. Whether there had been an earlier grant, or an earlier conquest, of Lothian is uncertain. Of its Scottish occupation from 1 This is merely a probability, not an ascertained fact ; but several circumstances point to such a supposition, there is nothing to con tradict it, and it would explain several difficulties. See History of the Norman Conquest, i. 691, ed. 3. 2 Up to this time the title is always &quot; King of the English,&quot; never &quot; King of England.&quot; Cnut uses the special style of &quot;King of all England,&quot; &quot;Rex totius Angliae.&quot; This is not strictly a territorial style ; still less is it the style of a conqueror. The object is to distin guish his kingship over all England from his earlier divided kingship when the land was parted between Mm and Eadmund. this time there is no doubt. But in 1031 Malcolm of Scotland, and two under-kings, the famous M acbeth and one described as Jehmarc, did full homage to the King of all England. The northern king thus held his dominions in three distinct forms. In Scotland proper he was simply under the terms of the old commendation. Cumberland, whatever extent of territory comes under that name, was strictly a territorial fief. Lothian was an earldom held within the kingdom of England. The position of Cnut, both as a man and as a king, Cnut derives a special interest from his being a convert to relati Christianity. His father Swegen was an apostate. He * th( had been baptized in his childhood or youth ; but he cast uri aside his new faith, and carried war into England as a heathen conqueror. His son Cnut was baptized in the course of his English wars, and he appears in English history as a Christian king, a devout king, a special favourite of the Church and her ministers. His laws are strong on all ecclesiastical points, and they contain what was need ful in his day, but which had not been needful, in Wessex at least, for some ages a crowd of provisions for the suppression of heathen worship. In Denmark he appears as completing the conversion of that kingdom which had already begun. His newly born religious zeal led him, like yEthelwulf, to make the pilgrimage to Home. His recep tion there by the pope, the emperor, and the Burgundian king, helped to raise the position of England and her sovereign in foreign eyes ; but it had no other political result. One change, the fruit of which was chiefly seen a little Cnut later, was made by Cnut in the administration of the earls, kingdom. As far as we can see, the rule had hitherto been for each shire to have its own ealdorman. One ealdorman sometimes held several shires, and the arrange ment, at any rate under yEthelred, was confused and fluctuating ; under Cnut it was organized in a new shape. Four great chiefs were set over the four great divisions of the kingdom, Wessex, East-Anglia, Mercia, and Northum berland. The Danish title Jarl or Earl, hitherto used only in Northumberland, was now substituted for ealdor man. We find also smaller earls of one or more shires ; but it is plain that these were subordinate to these great governors. Wessex, above all, received now for the first time, in the person of Godwine, a governor distinct from her king. The relations between England and Normandy now get Relat closer and more important. ^Ethelred had found shelter with: in the Norman court with his brother-in-law Duke Piichard. manc The young vEthelings, yElfred and Eadward, the sons of yEthelred and Emma, were brought up at the court of their uncle. But, strange to say, their mother Emma entered into a second marriage with Cnut himself, who must have been many years younger than she was. With Richard of Normandy Cnut kept unbroken peace ; but Richard s more adventurous son Robert asserted the rights of his cousins and threatened perhaps attempted an invasion of England on their behalf. Robert presently died on his famous pilgrimage. In the same year (1035), Cnut himself died, still in the prime of life, after a reign of only eighteen years from his final election. Such a dominion as the northern empire of Cnut was Divif in its own nature ephemeral. Such a power *can hardly of Cr endure beyond the life of its founder.. The dominions of empt Charles the Great, geographically continuous and bound together both by Roman and by Frankish traditions, could not be kept under one ruler. Much less could the scattered empire of great islands and peninsulas which Cnut had brought under his power. Not only did his empire break in pieces, but his kingdom of England was again, for the last time, divided. Of his empire he himself had decreed